Gmail Gets a New Loader

Went to login to my Gamil account today and I saw they added a new loading screen. Google has found the perfect middle ground between new technologies (mainly AJAX) and using them correctly/not abusing them.

I wonder if this is why Google seemed to be down off and on for the past two weeks…I hope they have a better reason than that.

Using Greasemonkey & Firefox To Show Google Calendar With Gmail

If you are sucked into the Googlverse as badly as I am, you are no doubt using two of Google’s most popular services: Gmail and Google Calendar. Now normally I lock these tabs in Firefox with the PermaTabs addon.

This is nice, but what would be really nice is if I could combine the two tabs into one. Thanks to Greasemonkey and a brilliant developer known as ‘The Dot‘, now we can…and very easily;)

What We’re Going To End Up With

Getting Ready

All you really need to do this is to make sure you have the Firefox web browser installed. After that, we will install Greasemonkey. Here’s how.

Installing Greasemonkey

1. Get Greasemoneky.
2. Click the green ‘Add to Firefox’ button
   
3. Click the ‘Install Now‘ in the following window
   
4. After it completes, hit the ‘Restart Firefox‘ button to complete the install
   
5. You should now see a little monkey head in the lower left of Firefox.
   

Installing the Gmail Addons Script

1. Browse to the Gmail Addons UserScripts site
2. On the right hand side, you should see a button called ‘Install this script‘
   
3. After you click it, you will see a new box. Click ‘Install‘
   

Using the Script

1. Open up your Gmail account (if you already have it open, you may need to refresh)
2. You should now see three new links in the upper left: Chat, Prefs & Calendar
   
3. Since this is about the Calendar, we are going to click that link
4. You should now see that half the screen is taken up by Gmail, and the lower half if your Calendar!

MSN Having a Little CSS Trouble

Went to MSN.com to see what was going on, and I saw this…

MSN, if you need some help with your CSS, send me an email and we can talk.

User Question: Whats Your Favorite Application/Tool/Algorithm & What Files Do You Protect?

So I just installed Skribit today, and about an hour later I got my first user submitted question for a post. I thought it was a really good question that definitely deserved my attention. Also, if you were the person who asked this question, please email me at (randy AT randyjensenonline DOT COM) so I can give you a link to your blog/website/Facebook page/etc.

Whats Your Favorite Application/Tool/Algorithm & What Files Do You Protect?

Favorite Encryption App/Tool

TrueCrypt. This one’s not even close. This thing is the best of breed and anyone serious about security should be using it. I also like AxCrypt for encrypting single files you want to send securely.

Favorite Algorithm

256bit AES (or AES/Rijndael). If you use a strong passphrase (20 characters or more) for your most secure data, you should never have to worry about having this cipher cracked anytime in the near future. One of the cool features of TrueCrypt is that it will also allow you to choose cascading algorithms, meaning you could use AES-Twofish-Serpent or Serpent-AES. Of course, you still need to make sure you have a really good passphrase no matter what cipher you use.

What Do I Encrypt

I currently encrypt all my hard drives with 256 bit AES encryption with TrueCrypt (what can I say, I eat my own dogfood:). I also encrypt any thumb drives that I carry with me. You can learn to encrypt your entire hard drive and your thumb drives.

Bonus Security Links

PayPal Security Key

This thing is a must have if you are a serious PayPal user. It’s a small key fob that generates a random six digit code. Whenever you login to your PayPal (or eBay) account, you push the button to generate a code and enter it on the appropriate page. This is part of a greater security movement called ‘multifactor authentication‘ which I wrote about a while ago.

Securely Erase Your Hard Drive

Darik’s Boot and Nuke: This this is great for wiping hard drives. It can do as many passes over your drive as you’d like it to. If you’re seriously paranoid, you could do something like running TrueCrypt over the drive to encrypt it, and then wiping it several times with DBAN. But what are you hiding anyway;)

Protect Your Anonymity Online

TOR: TOR stands for ‘The Onion Router’. It works by routing your internet traffic through several TOR ‘nodes’ located around the world. After it goes through these, it arrives at your requested site, which is then routed back through the nodes, and to your browser. It’s not perfect, but it is a good way to remain semi-anonymous online. Oh, and it will probably dramatically slow down your browsing speed:)

Secure Password Generator

Steve Gibson’s Perfect Password Generator: If you want a quick, easy way to create an almost perfectly unique password, Steve Gibson’s ‘Ultra High Security Password Generator’ is all you need. The algorigthm Steve has created creates a password with the highest possible entropy, meaning your password is almost guaranteed to be unique.

Encrypting Thumb Drives With TrueCrypt

Last week I wrote a post on how to encrypt entire hard drives with TrueCrypt. We all know how easy it is to have your laptop lost or stolen and how important it is to protect sensitive data. However, something that is even easier to lose and often has just as sensitive data on it is thumb drives. I know personally I’ve lost a couple of them over time.

Today we’re going to learn how to encrypt these drives to keep them from prying eyes.

Setting Up

Just a few things to get you prepared for the encryption process.

1. Grab TrueCrypt if you don’t already have it.
2. Make sure your thumb drive is plugged in and move everything on it to your desktop. This is important because TrueCrypt is going to format the drive during the encryption process.
3. Open the main TrueCrypt window
   

Beginning the Encryption Process

During this phase, we will be getting the settings together so we can actually encrypt the drive.

1. Click the ‘Create Volume‘ button on the main TrueCrypt window
2. Choose the second radio button: Create a volume with a non-system partition/device
   
3. At the next screen, leave the radio button on ‘Standard TrueCrypt Volume‘ (unless you know what you’re doing and want to get fancy:)
   
4. Now click the button that says ‘Select Device‘
   
5. Find your thumb drive in the list (you can tell by what drive letter it is mounted in Windows). For this tutorial, we are going to choose the ‘partition’ not the actual device (so in my case ‘\Device\Harddisc6\Partition1′)
   
   If you get a warning after clicking ‘ok’, you can ignore it. It’s simply stating that you could also create an encrypted file on the device rather than encrypting the entire drive. Click Next
6. I like to leave the Encrpytion and the Hash algorithms at their defaults, AES and RIPEMD-160 respectively. Feel free to play around if you know what you are doing.
   
7. On the Volume Size screen, you won’t be able to do anything because we chose to encrypt the entire drive. Click ‘Next‘
   
8. Create a passphrase on the next screen. Depending on how secure you want it to be, 20 characters is recommended. If nothing else, try to use symbols, caps, lowercase and numbers.
   

Starting the Encryption

Now, we will actually start the encryption process itself.

1. Now you will need to move your mouse around the TrueCrypt window to create a unique pool of characters. This is important to the strength of the encryption keys TC will use.
   
2. Once you are satisfied, click the ‘Format’ button. You will be presented with a box saying that all data will be lost NOT encrypted. If you followed along from the start, you’ve already moved all your data off the drive and this won’t be a problem and you can click ‘Yes‘
   
3. TrueCrypt will now begin to encrypt the drive. Mine was only 128MB so it only took a few minutes. Your time will vary
   
4. If everything went well, you should see a box saying the encryption was successful!
   

Mounting the Drive

The first thing you will probably notice is that Windows doesn’t recognize the drive like it normally did. You can click on the drive letter it assigns it, but it’s just going to ask you if you want to format it. Don’t! Here’s what you do.

1. Make sure the drive is still plugged in and the main TrueCrypt window is open. Also, select a drive letter in the list, I highlighted ‘Y’
   
2. Click the ‘Auto-Mount Devices‘ button. It’s going to ask you for the passphrase you created earlier, so enter that.
   
3. Your drive should now be mounted as whatever letter you choose (in my case ‘Y’)
   
4. Your drive will now be able to be accessed just like any other drive on your system!

Final Thoughts

There really isn’t much to encrypting your data with TrueCrypt, but that doesn’t diminish the need for strong encryption on all of our portable (and non-portable) devices. A couple of final notes:

1. Make sure you ‘Dismount’ the thumb drive before pulling it out by selecting the volume in the main TrueCrypt window and clicking on the ‘Dismount’ button.
2. Also remember that you need TrueCrypt installed on every computer you will be using your thumb drive one. Sounds like a no-brainer, but be aware if your IT department won’t allow you to install extra software on your work machines.

Fry’s, You Don’t Know My Mom Very Well

I got an email from Fry’s Electronics today telling me they had all kinds of great Mother’s Day gifts. Turns out the last time Fry’s did any research on what mom’s want was during the middle ages.

I can’t wait until mom opens this years Mother’s Day present. Boy is she going to be excited when she gets an online RPG game version of Conan the Barbarian!

Using Truecrypt to Encrypt Your Entire Hard Drive

If you’re as paranoid as I am, you more than likely appreciate the advancements that the TrueCrypt team has made with version 5.0. For me, the greatest thing they did was making whole disk encryption dead simple. Here’s how you do it.

Getting Started

1. First you will need to visit the TrueCrypt site and download and install it on your system. I’m going to be using Windows XP for my demonstration, but they have since released very good and stable version for Mac OSX and Linux.
2. Next, go ahead and open the main window by clicking on the TrueCrypt logo in the system tray. The window should look like this
   

Setting Up the Encryption Settings

3. Click the the ‘Create Volume ‘ button
4. On the next window, choose the radio button next to ‘Encrypt the system partition or entire system drive ‘
5. You now have the option to ‘Encrypt the Windows system partition’ or ‘Encrypt the whole drive ‘. We will be choosing the latter for this example.
6. For the next screen you can choose ‘Single Boot ‘ or ‘Multi-Boot’. More than likely you are only running one OS on your computer, so we will choose Single Boot.
7. Now you can choose the encryption settings. Unless you really know what you are doing, the default settings are fine. AES is an incredibly powerful encryption algorithm and should be all you need. I would also leave the Hash Algorithm at RIPEMD-160
   
8. Next you will need to create a password. Depending on how paranoid you are, you should choose a passphrase close to 20 characters in length. I would also recommend using Steve Gibson’s Perfect Passwords Generator to make sure you create a completely unique phrase.
   
9. Next you will need to move your mouse around the TrueCrypt window to create randomized data. This is fairly important, so spend a minute or two moving your mouse to make sure you really randomize things.
   
10. The next window should simply be showing you the keys that were generated for you. You can simply click next here.
    

Creating the Rescue Disk

11. The next step is to create what TrueCrypt calls the ‘Rescue Disk’. This disk will be used in case the boot loader or Windows become corrupt or infected with malware, yu will always have a way to decrypt the system. This step is extremely important, and TC will not let you proceed until it is satisfied that you did everything correctly. Begin by clicking the ‘Browse ‘ button. This will bring up a dialog box. Browse to your desktop and name the file something like rescueDisk.iso. IMPORTANT: remember to append the .iso or your file will not work correctly.
    
12. You should now see a window telling you the file was created successfully. It’s now time to burn the newly created .iso file to a cd. I strongly recommend using ImgBurn . If for some reason that doesn’t work, you can use something like CD Burner XP Pro . Click next
    
13. Make sure you have a blank CD in your drive and open ImgBurn. Click on ‘Write image file to disc’
    
14. Next click on the ‘Browse for a file’ button
    
15. Finally click the giant ‘Write’ button towards the bottom
    
16. After you have the disc burned, leave it in the drive and click ‘Next’ in the TrueCrypt window
    
17. If all went well you will be notified that the Rescue Disk was successfully verified
    

Pretest and Installing the Bootloader

18. You can choose to wipe the drive to really give you an incredibly secure hard drive, or just choose none if you aren’t storing government secrets on your computer (not that the government is intelligent enough to encrypt hard drives).
    
19. Next TC will begin the pretest to make sure everything is in working order before it begins the encryption process. This will also install the TrueCrypt boot loader on the boot sector of your hard drive. This is a major reason why this encryption is so great. There is virtually no way to boot into the Windows file system without having the decryption key. Click ‘Test ‘
    
    A friendly warning:)
    
20. After TC runs a few things you will be presented with a window to restart. Click ‘Yes ‘
    
21. After the computer boots back up, you should see a black and white screen. Enter your passphrase you created earlier.
    
22. If all went well you will now see a new dialog box saying the pretest was completed successfully.
    
23. Click ‘OK’ on the Rescue Disk information window
    

Finally! Encrypting the Drive

24. Whew! If you’ve made it this far, congratulations! We are now ready to encrypt the drive. You should see a window similar to the one below. Simply click the ‘Encrypt’ button and depending on your wipe mode and your encryption algorithms, go have a cup of coffee or go to sleep and let it run overnight.
    
25. When everything is done, you should see this
    

In Closing

If you were able to get through this tutorial, you should now feel much safer with your data knowing it’s now gone from incredibly insecure, to even the DOD or NSA would have trouble getting in (unless of course there was water boarding involved).

This is really helpful if you travel a lot and carry a laptop all the time. If something were to happen and it gets lost or stolen, yes, you lose the data but at least whoever has it can’t get it either. Of course this means we need some training in the art of backing up;)

WP 2.5 Image Upload Issue Fixed

Found a fix to my WordPress 2.5 image upload problem I was having after I upgraded on Saturday.

After about an hour of stumbeling around I came across a post on a forum where someone said they got the image upload to work by adjusting their .htaccess file on thier site with the following code.

<IfModule mod_security.c>
<Files async-upload.php>
SecFilterEngine Off
SecFilterScanPOST Off
</Files>
</IfModule>

I made the change to my .htaccess file, and like magic the image upload feature started to work again!

Josh Highland’s Blog WordPress 2.5 image upload problem : SOLVED

Microsoft Visual C++ Runtime Library Runtime Error With CD/DVD Player

Image from Wikipedia

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UPDATE: After all this, the drive stopped working several days later. I reformatted the machine, swapped cd drives…only to find out that the SATA cable went out on me. Once I replaced that, everything worked perfectly. (I would still follow the instructions below to get rid of the annoying DISCover.exe Runtime Error.
*******************************

I’ve been getting a Microsoft Visual C++ Runtime Library Runtime Error from a file called DISCover.exe sometimes when I would boot my computer. It didn’t happen all the time and I wasn’t sure exactly what the issue was. I didn’t have any program installed on my machine called DISCover and nothing was running in my system tray.

Whenever I would get this error, my CD/DVD drive would no longer show up on my computer. Very, very annoying.

I did some Googling and kept coming up with the same answer: Upgrade Visual C++ Runtime Libraries. I did this with exactly zero results.

Finally I went and found the DISCover.exe file that was causing the problem in this location: C:\Program Files\DISC\DISCover.exe. Instead of deleting it and for some reason having it crash my computer, I simply renamed it to DISCoverX.exe.

Problem solved. Why are the most frustrating problems the easiest to solve?

First Issues With WordPress 2.5

I’ve been using the newest version of WordPress a little while at WordCamp and I’ve run into a few issues with the new image uploading system.

Everytime I try to add an image, I get an HTML error. I’ve tried to chmod the uploads folder and the individual folders to 777, but that still didn’t seem to fix it. If anyone has any ideas, please let me know.

Other than that small issue, the new version is pretty amazing.

WordCamp Dallas 2008

I’ll be at WordCamp all day today and most of tomorrow so if you want to keep up with me, follow my Twitter stream here.

WordPress 2.5 Released

If you’re using WordPress, make sure to upgrade to the newest version 2.5 which was just released about 20 minutes ago:) Download WordPress 2.5 now

Hulu Offers New Advertising Options

Went to Hulu today to waste some time. I click on a clip of the NBA game of the Lakers vs. the Raptors when Kobe scored 81 points. Instead of it playing immediately, I was presented with an option that I haven’t seen before. I could either watch the trailer for Hellboy and watch the game commercial free, or I could start the clip immediately and watch it with commercials.

So what do you think about this? Good option, or just another meaningless click to and ad you probably aren’t going to watch anyway?

RUBotted?

If for some reason you think your computer has been compromised by a botnet, Trend Micro has a slick tool call RUBotted. It’s small, lightweight and simple to use. Here’s how to do it.

1. Download RUBotted here
2. Run the installer
3. You should now see the icon in your systray
4. If you left the box checked to run the program, you will see the following screen
   
5. If all is well, you now see this screen
   

That’s about it. you can leave this thing running in your systray to constantly monitor your computer, but if your careful on the internet you shouldn’t need to have it running all the time. It should also be noted that this is in beta so if it crashes, don’t be surprised.

Finally Time To Dump Cable?

Hulu.com launched a while back in private beta. Since then, it’s been released to the general public. I’ve been playing with it for the past week or so (tough job right?) and I’m completely blown away.

Did someone from big media finally get something right? I can’t believe it, but Hulu is nearly perfect.

Good quality, lots of choices (with more being added all the time), access to tv shows and movies, quick load time, the ads don’t bother me personally, great interface…honestly, it’s probably just easier for me to let you check it out and see what you think. Leave a comment and let me know what you think of it.

Hulu.com