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A couple years ago, the Apple Mac OS was given the title of "Most Secure Operating System" for home users. They stated that it was good because of the rock solid FreeBSD backend, plus the fact that there are next to no virus or trojan exploits out there for it. It's user authentication system for installing applications or modifying system settings also helped to prevent any malicious software from changing things.

Well, times have changed a lot since that article was put out. Mac has been pushing out updates left and right. There are constant restarts where you used to be able to leave the system on months at a time. Now, users are lucky if you can leave their systems on for more than 2 weeks before another update is out and you need to restart again. The Dashboard, which is supposed to be a user-friendly feature to display what you want right at your fingertips has turned into a huge security problem. Scripters have now made malicious widgets, running junk in the background on your Dashboard. The iPod and iTunes explosion in popularity has not helped the security issues either. With their increase in popularity, more and more folks moved over to the Mac platform, and thus put more attention on the operating system and its components from the hacking community, and not the good side of hacking either. This added attention has brought up security vulnerabilities on nearly everything and likely a lot of unwanted attention. Read more »

So, I found this cool new web browser this evening. Thanks to one of the other Windows Vista Beta Testers for mentioning it. It has a bunch of cool features embedded, like uploading pictures to Flickr or Photobucket, news feeds, a cool little search bar, and built in blog poster. Now, you may be thinking that "I already have a cool web browser" or something like that. Well, you might as well give it a shot, I mean, you don't really have much to loose do you? It's built off of Mozilla's Firefox so it's more secure, and since it is new and barely used, very unlikely to get hit by some random attack. It supports extensions, although I don't know if Firefox extensions are supported yet as I haven't tried that out yet (I just started using it). One nice thing about it though is that it has a very smooth GUI and is pretty nice to look at. Now, since I'm saying that this is a good browser, you're probably wanting to try it out now, so you can head on over to Flock's Homepage and download the browser and test it out to see how you like it. I know that I'll likely be using it now that I've found it, and even though it doesn't have the extensions that I use in Firefox, I don't really have that many that work "real-time" anyway. So, download, install, and try it out, all you have to loose is your old web browser

So, I’m working on getting a dual-boot method of installing Windows Vista and some flavor of Linux installed at the same time. Since Ubuntu is a very popular distro now-a-days, I settled upon testing it out first. Also, based on the fact that it uses GRUB as the bootloader, it is a good decision as that is the most common one in use now as far as I know. So, I go to install Ubuntu in a virtual machine under VMWare, and installation goes just fine. I found out that you need failsafe graphics mode to use the latest release of Ubuntu in VMWare though, otherwise you get an aweful screen that is very hard to read and do anything in. So, due to the fact that it is a virtual machine, everything runs a little slower, especially at the end of the the installation. What I find odd though, is that you go through this whole setup process for Ubuntu, configuring all of these options and everything that you want. You would think that they would be applied prior to actually installing the operating system though.

The odd part about it is though, that it doesn’t do the logical step and just ignore anything that isn’t needed. It goes through, installs everything first, then goes back and uninstalls all of the language packs and stuff that aren’t needed for the system based on your configuration. For some reason, it also goes through and uninstalls some utilities that users may find useful. The most notable one that I saw while packages were being uninstalled during installation (sort-of unintuitive isn’t it) is ntfsprogs. A set of utilities that allow Linux/Unix users to work with NTFS partitions from Windows. Now, many people won’t need these utilities, but what is the point of going through and installing all of this stuff if you’re just going to uninstall it a few minutes later? I mean, it’s called installation for a reason, you’re supposed to be installing stuff, not uninstalling it. I guess the folks over at the Ubuntu development labs are still learning this though.

Even though it does do some really funky stuff, do not discredit Ubuntu as a Linux distrobution. Its ease of use and huge userbase allow for great support, so it is a very n00b friendly distro to work with. Although, I do find things such as this kind of odd.

Yes, that’s correct. Despite the tries from Microsoft to make Vista less Linux friendly, such as altering NTFS and changing the bootloader, Linux still plays nicely with Windows Vista. The past week, I’ve been working with a few other users at PROnetworks in the compilation of a guide for installing Linux alongside Vista. Seeing as it is something that is bound to show up, and the fact that more and more people are trying out both now, it is only logical to figure out how to make them play nicely together. There are two big factors that are making it easier for users to test out both here too. The main factor is that Microsoft just released the public beta of Windows Vista (Beta 2). This allows users to install the operating system legally for the first time, and with all the hype around it, people are installing by the thousands. The next big factor that’s causing people to test out Linux is that there is finally a very easy to use and install version with great support, and that is Ubuntu, which has taken the Linux community and the rest of the world by storm. A minor factor which is helping things along is the fact that more and more users are switching to broadband, making it all the easier to download both Linux and Vista to install. Back in the days of dial-up, it would take a solid week just to download a CD image required to install any sort of Linux. With broadband, it takes a few hours; making it much more convenient to do. The guide has been posted, so if you were looking at trying this, check it out. And, as always, you can easily get support in the forums of PROnetworks.

This was brought about when a few beta testers were chatting. As more and more people install the beta, it is likely going to be more and more noticed, but this has been somewhat unmentioned thus far. Vista, when compared to previous versions of Windows, has a ton of processes by default. Many of them look like the same old things, just different as they are updated for Vista. The thing is, there are tons of processes by default. Where Windows XP would have maybe 40 running processes after installation, Vista has closer to 60. There are some reasons for this that can be explained, and there are also unknown reasons why there is so much stuff running after installation. However, we can look at the stuff that is running and see what the reasons may be for them.

The first thing one may notice is that there are a lot more svchost.exe processes running by default when compared to Windows XP. This is likely due to the increased security and the hope for better stability in Vista. Now, you may be wondering how running 2-3 times more stuff makes it more stable or more secure. Well, the reason for this is that under XP, each svchost.exe process accounted for several different services within Windows. Many times, there were critical system services running under the same processes as other, not very important services, and there were also large groupings of tasks for each process. This has changed in Windows Vista though. The individual tasks that svchost.exe is taking care of are now much more distributed and split up more evenly now. Critical services also do not appear to be "bundled" with as many other services under one process, if the process is running multiple things at all. This makes things more stable as it prevents a bunch of stuff from stopping if one service has an issue. It also makes things more secure for about the same reason, as any security issues in a given service prevent access to as many other services. Read more »