TTC Shelbyville – Technical Blog

VirtualBox Virtual Appliances | VirtualBoxImages.com.

VirtualBox Virtual Appliances

Total Activated Virtual Computers: 

46,902

VDI images of pre-installed “Open Source” Operating System distros. Pre-installed virtualbox images ready for you to explore and play with.
VirtualBox runs on SunOS, OpenSolaris, Mac OS X, Windows, OS/2 and Linux.

People are always asking me where they can get free eBooks.   While there are many places to obtain free eBooks, Project Gutenberg  and Google’s eBook store are some of the best online free resources.  With thousands of books, new and classics are available in almost every format.

Formats for most of these books are ePub, HTML, online (viewing), Kindle, Plucker, QiOO Mobile and even plain text.

How to download to mobile devices

It’s January 28th, 2011, and that means Data Privacy Day is here! The NCSA would like to celebrate this event by emphasizing ways that everyone can contribute to cybersecurity and data privacy. See which categories apply to you and check out how you can spread the word…more

Dawn found a listing of tools that analyze crash dumps, hunt for trojans and more.  Check out this website for an excellent assortment of tools.

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Can you multi-task?  Here’s a simple test to see.   Link (Note, your computer will go to full screen.)

My results are below, I was eating chocolate cake with whip cream and strawberries while feeding the dogs and watching a drama on TV. Article.

Recently Pat had a program he needed to update.  I couldn’t remember the settings to bypass a proxy server if you have a program that will not update and there are no settings to use a proxy server.

Here’s his solution:

In order to bypass the proxy, log in as the administrator, open IE, Click on Tools, Internet Options, Click on Connections, Lan Settings, Click on the Advanced Setting and enter the websites that need to bypass the proxy server.

Chrome and Firefox users – If you click under options under these browsers, the Internet Options (above) will open.  Follow the same steps.

This tip has been around for a while but your risk data loss in a power failure if your computer isn’t on a UPS (Uninterruptable Power Supply) is increased.   Because laptops have a battery, this can be an ideal setting.

1. Right Click on Computer and select Manage
2. Click on Device Manager
   
3. Expand Disk Drives
4. Right click on the hard drive and select Properties for that hard drive (you can also double click the drive
5. On the Policies tab:
   Check Turn off Windows write-cache buffer flushing on the device
6. Hit OK and close the Device Manager
   

You may be able to improve your hard drive’s performance in Windows 7 by using this registry tweak.   Like any registry tweak, you should have all of your files backed up and make a restore point before trying this out.

Computer hard drives are connected to the controller on the motherboard of the computer.  A lot of computers today may have the hard drive configured to use the older IDE interface protocol to communicate with the SATA drive.

If your new hard drive supports NCQ (Native Command Queuing)you may see a performance increase with the drive by following the tweaks below.

An easy solution to switch between IDE and AHCI is to change the following registry key.

Before doing this see if your BIOS has AHCI capabilities

1. Open Registry Editor and move down to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\msahci.
2. Right click on the Start DWORD and click on Modify.
   
3. Set the value to 0 and click OK.
   
4. Reboot your computer and enable the AHCI setting the BIOS.

If you are using a RAID adapter on your computer you may try the following:

1. Open up Registry Editor and naviage to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\iaStorV or the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\iaStor.
2. Repeat all of the steps above.

Testing your hard drive speed (blog)

Hacker Sells Access To Military, University Websites | News & Opinion | PCMag.com.

With only 8 days left many ISPs are scrambling to get IPv6 compliant.  Hurricane Electric offers many tools, tunnel broker and certifications in IPv6.  Link

Articles on IPv6

With the world of mobile devices upon us, is 5gb enough?  After researching the way people use the internet with social websites, e-learning and streaming video is this amount enough for an average user?

Smartphone Hack Highlights More GSM Woes – Darkreading.

A European researcher today showed how bugs he has discovered in the baseband chipset firmware of iPhone and Android smartphones could be exploited to ultimately take control of these devices.

Weekend Contest: Win A Bulletproof IoSafe Hard Drive.

Many manufacturers offer a download to securely erase your hard drive.  Darik’s Boot and Nuke downloads as an iso that can be written to a CD or DVD.   Boot and Nuke erases your hard drive when you have installation errors or just want to get rid of files on a hard drive.

BrightHub Review by Bill Fulks

Bart my not be the smallest but I haven’t seen a smaller utility to backup your files.  At 50 kb, this light weight program can be used to backup your files onto your external drive or across a network.   The good thing about Bart is it looks for files that have changed in the folder you specify and copies only the changed files once the initial backup has taken place.  If you have files you don’t want backed up, simply make an exclusion.   The website includes excellent instructions on how to run as a scheduled task.

Facebook Apps Allowing Access to Numbers, Addresses | News & Opinion | PCMag.com.

The Identity Theft Resource Center has reports that cover last year and information about past data breaches with prominent companies.  The ITRC has information on what to do if your id is stolen.  Link

Full Books

Amazing list of books online.

Hacker cracks W-LAN password in 20 mins using Amazon cloud – The Local.

Interesting article on how passwords can be broken if given time.  By using cloud computing, this individual could use multiple fast computers to break a password on a wireless network.  The article continues to tell you how to help protect you against this form of hacking.

Thanks Kevin!

Data Breaches In 2010: Indicates Mandatory Reporting Needed – Darkreading.

“The Identity Theft Resource Center recorded 662 breaches on its 2010 ITRC Breach List. It is apparent, with few exceptions, that there is no transparency when it comes to reporting breaches. Other than breaches reported by the media and a few progressive state websites, there is little or no information available on many data breach events. It is clear that without a mandatory national reporting requirement, that many data breaches will continue to be unreported, or under-reported.” Read more..