Microsoft will change Windows 7 UAC

Reacting to intense criticism of an important security feature in Windows 7, Microsoft Corp. today said it will change the behavior of User Account Control (UAC) in Windows 7's release candidate.

"We are going to deliver two changes to the Release Candidate that we'll all see," said John DeVaan and Steven Sinofsky, two Microsoft executives responsible for Windows' development.

"First, the UAC control panel will run in a high integrity process, which requires elevation," said DeVaan and Sinofsky. "Second, changing the level of the UAC will also prompt for confirmation."

The changes, they said, were prompted by feedback from users, including comments appended to an earlier post Thursday by DeVaan in which he defended the modifications Microsoft made to UAC in Windows 7.

"Our dialog is at that point where many do not feel listened to and also many feel various viewpoints are not well-informed," DeVaan and Sinofsky said in the later blog post. "That's not the dialog we set out to have and we're going to do our best to improve."

The UAC feature, which debuted in 2007 as part of Windows Vista but was altered to reduce the number of prompts in Windows 7, has been under fire since last week, when two Windows bloggers, Rafael Rivera and Long Zheng, first reported that it could easily be disabled by attackers.

Yesterday, they followed up with more information about how hackers could piggyback on UAC-approved applications to fool Windows 7 into giving a malicious payload full administrative rights.

"This is definitely the result we've been looking for," Long said in an e-mail late Thursday. "[But] I'm a little bit shocked at just how quickly Microsoft has turned around, considering they made a post not 12 hours earlier stating that they would not change their position."

Rivera, Long and others urged Microsoft to reconsider the default setting of UAC in Windows 7. That default, which DeVaan said Microsoft had selected because people running Windows balked at dealing with more than two security prompts per day, was to "Notify me only when programs try to make changes to my computer."

Microsoft, however, won't be taking that tack. Instead, the next public version of Windows 7 -- dubbed RC, for release candidate -- will prompt the user before allowing any changes to UAC settings. "The way we're going to think about this [is] that the UAC setting is something like a password, and to change your password you need to enter your old password," DeVaan and Sinofsky said today.

Microsoft has not spelled out a Windows 7 RC timetable, but Sinofsky reiterated last week that the development process was moving straight from the public beta, which was launched Jan. 10, to the release candidate. In the past, the company has delivered multiple betas before moving to the RC milestone.

The other change to be implemented in Windows 7 RC will effectively render moot the proof-of-concept attack that Rivera and Long published last week, which silently disables UAC. "That was already in the works before this discussion and doing this prevents all the mechanics around SendKeys and the like from working," DeVaan and Sinofsky said.

They didn't issue an apology for the dust-up, but said Microsoft had erred when deciding how to implement UAC in Windows 7. "We said we thought we were bound to make a mistake in the process of designing and blogging about Windows 7."

"We want to continue the dialog and hopefully everyone recognizes that engineering, perhaps especially engineering Windows 7, is sometimes going to be a lively discussion with a broad spectrum of viewpoints," they said.

One security professional praised Microsoft's move. "This goes back to what beta programs are supposed to provide: feedback from a real audience," said Andrew Storms, director of security operations at nCircle Network Security Inc.

"This was an obvious design flaw, and for them to say they simply weren't going to fix it, that was the real problem," Storms said. "I think they realized that they needed to do something, more over the concern about their reaction than to the vulnerability itself."

Source : www.computerworld.com

Speed Up Your FireFox

Yes, the fox is already pretty damn fast but do you know if you can actually make it faster?
That's the beauty of this program being open source.

So, this is what you do:

In the URL bar, type “about:config” and press enter. This will bring up the configuration “menu” where you can change the parameters of Firefox.

Note that these are what I’ve found to REALLY speed up my Firefox significantly - and these settings seem to be common among everybody else as well. But these settings are optimized for broadband connections - I mean with as much concurrent requests we’re going to open up with pipelining..... you’d better have a big connection.

Double Click on the following settings and put in the numbers below - the true / false booleans will change when you double click them.

Code:
browser.tabs.showSingleWindowModePrefs – true
network.http.max-connections – 48
network.http.max-connections-per-server – 16
network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-proxy – 8
network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server – 4
network.http.pipelining – true
network.http.pipelining.maxrequests – 100
network.http.proxy.pipelining – true
network.http.request.timeout – 300

One more thing…
Right-click somewhere on that screen and add a NEW -> Integer.
Name it “nglayout.initialpaint.delay” and set its value to “0”.
This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it receives. Since you’re broadband - it shouldn’t have to wait.

That's it, you should notice you fox running faster now : )

Related post :

Tips to Speed up Your Modem
Do you know that maybe at this momment, your browsing speed has been limited by your own modem? Then follow this to make sure!

BIOS Beep Codes - Error Codes

Finally after some long search i've found this information.

BIOS Beep Codes

Have you ever found your computer cannot be turned on? The power light is on but there's nothing happen but some beeping sounds. Then you got to know this information.

When a computer is first turned on, or rebooted, its BIOS performs a power-on self test (POST) to test the system's hardware, checking to make sure that all of the system's hardware components are working properly. Under normal circumstances, the POST will display an error message; however, if the BIOS detects an error before it can access the video card, or if there is a problem with the video card, it will produce a series of beeps, and the pattern of the beeps indicates what kind of problem the BIOS has detected.
Because there are many brands of BIOS, there are no standard beep codes for every BIOS.

Standard Original IBM POST Error Codes

Code Description

1 short beep System is OK
2 short beeps POST Error - error code shown on screen
No beep Power supply or system board problem
Continuous beep Power supply, system board, or keyboard problem
Repeating short beeps Power supply or system board problem
1 long, 1 short beep System board problem
1 long, 2 short beeps Display adapter problem (MDA, CGA)
1 long, 3 short beeps Display adapter problem (EGA)
3 long beeps 3270 keyboard card

IBM POST Diagnostic Code Descriptions

Code Description

100 - 199 System Board
200 - 299 Memory
300 - 399 Keyboard
400 - 499 Monochrome Display
500 - 599 Colour/Graphics Display
600 - 699 Floppy-disk drive and/or Adapter
700 - 799 Math Coprocessor
900 - 999 Parallel Printer Port
1000 - 1099 Alternate Printer Adapter
1100 - 1299 Asynchronous Communication Device, Adapter, or Port
1300 - 1399 Game Port
1400 - 1499 Colour/Graphics Printer
1500 - 1599 Synchronous Communication Device, Adapter, or Port
1700 - 1799 Hard Drive and/or Adapter
1800 - 1899 Expansion Unit (XT)
2000 - 2199 Bisynchronous Communication Adapter
2400 - 2599 EGA system-board Video (MCA)
3000 - 3199 LAN Adapter
4800 - 4999 Internal Modem
7000 - 7099 Phoenix BIOS Chips
7300 - 7399 3.5" Disk Drive
8900 - 8999 MIDI Adapter
11200 - 11299 SCSI Adapter
21000 - 21099 SCSI Fixed Disk and Controller
21500 - 21599 SCSI CD-ROM System

AMI BIOS Beep Codes

Code Description

1 Short Beep System OK
2 Short Beeps Parity error in the first 64 KB of memory
3 Short Beeps Memory failure in the first 64 KB
4 Short Beeps Memory failure in the first 64 KB Operational of memory
or Timer 1 on the motherboard is not functioning
5 Short Beeps The CPU on the motherboard generated an error
6 Short Beeps The keyboard controller may be bad. The BIOS cannot switch to protected mode
7 Short Beeps The CPU generated an exception interrupt
8 Short Beeps The system video adapter is either missing, or its memory is faulty
9 Short Beeps The ROM checksum value does not match the value encoded in the BIOS
10 Short Beeps The shutdown register for CMOS RAM failed
11 Short Beeps The external cache is faulty
1 Long, 3 Short Beeps Memory Problems
1 Long, 8 Short Beeps Video Card Problems

Phoenix BIOS Beep Codes

Note - Phoenix BIOS emits three sets of beeps, separated by a brief pause.

Code Description

1-1-3 CMOS read/write failure
1-1-4 ROM BIOS checksum error
1-2-1 Programmable interval timer failure
1-2-2 DMA initialisation failure
1-2-3 DMA page register read/write failure
1-3-1 RAM refresh verification failure
1-3-3 First 64k RAM chip or data line failure
1-3-4 First 64k RAM odd/even logic failure
1-4-1 Address line failure first 64k RAM
1-4-2 Parity failure first 64k RAM
2-_-_ Faulty Memory
3-1-_ Faulty Motherboard
3-2-4 Keyboard controller Test failure
3-3-4 Screen initialisation failure
3-4-1 Screen retrace test failure
3-4-2 Search for video ROM in progress
4-2-1 Timer tick interrupt in progress or failure
4-2-2 Shutdown test in progress or failure
4-2-3 Gate A20 failure
4-2-4 Unexpected interrupt in protected mode
4-3-1 RAM test in progress or failure>ffffh
4-3-2 Faulty Motherboard
4-3-3 Interval timer channel 2 test or failure
4-3-4 Time of Day clock test failure
4-4-1 Serial port test or failure
4-4-2 Parallel port test or failure
4-4-3 Math coprocessor test or failure
Low 1-1-2 System Board select failure
Low 1-1-3 Extended CMOS RAM failure