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21 Feb 2020 - Podcast #681 - (21:48)
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Does this ever happen to you? You remember that you were working on a file this morning, or yesterday, or sometime last week. You need to open the file again, but you can’t remember what you called it or where you saved it.
Frustrating, right?
So you open the File Explorer, open the Documents directory, switch to details view, and then sort the files on the date modified column by inverse order so the most recent items are at the top. That might work, but many applications store their files in specific directories.
The situation is even worse if you have multiple disk drives and worse still if you lack a hierarchical filing structure or you don’t remember which application you were using to create the file.
Windows 10 has an easier way.
Click any of the small images for a full-size view. To dismiss the larger image, press ESC or tap outside the image.
Press and hold the Windows Key and tap the Tab Key. Maybe you’ve done this to open the more powerful version of the Task Switcher (Alt+Tab). WinKey+Tab is also the key used to create a new virtual desktop. But wait, as they used to say on those late-night TV commercials, there’s more.
The initial display shows what you’re working on now and, if the computer has more than one monitor, the display can extend to the second monitor. You’ll see all of the applications and documents that are open right now. But we’re looking for something you were working on this morning, or yesterday, or sometime last week. Or maybe several weeks ago.
All is not lost! Look at the bottom of the screen (scroll down if you have to) and you’ll see the words "Earlier Today". Scroll further and you’ll see "Yesterday". Keep scrolling and you’ll go all the way back 30 days. Maybe. More about that in a second, but if you see the file you’re looking for, click it and Windows will open the application you were using with the file and then open the file.
The 30-day history has one small catch: You have to allow history information to be sent to Microsoft. If you don’t allow that, this feature will be limited to just a few days.
Depending on how much you trust Microsoft, you may want to store the information only on your computer and forgo the advantages of the long look-back as well as the advantage of being able to share history information across multiple computers that you own.
To check or change the settings, open the Windows 10 Settings app and navigate to Privacy > Activity History. You can specify whether or not to store history information on the computer, whether history information should be sent to Microsoft, and, if you have more than one account, which ones' activity will be recorded for. I need all the help I can get, so I’m willing to have the information sent to Microsoft.
As good as this feature is, it’s not perfect. You’ll be able to see you had a browser open but there’s no detail about sites you visited unless you use Microsoft Edge. That’s not a big deal for me and it might not be a big deal for you because browsers have their own history functions.
Microsoft says that not all applications are compatible with the history function, but I haven’t yet found one that isn’t. It’s possible, or even likely, that the warning from Microsoft is offered if some application some person uses somewhere on the planet cannot conform. My opinion: Don’t worry about it.
If you sometimes need to find a file that you worked on last year or two years ago or in 1998, the Windows 10 history function won’t help, but Agent Ransack will.
Mythicsoft has made it easy to find files for longer than I can remember. The company released Agent Ransack to search through files quickly and find ones based on a file name; words in the file; or the file’s location, size, create date, modification date, or location.
As it turned out, "Agent Ransack" scared the fecal matter out of corporate IT managers, so Mythicsoft started offering File Locater Pro. The programs are identical. Only the names have been changed to protect the needlessly squeamish.
Mythicsoft’s "lite" applications are free and the company offers professional licenses in three categories: Standard (can be installed on 3 computers), Technician (unlimited installations with the purchaser’s name), and Floating (usable by a licensed number of concurrent users).
For home and small-office users, the free version is more than adequate.
Let’s say that I’m looking for something that I wrote about WordPerfect in 2015, 2016, or 2017. WordPerfect is a topic that I’m likely to have mentioned during that three-year period, but the document I’m looking for might be a plain-text file in any of several directories on drive D or drive E or it might be a WordPerfect, Word, or InDesign file on either of those drives.
Searching manually could take longer than I want to spend because I’m impatient.
Agent Ransack can do the job. On the Main tab, I specify that I want to search WordPerfect (*.wpd), Word (*.docx), text (*.txt), and InDesign (*.indd) files on drives D and E. The files must contain the term "wordperfect" and the file must have been created after 1 January 2015 and before 1 January 2018.
I gave Agent Ransack those instructions and less than a minute later I had a list of 118 files, including WordPerfect is not Word.wpd in the D:\WORDS\WordPerfect docs\Bill’s Files directory.
Agent Ransack (or File Locater Pro) can be downloaded from the Mythicsoft website. After installing the application, you must obtain a free license key. This is an application every Windows user should have.
Besides the applications you install and the photos, documents, spreadsheets, and other files you create, your computer probably has some junk files that you might want to get rid of.
These non-essential files may not be a big deal if you have a desktop computer with a large hard drive or several large hard drives. Those who use notebook computers may feel the pinch, though. If you opted for a small solid-state boot drive in the interest of having a faster computer, the pinch will be noticeable sooner.
It’s easy to install extra drives. Maybe too easy. In addition to a modest solid-state boot drive and a mechanical network attached storage drive that’s connected to the router, I have four mechanical drives in a separate housing that connects to the primary laptop. Except for the boot drive, I’m responsible for all the files on the other drives.
The boot drive collects unnecessary files. Instead of a 1TB mechanical drive, I selected a 500GB solid-state drive. That makes the boot process fast, but I have a lot of installed applications and need to monitor that drive.
Computer crashes often create log files and a memory dumps. Windows updates save the previous version of the operating system in case the new version creates problems. Most applications create temporary files and too many applications don’t clean up after themselves.
Microsoft’s Disk Clean-up utility has been around for a while, but Windows 10 has a more powerful tool. My 500GB C drive has 166GB of free space. That’s not cramped yet. Performance problems begin when a disk drive has less than 15% free space, so I could accumulate another 100GB of files before I’d have to worry. I’d like to keep at least 30% of the drive as free space and a little less than 35% is free now. It’s time to see what can be discarded.
The Windows 10 Disk Cleanup options are in Settings, so open the System panel and choose the Storage tab. At the top of the screen, you’ll see an toggle for (1) Storage Sense that can free up space when a disk is running low. This is off by default and I leave it off because I want to decide what should be deleted and when. Next, there’s (2) an option to configure or run Storage Sense. Selecting that will take you to a screen where you can specify how you want Windows to deal with superfluous files.
Below the bar chart that shows how much space is available on the C drive there’s a list of file types based on what the files contain. Because I store data files, photos, email, and all other files that I create on drives D through I, (3) Apps and Features is the only category that contains much and (4) Other, Documents, Temporary Files, Other People, and Mail appear to be almost empty.
I configured Storage Sense to delete any temporary files more than one day old. Temporary files are by definition not intended to be kept, but many programs create these files and then fail to delete them when the application exits. Deleting temporary files increased the available storage from 166GB to 172GB. That’s not much of an improvement and if I want to clean up the boot drive, the process will probably involve deleting some old versions of applications I use and all versions of applications that are no longer in use.
Click (5) More Storage Settings to show the amount of space left on other drives. Clicking any of the drive letters will drill down to show the contents of those drives
CAUTION: Never delete any file or folder unless you know exactly what it is and you’re certain that it isn’t essential to the computer’s operation.
Some applications offer choices for what to do with files that are probably no longer needed. Microsoft Outlook, for example, offers to remove all message in “Deleted items”. Other email programs have settings that control when deleted items are purged from the system. Don’t forget to empty the Recycle Bin occasionally, too.
A blog I read recently had a question about how to turn off User Account Control (UAC) warnings that pop up when you install an application or make certain changes to the computer.
The guy’s reasoning was that he knew when he was installing something and didn’t need to have Windows ask him if he really wanted to allow the installation. He found the intrusions both useless and annoying.
UAC warnings have been around since Microsoft introduced Vista. Many people didn’t like the idea. That was 14 years ago, and I couldn’t remember what I thought about it, but I found my first mention of the protective measures in a 2007 program. Back then, I wrote “Windows XP has only 2 kinds of user account: Administrators (who can do everything) and everybody else (who can do nothing). Because the non-administrator accounts are so limited, everyone gets an administrator account. This is a lot like allowing all Unix/Linux users to run as root. Dumb. Windows Vista adds a layer and provides the oft-maligned user account control (UAC).”
I followed that with a further explanation: “UAC allows most users to log in as standard users because a standard user who knows the administrator’s password can allow potentially unsafe actions to proceed by providing that password. UAC asks for permission before performing actions that might affect the computer’s operation or change settings that affect other users. An administrator who sees a UAC message can simply indicate approval; standard users must provide an administrator’s password to proceed. The goal of UAC is to prevent malware and spyware being installed.”
For once, I seem to have gotten it right the first time around. Even though the implementation could annoy, the idea was good.
Since then, we’ve been through several iterations of Windows and user access control gets in the way less than it used to. Still there are users who resent having the operating system act like a big brother. I’ve said this more than several times: I’ll take all the help I can get. That attitude is reflected in my use of spelling and grammar checkers, protective software, and anything else that forces me to take a second look at a sentence, an action, or a software installation that I might regret.
The UAC warnings can annoy, though. I’m not going to turn them off, even though Microsoft makes this possible. Instead, it's possible to adjust the warnings to be protective, but less bothersome. I don't even do that, but here’s how if you want to.
As of early 2020, the UAC settings are still in the old-style Control Panel. You can get there by clicking the Windows key, typing “control”, and selecting Control Panel App. Click System and Security, choose System and Security from the list on the left panel, and then click Change User Account Control Settings. You’ll see a UAC warning that asks if you want to allow the app to modify the computer. You do, so click Yes.
Now you’ll see a panel with four options:
Following my “I’ll take all the help I can get” policy, my preference is option #1. The UAC warnings take only a few seconds and can save hours (possibly days) of work to repair a botched system. Choosing this option recognizes that I am fallible and that I might accidentally do something stupid. It’s the setting I recommend.
The second and third options are similar. The primary difference is that the third option will not freeze other applications until you respond to the UAC warning. Microsoft recommends #3 “only if it takes a long time to dim the desktop on your computer.”
Option 4 allows anyone or anything to modify the system. You won’t be notified when something tries to install software or make changes to the operating system. Nobody who comprehends the dangers would select this option.
If you use Firefox and keep it up to date, you can skip this section, but this is important if your version of Firefox might be out of date.
At the time I prepared this article, version 72.0.2 was current and the flaw I’ll describe here was fixed in version 72.0.1. The Mozilla Foundation described it this way: “Incorrect alias information in IonMonkey JIT compiler for setting array elements could lead to a type confusion. We are aware of targeted attacks in the wild abusing this flaw.”
The IonMonkey JIT (just in time) compiler is a Mozilla component that converts source code to machine code shortly before it’s needed. The component’s two primary objectives are to provide a well-engineered design that easily supports adding new optimizations and that allows for specialization needed to generate extremely fast code.
The flaw could allow an attacker to exploit Javascript code to hack a user’s PC and install malicious code outside of Firefox. Mozilla’s report said that the organization was aware of targeted attacks in the wild abusing this flaw, but provided no information about how widespread the attacks are.
“Type confusion” refers to a memory bug in which a value is created and allocated as one type and is then switched to another type during manipulation. The result is an ability to execute code on a vulnerable system.
Mozilla deemed this to be a “critical” bug and Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency warned users to obtain a patched version of the browser immediately. Mozilla credited Chinese cyber-security firm Qihoo 360 with finding and reporting the bug.
Older versions of Firefox display version and update information when the user selects Help > About from the menu. More recent versions of the browser have moved that information to Help > Troubleshooting Information.
Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) is evolving. It has grown from small, ad hoc tasks performed disparately across organizations to robust programs with their own staff, tools, and processes that support the entire organization. That good news is shown in a survey by the SANS Institute.
The SANS Institute has been around for more than 30 years. It began as a cooperative research and education organization in 1989 and is considered to be the largest provider of cyber security training and certification for professionals at governments and commercial institutions.
Survey author and SANS instructor Robert M. Lee says the past three years have brought "an increase in the percentage of respondents choosing to have a dedicated team over a single individual responsible for the entire CTI program."
Survey results indicate that just less than 50% of respondents' organizations have a team dedicated to CTI, up from 41% in 2019. While the number of organizations with dedicated threat intelligence teams is growing, results also demonstrate a move toward collaboration, with 61% reporting that CTI tasks are handled by a combination of in-house and service provider teams.
This is all good news because criminals are becoming increasingly adept — state-based organizations in Russia have the full support of the government, but even small, rogue organizations pose an increasing threat.
Lee says that SANS continues to see an emphasis on partnering with others, whether through a paid service provider relationship or through information-sharing groups or programs. "Collaboration within organizations is also on the rise, with many respondents reporting that their CTI teams are part of a coordinated effort across the organization."
Another sign of maturity is the definition and documentation of intelligence requirements. The number of organizations reporting a formal process for gathering requirements increased 13% from last year, to almost 44% in 2020. This makes the intelligence process more efficient, effective and measurable — keys to long-term success.
This is a battle that won't be won easily and it's essential for individuals, corporations, organizations, and government agencies to work together.
It's not a computer virus, but the Coronavirus has caused cancellation of some events and is being used (surprise!) by scammers. Also (surprise!) disinformation campaigns are being built around it.
The Global System for Mobile Communications (GSMA) has canceled the gigantic mobile trade show, MWC 2020, that was to be held 24-27 Feb 2020 in Barcelona. The show attracts 100 thousand attendees. Before the cancellation was announced, some of the major vendors had decided not to attend.
Criminals have created fake messages that claim to be from the World Health Organization. Some of the messages contain attachments that install malware that's designed to steal information. Others use basic social-engineering ploys to trick users into revealing login credentials.
Disinformation and misinformation about the outbreak are being spread by people who share information originating in Russia. You've probably seen some of them if you use social media. Maybe we should all bear in mind that Russia's "president" (who might better be described as a dictator) was once a KGB agent and the KGB has a long history of spreading lies.
Looking back at my account of Microsoft’s first "industrial strength operating system", I’m surprised by how much of what seems routine today was so exciting back then.
Windows 2000 had a pre-flight check that told me I would need to update device drivers, that some software would require patches, and that a few applications wouldn’t work at all. The installation process didn’t need my help to find anything and when the process was complete, everything worked. The settings I’d created under Windows 98 were still there.
I seem to have been most impressed by improvements in typography: "For graphics professionals, Windows 2000 offers a huge advance: The ability to use and display Postscript (type 1) fonts in addition to the Windows-format True Type fonts." And, although the operating system had been out for less than a week, there was already a service pack.
Some things never change.