Practical Technology

for practical people.

May 17, 2010
by sjvn01
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Facebook Privacy remains as bad as ever

I think it’s become pretty darn clear that if you’re going to keep using Facebook, you can forget about Facebook helping you keep your private life private.
That all hands Facebook meeting about privacy? The results appear to have been a big fat zero.

To be exact, Facebook did introduce two new security features. Too bad they don’t work that well and neither of them addresses privacy concerns.

The first of the new Facebook security features lets you set up “Account Security” so that if you select to turn this on, you’ll be asked to name and save each device you use to log into Facebook. So, for example, I used it to sign on with my main Linux desktop, my iPad Touch, and my SUSE Linux-powered ThinkPad.

But, think about it. If someone steals any of those devices, this doesn’t stop the thief from logging into Facebook. Or, if someone manages to snatch my login ID and password, they can add their own device to the list. I don’t see how this really makes any more secure than I ever was.

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May 17, 2010
by sjvn01
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The New WiMAX

While you’re waiting for WiMAX or other 4G data technologies to roll out, you might be interested in knowing that a new, faster still, WiMAX2, is on its way.

WiMAX (Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access) is slowly making its way into businesses and homes. With its promise of average speeds of 4 to 6Mbps (Megabits per second) and coverage areas of square miles instead of square yards, WiMAX has long promised to be the next generation of Wireless networking. Now, faced with competition from LTE (Long-Term Evolution), WiMAX supporters are upping the ante with WiMAX2.

According to the WiMAX Forum, the industry trade group that supports WiMAX, the new WiMAX will be more than 50 percent faster than today’s WiMAX while remaining compliant with the existing IEEE 802.16e standard. WiMAX 2 is built on the still evolving IEEE 802.16m standard. If it works the way its designers want it to, WiMAX2 equipment will be backward compatible with existing WiMAX hardware while delivering double the peak data rates while increasing the average and cell edge end user performance by 50 percent.

So, how are they going to pull this trick off? Here’s the techie details.

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May 14, 2010
by sjvn01
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Running Windows games on Linux gets easier

One constant complaint about the Linux desktop is that it doesn’t have enough games. That’s actually not true. Linux has plenty of games. What these people usually mean is that it doesn’t have their favorite Windows games. Now that’s changing.

Granted, Linux has never been a big gaming platform. Some have suggested that it might be a good idea for vendors to work on making Linux a gaming platform for its own high-end games, but little has come of this idea. Of course, it’s always been possible to run many popular Windows games on Linux. I play Guild Wars, a Windows-based MMORPG (Massively multi-player online role-playing game), competitively in player vs. player mode on Linux all the time. If it didn’t work great on Linux, I’d be running it on a Windows 7 PC.

Two recent developments have made it even easier to run Windows games on Linux though. The first, as reported by Phoronix, is that Valve, makers of the Steam gaming system and content delivery platform, will be releasing a Steam client to Linux later this summer. While you could run Steam on Linux before, it was both slow and difficult to set up properly.

Now we can look forward to a full Steam gaming experience on Linux. The Steam Linux client is already available in a closed beta. And 3D graphical card support on Linux has improved, which will help give players a good game experience. Linux users can look forward to playing native versions of such popular games as Quake Wars, Doom 3. Half-Life 2, Counter-Strike: Source, and Team Fortress 2.

The other development is that CodeWeavers has released a new and significantly improved version of Crossover Games. CrossOver Games is based on the open-source project Wine, an implementation of the Windows API that runs on top of the Unix/Linux operating system family.

You can run Windows games on Linux, including Steam-based ones, with Wine alone, but you’ll need to be an expert Linux user and have a good idea of what each game demands from its environment to pull those tricks off. Unless you’re the kind of person that enjoying working on technology more than playing games, you’re better off buying CrossOver Games.

This new edition, version 9.0, features an easier-to-user game installation routine, thousands of minor improvements, and a feature that lets gamers share ‘Compatibility Profiles,’ or ‘c4p’ files. These enable users to create and share custom set-up recipes for officially unsupported games, so that others can install them without having to get their hands dirty with finicky customized set-up. The net result, CodeWeavers promises, is that you can now play a good deal many more Windows games on Linux and the ones you could play before are now more responsive.

I’ve already played with it for a few days, but it looks to me like that CodeWeavers has a winner on its hand. You can see it for yourself by downloading a trial version of Crossover Games that will run for 7 days. The full price is $39.95.

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May 11, 2010
by sjvn01
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Too many Ubuntus?

Listen. I get it. Ubuntu is an excellent Linux distribution. The latest version, Ubuntu 10.04 is great. And, I certainly see why there are several Linux distributions based on Ubuntu such as Kubuntu. But, do we really need two new Ubuntu desktops, Unity and Light? Can Canonical do everything that it’s already doing while adding more work to its load?

Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, certainly seems to think so. On May 10th, Mark Shuttleworth, Canonical’s founder, announced the two new Ubuntu variants.

The first, Unity, is designed to get the most good out of a netbook’s limited screen real-estate. This is not just a matter of dumping and/or shrinking down icons. Shuttleworth and company are thinning down and rebuilding the GNOME interface to fit the most goodness into a netbook’s 1024X600 display.

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May 11, 2010
by sjvn01
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Ignore the nonsense: Anti-virus software is as good as ever

Anti-virus software is not the be-all and end-all of Windows PC security by a long shot. But, to claim, as David Matousec does in his paper, KHOBE-8.0 earthquake for Windows desktop security software is utter nonsense.

The gist of Matousec’s is that Windows’ SSDT (System Service Descriptor Table) can be attacked by a technique, he calls “the argument-switch attack or KHOBE (Kernel Hook Bypassing Engine) attack, which allows malicious code to bypass protection mechanisms of security applications.” The short English version of this is that, in the time between when an anti-virus program checks a file for a malicious payload and when the file actually runs, it can transform into malware and wreak havoc on your PC.

There is some truth here. Rootkits have been successfully attacking Windows via the SSDT for years now. There’s nothing new about that.

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May 11, 2010
by sjvn01
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ReadyBoost: A Cheap and Easy Way to Improve Windows 7 System Performance

Usually, tuning up a PC requires a lot of work, spending much money on new components, or both. ReadyBoost can speed up slow or overwhelmed PCs without either one.

There’s no such thing as a fast-enough computer. No matter how hot your CPU runs or how much RAM you have, eventually you’ll run out of performance — usually, just when you need it most. Fortunately, Windows 7 comes with a cheap and easy way of improving system performance: ReadyBoost.

Windows 7’s ReadyBoost is Microsoft’s latest take on a very old idea for improving computer performance: caching. With a cache, you gain speed by keeping frequently accessed data as close as possible to the CPU cores. The faster the cache, the closer it should be to cores. That’s why high-end processors, like the Intel i7 quad-core CPU, have their own on-board cache.

Caching used to be easy. You used caching on uniprocessor, single user systems to free yourself from the slow I/O jail, whether that I/O was from the system bus to the processor or from the hard drive to the bus. As multiple-CPU and core systems became more common, simply placing fast RAM between system components with varying I/O throughputs was no longer enough. System designers had to contend with making sure that the available data to the processor was the real, newest data.

In ReadyBoost, cached data is stored in a Flash memory drive (usually a USB stick, but Secure Digital (SD) and Compact Flash (CF) cards are also supported). When data is read at random rather than in large blocks of data, ReadyBoost can improve file and data read input/output (I/O) by several times over traditional hard drives. You also get a performance boost from random writes, but it won’t be as significant.

In Windows 7, caching is usually done with SuperFetch and ReadyBoost working hand in glove. That’s setting aside such specialized caches as DNS cache (for Domain Name Service Internet addressing), Thumbnails cache (which contains downloaded ActiveX and JavaScript programs), and network file caching programs (such as BranchCache).

SuperFetch watches for which applications, documents, and system programs you use the most often and pre-loads them into your system memory. This way they’re ready to spring into action when you call on them. Of course, you could be using that RAM for other, potentially more useful work like running memory-hungry programs such as Adobe Photoshop or InDesign. In short, if you have relatively little RAM, or you’re using most of it, you should see some benefits from using ReadyBoost.

The other situation where you’ll see some performance improvements from ReadyBoost is when the computer has a slow hard disk drive. Computers with a hard disk Windows Experience Index (WEI) sub-score lower than 4.0 should see the most significant improvements. Conversely, if you have a very fast hard drive, such as a solid state drive (SSD), you won’t see any benefit from a USB 2.0 drive. Indeed, by default, Windows 7 disables ReadyBoost if you’re using an SSD drive.

Unfortunately, not all SD and CF cards, or even USB flash drives, work with ReadyBoost. While some storage media advertise that they’re “enhanced for Windows ReadyBoost,” they may not actually be ReadyBoost worthy. For a device to be ReadyBoost capable, it has to be able to handle 2.5 MBps throughout for 4 KB random reads and 1.75 MBps throughout for 512 KB random writes. In addition, the device must have at least 235 MB of available storage.

To my surprise, I’ve found that some ancient, tiny USB drives were ReadyBoost ready while other, brand-new drives failed. If you’d rather not waste time buying and trying USB drives, there’s a useful ReadyBoost Compatibility List based on real-world testing.

When you first attach a flash drive that ready for ReadyBoost, AutoPlay should provide ReadyBoost as an option. Even if you don’t see that as an option, you may still be in luck.

Try configuring ReadyBoost by right-clicking the device in Windows Explorer, clicking Properties, and then clicking the ReadyBoost tab. The only configuration option is to configure the space reserved for the cache. You must reserve at least 256 MB. Larger caches can improve performance, but the ReadyBoost cache cannot be greater than 4 GB on a FAT32 file system or greater than 32 GB on an NTFS file system.

So how much should you use? Microsoft recommends, “a 1:1 ratio of Flash to system memory at the low end and as high as 2.5:1 flash to system memory.” So if you have 4GB of RAM, you should pair it with at least a 4GB USB drive, but a 16GB USB stick would be overkill. With Windows Vista you could only use one drive at a time for ReadyBoost, but you can now use multiple drives. For example, on my Windows 7 test system with 6GB of RAM, I use a pair of inexpensive 4GB USB drives to provide the system with an 8GB ReadyBoost.

Worried about someone pulling out your USB stick and walking away with the files you’ve been working on for months? Don’t be. Information on ReadyBoost drives or disks is safe from casual hackers. All files on removable drives are encrypted with Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) 128.  In any case, while ReadyBoost stores data and programs as files, and not as raw data, you can’t access these files as if the USB stick was a normal drive. They can only be used by ReadyBoost.

So, is it worth it? In my informal tests, when I pushed my Window 7 system by running PhotoShop and InDesign on a large publishing project with multiple small files, I saw an overall performance benefit of about 10%. When I wasn’t pushing my system, however, I saw no improvement. If you want to drill down into what ReadyBoost is, or isn’t, doing for you I recommend using Performance Monitor, as described in this excellent and detailed article.

That said,  if your workers have slower systems or large computing workloads I have no doubt that ReadyBoost, with its minimal requirements, is an easy way to get more productivity out of your systems. Sure, you could do more (say, adding a faster hard drive or adding more RAM), but when you consider that ReadyBoost only costs a few dollars for USB drives and a minute to activate, ReadyBoost is a clear winner when it comes to a cheap, easy way to get more out of your PCs.

A version of this story first appeared in IT Expert Voice.