The HP Security Laboratory has created the application SWF Scan which can be used by both developers and end users to analyse Adobe Flash files for more than 60 vulnerabilities. Usage is pretty simple and straightforward although interpretation of the findings might require a deeper understanding of Adobe Flash or extensive research on the Internet. The application works with both local Adobe Flash files or those embedded in websites.

Users will first have to find out the direct url to the embedded flash file on the website. All web browser provide those capabilities. Firefox users for instance right-click the page and select Page Info from the context menu to get a list of objects that are embedded in the website. A click on the Media tab and a manual search for files of the type embed should be enough to find the url of the Adobe Flash file. A right-click on the flash object will open a menu with the option to copy the url to the clipboard.

Once the url has been copied to the clipboard it can be pasted into the interface of the HP SWF Scan application. A click on the get button next to the url bar will initiate a connection attempt of the Adobe Flash security scanner. If the file is a valid Adobe Flash file it will automatically try to decompile it displaying the findings in the sidebar and the actual source in the right window.

A proficient Flash user can now analyze the code on his own. Everyone else is better of clicking on the Analyze button in the header of the security program. This will analyze the decompiled source code and provide a summary to the user.

The summary contains a list of vulnerabilities that have been found in the Adobe Flash file. This vulnerabilities mean that the Flash file might be vulnerable to certain exploits. Flash developers can then rewrite part of their application to fix the discovered vulnerabilities. End users on the other hand may be delighted to know that an Adobe Flash file does not contain any of the known vulnerabilities.

SWF Scan is a free download after a mandatory registration at the HP website. It is currently only available for the Microsoft Windows operating system.

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The disk storage format tool displays a simple dialog after execution. The connected and recognized USB devices are listed on top. After making a selection there the user can select a file system for the USB device including the NTFS file system. It is furthermore – but not at the same time – possible to make the USB disk storage device bootable from DOS which is an excellent way of installing new software or running diagnostic software programs on a computer system without having to boot in the operating system itself.

The HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool will recognize many but not all USB devices that are connected to a computer.

The disk storage format tool has a size of roughly 2 Megabytes and needs to be installed on the computer system before it can be used.

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HP Smart Web Printing (thanks Archer for the tip) adds a button to Internet Explorer and Firefox after installation. This button was immediately accessible in Internet Explorer. It is added to the Navigation Toolbar in Firefox which is disabled on my system by default. I had to enable the toolbar and drag and drop the button to another toolbar in Firefox to be able to access it.

Clips can be selected by pressing the HP Smart Select button and the sidebar that displays all created clips can be opened with the shortcut SHIFT CTRL K or by selecting the menu of the button.

The HP Smart Web Printing application integrates itself nicely into both browsers and provides a very interesting feature to be able to print exactly the area of the screen that should be printed. Definitely a must have for users who print regularly.

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Their problem was that they always had to change the settings when they wanted to print a picture that they took with the digital camera. Here is what I did so that they did not have to change those settings all the time. You all know that it is possible to add additional printers to your system. What most users do not know is that you can also add the same printer again and configure it with different settings. What I did was I installed the printer again in Windows Vista.

This had the result that I now had two printer profiles. I started by naming them accordingly. One was named Print Text Documents while the other was named Print Photo. Since the profiles are independent of each other it was easy to keep the text document settings of the default printer and optimize the settings of the photo printer to print pictures in best quality.

No magic involved here, sorry. Whenever they want to print a photo they simply use the second profile with the name Print Photo. It’s theoretically possible to create additional profiles if need arises.

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