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I don’t think they needed any more advertising so I decided not to include the full URL. To be honest I can’t remember what is was, only that they are usually posted in the gamming sub-forum.

Earlier this month is was reported that the Birmingham, Alabama school district was going to be the first to offer the One Laptop per Child (http://one.laptop.org/) in America (https://linux.slashdot.org/story/07/12/04/1525219/alabama-schools-to-be-first-in-us-to-get-xo-laptop). This story caught my attention because it hits close to home (I will leave it up to your imagination in which way.) The basic idea is that eighth-grade Birmingham students will get the laptops at the beginning of the year and then turn them in at the end. If the laptops, which look like some sort of fancy toy, are lost or stolen, they can be remotely disabled.Now comes the interesting questions. What happens when the very innocent and well intentioned city council sees some of the darker sides to giving every eighth-grader a laptop?Now I don’t know if you can remember all the way back to this time in your life but I do remember a few bits and pieces. One of the biggest things on the mind of an eighth-graders mind is p0rn. The best place to find p0rn is on the Internet. The best way to get on the Internet is to have your very own laptop. I think you can see where I am going with this. The question is what will the council think when they start getting laptops turned in with 30 gigabytes of adult content.The second issue is what happens when you look at lots of free p0rn, spyware. Could this be the beginning of the next one million member bot net courtesy of the one laptop per child initiative?While we are on the subject, how will the laptops be monitored? I am assuming it is up to the individual families to provide access to the Internet. But will the city place some sort of content filter to prevent to aforementioned problems? When you are taking this object into a private home, will doing something like this effect your civil liberties?And what of the poor parents who get a call telling them that little Jimmy has placed an encrypted volume on the computer or hacked the computer in some unforeseen way? Are the parent held responsible for the actions of their children even though they were forced into giving their child a laptop?The bottom line is I think giving every child is a great idea, you just better be prepared for what may happen. Knowing how city council members think, they may not expect any of these bad things to happen.

Only when installing updates.

Here is suggestion two. Make a system that automatically emails the primary account when your credits get below lets say three days and another when it reaches one day. I got this idea from DynDNS. They email you five days before your domain will expire.

Quick question about advertisements on Xisto. I donât remember reading anything in the TOS that advertisements were banned but I have a feeling that they are. Either way I have reported several gold farmers for advertisements. Here is a prime example: If it is OK for this to be posted then I will stop reporting, otherwise I will be more than happy to keep reporting. I donât feel that selling WoW gold is a bad thing but I think unsolicited advertisements distract from the main purpose of Xisto. Xisto is doing an excellent job of providing a great discussion forum for computer savvy users without unneeded SPAM. I for one have to say that Xisto is an exception to the general rule of web hosting and I enjoy visiting Xisto everyday.

Sounds like a homework problem to me. Not that I have never been guilty of doing “research” on the Internet, but I have always found the best way to retain knowledge is to work the problem out on your own. If you develop the mythology for problem solving then you will be able to apply that to many other areas of your life.Steps off soapbox.

Here is a cautionary tale for anyone who may be experiencing a similar problem. I was fortunate to find the solution but only after a few hours of uninstalling, reinstalling, and various other black magic tricks. Problem: I installed the latest Microsoft .NET 2.0 and 3.0 service packs from Windows Update and all instances of .NET stopped working. Symptoms: The first sign of trouble was a failed install of the service packs through Windows Update. It was late at night so I didn’t think much of it and shut down the computer for the night. On the next reboot another odd thing happened, my ATI video card control center (which relies on .NET 2.0) did not start and showed an error box. Yet again I was in a hurry and didn’t think much of it. I have had problem in the past from ATI so I chalked it up to an ATI bug. I finally realized that my entire .NET installation was hosed when I opened up Visual Studio and got a rather nasty list of errors. I soon verified this by opening a known good .NET application without success. Solution Attempts: I first tried to reinstall the update from Windows Update and got the same error message from earlier. I soon verified that all versions, 1.0, 1.1, 2.0, and 3.0, were messed up. I then uninstalled everything related to .NET and restarted. After the restart 2.0 and 3.0 installed fine but I got an error with 1.1. 1.1 died when trying to register System.EnterpriseServices.dll and produced a regsrv crash message. After a few Google searches I found a .NET developer blog by Aaron Stebner First I tried to disable the Microsoft Distributed Transaction Coordinator (MSDTC) service. Next I tried the custom .NET uninstaller; all without success. Solution: Throughout the blog there is mention of DEP (Data Execution Protection) errors. Out of desperation I disabled DEP, restarted, and it worked perfectly. This is very surprising to me because Microsoft can not get its own software to play nicely with DEP. Conclusion: Disable DEP before installing any .NET updates.

I have been using the latest version of Yahoo! Messenger for over two weeks now and I would like to give a quick review of it. Overall this is not a major change from what I know as Messenger. As it has been said before, this is evolutionary not revolutionary. From what I can see there are no new features (at least none that I would use), the user interface (UI) is prettier, and it looks like there have been some bug fixes; that’s it. Under the hood there are some things to note. The current version of the YSMG protocol with version 8 is 15 and Messenger 9 has been upped it to YMSG 16. I’m not sure what this means because it looks like it behaves the exact same way as 15, 14, and even 13. Most likely they have added some new phone features that require a new revision number (once I take a more in depth look I will get back to you). I also see that some of the auxiliary components such as the webcam view have a new version number. Here is a quick list of my findings thus far. In general I will have to recommend the upgrade. Although there are not an overwhelming number of positive reasons to upgrade, there are virtually no negatives. Good • Appears that the stability is better. I kept getting kicked off every 15 minutes or so which was annoying. I am now getting consistently long times without having to reconnect. • Better (prettier) user interface. This is not a big one for me but it might be great for some. • Some bug fixes. In Messenger 8 you can hover over a contact’s name and a quick profile window pops up. Many times the quick profile window would hang and not disappear even if Messenger was minimized. Messenger 9 has somewhat fixed this and a few other similar bugs. Nothing major, just some minor headaches. Bad • I didn’t really see anything that I would call a negative. In the Middle • This is not a major update. It looks like they could have done much more with their time. • The protocol version has been revised to YMSG 16. • The GUI is different. The default setting has an expanded contact list with more information present. This annoyed me quickly and soon changed it. Not necessarily a negative as user tastes are different.

Wow Windows 98, I remember that, kind of. Unfortunately things are not quite as easy as just throwing the old hard drive into the new computer. As for the physical properties of the old hardware, as long as you have the proper connectors in the new computer you will not have any problems. Absolutely no worries of your hard drive blowing up.The software side is not as easy. When Windows installs for the first time it installs drivers for your specific motherboard and processor. If you put the old hard drive in the new computer then it will start the boot process, Windows will load the drivers for the old hardware and quickly blue screen. Windows 98 is not as forgiving as the later versions of Windows to new base hardware. My suggestion would be to reinstall it. Better yet I would scrape and scrounge to get a copy of XP. 98 is no longer supported by Microsoft and security is a concern now.I did hear of a quick fix for 98 but I have never tried it before. You delete one of system driver folders and restart. Supposedly when you restart, 98 sees that it’s missing the drivers and reinstalls them but this time for the new hardware. It sounds very tricky and I certainly wouldn’t do this without having everything ready for a clean install anyway. Search Google for the details and note that this does not work on 2000 or XP.As for your dual setup, you should be able to reinstall only to your Window partition and the Ubuntu partition will be fine. Just be sure to make a note of which partition belong to which OS.

I personally recommend Spybot (https://www.safer-networking.org/). The issue of needing a spyware program is a complicated one. If you think that you need an antivirus program then you mostly likely need a spyware scanner. Some of the most respected security professionals never run antivirus because it slows down their system so much. It has been years since I have seen a virus or even spyware on my system so I would consider myself to be at low risk also but I still run both for the just in case factor.In my opinion some of the most useful features of Spybot are not in the scanner itself. I always keep the immunize feature up to date which actively blocks known malicious web addresses. I also use Tea Timer which alerts me when something wants to modify critical registry entries, specifically the startup registry keys. Spyware will never get a hold in your system if it doesn’t have a place to start from. Tea Timer does throws a lot of pop ups on your screen but I don’t mind. I always read what wants to make the change and make the proper decision. If something ever did get in I know this will be my canary in the coal mine.

Two different results from the same ctypto standard, now that’s scary.

The problem with image based systems is there are only a finite number of images to choose from. Let’s say I created the above example with nine images and I had to pick the cat. In order to break the code I would download every single image on the system, I will assume 1000 images in this case. I then make a MD5 hash of the images so I can accurately determine the image displayed. I take a long afternoon and enter what the image is into a lookup table. To create an automatic system I then go to the CAPTCHA page and see what it wants, a cow for example. I then download the nine images presented to me and use the lookup table to find the cow. I submit the answer with the cow and the system is broken. Even if the system has a million images, the foundation for this hack is the same and can eventually be broken.To me the most annoying part of requiring a CAPTCHA to get into chat is the implementation. When using the official Messenger client you have to click a hyperlink and an external web browser is opened with the link. This adds at least 5-10 seconds to get into a room. YahElite on the other hand has an image browser built in so it displays the code in a new window without having to open your web browser. I was extremely surprised to find that the latest beta of Messenger 9 still has to have a web browser. It looks like this would have been one of the first things they fixed.

Well just to let everyone know, if you do get that CAPTCHA cracking code don’t forget to tell me about it. It’s only a matter of time before a developer releases it. I understand that it’s good to keep it away from spammers but I can think of several less sleazy ways to use it.

Sorry about that, I was being a bonehead and rushed out the answer right before I left work. I of all people should have caught that one. My traditional approach is to just put invokes on every single control that interacts with a threaded return. It can become time consuming and nasty but I just put them in a separate region and forget about them. In my experience there are actually only a few controls that will need invokes. The current program that I am working on has the same problem but the only controls affected are buttons that need to change their enabled status and a list view. I wrote a single delegate to take care of the controls (from the previous example) and two for the list view as there were only two operations involved. I understand that there may be several threads flying around in your main class but it really doesnât matter. The only time that you need to worry is with windows controls. Below is the second alternative example that I mentioned before. You can create a separate class and have it inherit control. Since you are making your own socket class I assume this would be the best anyway as you can just drop it on your form. As you can see I have created two delegates on frmMain which are passed into the control as a property. Once you want output from the control, the invoke method is called with the proper delegate. The delegates are put back on the main thread for you. You can also grab the full example project from http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/. Once again let me know if this helps. The main form Option Strict OnOption Explicit OnPublic Class frmMain Private _work As New WorkComponent#Region "Threaded Callbacks" Delegate Sub WorkComponent_ReturnDelegate(ByVal strMessage As String) Delegate Sub WorkComponent_ExceptionDelegate(ByVal e As Exception) Dim WorkComponent_ReturnDeleg As New WorkComponent_ReturnDelegate(AddressOf WorkComponent_Return) Dim WorkComponent_ExceptionDeleg As New WorkComponent_ExceptionDelegate(AddressOf WorkComponent_Exception)#End Region Private Sub frmMain_Load(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles Me.Load 'setup work 'You have to create the handle first Dim iCMDHandle As IntPtr = _work.Handle _work.dReturn = WorkComponent_ReturnDeleg _work.dException = WorkComponent_ExceptionDeleg Dim Tim As New System.Timers.Timer Tim.Interval = 1000 AddHandler Tim.Elapsed, AddressOf Tim_Elapsed Tim.Enabled = True End Sub Sub Tim_Elapsed(ByVal Sender As Object, ByVal e As System.Timers.ElapsedEventArgs) _work.WorkToBeDone() End Sub Private Sub WorkComponent_Return(ByVal strMessage As String) txtOutput.Text += strMessage + vbCrLf End Sub Private Sub WorkComponent_Exception(ByVal e As Exception) txtOutput.Text += e.ToString + vbCrLf End SubEnd Class The control class Option Strict OnOption Explicit OnPublic Class WorkComponent Inherits Control Private _dReturn As frmMain.WorkComponent_ReturnDelegate Private _dException As frmMain.WorkComponent_ExceptionDelegate Private _iCount As Integer#Region "Properties" Public Property dReturn() As frmMain.WorkComponent_ReturnDelegate Get Return _dReturn End Get Set(ByVal Value As frmMain.WorkComponent_ReturnDelegate) _dReturn = Value End Set End Property Public Property dException() As frmMain.WorkComponent_ExceptionDelegate Get Return _dException End Get Set(ByVal Value As frmMain.WorkComponent_ExceptionDelegate) _dException = Value End Set End Property#End Region Public Sub WorkToBeDone() _iCount += 1 Try 'exception thrown every other time If _iCount Mod 2 = 0 Then Dim I As Integer = 5 I = CInt(I / 0) ' The culprit Line End If BeginInvoke(_dReturn, New Object() {"Work Done"}) Catch ex As Exception BeginInvoke(_dException, New Object() {ex}) End Try End SubEnd Class P.S. To bad code doesnât count for post credits, I am quite proud of this one, lol. P.P.S Try not to poke a hole in this idea

This problem got me to thinking more. I wrote a test program that checked to see if exceptions are automatically invoked onto the correct thread and they are. As long as the code that may cause the exception is in a try catch statement you should not have any problems. The code below demonstrates this. The main form only has a textbox named txtOutput which is multiline and has scrollbars turned on. You will notice that the textbox does not have any invoke statements yet still handles the text coming out of the exception even though it is raised on another thread. This is because an exception will automatically jump to the calling thread until it reaches the lowest level thread. In this case it is the main GUI thread. Option Strict OnOption Explicit OnPublic Class frmMain Private Sub frmMain_Load(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles Me.Load Dim Tim As New System.Windows.Forms.Timer Tim.Interval = 1000 AddHandler Tim.Tick, AddressOf Tim_Elapsed Tim.Enabled = True End Sub Sub Tim_Elapsed(ByVal Sender As Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Try Dim I As Integer = 5 I = CInt(I / 0) ' The culprit Line Me.txtOutput.Text += Date.Now.ToString + "The Clock Just Ticked" + vbCrLf Catch ex As Exception Me.txtOutput.Text += ex.ToString + vbCrLf End Try End SubEnd Class

I have seen that for the most part you should have no problems with Vista unless you are trying to perform something “administrator duties.” This involves requesting higher privileges over what you are currently granted. Even at this it will not stop it from working on Vista, it will only show more annoying dialogue boxes asking if you really want to do this. The main goal behind making a Vista compatible program is to only ask the user for elevated privileges once and then handle the rest internally.If your program only adds numbers together then you shouldn’t worry about Vista compatibility. You should only worry if you are trying to access restricted parts of the file system (c:\program files) or modifying certain registry keys. This can also apply to installing new components or the program itself.

You have come across one of my biggest headaches in .NET, cross threading exceptions. I usually use a little more sophisticated logic to determine if an invoke is required or not. The following code either enables or disables a control. #Region "Threaded Callbacks" Delegate Sub txtEnableDelegate(ByVal bEnabled As Boolean, ByVal ctl As Control) Dim dtxtEnable As New txtEnableDelegate(AddressOf txtEnable) Private Sub txtEnable(ByVal bEnabled As Boolean, ByVal ctl As Control) If ctl.InvokeRequired Then Dim d As New txtEnableDelegate(AddressOf txtEnable) Me.Invoke(d, New Object() {bEnabled, ctl}) Else ctl.Enabled = bEnabled End If End Sub#End Region and it is called by dtxtEnable(True, udCaptureRate) Another trick that I use is threading.timer. I find that it is more flexible when you are starting a new thread and want a timer built-in. If this does not help then you may want to consider making your own exception class specific that your thread. You can throw a general or your own exception when it is needed and to my understanding exceptions will automatically be invoked. A second approach would to make your object to be threaded a control itself. That way you can call the control.invoke(delegate) from the thread and not have all the logic needed to invoke the individual controls. The trick is to pass the delegate as a property to the thread when it is created. There is a good example of this in YCC Bot Maker http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ I hop this help and let me know if it still doesnât do the trick. I am interested in your results myself.

You might want to check out the tool FileMon from SysInternals (https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896642.aspx). It shows every file that is open on your system and which program that has it open. I sometimes can’t delete a file that is still open because I don’t know which program is still using it. It is often the case that the program in question failed to properly shutdown or crashed and thus never released the file handle. If all else fails I simply reboot and all the handles are released.

It looks like Yahoo! has yet to fix the bug in Messenger that causes the installer to fail when the machine is running DEP. This is an ongoing issue with Messenger 8 and is still an issue with Messenger 9 Beta. Below is the message that I sent to the Messenger Beta feedback page.“I see that the default installer still does not run with Windows Data Execution Prevention (DEP) enabled. This should be fixed so that the more security conscience of us are able to install Messenger without having to disable DEP, restart, install, re-enable DEP, and restart again. “

Can you give a little bit more detail? How are they disturbing you?

Aww, why does the easy ones get answered so quickly.

I’ve never run Smiley Central myself so I can not give you a definite answer. (I was never quite that stupid.) I do know that they have been around for a very long time and they have a long history of deceiving customers and loading spyware. When a company has such a reputation I would believe it is wise to steer clear.On the issue of advertising, I don’t know which company Xisto uses but I am sure they run advertisements independently of content. Much like a radio station, the advertiser buys so many impressions and then the station randomly runs the ads. I listen to Dave Ramsey (http://www.daveramsey.com/home/) all the time and occasionally you will hear a credit card ad. Dave is a die hard pay off all your debts and cut up your credit cards philosophy so it is not a good spot for credit ads. Same thing for web advertisers. You could get a Smiley Central ad on http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/.

Yahoo! had another quarter annual Hack Day with three new ideas for Yahoo! Messenger (http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/). The first is to integrate webcam into the web version of Messenger. Personally I think this is a duh moment as this was one of my first reactions when I used Web Messenger. I guess the hack is more that it happened than an innovative idea. The second is a real time translation of IMs similar to Babelfish (http://yahoo.com/). The last hack is a Yahoo! Answers bot.I see this list as already being sorted in descending order of likely to occur. My beat is the webcam will be added but it may take about a year or a new version of Web Messenger. The translator is of marginal value so I don’t see it happening. The Answers hack is just fluff so it should never see the light of day. (Of course in Yahoo! tradition, the Answers bot will be implemented next week while the webcam never happens.)

I will have to agree with you Jeigh that this is not the ultimate goal perused by “hackers” but I think you would be hard pressed to say that an almost ten fold decrease in cracking time is insignificant. All of a sudden you have taken a task that would have taken 10 years down to 1 year. In certain situations this would be the deciding factor in trying to even attempt such a crack.I will also agree that this does little in the space of very strong ciphers. If you are using 256 AES then you have only reduced the time from well after our sun goes supernova to just before our ultimate destruction. (For those who do not know, scientists predict that out own sun will end in a supernova explosion. You shouldn’t worry too much though because this will happen billions of years in the future. At current rates, it will take many billions of years to crack current strong cryptography and thus we will not be around to see the fruits of the cracking labor.)I also see the true power of this technology in parallel processing of some sort. If you can get a ten fold increase out of a single graphics card then imagine if you crated a computer with one CPU and 10,000 GPUs. This is exactly what happened with the greatest blows to DES. The EFF funded a project called “Deep Crack” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EFF_DES_cracker) that exploited specialized FPGA hardware in parallel. When given the task of computing a DES cipher, this hardware was much more efficient than any supercomputer. When you put 10,000 of these things together all of a sudden you have a super cracking machine. This was one of the many projects that ultimately showed the US government that DES needed to be replaced. I would have to have guess that even ten years before this it was inconceivable that such a thing could happen.

Thereâs not much meat or new content in this post but I did find it rather humorous. Richard Sinn is apparently the software security engineer for Yahoo! Messenger and he now has a new book out entitled Software Security Technologies: A Progammatic Approach (http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/)(https://www.amazon.com/dp/142831945X?tag=open0f-20&camp=14573&creative=327641&linkCode=as1&creativeASIN=142831945X&adid=1435SV1WH79S425NG1ZF;). The price is high for a paperback at $87.95 USD but I may read it once the price drops or there are used copies. Some scholars say that you canât understand a work of literary art until you know the person. In this case I donât think you can truly understand the security of Messenger until you know the person designing it. In short I think the first user post sums it up: