180488183
submission
eggegick writes:
My trusty Samsung smartphone died. I went to the Verizon store to get a replacement but they only had Motorola, so that what I bought. The thing was preloaded with tons of the most annoying and intrusive shovel-ware and took hours to clean up. Does anybody know of a basic phone without all the $#:+ on it that will work with Verizon?
172935052
submission
eggegick writes:
I'm looking for a cheap mini PC I can turn into a headless Linux based
wireless and Ethernet router. The setup would be a cable modem on the
Comcast side, Ethernet out from the modem to the router and Ethernet
and WiFi out to the home network. My goal is to have a firewall that
I trust, not a firewall that comes from the manufacture that might
have back doors.
172284519
submission
eggegick writes:
Is there some sort of official standard for password length and
complexity that we can ask organizations to use? Every site I visit
has its own idea of the minimum and maximum number of characters, the
number of digits, the number of upper/lowercase characters, the number
of punctuation characters allowed and even what punctuation characters
are allowed and which are not.
The limit of password size really torques me, as that suggests they
are storing the password (they need to limit storage size), rather
than its hash value (fixed size), which is a real security blunder.
Also, the stupid dots drive me bonkers, especially when there is no
"unhide" button. For crying out loud, nobody is looking over my
shoulder! Make the "unhide" default.
I know the NIST has recommendations, but they are fuzzy, not a simple
statement you can give to Grandma.
171516848
submission
eggegick writes:
I use vim to keep my passwords in an encrypted file. I find it simple
and easy to use. My wife is not a Linux geek like I am, and so she is
using keepass. It's relatively simple to install and use, but I seem
to recall it used to be even much simpler: I recall that it used to be
just an executable that you copied to your system and ran. You could
put it on a USB stick along with the database to insure you'd be able
to quickly access you passwords in an emergency on another system.
Now you have run an installer which creates a keepass directory under
"C:\Program Files\" which is full of .dll files and lots of other
stuff. Just another hassel.
Does anybody know of a really simple password manager or encrypting
notepad? I've looked at a number of them and they use Java or
Javascript, or they involve an external web site, or they have way too
many features, or they use an installation program, or windows
defender objects to them.
170371765
submission
eggegick writes:
It's time for me to build a new Linux PC.
Dell sell Linux PCs for a lot of money. Complete and total rip off.
By default modern Dell PC's will not boot from the CD (I guess this is
a security measure, but I can think of better ways to implement this,
for instance ask the user to type in "yes" or "fire the explosive
bolts", or some sort of simple override). But I suppose Microshaft
would not like it easy to install other operation systems.
As it is, I hit the F12 key during the boot to enter the BIOS, hoping
to tell it to enable booting from the CD. Well I have not looked at a
BIOS screen in a long time, and there is no "enable boot from CD
option" anymore. There are some options for booting from other devices but it is all fubar magic to me.
So my question is, who build desktop PCs this day that is user
friendly in this regard (i.e. let me install the OS I want)
3728777
submission
eggegick writes:
My wife has taken a number of college courses over the last three years and many of the classes used on-line materials rather than books. The problem was these required IE along with Java, Active X and/or various plug-ins (the names of which escapes me), and occasionally I'd have to tweak our firewall to allow these apps to run. I don't think any of these training apps would work with Firefox. All of this made me cringe from a security point of view.
Myself, I use just use Firefox, No-Script, our external firewall and common sense when using the web. I have a very old windows 2000 machine that I keep up to date. To my knowledge I've never had a virus or malware problem.
Her computer is a relatively new XP machine, and this point she feels here computer has something wrong. But now she prefers to use my old machine instead of hers since it seems to be more responsive. We plan to run the recovery disk on hers.
Assuming the college course work applications were part of the cause, what recommendations do any of you have when having to run this kind of software? Is there a VMware solution that would work — that is have a Windows image that is used temporarily for the course work and then discarded at the end of the semester (and how do you create such an image, and what does it cost?).
