Users who want to update their Windows operating system can use the automatic updates feature to download updates for Windows automatically, visit the Windows Update website in Internet Explorer or use one of the several Windows Updates downloaders like Autopatcher or Windows Updates Downloader.

A third possibility came to light recently with the introduction of the Windows Update Catalog. Like the Windows Updates website the Windows Update Catalog only loads properly in Internet Explorer. It does offer however a nice and convenient way of download all updates for Windows in one go from the official Microsoft server.

The website features a search form that searches the entire Windows database of patches, updates and applications. Entering a generic name like Windows XP returns more than 1000 results which means that it makes sense to reduce the results by narrowing down the search.

continue reading "Download All Updates For Windows From Microsoft"

System Protect can protect custom files and folders as well as system files in Windows. By default all files and folders that are necessary to run the operating system are protected by the security application. Protected in this case means that deleting and modifying protected files is denied to the user. This setting can be changed in the program’s options to allow system changes on the user requests which is for example helpful during system updates.

An access denied window pops up when the user or system tries to delete or modify a protected system file. This popup notification can be removed in the options as well.

Besides protecting important system files System Protect can also protect custom files and folders that have been selected by the user. This is done by adding those files and folders to the Custom Protection tab in the software program’s settings.

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Internet Explorer’s Content Advisor works as a safeguard and web filter so that family members might not open websites that are not suited for them. The Content Advisor is pretty much a content filter and makes use of several filtering mechanisms to prevent family members from accessing inappropriate websites.

Internet Explorer Content Advisor makes use of two main methods to restrict and allow access to websites. The first makes use of The ICRA System which is basically an external content rating system. The computer administrator has the option to use a slider to allow or prevent access to sites that have been rated a specific way.

The whitelist is the second method, it can be used to allow access to specific websites. Those websites are then accessible even if one of the Content Advisor filters would disallow them otherwise.

Each url that is accessed is checked against the content advisor filters. If the check fails the user is presented with a popup window that explains why access to this website has been disabled and that a supervisor can enable access by entering his master password.

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As far as file-sharing protocols go, BitTorrent has emerged as one of the leading P2P technologies being used. μTorrent is one of the most popular BitTorrent apps around, largely because of its small size and ease of use. While μTorrent used to be an independent client, it has since been taken over by BitTorrent Inc. which has partnerships with almost all the major movie networks.

μTorrent has recently been found to contain a very serious security vulnerability. Apparently, there is a boundary error in the processing of ‘.torrent’ files, which can be exploited to cause a stack-based buffer overflow.

What this means is that someone can create a malicious torrent file and place his or her own code in the ‘created by’ section of the torrent. This code may be harmless or something serious like allowing the hacker access to the machine that runs the .torrent file.

continue reading "A New Vulnerability Discovered in μTorrent"

The Windows Vista Firewall is definitely better than the Windows XP Firewall because it is able to control incoming and outgoing connections. If you have to rely on the firewall you might feel that it is missing several features known from desktop firewalls. That’s where Vista Firewall Control comes into play. The free version of this firewall management software comes with reduced functionality but introduces one interesting features: The ability to allow or deny access to the Internet for running applications.

Whenever a application requests a connection to the Internet that is not in the list of applications that have already defined firewall rulesets Vista Firewall Control asks the user if he wants to allow or deny that connection.

That’s a known feature from many desktop firewalls. The options are to configure the application to disable or enable all connections or to allow only incoming or outgoing connections.

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