Secure Your PC - Part I - Setting Up

Do you consider yourself a power user? It's a tough question. After all, where do you draw the line? Hardware hacking? Command-line skills? Unix? These 29 essential PC skills define the core competency of any power user.
A power user is not a simple state of being. It's a path, filled with accomplishments and achievements and failures and applied knowledge. And merit.

Setting Up Your PC

The first few hours of any new PC's existence are critical. Set things up right and you'll enjoy years of stability and longevity. Get things wrong and… well, you know how that goes. Every mistake, oversight, and wrinkle introduced during a new PC's inception will compound itself over time. Here are the essentials to getting it right.

Install Windows the Right Way

You already know how to install Windows-pop in the disc and watch an episode of The Office-but what do you do when it's finished? The first step we take is to fire up Windows Update and install any and all applicable patches. You'll most likely have to reboot your system, at which point you should check Windows Update again.

When that's finished, head over to your motherboard maker's website and download/install the latest chipset drivers specific to your mainboard. Next, install the latest graphics driver for your videocard, and then finish things off by updating any other components, like your soundcard and/or network adapters. Windows' default drivers will handle most components in a fairly stable fashion, but you're going to get the best results from native drivers.

Banish Crapware from a New PC

PC Decrapifier is ideally suited for any PC purchased from a retail outlet or online vendor. Goodbye, crapware!

Trials and toolbars and links, oh my! As a way of generating revenue from software vendors, OEMs often shovel all kinds of performance-hampering crapware onto your new PC. You can spend the first 30 minutes hunting down uninstallers and restoring your system to pristine condition, or knock out the bloat with a single blow using PC Decrapifier, a free utility that detects and uninstalls whichever programs you select.

Manage Power Usage and Sleep Better at Night

Navigate to the Control Panel and select Hardware and Sound > Power Options. For portable PCs where battery life is a priority, we build off of the Power Saver profile. Similarly, choose the High Performance setting if you're working with an enthusiast-class rig. Once you have a starting point, tweak the individual settings by clicking Change Plan Settings and then Change Advanced Power Settings. Here are our favorite toggles:

• Hard Disk - You can configure your HDD to switch off after a set period of inactivity. If you own a modern hard drive, chances are it already comes with several power-saving features built in, so don't expect any miracles here. And if you own an SSD, any potential power-saving benefits go right out the window because of a lack of moving parts.

• USB Selective Suspend - When enabled, USB devices will stop drawing power while in an idle state. This is done at the driver level, so not all devices support this setting.

• Processor Power Management - Notebook users looking to extend battery life can set the Maximum Processor State to a value less than 100 percent. The obvious drawback here is that you'll lose performance when performing CPU intensive tasks, and since today's processors come with all kinds of power-saving features already built in, this is of dubious value on modern machines.

• Display - A brightly lit LCD drinks electricity like it's going out of style, and what's the point if you aren't even looking at it? Notebook users should configure the display to dim after a short period of inactivity, or better yet, turn off altogether. Desktop users won't see much benefit, but hey, you'll sleep better at night knowing you reduced your carbon footprint.

When you're finished configuring your power options, look for any problems using Windows' Powercfg utility. To do this, open an elevated command prompt (right-click on cmd and run as an administrator) and type powercfg -energy -output c:\report.html. Windows will then observe your PC for 60 seconds and spit out an energy report at the location and filename specified.

Set Up Three Displays

Before shuttling those old LCD monitors to the landfill, consider filling your desktop with a triple-display setup instead. In most cases, you'll need a second videocard to make the magic happen, but it doesn't have to be gaming grade-a PCI card will work just fine. Unlike previous versions of Windows, Windows 7 isn't likely to cough up a hairball in this scenario. Once installed, go into Display Properties to finalize your configuration options. For even more control, we recommend running UltraMon or DisplayFusion to squeeze out additional features, like multiple taskbars, from your three-headed monster.

Use Benchmarks to Expose Shoddy Settings and Busted Hardware

There's more to benchmarking than just bragging rights. It's also an ideal way to gauge whether your components are firing on all cylinders. An unusually low benchmark score could be indicative of a misconfigured setting, or even a faulty piece of hardware.

Before you begin your first benchmark run, prep your PC to eliminate any outside variables. Disconnect from the Internet, turn off your screen saver, turn off auto update, and disable your antivirus and any other background tasks. It's also a good idea to defrag your hard drive (but not your SSD). Finally, reboot your PC.

Far Cry 2's built-in benchmark allows you to measure your new system's real-world performance. It's a great way to gauge whether your rig is running in a healthy manner.

Use a mix of synthetic and real-world benchmarks, starting with Futuremark's PCMark Vantage Suite to get an overview of your system as a whole. To suss out your CPU, fire up Maxon's Cinebench 11.5. You can benchmark your RAM with SiSoft Sandra's built-in benchmarking tools, and for your GPU, we recommend a variety of tests, including Futuremark's 3DMark Vantage and built-in game benchmarks, such as the one included with Far Cry 2.

Stress testing is a little different than benchmarking, in that you're primarily testing for stability, not performance. Running Prime95 will let you know if your overclock is stable (select Run Benchmark from the Options menu), while Memtest86+ does an excellent job at exposing defective RAM. To use the latter, download either the bootable ISO or auto-installer for USB keys and boot directly from either one. Let Memtest86+ run a full pass on each stick individually.

Secure Your PC - Part II - Protect Your Data

Secure Your PC - Part III - Networking

Secure Your PC - Part IV - Maintenance

Secure Your PC - Part V - First-Aid

Secure Your PC - Part VI - Hardware

Secure Your PC - Part VII - Spice Up Your Skills

Secure Your PC - Addendum - Cool Windows 7 Shortcuts

India is finally seeing the birth of alternative journalism

Some journalists get confused and start believing that they make the news, rather than just reporting it. This, and journalistic groupthink, has led to a skewed discourse: India’s supposed ‘centrists’ would be considered ‘far Left’ elsewhere. Their conventional wisdom is curiously anti-national as well.
“All the news that is fit to print” simply isn’t printed in India; only that news is printed which supports a particular viewpoint. Besides, those who do not toe the line are blackballed: you cannot get published. Several people have told me their personal experience of being excluded for their views.
This perverted system engenders a persistent anti-India bias in international media, too. When in India, foreign correspondents interact primarily with Delhi’s insular, incestuous sling-bag-wallah-journalist nexus that sneers at middle India; their endemic prejudices infect the foreigners too.
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At least the Western media pays lip service to being non-judgmental. In India, there is an obvious industrialist-politician-journalist axis. They ‘manufacture consent’. But they were caught red-handed, Watergate-style, in the Radia tapes incident. Thereupon, the entire media closed ranks, and buried the story, hoping it would go away: this tactic has always worked in the past. Unfortunately for them, this time it didn’t work, because Internet readers, especially Twitterati (those using the Twitter social network), kept the issue alive.
Self-important scribes became concerned about their image on Twitter. When they were not given fawning adulation, they began abusing the Twitterati as cave-dwelling illiterates or “Internet Hindus”, showing their habitual scorn for the ‘little people’. One even threatened people with IPC 509, “insulting the modesty of a woman”, simply for questioning her dogmas.
But the Twitterati, mostly middle-class, urban, young, tech-savvy Indians, both in India and abroad, were not browbeaten, and responded in kind — and in this level-playing-field medium, they had exactly the same access as any high-and-mighty journalist. The latter, accustomed to being little tin-pot dictators and censoring any opinions they didn’t like in their media, were quickly put on the defensive.
And this developed into a sort of dependency: the scribes desperately wanted respect from the Twitterati! Not surprisingly, Twitterati have utter contempt for the journos, and said so in no uncertain terms. The Twitterati — some influential commentators include @atanudey, @barbarindian, @sandeepweb, @swathipradeep2 —clearly did not buy the same old anodyne
Kool-Aid that was being dished out.
And then the western media picked up what bloggers and Twitterati were saying. This hit the uppity journos where it hurt the most. They fulfilled their greatest ambition — getting their coveted fifteen minutes of fame in the New York Times or Washington Post; but, alas, it was via a commentary on their (lack of) journalistic ethics and on the harsh judgment of the Internet readers.
As a result, Vir Sanghvi, for all practical purposes, fell on his sword, shutting down his impugned column. Barkha Dutt tried the opposite tack: brazening it out and proclaiming innocence. This did not work; NDTV’s credibility is damaged and her ratings have plummeted (according to TAM data for December). An attempt at self-defense on TV boomeranged: she appeared shifty and guilty as charged, Nixon-like.
Furthermore, the IBN network, also viewed with derision as #IBNlies, was caught by @preeti86, ham-handedly fabricating fake tweets (messages) from non-existent identities in an effort to inflate support for its positions.
Pathetically, the scribes and their sock-puppets (planted supporters) are attempting to paint themselves as victims of a conspiracy among Twitterati. But this is not selling. One of the sock-puppets, some minor Bollywood type screeching #stopabuseontwitter, showed himself to be a hypocrite by making crude sexual suggestions to a woman online, and then running for cover when someone brought up IPC 509.
Fed-up Internet mavens have long complained that the media in India is corrupt, sold out (#paidmedia and #dalalmedia are popular terms) and anti-national. It appears that the Twitterati have finally created an alternative, uncensored, independent channel for news and commentary which is as subversive as the samizdat underground press in the erstwhile Soviet Union was. Even more ominously for the powerful, there is the example of OhmyNews in Korea. This paper, initially a one-man effort, became so popular that eventually it was instrumental in toppling an elected regime in 2002.
Will the emergent people’s media in India play a similar role? That would be poetic justice — he who corrupts the media falls to its new, web-enabled incarnation. The establishment, naturally, will fight this: a new push to monitor Internet usage may lead to a great firewall of India, stifling the new medium.

Rajeev Srinivasan | Wednesday, January 12, 2011

How To: Hide Your "Collection"

All this talk about preserving digital legacies got me thinking: What about the bits we don't want to leave behind? Y'know, the risqué material? Don't pretend you don't know what I'm talking about.

This seems like a complicated subject. It's not. There's some data that's private, both in terms of content as well as the very fact of its existence, and your viewing of it. Let's say you look at porn. (You do.) This fact—not just the art porn itself—belongs to you. There's no need for it to be a discoverable part of your digital life, or, god forbid, your digital legacy. Here'show to make sure your private collections are in order, and our of sight.

Level One: Obfuscation

Who hasn't created a folder called "Business" only to fill it with an entirely differently kind ofbusiness? It's a hallowed tradition, enjoyed by nearly everyone who's used a computer in the last 20 years. And as ridiculous and inept as it sounds, it probably worked—then.

There was a time when hiding a folder deep within an operating system's file structure actually hid it. Family members and spouses never had a reason to explore C:/Windows/System32, much less the "Nrop" folder you cunningly stashed there. And unless anyone went out of their way to search for incriminating content, it just wouldn't come up.

Today, things are different. Both major OSes have deeply integrated and everpresent search features—Spotlight in OS X and Start menu search in Windows 7—which bring the depths of your file system bubbling to the surface with alarming ease and frequency. They prioritize file types over file locations, so your buried videos are just about as discoverable as if they were stored your "My Videos" folder. As far as hiding your shit, and keeping your bereaved family from discovering your bizarre-but-harmless-but-still-pretty-bizarre video collection, this offers only the slightest protection.

The section age-old variation on pornfuscation is the trusty file rename. Here's how it goes: Save your files, change their names to something innocuous, and switch their file extensions to something inscrutable. LadiesEatingFriedPigsFeetInLingerie.avi becomes lefpfil.dat. And it helps to sew together a little cipher, too. Something like:

.avi=.dat
.mpeg=.dll
.mp4=.lib
.jpg=.docx

While this will probably accomplish your goals with almost no initial effort, it's pretty unwieldy in the long term, and far from failsafe.

Level 2: Encryption

The word "encryption" evokes spy films, shady government agencies and more than anything, nerds. But here's the thing: It's actually super easy. It's also nearly 100% effective, unless someone very serious is looking very seriously for something seriously incriminating on your computer, in which case I probably don't want to help you out anyway. So!

Mac OS X: Creating a password-protected archive is your best option here. It's dead simple, consolidates your files, and puts your stuff one extra layer of abstraction further away from search indices and the like. To make a passworded .DMG file (an image/archive file that you can open with a simple click) from an existing folder, just do this:

• Open Disk Utility (Spotlight search Disk Utility)
• File>New>Disk Image from Folder
• Select the folder, click Image
• Select encryption (128-bit AES will do)

• Choose a unique password

And that's it! Now you have a whateveryouwant.dmg file that can't be viewed, opened or edited by anyone but yourself. Your very own little lockable porn capsule! (Ugh.)

Windows

To create a password-protected archive in Windows Vista or 7, you'll want to download a 3rd-party archive utility, like WinZip or WinRAR. And by like WinZip or WinRAR, I mean just download PeaZip. It's free, and better than the software you're used to. Then:

• Open PeaZip
• File>Create Archive
• Select the files you want in the archive
• Click the Lock icon under the Output selector
• Select "Encrypt Also File Names"
• Select archive type "PEA" (the fact that you're using this program's proprietary format, as opposed to something like ZIP, means that it'll be even less identifiable as, well, what it is.)

And there you go.

Level 3: Liquidation

Seriously, people, stop storing incriminating material on your computer. You're already getting this stuff from the internet, so just leave it on the internet. Stream videos online, and look at pictures without downloading them. It's easy.

Firefox, Chrome, Safari and even Internet Explorer have private browsing modes, which don't accumulate history, cookies, or local caches of any kind. Use them. Your digital self will thank you.

Happy secret-keeping, folks!

Send an email to John Herrman, the author of this post, at jherrman@gizmodo.com.

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‎"Not a shred of evidence exists in favor of the idea that life is serious"- Brendan Gill

Big B on Little Master and...

Here is a  post by the Big B, Mr. Amitabh Bachchan, in his blog on “A more comprehensive take on the Sachin – Bradman debate ”

In this article, he made many genuine points on our perception in general

Jalsa , Mumbai Dec 20 , 2010 Mon 11 : 40 PM

The entire day has been spent in trying to attend to millions of sms on the mobile asking me to join in at a discussion cum debate on the television, for the reaction to Sachin and his 50 test hundreds ! And I have deliberately and I feel judiciously remained away from it and not responded.

There are as always, many reasons for this. Firstly, I am amused by the thought that every time there is a topic that comes up in which the media shows interest, they seek reactions from us common folk. And I have often wondered, why would they believe that we in the film industry would ever be in possession of such wisdom, which would give inputs of any value. We are the 'film industry' as we all know ! We are 'filmy' - an almost derogatory terminology used by the media often - and therefore less possessed of any semblance of what is right, what is fashionable, what is politically correct, what ails society, what compromises our morals, and a host of other similar issues that plague our systems. So why come to us ?

And secondly, why must there be a debate or even a discussion on whether Sachin is greater than Don Bradman or not ? Sachin is greater, period ! By bringing the topic up for debate you are somewhere unsure whether he really is deserving of being great or not ! And this is objectionable to me. How much more does one have to do to prove one's credentials. And who are the media to concur who is great or not ? We know he is. Matter over. Do not, I plead bring down the stature of this great son of the land by continuously comparing him to others. Let others compare themselves to him. Why do we always play it the other way around ? Why are we so complexed ! Why do we always want to describe our achievement or subject with a comparison from the West. Alright, the West is far developed than us, is richer materially, advanced and secure. So how does this give us the need to comment that they are superior. Or that the best comes from there and not here.

Yes, thousands of years of slavery under foreign invaders and rulers, has made us submissive and servile. But being servile does in no manner display the fact that there are some regions where we have excelled too. And in such a short time span. Ridding ourselves of dependence and coming out in this hugely competitive world through great individual enterprise, indigenous and unique.

Under these circumstances, under a suppressed environment, under the constant shadow of being made to feel inferior, when we do excel, do not compare us with others. It diminishes our own most deserving value and strength and status.

I do not for a moment wish to demean the accomplishments of others. They are hugely impressive and of immense value. They are great, but we are greater ! At least in this most pertinent yardstick set by our own Sachin Tendulkar. And I have this to add. Had this achievement come from one in the United Kingdom or the US of A, you would have seen how fantastically proud and poised they would have been towards their hero. Their love appreciation and acknowledgement towards their fellow countryman would never have permitted the mention even of anyone from another state or region. This I shall hand to them. When it comes to propagating their own cause they are far far superior than us.

We are, I believe in a state of deep complex. We think so little of ourselves that we allow and permit other lesser achievers to make us look small and worthless. We are not ! Its just that we have no concept of how we need to market ourselves. How to take pride in ourselves and in what we achieve.

'When will you be working in a Hollywood film, Mr Bachchan ?' , is often asked of us. 'We want to see you win an Oscar' .. or 'when will this film go to the Oscars ?' See we have already accepted defeat. We have concluded beyond any argument that the Oscars and Hollywood are superior than us. That that is a title that marks the highest honor. I have no qualms in accepting that Hollywood is far advanced, but that does not still make it the final destination. Why should it. Take pride in our own system. Why ... oh this is the Tom Cruise of the Hindi Film Industry, or so and so is the Brad Pitt of ... when we go to introduce a subject or issue or character. Why can it not be that Tom Cruise is the Shah Rukh Khan, or Brad is the Salman of ... !!!

When we shall take pride in our own heroes without any comparison to others, we will find others complimenting our sentiments, looking up to us, and putting us on that pedestal where we belong.

I visit the UK often and I observe that every time there is a British defeat or an unsuccessful venture, they will always put up for public broadcast a previous achievement of the country, almost immediately. It shows the character of a nation. On our 'Face the Nations' and 'We the people' all we do is take immense pleasure in tearing down and making our own system look false and down.

Unless we learn to acknowledge our own achievements how on earth can we expect others to.

So stop this debate on whether Sachin is superior or not ! He is ! And the entire world needs to honor it !

Love good night and may you have a pleasant sleep !!

Amitabh Bachchan

http://tl.gd/7jt4i3