Microsoft has rolled out a minor upgrade to its free security program, Microsoft Security Essentials. A few days ago I began running into computers with an MSE icon by the clock that had an exclamation point in it. Take a look at your icon! If it looks like the picture on the left, double-click on it to start the program.

It takes a single click to install the upgrade. The process takes 2-3 minutes – it only seems like a long time if you’re staring at the screen impatiently drumming your fingers.

Microsoft has released no information at all about what is new or changed in this upgrade. The only visible change is the addition of a line showing when your last scan took place. A couple of people believe the first scan after the upgrade takes longer and subsequent Quick Scans are faster but there’s no confirmation. Presumably something is changed under the hood for malware detection that makes the upgrade necessary.

Microsoft Security Essentials continues to be a good friend – free, easy to install, effective, and quiet in operation. If you haven’t switched to it, think about making the move from Norton, McAfee, OneCare or the others. Here’s more information about Microsoft Security Essentials to bring you up to speed.

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Apple has a new TV ad for the iPad that appears to be deliberately deceptive.

One of the strangest choices for the Apple iPad was its shape – nearly square, like an iPod or an old-fashioned TV, instead of widescreen, taller and narrower, like an iPhone or a widescreen TV. The proportions of an old TV or CRT monitor are 4:3 – almost square. A new widescreen TV or monitor is proportioned like a movie screen, usually 16:9. The screen on the iPhone is not quite true widescreen (it’s somewhere in between 4:3 and 16:9), but one of its selling points was the iPhone’s ability to function as a “widescreen iPod.”

The iPad held up by Steve Jobs is built on the old 4:3 ratio, reportedly at 1024×768 resolution. You’ve probably seen widescreen movies on an old square TV. Either the left and right sides of the movie get chopped off, or there are black bars on the top and bottom of the screen. The Unofficial Apple Weblog posted this picture to demonstrate how big the black bars would be for widescreen movies on the iPad.

Watch the shape of the iPad in the TV ad that Apple launched during the Academy Awards. The commercial cuts constantly between two different devices that have different shapes. It’s far more than can be explained by camera angles.

Here are two pictures from the commercial. The one on the left appears at the five second mark; the one on the right appears at the eight second mark. Pull out a ruler and measure the length and the width. They’re not the same proportions. The one on the left doesn’t look like it’s quite 16:9 widescreen but it’s significantly different than the 4:3 ratio on the right.

During the thirty second commercial, the taller, narrower iPad appears in a number of shots where the iPad is shown vertically. (A couple of seconds from the movie Star Trek are shown on the square screen, with the shot carefully chosen to conceal how much of the widescreen movie is being cut off from each side.)

This is what it looks like if the iPad on the left is cut out and rotated and placed over the iPad on the right, with the bottom and sides lined up.

What’s that all about? It’s a weird bit of deception when the actual device will be in the stores within a few days. Presumably it was done because the iPad looks better as a slimmer widescreen device, which gets back to the original question of why it was designed to be square in the first place.

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Microsoft Office 2010 will be available to consumers on June 15. There are new features focused on increasing the integration with online file storage and collaboration – plus a major redesign of Outlook, adding everything from a ribbon bar across the top to social networking links. There are some nice new things, although I haven’t seen anything yet that strikes me as a game-changer.

Starting now, if you buy Office 2007 or buy a new computer with Office 2007, you’ll get a free upgrade to Office 2010 when it’s released. The deal requires the usual work of filling out some forms but nothing too onerous, although you will be required to have a Windows Live ID or set one up. (Here’s some information about your Windows Live ID, if that’s new to you.)

Here’s the website with details about the upgrade and the signup procedure. Don’t overlook this if you get a new computer!

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Dell has added the Latitude 13 to its business notebook lineup, with a design that is identical in virtually every respect to the Vostro V13 introduced in December. The “Latitude” brand name is used by Dell to indicate that the notebook includes features for management by large companies. Here’s the description of the added features distinguishing the Latitude 13 from the Vostro V13:

The Latitude 13 adds features such as remote manageability and  desktop virtualization through certification from Citrix and VMware to deliver a full PC experience to users in non-standard computing environments such as call centers, regional offices and hotels; Comprehensive systems management with support for BroadcomTruManage technology and Dell ImageDirect service which lets IT create, update and deploy system images 24/7 from a secure online location; Flexible connectivity options from mobile broadband and Wi-Fi via 802.11 g/n; and customized security offerings including solid-state drives (SSD), full disk encryption (FDE), Trusted Platform Module (TPM) control and Computrace software.

The Latitude 13 includes a choice of built-in mobile broadband devices for Verizon, Sprint & AT&T which are not available for the Vostro, but the other features aren’t important to small businesses or home users. The Latitude 13 is a couple of hundred dollars more expensive than a comparable Vostro V13, with no advantage for non-enterprise customers.

It’s worth noting that the other manufacturers are not standing still. HP introduced six new laptops yesterday – “EliteBook” models and “ProBook s-series” models, whatever those might be. Toshiba is in the middle of a refresh of its business notebook line, Lenovo has introduced a new model of notebook every single day in 2010, and you have no idea how many notebooks and netbooks are being distributed by Acer, Asus, Sony, and others you’ve never heard of.

(Lenovo might have missed a day here and there but wow, they have a lot of laptops – something like 40-60 different models listed on their website tonight, depending on how you count.)

I only follow Dell products closely, for two equally important reasons:

• Dell is good enough. Dell continues to deliver consistently solid products and decent support. Not every experience with Dell is perfect but the chances of a good experience are as high or higher than any other manufacturer.
• I’m really tired. It’s difficult to keep up with more than a tiny fraction of the press releases for new products, and literally impossible to develop any kind of working knowledge of what it means to order and support them. I can barely keep up with Dell’s lineup.

Fortunately almost everything on the market is good enough. Don’t obsess when you’re shopping – follow my guidelines and enjoy your new computer!

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Look, you don’t think I enjoy this, do you? The constant grind of shuffling from airport to airport, renting cars and climbing on shuttle buses, desperately drinking coffee to wake up before dragging myself out to yet another ski slope.

But when the economy is dragging, I consider it my civic duty to step up and provide whatever stimulus I can to local economies. What can I tell you? I’m a giver.

Don’t panic.

• I’ll be available by email each afternoon and evening, and by phone any time for emergencies. I’ll be able to provide remote support in the afternoon if necessary.
• If you need immediate help and can’t reach me, please give my trusted colleague Mike Cook a call at (707) 827-1524.

Thanks for your continued loyalty and support!

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(Thanks to haha.nu!)

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Technology has left everyone feeling a bit adrift. Everyone fears that they don’t have basic skills that other people seem to have mastered – whether it’s finding files on a computer or locating information online, running programs or using handheld devices. Some people are ahead of the curve, some are behind, but almost no one feels confident. It’s hard to step back and realize how much you’ve learned about computers and the Internet in the last ten years.

Here’s an anecdote about a mistake. I don’t mention it to make fun of the people involved. We’re all fighting our way up this learning curve, every day.

A couple of weeks ago a popular blog, ReadWriteWeb, posted a story about Facebook. For a while the story was the top link in a Google search for “Facebook login.”

In the next few hours, many people arrived at the page because they typed “Facebook login” into Google and clicked on the first link. They believed they were on Facebook and concluded that there had been a terrible redesign which made it difficult to find the link to log in. There are literally hundreds of comments from people asking for help to log in or complaining about the redesign.

If you’re an experienced web surfer, this is an obvious mistake. It’s hard not to feel a little patronizing to the poor confused n00bs. As one blogger put it:

It’s like… Like if you asked a friend if there was a Starbucks in his neighborhood and he said, yeah I think there’s one half a mile down, maybe. And you drive half a mile and see a big carwash place, and you park and walk in and ask to speak to the manager. And you tell the carwash manager how unhappy you are with this terrible new Starbucks redesign.

Think about it a minute and it’s not quite as harmless and funny. People who can’t tell the difference between Facebook and a blog with an article about Facebook are also targets for phishing scams, which trap people who can’t read a URL and tell if they’re really on an official bank site.

Here’s an article about the Facebook login incident that turns into a thoughtful essay about information literacy. The article considers some of the reasons that some people are slower to pick up new technical concepts: lack of confidence, disabilities, difficulty understanding the way information is stored on a computer, the mystifying nature of complex URLs, and natural confusion as we struggle to absorb new abstract concepts – blogs, social networks, news feeds, and more.

Then the writer turns to some of the things that might help move people forward, including suggestions for how computer classes in high school and community college might be redesigned to be relevant in 2010 instead of glorified typing classes. It’s an interesting checklist that touches on many of the things that all of us will struggle to understand in the next decade or so.

To create a computer course for laymen that does not do them a disservice, it should be rooted in things that we can reasonably anticipate will not change. I’m not quite sure what those are but the stumbling blocks outlined in the previous section are a good place to start. It should combine practical computer skills and general information literacy. It should be required and it should be rigorous, not a blowoff course.

Imagine how many fewer bank accounts or email accounts would be hacked if a section on the final exam gave students URLs and asked them to identify the domain name, the subdomains, the path, the port, and the protocol. This sounds like esoteric technobabble at first. But if high school students are expected to know how many valence electrons molybdenum has or how to define trigonometric functions in terms of each other, it’s highly practical by comparison.

Teaching students how a hierarchical file system works would make sense. It could even briefly cover the directory structures on each popular OS at the time and where things go. I have my doubts on how long the idea will last, but I’m betting at least another 15 years.

I’m hoping email (as a means of communication) will die a horrible death in the near future. But if it doesn’t, its technical intricacies should be taught in some detail.

Such a course might also include a primer in Boolean logic and proofs, plus basic set theory — nothing too comprehensive. This would certainly allow students to refine their Google queries if the first result isn’t right (assuming they actually check).

Or there could be projects where students are asked to make simple relational database applications (not requiring any programming — just using a GUI) and to construct queries that join across tables to locate information. Or maybe they could use Yahoo Pipes to create mashups of multiple sites to solve a given problem.

Hell, a basic non-mathematical introduction to public key cryptography wouldn’t be a bad addition. I don’t think that’s going away for a long time, at least not until we get quantum computers.

This course could give students research projects to hone critical thinking. They could be given news stories, Wikipedia articles, and whitepapers by interest groups and be asked to get to the heart of the matter and argue one way or another. Students should be able to recognize logical fallacies and propaganda techniques so often employed by politicians and forum trolls alike.

The crux of all of this is that it’s becoming an essential skill for any capable person in our society to be able to sift through vast amounts of information of uncertain quality to find the best. Teach this and the rest effectively teaches itself.

Ultimately, if schools were completely successful in designing a curriculum for the 21st century, they might find themselves the architects of their own obsolescence as institutions.

But until then, teaching kids how to read a URL so they don’t get scammed by the Nigerians would be a nice improvement.

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When you tell me about certain kinds of computer problems, I sometimes begin weeping uncontrollably, or excuse myself from the room for a few minutes while I gobble down powerful antidepressants. Let me give you another example to show you why.

A law firm wrestled with a new Dell Optiplex 760 for months, starting almost immediately after it was purchased – erratic lockups with no obvious cause and no pattern.

At some point the computer refused to restart, with a message on a black screen that there was no boot device to be found. It wasn’t consistent – the system could still be made to restart with enough frustrated smashes on the power button.

I contributed sage advice, ranging from “I’ll be damned,” to “Wow, how strange,” which was not as helpful as I hoped. The client sighed and picked up the phone for Dell tech support.

It actually wasn’t a bad experience with tech support. Sure, you wish magic tech support fairies would come flying out of the phone and instantly understand the problem and solve it, but those are hard to come by, so Dell’s support reps instead plod through their scripts, running through tests and eliminating the obvious. You know it’s plugged in but forgive the tech support rep who asks you to check – I’ve been on the other end of calls where people tell me, no, there’s no light on the surge protector, could that be the problem? Yes, that could be the problem.

Eventually the support rep conceded that the hard drive might be the cause of the problem, and a new hard drive appeared on the doorstep in short order. The client installed it and, I’ll be damned, the same problem happened almost immediately – no boot device, error initializing drive.

Second long session with tech support and an unfortunate result – the next tech support rep said the new hard drive must have been defective or jostled during shipment or something, so he sent out another one.

This time it wasn’t much of a surprise that the same thing happened again. Back to the phone, with more force and emotion and a teensy bit of anger. You have a sense of how much time is going by during all this jousting back and forth, right?

Dell finally sent out a technician with a replacement motherboard, like it should have done one phone call earlier. A new motherboard was dropped into place on Friday, the system was stitched up, and things appeared to be fine.

I stopped by the office today to install drivers and build the system up with updates and case management programs. I didn’t give it much thought when the system froze after a few minutes, but I was nonplussed to see the same black screen “no boot device” message when I tried to restart it. I spent fifteen minutes poking around in the BIOS to no avail, then yanked the computer back to my office in case this was all caused by the law firm building being built on an old Indian burial ground or something. No luck – the same error message, the same boot failure.

The hard drive had been replaced. The motherboard had been replaced.

Lightbulb. Should have thought of it sooner.

I replaced the SATA cable between the motherboard and the hard drive.

The system started up and it’s been rock solid ever since. I’ve been working it to death and restarting it over and over and over, without a hiccup.

The cable. Stupid $9 cable hiding in plain sight, shorting out or whatever it’s doing wrong.

These are the stories that make me hesitant to dive into some kinds of computer problems. The next time it won’t be the cable, it will be a bit of flaky RAM, or a power supply that spikes, or cat fur blocking the fan, or a Milk Dud on the power switch, or an overheated video card, or it won’t be hardware at all. The same thing can happen with software problems, especially when malware gets on a computer – I can sometimes remove it with half an hour or an hour of work, but I’ve lost systems after spending three hours cleaning off bad things. Oddly, most people don’t want to pay me hundreds of dollars for doing really smart work when it happens to be completely useless.

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Be careful out there!

I went to Grooveshark tonight to listen to some music. (Here’s what I wrote about Grooveshark recently. For obvious reasons, I’m not going to link directly to the site tonight.)

Within a few seconds, the Internet Explorer window vanished and was replaced by a typical malware window claiming that my computer was infected with terrible diseases.

The malware came from a poisoned advertisement. Web sites that display advertising don’t put the ads there individually. Instead, they sign up with an ad network that’s responsible for supplying the ads to fill a space on the page. Here’s an admission in a Grooveshark forum that they’ve been battling poisoned ads for at least the last month. The last official response was a reassurance that “we have caught the culprit(s)!” Nope, apparently not.

Unfortunately, this is not limited to Grooveshark (which was perfectly safe and well-behaved when I went back to it and got a legitimate Mazda ad instead of the poisoned ad). Last fall the New York Times home page briefly served up poisoned ads, and it has happened – and can happen – to any legitimate web site with advertisements.

Let’s focus again on the relevant rule for safe computing:

If a web site brings something up on your screen that might be malware, do not click on anything. If you click “NO” or “CANCEL,” there is a good chance that they lied and you actually gave permission to install the malware.

• If there is any chance that a dodgy web site is on the verge of installing a bad thing on your computer, start Task Manager and kill Internet Explorer from the list of applications there. 
• If that’s not sufficient to close the possible malware window, see if you can identify it in the longer list of “Processes” in Task Manager.
• If neither of those work and you still have a window onscreen that might be dangerous, turn your computer off with the power button.

You can open Task Manager by hitting Ctrl-Alt-Del, or by right-clicking on the taskbar on the bottom of the screen and clicking on Start Task Manager.

If you think Internet Explorer is displaying a malware window, kill all instances of iexplore.exe on the Processes tab.

Tonight I killed all running instances of Internet Explorer, the malware window closed, and life went on normally.

Have I mentioned it lately? Be careful out there!

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Here’s a procedure for people working in a very small business that don’t want to call me for every routine task.

Very small businesses frequently have a single folder for all company or firm files. It’s almost always mapped to a drive letter, so everyone stores all work files in the “N:\” drive or the “P:\” drive. Everyone has full permission to add, edit, and delete files and folders in the COMPANY or FIRMDOCS folder. There are subfolders for each client or project, so things get a little cluttered and messy after a while, but it works well enough that there is seldom any pressure to move to expensive document management programs or Sharepoint services or the like.

When the company or law firm grows bigger – 15 or 20 employees, say – things get more complicated. There are more servers, more places to store files, less tolerance for mistakes (“Oops! I accidentally deleted the folder with all the files for the Gotham City project”). Employees in bigger companies come to understand the language of network shares and are able to find their way to \\appserver\hr\employees\discipline and \\sbsserver\engineering\electrolytes instead of always looking for the N: drive.

Folders don’t have to be open to everyone. Bigger companies lock folders down routinely and grant access only to members of security groups defined on the servers: the Engineering group can access the engineering folders but not the HR folders. When new employees are hired, they are added to the appropriate groups and get access to folders based on their group membership.

Very small businesses don’t have groups. They have Jane. Jane has always been there. Changes happen infrequently and usually involve a single employee at a time. The businesses don’t want to pay me to create a bunch of security groups when we can accomplish things really fast by acting as if Jane will always be there.

Eventually someone wants a confidential folder. (Typically the business owners want a place for files about personnel matters.) The most convenient place to put it is in the Company folder.

Let’s do these steps while we’re logged onto the server with the Administrator account. That’s not strictly necessary but it’s the easiest to understand. (These screen shots are done on a server running Windows Server 2008 but the process is similar on Windows Server 2003 and can even turn up on Windows 7/Vista/XP desktops with shared folders.)

So let’s see how we restrict access to a new Confidential Files folder next to the shared Client Files folders.

Permissions are set by right-clicking the Confidential Files folder and clicking on Properties. On the Security tab, you can see that “Domain Users” and “Users” each have full control.

Brimming with confidence, you click on the tempting button that says “To change permissions, click Edit.” On the next screen, you highlight “Domain Users” and click on “Remove.”

Ha! You can’t do that. You’ll get this message explaining that you can’t make changes to permissions because the subfolder is being governed by the permissions on the parent, the overall settings for the shared Company folder.

Try this. Back in the Properties window, click on the Advanced button.

You’ll be in a window for “Advanced Security Settings,” with a tab for Permissions. Click on the Edit button.

The next window is also called “Advanced Security Settings,” and it has the checkbox we need. Uncheck the box to “include inheritable permissions from this object’s parent.”

A window will come up explaining that parent permissions will no longer be automatically applied. Click “Copy”.

Now you’re free to make changes to the permissions on the folder – you can remove “domain users” and add individuals or groups with authority over the folder.

Before you leave the “Advanced Security Settings” window, check the box to “replace all existing inheritable permissions on all descendants with inheritable permissions from this object.” If your confidential folder already includes subfolders and files, the checkbox will make sure that the new permissions attach to all of them.

Someone should keep records of these changes! I can’t insist that all my clients call me when work like this is done but it only works on a very small scale. It can quickly become very difficult to discover all the custom settings or make changes if Jane finally leaves.

Fortunately, the people who might try this in my clients’ offices are all extremely bright and do meticulous recordkeeping, as well as being extraordinarily good looking, so I’m not worried about them. It’s everyone else who should be careful. These screen shots were done on a test track by highly trained professionals. Please do not try them at home without adult supervision!

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