It gets weirder...

Tried playing stuff on the "other" account and it still crashes out. Rome won't load at all anymore.
Weird thing happening with some windows - missing menu items, no close buttons, etc...

Uninstalled Rome.
Uninstalled Defcon.
Uninstalled my sound and graphic drivers.
Reboot.
Installed sound and graphics again.

Missing menu items back.

Installed SpeedFan - latest version and downloaded the specs for my hardware and now my system runs nice, quiet, and cool.

Will try re-installing Rome and see if it works. If it does, it may be that Defcon is dodgy, however, it works fine on my work machine.

Anyone know how to calculate time over days from a starting time in Excel?

"=a1-a2" where a1 is "=now()" and a2 is the date you're counting from, both cells set as "date" under "number..." in the "format" menu?

That seems too easy.

i think thats what I did, but it wouldnt give me the "over days" piece. it reset after 24 hours, which is fine. I just wondered if there was a better way.

My folks called asking me if I have any idea why some of the script on their computer is written in Arabic whoops scratch that, It may be in some sort of "Riven" script.(they just called back) It showed up as the text attachment for an obituary sent from a funeral home attachment from Chicago,my Dads financial page and in the odd e-mail here or there.
My Son and his Grandpa do play Riven on the computer from time to time, but nobody has any idea how this would happen sporadically or at all ... Any ideas?

Maybe Riven installed a font or several fonts, and either some incoming things have it specified in the source that they use this special font (maybe assuming that it is another non Riven font).

The following is not neccesarily a request for assistance, rather just an observation...

Windows XP Pro has the fucking worst interface ever for setting access rights for files and folders.

quote:

Originally posted by Wanderer:
Windows XP Pro has the fucking worst interface ever for setting access rights for files and folders.

You can do that in WinXP?

In XP Professional yes, but not in XP home edition. I took me an hour or so to figure out that i had to go into the control panel and switch of some silly default folder display setting (under advanced settings -> use simple share settings; or some such) before i could actually get to the actual interface. Then it took me another half hour just to figure out the interface itself and be able to actually add users.

... and i still haven't succeeded in doing what i actually want to do!

(which is, enabeling the mysql functions in my PHP installation)

WiFi laptop privacy question...

If I post from a Manhattan Starbucks with a borrowed laptop, will anyone see anything other than the ISP coordinates from whatever company is renting the Internet to Starbucks? Or will it somehow still be *readily* apparent that I'm posting from one of the Bank of Iceland's computers while not sipping a double chocolate mocha soy latté?

Banks in Iceland. Good one!

God that's funny!

I'd like to withdraw some cod so I can buy a new peat parka.

quote:

Originally posted by Mean Old Man:
WiFi laptop privacy question...

If I post from a Manhattan Starbucks with a borrowed laptop, will anyone see anything other than the ISP coordinates from whatever company is renting the Internet to Starbucks? Or will it somehow still be *readily* apparent that I'm posting from one of the Bank of Iceland's computers while not sipping a double chocolate mocha soy latté?

I don't know much about wireless. But i know that at least the country if not the state and city will be pretty easy to track from the IP address, any IP address, you are connected ot the internet with (wether it's through wireless or solid wires). So if somebody knows your IP address when you are online (which is assigned to you by the ISP you use) they can most likely tell where you're posting from.

Conclussion, the internet is not a good place to be if you want to remain hidden.

quote:

Originally posted by Mean Old Man:
WiFi laptop privacy question...

If I post from a Manhattan Starbucks with a borrowed laptop, will anyone see anything other than the ISP coordinates from whatever company is renting the Internet to Starbucks? Or will it somehow still be *readily* apparent that I'm posting from one of the Bank of Iceland's computers while not sipping a double chocolate mocha soy latté?

Once you're talking about anything outside the Starbucks itself, WiFi has almost nothing to do with it.

Most likely, your borrowed laptop will be given an IP address by the system at Starbucks, dynamically. Very likely this IP address will pass through a level of translation on the way out to the real intarweb, so that you will only be identifiable as being in a particular Starbucks (or, to a more casual observer, coming from whatever ISP gives the Starbucks their service). It is fairly simple to find a geographic location from an IP address, although not always accurate, but that will still only be the Starbucks. (Even if the translation doesn't happen, you will still be identifiable only as sitting in the particular Starbucks.)

The association with the Bank of Iceland might be visible through other information. Web browsers are notoriously chummy and will tell web servers all about themselves with no prompting whatsoever. Probably it will not be enough to identify you, but there is the off chance that some icelandic identifying information will have snuck in there. To defeat this you could use an anonymizer service, if you can spell better than I can. Of course, the anonymizer will still be able to see that info. Or you could make sure there is no identifying info in the browser data, but that's a little beyond me. (I think the chances are pretty low anyway.)

Much more likely than either of the points above, your browser may be storing cookies (pieces of data, not cooked dough and chocolate chips) from earlier sessions before being liberated from the Bank of Iceland. These can (and often do) store uniquely identifying information, for tracking advertising mostly, but also for neat tricks like remembering your WGB login. A person with access to a web server you visit and some information about what cookies may have been left on the computer before might be able to access those cookies and determine that you are making use of Bank of Iceland property. With Firefox you can defeat this by deleting all privacy information (it's "Tools -> Clear Private Data" I think). On Internet Explorer you can clear the cookies manually as well, somewhere in the dialog boxes under "Tools -> Options," if I'm not mistaken.

For the truly paranoid, I believe there is a CD out there now which boots to a special version of Linux + Firefox modified to use an anonymous routing service, which is probably as close to perfect anonyminiousness as you are going to get with teh computar machine. I'll try to find the info about it if you're interested.

Edit: For someone sitting in the same Starbucks, who has previous knowledge of the Bank of Iceland's WiFi card MAC address, the computer is instantly identifiable as soon as it is turned on. You can defeat this by swapping in a new WiFi card, but I think we're really entering Spook Country at that point.

We should also keep in mind that Starbucks uses T-Mobile HotSpots. According to their literature, the wireless connection (that is, your computer's link with their wireless router) is encrypted, which means that nobody on the same network should more than gibberish out of any packets sent by your computer. In addition, your Bank of Iceland should be using some sort of encryption whenever you send or receive private information, adding yet another layer.

Now, I'm not sure how seriously to take the literature offered by T-Mobile about their HotSpots, but if your bank is worth their internet security guy's salt, you should have very little to worry about, unless someone stages a "man-in-the-middle" attack, but that would require knowing a great deal about you and could be done anywhere, not just on a wireless network.

Ah, I finally finely parsed MoM's original post and figured out the bit about the borrowed computer. As far as I know, the one bit of info that could identify your computer like a fingerprint is the MAC (Media Access Control) address, and that *would* be known to the Starbucks wifi. Now, whether the Starbucks wifi would know what to do with that information, or if someone from the Bank of Iceland, in a mad dash to secure roving assets, suddenly requested all the MAC addresses that ever accessed every Starbucks T-Mobile HotSpot in Manhattan, you'd probably get found out. In which case, getting some sort of PCMCIA card or other wireless solution to use instead of the included wireless card (as Colin says above), would help make that more difficult.

You just have to consider that the odds of someone keeping that close of an eye on their company's assets are probably fairly low and would only be a concern if the laptop were ever reported stolen and was known to contain sensitive data.

The encryption on the T-mobile hotspots is probably just that regular wireless stuff that I forget the acronym for. I've heard that it's not all that secure, actually, from a determined attack. On the other hand, to attack it the person would have to be on the local wireless network at the Starbucks, which presumes that somebody is following MOM around. Of course, it's a good idea to protect any important information from random snooping anyway with another layer of security such as that used by most corporate VPNs. This is a bit separate from the issue of identification, of course, since by using such software your sort of have to identify yourself to the world at large at some level (even if that is only "somebody is connecting to the Bank of Iceland's VPN server").

I don't think it's likely that Starbucks logs all the MAC addresses on their wireless nets, but it is possible, technically speaking, so again, if you're paranoid...

Probably the real spooks have cool wireless cards that pick random MAC addresses every time they restart.

Real spooks use carrier pigeons. : )

... and they park behind the Starbucks, or better yet, just wardrive around suburbia until they find an open wireless link (should take about 10 minutes?) so that even if the thing does get traced down it's unlikely they show up on a security camera nearby...

The hard part is connecting the pigeon to the wireless.