Firefox Gets Proactive

I don't use Firefox as much as I used to. Chrome is just so much faster that I almost invariably turn to it first. But Firefox's rich collection of add-ons is so useful that when I have time and feel like some random web surfing, I'll usually fire up both Firefox and Chrome and use them side by side.

Tonight when I fired up Firefox, I was confronted by this dialog box. A bit aggressive no? Actually no. It turns out that Microsoft's Firefox add-ons expose Firefox users to malware attacks. I'd noticed this little piece of news this morning and by nightfall when I fired up Firefox, it was already uninstalling the Microsoft add-ons. That's a pretty fast turn around time for cleaning up a problem which was only recently discovered.

Now if only Firefox could identify the add-ons that are slowing it down....

Today's Windows Error at a Public Place...

...comes to you courtesy of the Chicago Transit Authority's Blue Line train station at Clark & Lake. At least it wasn't a Blue Screen of Death and it's not like Chicago is hosting the Olympics.

Microsoft Brings the Cute But Will Windows 7 Really Bring the Happy?

I'm very pleased with Windows 7 and I have it on most of my home computers. But as the release of Microsoft's latest OS draws near I can't help but feel this impending sense that Microsoft will somehow screw things up ruin Windows 7. Well, Microsoft must have sensed my concern because they've deployed one of the cute kids from an earlier ad campaign to calm my fears.

You have to hand it to Microsoft, no one uses cute kids to peddle their wares better. The kid is adorable and I get a huge shock when she starts playing a video she's created mashing up the positive reviews which Windows 7 has received with pictures of bunnies and unicorns and Europe's Final Countdown. I've always loved that song—so much so that I use it as my ringtone—and I'm fascinated by the way it's used by the media. Arrested Development used it to great effect during GOB's magic act. And now Microsoft is using to juxtapose extreme cuteness with the idea of happy future using Microsoft software. Watching this ad is downright addictive.

I'm impressed. And a little terrified.

Windows' Hidden Stacks

A new utility designed to replicate the MacOS's new Stacks feature got to thinking about the way I use my desktop. It suddenly occurred to me that Windows has had a similar feature to stacks for years. Since at least Windows 98, or possibly as early as a desktop update which was bundled with an early version of Internet Explorer (it depends on how you look at it), it has been possible to create toolbars like the Quicklaunch toolbar in the Windows taskbar. When these toolbars are compressed to their smallest possible size, they turn into menus. For over a decade, the first thing I do with a new Windows computer is to use this feature of Windows in order to create a "Desktop" menu which allows me to literally access every file on my computer.

Of course the Mac OS's stacks look cooler and are usually faster than the extra menus which Windows allows you to create. But the point is that both features work in much the same way and Windows had it first. With all the bashing you hear about Microsoft and its business practices on the 'net, we sometimes forget that they have gotten a lot of things right over the years and this is one reason why Windows is so popular.

The Funniest Line I've Seen on Slashdot in a Long Time

Right here.

Too Many People Want a Piece of Firefox These Days

Boing Boing Gadgets links to a Washingpost blog which complains about Microsoft quietly installing a Firefox extension without permission. This isn't the first time that this has happened. While I like AVG Antivirus, they have been installing their own Firefox extension for quite some time. As with Microsoft, they do this without permission, probably on the idea that they are doing it for the user's own good. But this is a troubling trend. One of the reasons that I use Firefox in the first place—indeed the reason most people probably use Firefox—is because of the degree of customizability and control that is allows. When companies decide that they can install extensions on their users computers willy-nilly, that is a bad thing. They are essentially telling their users, "We know better what's good for you." It erodes trust and quite frankly I'm not even sure that it is legal. Firefox afterall is made by an independent company, they are not owned by Microsoft or by AVG Technologies. So my question is, aren't these companies acting like virus writers when they do this and potentially opening themselves up to a lawsuit? If so, it would probably serve them right.

Windows 7's Potentially Show-stopping Boot Up Problem

Image by Mimi_K via Flickr

I have installed the Windows 7 Release Candidate on two computers now and for the most part, it works very well. But there is one very serious potentially show-stopping problem which I have encountered. I first installed the 64-bit version of Windows 7 on an old laptop with 32-bit Windows Vista. The first couple of times that I rebooted, the computer complained that "ntldr" was missing and would not boot up unless I inserted my Windows 7 DVD. This problem eventually went away and I dismissed it as a fluke. Then I installed it on another computer....

The story begins a few months ago when I tried to build a file server with Via's new Artigo 2000 box using 32-bit Windows XP Professional and two 2 Terabyte Western Digital hard drives. It was a pretty nice little machine but it just wasn't robust enough to handle moving thousands of little files across a network. It would crash from time to time and couldn't reliably transfer video files to my TiVos. So I decided to scrap the experiment and maybe try later with a dedicated server OS like FreeNAS. In the meantime, I still had a lot of files to move around multiple computers. So I rebuilt my Shuttle XPC with a dual core processor and 2GB of RAM. While I had used this computer as a file server before I hadn't been happy with the results and felt that it was overkill for just serving up files to other computers. Nevertheless I stuffed the two Western Digital drives in that box and installed the 64-bit version of the Windows 7 RC on it. The result was a very fast computer with 4TB of storage space that didn't crash when I used it to serve video to my TiVos.

Things went great with my new rig until Windows 7 decided that it needed to install updates and reboot. When it rebooted, the dreaded "ntldr missing" message reappeared and unlike with my laptop, it has stuck around for several reboots. Poking around the Internet, I saw that is happening to other people as well. I have tried several solutions but have yet to find one that works....Other than keeping my Windows 7 DVD in my CD drive during boot up.

Now perhaps this problem is my own fault for being careless but still it is a serious problem troubles me.

Windows 7 Exploit is a Blast From the Past

Geek.com reports on a "new" exploit found by F-Secure. I put the word new in quotes because it's really a very ancient exploit. I remember when the first scripting viruses came out, they took advantage of two features in Windows. The first was the newly introduced Windows Scripting Host which allowed users to create little files full of commands which would control Windows—in much the same way that DOS batch files control DOS. They also took advantage of the fact that Windows by default hides the extensions of most of the files on your computer. Typically you would receive an email message with an attachment which was supposed to be a picture or a document and was in fact a script full of malicious commands.

This was ten years ago. And this exploit is still possible. At least back then, it was possible to tell that a script was not a real document because Windows would give it an icon which differed from the normal icon it would assign to a real document. For example, a Word document would get a Word icon while a script with fake .doc extension would get a Windows Scripting Host icon. Nowadays, it is more common to use an executable with a fake extension and a proper icon for the document that it purports to be. Of course it still has a second .exe extension which would normally be a dead giveaway save for the fact that Windows will by default hide that second extension, unwittingly helping you get hacked more easily.

Ten years. And Microsoft still won't fix this serious security problem because it supposedly makes your computer easier to use. One of the first things I do with a new computer is to open up the Computer (My Computer in XP and older versions of Windows) item and select Tools | Folder Options. Then I click on the View tab and uncheck everything that Microsoft normally hides. Pretty much everyone who knows something a little bit about computers should do this—it just makes sense.

Windows 7 RC Quick First Impressions

About two hours ago I inserted my Windows 7 Release Candidate disk into my spare laptop's CD-Rom tray and for the most part I'm done. Windows 7 is still complaining that I need to install an anti-virus program and I do need to re-install the software I normally use on my computer but other that I'm up an running having installed Firefox.

The installation process was fairly straightforward. I already had the Windows 7 Beta installed on this machine. It was the 32-bit version and I used the 64-bit version of the release candidate so I couldn't just upgrade the Beta. Microsoft recommends a "clean install" anyway so I restarted the machine with the RC in the CD-Rom tray and let it install. This took about an hour. The computer restarted several times during this process.

Near the end of the install, Windows offered to activate itself automatically and asked for the key to my wifi hotspot. This was a fairly clever thing for it to do. Unfortunately, I have a 63 character wifi key which I keep on a USB flash drive and there was no way to get the wifi key off the flash drive and into the connection dialog box. No biggie, I just let Windows start and it already had a connection icon in the taskbar. I just clicked on the icon, chose my wifi hotspot from the pop up list, and copied and pasted the wifi key into that dialog box. I've noticed in the past that Windows Vista allows you to export your wifi key onto a flash drive in some (hopefully encrypted) format but never bother to use this feature. Perhaps people who have used this feature might be able to just insert flash drive into their computers and have Windows 7 recognize their wifi keys. Despite this problem, one of the big improvements going from Windows Vista to 7 is the improved ease in connecting to secured wifi hotspots.

When Windows finally came up it was with a fairly generic configuration at a relatively low resolution of 1024x768 giving my laptop's widescreen a fuzzy, squashed appearance. As I poked around the interface, Windows continued to look for updates and found seven of them, including the software drivers for my NVIDIA graphics card. I let Windows install the updates and reboot. Suddenly my laptop took on a more familiar appearance at its full 1280x800 screen resolution. Curiously, Windows went with a basic theme for my computer and I had to choose an Aero theme in order to get its pretty transparencies to appear. Windows was ready to go.

Now for first impressions. So far there are no surprises. I've been using the Beta for months and the changes which the Release Candidate brings are fairly subtle. While it gets rid of many of Vista's annoyances, there are still many which remain from Vista. Windows Explorer for example still tries to hide its menu and status bars and still comes with default settings which hide system files and generally make it a lot less useful. Luckily, as with every version of Windows, you can change these settings and make Explorer a much more useful program for organizing your computer.

Many have regarded Windows 7 as "Vista Service Pack 2.0." I prefer to think of 7 as "Vista done right." For example, unlike Windows Vista where themes and appearance mean two different things, they are pretty much the same in Windows 7. If you choose an Aero theme, Windows Aero Glass interface starts with it. If you choose a basic theme Aero shuts down. Vista by contrast has its themes and it has its color schemes. You can shut down Aero without changing themes in Vista and vice versa. By contrast if you want to shut down Aero in Vista, you have to choose a basic or high-contrast theme. While this led to some confusion for me at first, the more I think about it, the more Windows 7's way of doing things makes sense. Why bury so many options someplace which most users never see? In Windows 7 these options are displayed beneath the more popular ones and are easy to get to.

Many have always regarded Windows itself as a rip-off of the MacOS and Windows 7 definitely does take some of it cues from MacOS X. In fact it takes a few too many many cues from OSX. I've always felt that the OSX Dock while very pretty has always been very disorganized and sometimes confusing for new users—a triumph of aesthetics over usability. In Windows 7 the taskbar hews more closely to the Dock, removing the labels from running applications and mixing them together with Quick Launch shortcuts. Fortunately, you can restore the labels. One change that actually improve the user experience by adding thumbnail displays of your applications to the taskbar.

It a continuing the trend from Vista, 7 adds a lot of pretty eye candy with lots of themes and lots of background pictures and a link to more online. It also adds subtle performance improvements and a much smoother interface than Vista. I never expected to find myself excited by a new version of Windows but 7 definitely gives me something to look forward to in the Windows world.

Windows 7 Release Candidate is Out

There isn't much to say about this; Windows 7 RC was released a few hours early last night by Microsoft. It will remain usable for a year (the current Windows 7 Beta expires in June). So Microsoft is giving its users a rare opportunity to play with its software for free for a year. I've been running the Windows 7 Beta on a spare laptop and while it's not spectacular, it does subtly improve upon Vista in every way. It's slightly faster, the interface is slicker and some of Vista's annoyances have been remedied. Connecting to a wifi network for exactly is a simple matter of bringing up a list of available hotspots from the taskbar.

I downloaded the release candidate overnight and plan on installing it sometime this week....

From Seinfeld to Lauren to Giampaolo—The Irony to Microsoft's Madness

Microsoft has a new ad out. It follows the same pattern as the recent ad with "Lauren," the woman who decides she's not "cool enough to own a Mac" and opts for a cheaper, more sensible PC. It also includes the "I'm a PC" tag line which Microsoft has proudly adopted for its users of all ages. The current ad continues a campaign which began bizarrely enough with Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates in a shoe store. Throughout the campaign, one point has remained constant—Apple is elitist and Microsoft is the computer for the "common man." Like a shoe bought at a discount shoe store, Windows is familiar and sort of comfortable and much, much cheaper than those hip Macintoshes with their fancy tassels and candy colored user interface.

I hadn't picked up on this message at first until last November's election when I was being bombarded by this message not by Microsoft but by John McCain who thought he could become president by branding Barak Obama as an elitist. Things didn't quite work out that way and I doubt that things will work out much better for Microsoft. If anything, it makes Microsoft look desperate for attention. This is ironic since despite Apple's growing popularity, Microsoft still dominates the personal computer market. But it's no longer as relevant as it used to be. As smartphones and web applications become more popular, people don't necessarily need to use a PC or a Mac to do many of the tasks that were once only possible with a personal computer. And even when these tasks are done on a personal computer the computer's operating system, the object of all these ads and counter ads, suddenly matters a lot less because of web apps which run in your web browser which itself does not need to be tied to specific operating system. That is the other irony, as Apple and Microsoft bicker over which computer you should buy, they do so from a position of weakness because Google is quietly (when was the last time you saw a TV commercial for Google?) usurping their place in terms of power and influence. It's as if in the last election after hearing Obama and McCain talk for months we'd all gone to the polls and elected Ron Paul president. It seems that advertising, like politics, is more about creating perceptions than it is about facts. This is shocking, I know.

Things get worse for Microsoft as its ads are essentially telling users that software doesn't matter, that style doesn't matter. The only thing that matters according to Microsoft's ads is price. So what if a Mac Mini can easily be hooked up to your HDTV and fits perfectly into your home entertainment center? An eMachines mini-tower is cheaper, surely the money you save is worth the extra effort of setting it up as a Home Theater PC, you can probably hide it in a cabinet or something. So what if a MacBook Air is thin and beautiful, netbooks are tiny and cost a third the price. Sure they're a lot less capable but for the price of a MacBook Air, you can buy three netbooks!

This is the final irony. Microsoft is not the cheapest game in town. While people like to complain about the "Apple Tax" which comes with every Macintosh, there is also a smaller but still significant Microsoft Tax which comes with every Windows PC. Linux distributions like Ubuntu are almost easy enough to use for most people and are getting better all the time. And they are free. Who cares if Ubuntu has a bland, mostly brown, color scheme with ugly fonts? It's free! Who cares, if that new HP computer comes in pretty colors? If you're smart and reasonably handy, you can just buy the parts, stick them in a generic case, throw Linux on it, and save yourself a few bucks!

By highlighting one virtue, price, Microsoft may be inadvertently preparing its users to eventually abandon it. Surely there are other virtues that Microsoft can extol. I've used Windows PCs for most of my adult life and it wasn't because entirely because of their price. I've used Windows for years because it was easy to use, well organized, because it has thousands of applications (and is backwards compatible with thousands of older applications) available for it. Those seem like pretty good reasons to prefer Windows over Mac OSX. Of course, I can also run Windows on a Macintosh fairly easily. In the past this was difficult and slow but nowadays it's easy and fast because the truth is that when you crack them open, a Windows PC and a Macintosh are basically the same machine. They both run on Intel processors and surround them with the same basic set of components. That is the zeroeth irony, one that is so obvious that it should have come before all of the others. At one time, PCs and Macintoshes were built around completely different architectures. But now, they are nearly identical except for the software that runs on top of them. At time when the PC versus Mac debate has become more heated than ever, it has become more irrelevant than ever.

I Think That Beta Is Greek For "Crash"

Well, I've finally done it. I installed the Windows 7 Beta this morning and have just recovered from my first crash. In fairness to Microsoft, I've had the same problem on Windows Vista as well on at two computers including the old laptop on which I installed Windows 7. It seems that nVidia's drivers don't always play nicely with full screen flash videos. While this is bad news for Youtube and Hulu fans like myself, it at least is a predictable and reproduceable problem which has nothing to do with Windows 7.

So far I've only spent a couple of hours with Windows 7 and I certainly can't outdo ars Technica's excellent coverage of Microsoft's OS but here are some thoughts. So far, everything seems to work except for Daemon Tools which mounts disk images. I mostly just use it for playing Diablo II without having to look for my play CD. Since I mostly play Diablo II on a different computer than this one, I'm willing to overlook this problem for now. 

I think that I'm the only person on the Internet who actually liked the old Vista sidebar—on a widescreen laptop like this one it was a good way of organizing the Vista gadgets so it's a shame to see it go. On the other hand, the extra screen real estate does sometimes come in handy. Sometimes. Most of the time it goes unused; there seems to be a conventional wisdom among web designers than no one uses a screen wider than a 1024 pixels so Windows 7 web browsers can now double as a way for users to test the way their computers display the color white. Still, Windows 7 provides a couple of ways expose your desktop, by hitting the Win+Space keys or hovering over the edge of the task bar, so it's easy to show your desktop and the gadgets that reside upon it all the while maximizing screen real estate. Now if only Microsoft would make some decent gadgets.

For decades Mac fans have accused Microsoft of ripping off the Macintosh while ignoring the fact that Apple pretty much stole the Mac interface from Xerox PARC. Now, with the Windows 7 Beta, Microsoft has stolen more directly from Apple. With its big, shiny icons the Windows' taskbar looks like it has swallowed a Mac OSX dock. This is both good and bad. While Windows duplicates the way Apple indescriminately mixes running applications with quick launch shortcuts, it does  a better job than Apple of helping users distinguish between running applications and shortcuts. It also has bigger, more detailed thumbnails which show a full screen preview of their windows when you hover over them. I think that a lot of the positive reports of Windows 7 being faster than Vista or even XP are due to these little refinements which make the workflow of using your applications smoother. All these little changes make for a smoother, more pleasant experience.

Windows 7 Beta: Now With 15% More Aggravation

Microsoft has done something new with their new version of Windows. They are allowing people to download a beta copy of their upcoming new Windows 7 operating system. While this is likely a reaction to the tepid reception that their current operating system received, it's a refreshing and forward thinking thing for Microsoft to let people take a look at their software and play around with it before plunking down dollars for it. But this being Microsoft, the download process is full of hoops to jump.

First you have to get a Windows Live ID. Fine, Microsoft has been trying to get people to use this service as a single log-on for websites for a long time and it actually has a useful purpose as it can reduce the number of usernames and passwords that you have to remember if it catches on with a lot of websites and services. Of course, Google has pretty much the same service and it's way more popular than Windows Live (I can actually go to a lot of websites and use Google Checkout to buy things through my Google Account but have never seen a website that allows you to buy things through Windows Live) but I digress.

The real annoyance about downloading the Windows 7 Beta is that it doesn't support web browsers like Firefox or Chrome. You have to use Internet Explorer to download it and you have to install an ActiveX extension in order to download the Windows 7 Beta. Huh? I had barely gotten a third of the way through Slashdot's Windows 7 discussion before finding direct links to disk images for Windows 7 residing right on Microsoft's servers. Just out of curiosity I clicked on one of those links and it started downloading right away. Thanks Microsoft.

Interestingly enough, the direct linked download is downloading much more slowly (Firefox estimates that the download will complete in anywhere from ten to twenty hours) than the download that went through Microsoft's hoops and is downloading through an ActiveX control (the download manager installed by the control estimate that its download will complete in about two and a half hours). So there is a method to Microsoft's madness after all. Poking around the download manager a little more shows that it is making four connections to make the download. Kewl.

It looks like Microsoft is using this ActiveX control to break up the original file into pieces which it downloads through different servers, tracks them, and reassembles them on my PC. Congratulations Microsoft, you've invented Bittorrent, a technology which has been around for years and which is currently being used to pirate your software. Maybe if you had actually used this technology for allowing people to download music and video instead of for hiding your beta software behind it, you might have become the media powerhouse which Apple is today.

Google's CAPTCHA Cracked?

Slashdot reports that spammers are now claiming to have cracked Google's CAPTCHA system. This comes after reports that Microsoft's CAPTCHA system has also been cracked. And here I am always needing two or three tries in order to read Blogger's CAPTCHAs. It's a depressing state of affairs. It is now almost easier for spam-bots to send out penis enlargement ads and get rich quick scams than it is for legitimate users send each other pictures of cats....Now that I think about it, no one will ever notice the difference anyway.

Can I Borrow a Meme? Microsoft's New Ad Echos the Election

Maybe I was a little harsh when I suggested that Microsoft is irrelevant. Listening to Leo Laporte's TWiT podcast, I was struck by how thoroughly Leo and his merry band of nerds discuss Microsoft's recent ads. They are after all the same tech journalists who talk about nothing but technology, so in that respect, Microsoft has hit its real target quite effectively. 

Another thing that struck me when listening to Leo's podcast was the tone of the new commercial where the panelists agree that Microsoft sees Apple as elitist. That is indeed how Microsoft contrasts itself with Apple. Apple's "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC" ads are fairly simple, a young hipster represents the Mac and a stiff middle aged man in a cheap suit represents the PC. Microsoft's new ad turns that idea on its head with the "PC" guy introducing all of the "common" people who use PCs. The message couldn't be more clear—Macintoshes are for elitists, PCs are for real people.

That's not the first time we've seen this argument made in an advertisement. In fact, we are seeing this argument in John McCain's ads against Barack Obama. Just about every McCain ad and every utterance from every pundit is calling Obama an elitist. It's the exact same argument you are seeing in the new Microsoft ad—Microsoft has just been more subtle about it. 

Unfortunately for McCain, he is not the first person to try this argument. Hillary Clinton made the same argument against Obama in the primaries and lost. Fortunately for McCain, that argument did work to a certain extent for Hillary as was able to close the gap between Obama and herself using that same argument. McCain also benefits from the fact that the elitist argument has been a successful one for Republicans in the past. George W. Bush used that argument against John Kerry and his father used it successfully against Michael Dukakis.

In the end, all politicians tell the people that they are one of them. The most successful politicians are usually the ones who make the most people believe in "I'm just like you" argument. It's a compelling emotional argument. And it's the reason why every politician styles himself as an outsider—fighting for you against the "establishment" in which they have entrenched themselves. Really, it was only a matter of time before some computer company figured out this moldy, hypocritical argument and used it to promote themselves. Congratulations Microsoft, you've gone where everyone has gone before.