TTC Shelbyville – Technical Blog

Computer Information Technology at Shelbyville

Gives individuals a concise IT education and serves as an alternative path to a professional career; also helps area nonprofi ts with their IT needs as students serve as voluntary interns to gain experience.

Official program download

Official Website

Here’s a nice little utility that can run standalone or with an installer.  Core Temp monitors your CPU and warns you if you are reaching a critical temperature.   Tips for keeping your laptop cool-

• Keep all of the vents clear.
• Never sit it in your lap, on a recliner,sofa arm or bed without a hardened surface underneath
• Sit your laptop on a firm surface
• Never place your laptop on a magazine, newspaper or on loose papers
• Keep a TV tray or book handy to place your laptop on

Alternate Download Site

Over a period of time, you will install programs and uninstall programs often forgetting what you did and did not install.  By doing this, you often forget what is starting up and running processes in the background.

What’s Running is an excellent program that we have reviewed in the past and so has Rick over at What’s On My PC.  This program now in Version 3.0 and Beta 9 has more features than ever.   What’s Running allows you to take snapshots and compare what was running on your computer or what drivers were loaded at an earlier time.

Included on both the website and in the program is a feature to allow you to lookup any unknown process.

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Firewalls

Gufw – easy to install firewall and easy to use GUI

   Firestarter is an easy to use firewall for Linux

Backup Software

 BackupPC is an easy to use backup utility

Photo Editing

  Gimp is an excellent photo editing program

CD Ripping, CD/DVD Burning and Music Player

Sound Juicer rips your CDs into MP3s

Brasero burns your CD/DVDs

Amarok organizes and plays your music

Multimedia Player

 VLC is an excellent multimedia player for Linux

Productivity Suite

  Open Office is an open source productivity suite

Here’s the best password analyzer I have seen.   It analyzes your password and looks at all aspects of how your password is made up.   From Ask the Geek

Here’s two samples -

Weak

Strong

Note: You can have the best password in place but if you have a virus, malware or your firewalls, webservers or  OS has holes in them, strong passwords are useless.   Step 1 – create a very strong password.

Thanks to Dawn and Mickey for posting information about this article.

TDL4 – Top Bot – Securelist.

Very interesting article about a rootkit we’ve been seeing on people’s PCs lately. This is one scary virus!  - Dawn Babian

The malware detected by Kaspersky Anti-Virus as TDSS is the most sophisticated threat today. TDSS uses a range of methods to evade signature, heuristic, and proactive detection, and uses encryption to facilitate communication between its bots and the botnet command and control center. TDSS also has a powerful rootkit component, which allows it to conceal the presence of any other types of malware in the system.

Read About the Advertising Malware Problem

Look in My PC is an excellent program that gives you an overview of your computer’s hardware, software, registry entries, internet connections, event log information and dozens of other items including diagnostics.

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Google’s Street View faces multiple class action lawsuits over claims that its camera cars sniffed usernames, passwords, and even e-mails from open WiFi networks as they passed. Google argued that this couldn\’t be wiretapping because the networks were open; a federal judge has just disagreed.

via Judge to Google: sniffing even open WiFi networks may be wiretapping.

RSA Security will replace almost every one of the 40 million SecurID tokens currently in use as a result of the company\’s systems being hacked in March. This comes after confirmation that defense contractor Lockheed Martin was hacked using information gleaned from the RSA breach.

via RSA finally comes clean: SecurID is compromised.