As many of you know, I’m a true Debian fanatic. Some even say I’m a Debian nut head, borderline evangelist. And mark my words, to call me an evangelist is something truly unique, seeing how my feelings are towards true evangelists. But it has to be said, that I without a shadow of a doubt love and cherish the open source community. Many of us have heard the term open source, both in the media and in our travels across the world wide web. But what is open source, and even more importantly the open source community?

Continue Reading »

I had a really big fight against spyware yesterday. Recently, my boss had complained about sluggish performance on his office computer, and processes that started on its own and really annoying pop-up windows. When I was first approached with this scenario, I just told him in plain text. You are infected with the plague of the web; spyware. So what to do!? Well, here comes our good friend Ad-Aware in. It’s just like a virus scanner, but it scans for malicious programs running that virus detectors doesn’t scan for, but might do just as much damage.

The first scan revealed that the computer was infected with quite a list of different types of spyware. Some where key loggers, some where usage statistics gatherers, some were drone like processes, just waiting to be used in a coordinated DDoS attack. After three scans, and the removal of more persistent spyware the computer still showed signs of being infected, even though Ad-Aware was saying everything was fine. So I started to dig a little, and by a sign of good luck, the process that caused this havoc crashed, leaving a dialog that revealed my the name of the executable. I tried to delete the file, but that of course was impossible at first, since the file was in use by the system. So I had to dive into the system registry, and see what trails it had there, and of course to remove its startup presence in the system. So after having cleaned up the registry by hand, I was ready to reboot. The computer rebooted, and I was finally able to remove the persistent little bastard that caused the havoc on my bosses computer. Nothing like playing a digital Sherlock Holmes.

But what was really good about this whole thing was that I learned something new, I learned my boss to enforce a little more aware surfing pattern, he will now use Ad-Aware on a weekly basis to scan his computer along with his already existing anti virus solution. But, the best thing is of course, that I made him ditch Internet Explorer and move over to Firefox! Yet another follower added to the loyal user base of the best browser on earth! Go Firefox!

Has the Mozilla team done it? Have they made a browser that will finally be able to take up the fight with Internet Explorer? In my eyes, they have and with great style. Their new release in the Firefox branch has in many ways swept me off my feet. It’s fast becoming the number one choice for web browsers, and with a good reason. Firefox is nothing short of revolutionary.

Being a blogger and also being a nerd, you tend to be concerned about your pages being compliant to current web standards. Meaning, you want your XHTML, CSS, RSS etc to be correct and compliant so that it displays correctly in most browsers. Not only does Firefox do a great job at being compliant to these standards, but it’s built in support RSS is awesome! Your feeds go into your bookmarks, and whenever you go to a feed in your bookmarks the feed is updated automatically. It’s never been easier to see if a site you’re watching has been updated.

The list of new features in the new Firefox is quite long, but I’ll list a few of them here.

• Live Bookmarks.
  The ability to subscribe to RSS feeds in your bookmarks. When you happen to surf by a site that offers RSS feeds, a icon appears in your statusbar. All you gotta do is click on the icon, and choose whatever feed you want to subscribe to.
• Improved find.
  You now have a find tool bar which appears whenever you conduct a search in the current document. And I gotta say, it’s awesome Never has it been easier to find something, and with its built in automatic highlighting of search matches you spend less time finding what you’re looking for. I love this feature, being a coder/programmer. And of course, the ‘type as you go’ find feature is still there for links.
• Managing Annoyances and Protecting Security.
  Finally the extension system blocks attempts to install extensions from all sites other than update.mozilla.org. If you want to install extensions from a site other than Mozilla’s official site, you need to add the site into a list of approved sites. If a popup is blocked, you now have the ability to open it if it was an “important” popup. God knows why they haven’t had this feature before, but at least it’s there now. Another feature that I love, is that it now changes the colour of the address bar whenever you enter a HTTPS enabled site. As long as you see that the address bar is yellow, you know it’s secure to transfer your personal details and credit card details when doing an online purchase.
• Strong Encryption For Passwords Available.
  Finally Firefox has support for strong encrypted passwords. Consider this situation, you use a computer in a place that more than yourself have access to it and use it on a daily basis. Previously, all the passwords stored by Firefox’s password manager were stored unencrypted meaning that anyone with a bit of computer insight could easily steal your passwords. Well fear no more, now your passwords are stored encrypted and each time you start up Firefox it will ask for a master password that unlocks the usage of password manager. If the wrong password is supplied, password manager just lies dormant doing nothing.

Well, all I have to say to Microsoft is; Fear Firefox. I have recommended Firefox to all of my friends for ages, and I ditched IE ages ago for being bloated and prone with security issues. By this, I’m not saying that Firefox doesn’t have any security issues, any program has security issues. But it’s all about the severeness of them that is important to me. Firefox just keeps on getting better and better, and is for me the only choice. If you haven’t tried it already, I suggest you head over to Firefox’s page right now and download it. You will not regret it.

I’ve embraced Firefox as my new favourite pet. Do yourself a favour, do the same thing.