Jared Rimer’s Technology blog and podcast

Well,
I’m borrowing the E-mail posting facility to let people know whats been
going on. I was telling Shaun about the fact I was having issues with some
of Window-Eyes features. Now, i’ve been beta testing for a very long time,
and know that it can cause issues that may not be desirable. Today, I was
installing the latest scripts for Winamp from Script Central, and it
prompted me to turn off debug mode. I had sent off an E-mail to Jeff,
letting him know something I had forgotten. This is getting very
interesting.

Hi.
this is in responce to the new article just posted.
As I have always said, it depends.
Ever heard of the saying, that if you eat to much of a good thing…
Security itself is not secure.
Its secure at the current time but later on it can be broken.
How secure is secure?
Ok so you want a serious model of wat security should be.
Locks on all the doors, secured computers and everything.
Ok what if you forget your keys?
Or they get stolen, or well if something really bad happens you can’t control and the datafile for all the passwords and records is now a useless piece of crap, say you have a fire and most everything is destroyed.
As supposed to having everything in plain site of everyone that notices.
Find a medium ground.
My ground is having the week windows firewall on, the router firewall on, an antivirus scanner, an antispyware scanner and an antispyware protecter.
The scanners and virus system are sit at minimum values so they don’t introod on my use or performance.
passwords, internet and other info including banking info are stored in text files on a flash drive which is always by the desk with another used for actual data, this stuff is backed on 2 hard drives and a few cds for backup.
Is it secure?
No not really, but then is anything secure.
I am secure from casual hackers well most of them.
I check mails for spam or unusual things and remove attachments I don’t know about.
I can scan files if I so choose and often do.
my isp has spam and virus protection.
Even so I still get a load of spam.
about 2-5 a day which over all is not much in the scheme of things.
I do clean my cache out every few months.
I concider this secure, and believe me i have tried things.
Also every payed thing ie banks, the net, etc has its own password, however just about everything else is locked to a standard username andpassword.
is that secure?
No not in the scheme of things but its as secure as I need.
I have had issues where to much security had me having to manage the stuff on systems because of stuff that wouldn’t run because of it, I’ve even had the situation where windows itself was locked on 3 systems and actual lagit things were bard.
Ofcause its a different story if someone is managing security for you.
In that case you can be as secure as you like, you can do whatever you want, even install norton on a system.
if someone else manages it then well you don’t need to worry, this is my view and my view only.
Do I want to be more secure than I am now?
Yeah I do, if only I didn’t get headakes, ie lagit programs and mail lost, corruption to things and bugs requiring reformats of everything.
A nice and accessible way to manage things.
a way to remotely do things and a way to manage passwords so that if anything happened there was a way to fix it.
maybe have backup files.
But as it stands I have no desire to go back to what I was doing 5 years ago.
Half my time was spent maintaining security software as well as user work with it.
the rest of the time was split up on trying to use what I had and reformatting the systems because of extra preasure put on em by security software and other things.
Am I secure?
No but I am confortable.
Most security is comman sence.
If you don’t open unknown attachments and are carefull then thats most of the issues.
A spyware blocker and scanner should be installed as well as some sort of cookie viewer/killer.
you also should have a good antivirus scanner, this doesn’t neccessarily have to have residant protection.
if you have broadband you should use the hardware router that can keep most things out.
if not don’t worry, if you are hacked your ip changes all the time when you dial.
not a big issue is it?
Ofcause its not as clear cut as that, there are dumbasses among us and sadely most of us are in one way or another, even I am not imune from this.
There are still some things not known about security always will be.
Do you need a firewall software?
If you want to moniter things and like that by all means.
Do you want a suite of things.
only if you are going to use everything in that.
How secure is secure?
if you set all your security software on medium protection then you should be ok.
this includes getting the latest sun java instead of ms java although you will still need that for some things.

Hi all.
well thanks to jared this is my first email post to the blog.
this enables me to freely get things and well means that I can give more info faster.
So whats going on.
Finally softwarepatch.com has released security updates for vista, ie and xp as well as the new directx august release.
This version has updates to dx9 and 10 xact and all xna related materials, also direct 3d.
I wander how long directx will be updated for, there is not much really being changed on standard directx if the files tell of anything.
Yesterday I finally got firefox at least on a secondary role on the workstation my dad uses, so he could connect to the network at his work.
At which point there were issues to solve I have no clue, its for his company to bother with.

Tip!
This is a tip for jaws users or other readers.
Sometimes especialy with the latest updates jaws will crash semi sort of after ie loads a site.
This seems to be caused by some sites taking a while to load in ie.
if this happens restart the system.
type in the site you want to go.
the trick is to wait till jaws says 100 % and then hit escape.
most likely the site will be up.
if not hit control f5 and it will come up.
this looks to be site spassiffic.
thats all for now, this will be delivered when I finnish my mail, because I need to run the script for that.
later all

Hi all.
This small document is on how to update spybot 1.6
Not much different from 1.5 if you use that.
start, programs and spybot, then update then hit continue unless you wish to select a different mirror.
Here is the crux.
there will be several boxes that will be critical and will be checked and sometimes non critical updates.
Before you could select everything and download it.
However if you do this spybot will crash and not work so you need to download what is selected and then select all the other stuff on the second run of the updater and you will get it.
On that note I am still waiting for any accessibility improveme nts in spybot.
This bug with the updater and the disapearance of the settings pannel on some systems except for nvda users is the only thing different as far as I can see.
There are no actual improvements over 1.5 as to 1.6.

Hi all.
The net as it stands is not interesting for me.
no new poedcasts for me, nothing in mail to access no software updates or anything.
That is till you get to windows update.
The updates range from windows xp vista to probably and things to windows mediaplayer, outlook express, and activex.
To office, access snapshot, excell, word powerpoint outlook
and ie.
Also is an optional driver update for a known recovery software issue in some systems.
The strange thing is that there usualy is only 6 updates per months, 10 at most.
The most I have seen is 105 but thats after a reformat ofcause.
21 in total.
if you have office 07 more.
At least I think, who knows.
The good thing is that most things are small.
so yeah huge updates have come.
In other random news that I will almost sertainly cover in my live journal I managed to get 4 series of the giles wembley hogg bbc radio4 broadcasts thanks to arfy on dchubs.
I only got a cd once from the uk and really wanted the disks.
Now I have em all.
I will catch all the readers later.
log on to compguru-1.livejournal.com for the rest of this story.

Here’s just some of what I think people may be finding useful from “Top Tech Tid Bits” from Top Dot Enterprises

1. From the Access Ability Blog, this article, entitled “When Wikipedia Won’t Cut It: Twenty-Five Online Sources for Reliable, Researched Facts, is interesting in itself, and will also lead to its source, CollegeDegree.com.
   http://www.collegedegree.com/library/financial-aid/25-online-resources-for-reliable-researched-facts
2. Freedom Scientific announces the official release of Pac Mate version 6.1, featuring improved web navigation, the ability to read PDF documents, and the ability for those who wish to to write in contracted Braille in all applications.
   http://rs6.net/tn.jsp?e=001T953c5GqKOcMjKZ8hN2pjdVMvQoN-3uboS_cStoyjSMmg4QMfjx_LFZ-6-Rp8TNMNdXmYs5-aYmLl1×91GZgFwYAtFui-0TBt1d1CyHHb2iP_29vMMT1HgslL7bDHbMDKW8tw4OD2bHbBWxyMN-uX86RdfUNCXrU7Rz8SreoK5xQutng2u6Okau-ztOzcSSw
3. Gene Asner produced an elaborate, high quality tutorial on accessing the web entitled Surfing with Style. He is decided to make this tutorial freely available. He’ll provide no tech support on it, and no future upgrades will be made to it, that it will remain usable for a long time to come. Here’s the download link:
   http://www.divshare.com/download/5046375-ece w
4. Ai Squared announces the release of ZoomWARE, a low vision computer access solution for people in the early stages of vision loss or who suffer from the stress and fatigue of computer use. The program costs $149 to download if you live in North America, $229 overseas.
   http://www.getzoomware.com/download

Hope you find some of these interesting. I sure did.