The Windows Vista and 7 User Account Control security feature has been around for several years now and most of people will have at least come across it in some form or another. To put it simply, User account Control (UAC) is there to help prevent users getting their system infected with malicious applications and scripts. This is achieved by preventing potentially suspect software from automatically executing itself when it is asking for access to various important system locations such as the ‘Windows’ and ‘Program Files’ folders or the registry. Granting these extra privileges can only be achieved through an Administrator account and standard users will need to provide the administrator’s password for that access to be granted to the protected locations. Changing and configuring a number of Windows own settings can also trigger the UAC prompt as well as installing and removing software.

Being a system administrator, there may be times when you want to have a closer look at some of the systems running processes. Whether there is an issue with a piece of software currently running, and you suspect it may be connected with the programs access rights, or an unknown process requires a bit more investigation about its integrity and what rights it has, or has asked for. A useful little utility called UAC Process Analyzer can help give you that valuable information about the integrity of a running process. It can also help identify what user account control restrictions are currently in place for the process and whether it is being executed from a trusted location.

UAC Process Analyzer is a portable application of around a Megabyte unzipped. As you might expect, the program needs to be ‘Run as Administrator’ when starting for non admin users.

Usage couldn’t be much simpler, select the process to analyse from the dropdown list and click the ‘Analyse’ button. All the relevant security information will then be displayed which requires a brief explanation.

The filename is the file description name taken from the file details, and ‘File Details’ is pretty self explanatory, being the physical location of the file.

‘Integrity Level’ is the amount of access the process has been granted to perform write operations in important system locations. ‘Low’ Integrity means the process can only be granted this level of access after being allowed to by the administrator. A ‘High’ integrity level is obviously the opposite and means a user does not need administrator privileges and will not be prompted for enabled write access to these locations.

When the ‘UAC Virtualization’ is enabled, this means the process does not have write access to ‘Program files’, ‘Windows’ folders or other core system areas. Writes instead are redirected to the user profile folders where elevated privileges are not required and critical system files have much less chance of be harmed. ‘Disabled’ means full write access is granted for the process.

‘Trusted Directory’ is simply used to check whether the application is situated in a trusted location or not.

The last piece of information tells you if the process has been digitally signed or not and could help determine if the file has been altered from its original state. If a signature is present, clicking on ‘Show information about this publishers certificate’ will display more information about the certificate including issued to and issued by, the serial number, algorithm and thumbprint.

Compatible with Windows Vista SP2 and Windows 7 32bit and 64bit

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Web browsers such as Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera are considered very fast due to the cache. For example, if you’ve previous visited raymond.cc and then when you re-visit raymond.cc from a bookmark or manually typing it in the address bar the next time, you will notice that the webpage loads very quickly, thanks to the web browser automatically loading the files from the local cache for most of the requests instead of redownloading the images, javascripts, CSS and etc. It is possible for the webmaster to configure the expiration date of the cached files so that your web browser will automatically recheck if the files are modified upon reaching the expiration time and will automatically pull the latest version if it is newer than the cache stored locally on your computer. The cache used by web browsers is truly a useful technology to save both time and bandwidth resources for the user and for the server as well.

We all know that every web browsers comes with a refresh or reload button but do you know exactly what it does when you click on that button? Do you also know the difference between a soft and hard refresh? Well I recently wanted to know the refresh webpage function myself so I’ve done some research and testing to understand more about this.

If you’ve previously visited a website and the cache files are not expired, visiting the website again by typing the URL on the address bar or opening from the bookmark will load the unexpired files from the local cache on your computer.

Web browser loads files from local cache

If you click on the refresh/reload button or press the F5/Ctrl+R hotkey on your web browser, this will trigger a “soft refresh” on the web browser where it will check against the web server to see if the files are modified. If modified, the web browser will pull the latest version of the file and if not modified, the web browser will continue to use the cache version. A soft refresh takes very little bandwidth just to check the HTTP response headers of the files to determine if the files are modified.

Soft refresh forces web browser to check if the files are modified.

As for hard refresh, it is a method to force the web browser to fetch all of the files again ignoring the expiration time and bypassing the local cache.

Hard refresh forces web browser to fetch all files without checking.

Now that you know the difference between a soft and hard refresh and how it works, here are the commands to perform a soft or hard refresh on different web browsers. There are actually a couple of different methods used for refresh such as Ctrl+R, Shift+F5, and etc but I’ll only show you the standard method so that it is easier to memorize.

Soft refresh: Click on the Reload/Refresh button or press the F5 key on keyboard. Works on Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera.

Hard refresh: Press Ctrl+F5 keys simultaneously. Works works on Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome and Opera. As for Safari, the only way to force a hard refresh is to press and hold the SHIFT key on the keyboard followed by clicking on the Reload button.

Logically, most of the time you don’t really need to do a soft or hard refresh unless the webpage suddenly looks broken probably due to some changes being made on the website. If the webpage still looks broken after a refresh, then only you should contact the owner of the website. Some of you reported that the floating social bar at the left hand side overlapping the first two paragraphs. Please do a soft refresh for your web browser to fetch the latest files. That should fix the problem.

Having hundreds of Gigabytes of data is not unheard of for a lot of people these days. The problem comes with the sheer amount of different places where you might have got them. From smart phones and digital cameras, to downloading files off the internet, ripping music and video, or simply receiving files from friends. With all this variation in sources, the inevitable consequence is there will most likely be a huge variation in the way everything is organised and named.

Whether it’s working with your collections of music, videos, archives or pictures, the chances are you have likely spent far too much time manually renaming hundreds or thousands of files. Removing erroneous numbers or replacing or adding strings to rename files is often required to make everything more readable. To make things far easier and save a lot of time, what you need is a way to rename multiple files and folders at once.

That’s where a batch renaming utility comes in handy and one such program is Rename Master. While aiming to be relatively easy to use, it also has some powerful functions. Apart from the more standard types of rename functions like add, remove, or replacing selected parts of the filename, Rename Master also supports renaming via the files properties, and also the meta tag or exif information found in most MP3 or JPEG files.

There are plenty of other features of note including; a built in Explorer type folder browser to locate files for renaming, a thumbnail preview window, auto previewing so you can see what the names will look like before renaming, and an undo function if you do get it wrong.

The Rename Master download contains both a portable executable and an installer if you wish to keep it on your system. When it is first run, the main window may seem a bit complicated, but the program can be made as easy or advanced as you require and performing even complex renames can be done with a couple of clicks of the mouse. Simply locate and select the files using the upper window, path bar, filter and pop out folder browser.

As you can see, there are twelve main renaming functions available. All of these have a set of sub functions when you click on them. This is where the programs power lies, and affects things like which part of the filenames are to be altered and what the replacement strings will be.

As a simple example, these next steps will perform a common task of converting a folder full of generically named photos into something a bit easier to identify. Clicking on ’06 : [Replace Name/Phrase]’ will bring up a small window, and select Replace the ‘Entire Name’ from the dropdown‘. The option is there to replace the name, extension or a part of the name.

Clicking the small play type button brings up a menu containing a number of file, date and tag variables which can be inserted into the filename. Here I select ‘Renumbering’ > ‘Counter’, manually enter the text ‘ Holiday ‘ and then ‘File Date’ > ‘Date Modified Year’. The potential result can then be seen in the ‘New Name’ column of the file display.

If the new name result is satisfactory, then press the ‘Rename’ button. This example is obviously quite a basic one and much more advanced operations can be carried out by using several of the renaming scripts at once. Longer and more frequently used scripts can be saved for future use with the ‘File’ > ‘Save Script’ option. The Online Help is definitely worth a read to explore and understand what the program is capable of.

Compatible with Windows XP, Vista and 7

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DarkComet is a remote administration tool that opens an invisible backdoor giving the controller full access to the computer including access to the hard drive, activating webcam and sound capture, keylogging to steal username and passwords by capturing keystrokes and many more. DarkComet is one of the very few free remote administration tool that has been in development for such a long time. About 2 months ago CNN reported that the Syrian government was using a free and publicly available remote administration tool called DarkComet to spy on the supporters of the Syrian opposition. When the coder of DarkComet got to know about this, he quickly created a remover for his own tool to fix what the Syrian government did to the opposition movement.

Since DarkComet can be downloaded publicly, the server file that is generated from it is obviously fully detected by most if not all antiviruses. So anyone with the intention of infecting another person’s Windows computer will have to make the server file fully undetectable by crypting it to bypas the antivirus detection. What makes DarkComet RAT Remover special is the ability to detect DarkComet’s presence even if it is virtualized, packed, encrypted, compressed or obfuscated.

DarkComet RAT Remover is a portable and simple to use tool that is able to detect DarkComet RAT instance by taking a few minutes to scan the memory and offers to cure the threat in just a click of a button. The DarkComet removal tool also shows the process name and the installed location if the presence is found. Since modern Windows operating system such as Windows and 7 has UAC enabled by default which protects third party application from modifying the registry, it is advisable to run the DarkComet RAT Remover as administrator by right clicking on the tool and select “Run as administrator”.

As you can see from the video demo above, the DarkComet RAT Remover is able to detect the presence of DarkComet but the ability to remove the infection is a bit weak. DarkComet RAT Remover terminates the process but the file and registry entry that makes it auto start with Windows is still intact which means that when Windows is restarted, DarkComet will run again. The persistence installation option at the Module Startup is not even enabled during the creation of a new stub.

Another powerful option found in DarkComeT RAT that definitely breaks the DarkComet RAT Remover tool is the persistent process option in the Module Shield. When this option is enabled, the server process will automatically restart when it is killed or terminated.

Perhaps the DarkComet RAT Remover is very useful to detect its presence but shouldn’t fully rely on it to remove the infection until the cleaning function has been polished. The latest version of DarkComet RAT Remover was released about 2 months ago and this file has been constantly being scanned in VirusTotal with the result of a perfect zero (0/42) detection. Rest assured that the DarkComet removal tool is definitely safe without any backdoor being embedded to it that is if you download from the official link below.

Download DarkComet RAT Remover

When it comes to storing and synchronising your data, there has been a large rise in ways to achieve this in the last couple of years. One of the more popular ones is uploading and storing your files with an online service. There are plenty to choose from depending on how much data storage is required. Although there are services that offer more storage space if you need a lot, possibly the most popular and the one I use, is Dropbox. The 2GB or so basic package it offers does me just fine, although I believe this can be increased to around 16GB with some effort.

Dropbox really can be a very useful application allowing you to access your data and sync files and folders across multiple computers and devices. And because it’s a cross platform service, there are a number of possible ways to do it. Firstly, you can download and install the Dropbox desktop client on all computers that need access to Dropbox, or simply open a web browser and access the online version. If you are on the move, there are iPhone and Android versions available as well. One way Dropbox does’t currently offer is taking your synced account with you in a portable way such as a USB stick.

Having a portable Dropbox account has a few big advantages such as allowing you not to have to install the desktop application on systems you don’t really want to, which is better for security and privacy reasons. Also, a portable version doesn’t have a limit of one account per machine, it’s one account per folder so multiple accounts are possible. DropboxPortableAHK is an easy to use utility to enable you to do this.

The nature of the program obviously means it is completely portable, all that’s needed is for you to download the zip file and extract it to a folder or USB stick. Then run the DropboxPortableAHK executable.

The program is pretty easy to use as it’s a series of screens to go through to set everything up and get the Dropbox portable account working. Screen 2 checks for a current internet connection and allows the setup of custom connections if needed. The standard system method is ok for most situations.

Screen 3 is for choosing a folder name and location for the Dropbox folder, pretty self explanatory.

Screen 4 is useful if you already have the Dropbox application setup because the data folder can be moved or copied to the portable location which saves downloading it again. The ‘Use previous Dropbox configuration’ option should transfer your account information but I constantly got a ‘No Dropbox path was found…’ error when I tried to use it, so it’s something to watch out for.

The Addons screen has a number of options including ‘folder Protection’ which will terminate the Dropbox process if you unplug a USB stick while it’s still running, and ‘SyncAndGo’ that will open the Dropbox application, sync your files and then close again. If you don’t want to enable this option permanently, it can be turned on temporarily by holding Ctrl while starting the executable. It is worth having a good read of the online setup instructions for a better explanation what all of the options do.

Screen 8 is where the Dropbox setup files are downloaded if they haven’t been already, and the icon colour can be changed so different accounts can be given separate coloured icons. The setup zip file to be downloaded and extracted is around 16MB.

The final screen just has a button to start the Dropbox setup process where you can create an account or enter your details for a currently used one. Once that is done, the portable Dropbox application is ready to use and the chosen colour icon will be displayed in the system tray. Files and folders will then be synced in the normal way of adding or removing data from the Dropbox folder.

To create a different account, unpack the downloaded DropboxPortableAHK zip file using a different folder name. Opening the setup window again after an account is configured can be done by holding ‘Shift’ when double clicking the executable. Right click the Dropbox tray icon and ‘Exit’ to close everything down.

Compatible with Windows XP, Vista and 7 32bit and 64bit

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With the resolution of today’s digital cameras and smartphone’s, the size of the photos taken can be massive. Some high quality cameras can output pictures at 6000 x 4000 pixels or more and the resulting file size can be several Megabytes. If you’re a fan of photo sharing websites or social networking and need to upload your photos to sites like Twitter or Facebook, trying to upload one huge picture is going to take enough time, but doing it with a whole holiday’s worth of snaps will take forever unless you have a fast internet connection. You also have to think of the people who are going to view or download these files. On anything but a reasonable internet connection, and a fast mobile device or respectable PC, it could be a rather painful affair.

The situation is also very similar for web developers and websites, because as well as taking the extra time to upload batches of larger images, how much space being taken up is also a consideration. I’m quite sure there would be a number of visitors to Raymond.cc who would not be too impressed if each page took minutes to load because it contained half a dozen high resolution screenshots! Keeping it reasonable is a must.

Of course, there are several other reasons why you would want to resize images or change the file format of a number of images or even entire folders. The good thing is, there are masses of free applications around that deal with the converting and manipulation of images and many of you will already have a favourite in mind. Fotosizer is a utility that caught my eye because it seems to have a good blend of usability and functions without being complicated to use.

As well as performing the resizing and conversion a number of different ways, the program can also change the image quality, alter the DPI settings, retain the EXIF and XMP metadata, and perform a few colour changing or rotating effects. Fotosizer is only a small download of around 1.6 Megabytes and although it doesn’t have a dedicated portable version, can be made portable by extracting the executable with 7zip.

Everything the program does is contained within the single window so ploughing through multiple windows to get tasks done is thankfully not needed. Adding images is simply a case of dragging and dropping all the required files and folders onto the window or using the add and remove buttons underneath.

The resize settings are pretty simple to understand. ‘Custom size/Percentage of original’ as the name suggests, allows you to set the desired resolution as an absolute pixel size or a percentage of the original size. ‘Preset size’ has a number of common sizes in the dropdown box including some for iPhone/iPod and Sony PSP. A couple of tick boxes like ‘Maintain aspect ratio’ and ‘Reverse width and height by orientation’ are there to safeguard against producing images out of proportion.

The three tabs under ‘Optional settings’ offer functions like turning the images into negative or black and white and rotating or flipping the images. The ‘Misc’ tab can change the percentage of the JPEG quality or the print DPI as well as turning on or off the retaining of any metadata in the original images.

The final area of the main window is for the output format and the destination folder with the option of customizing a filename mask. Fotosizer can save the files in BMP, JPEG, GIF, PNG or TIFF formats. The destination folder can be set as the ‘Same as original’ or simply select a custom location.

The ‘Filename mask’ area is quite a useful little option because there are a total of ten different mask patterns you can enter into the box separated by any chosen combination of custom characters. Dates, automatic numbering, dimensions and filename are included along with a few presets in the dropdown box.

The process is pretty quick, enlarging 15 pictures from 1024 x768 to 1600 x 1200 and changing the format from JPG to PNG took under 10 seconds on a single core PC. Although Fotosizer is in a crowded area in regards to image editing software, it has a good mix of being powerful enough for most people and easy to use. There is much more powerful software out there, and Faststone Photo Resizer is one such program to check out if you require tons of functions. But more power often means less user friendliness which is why if Fotosizer does everything you want, it’s definitely one to have a look at.

Compatible with Windows XP, Vista and 7

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Malicious software and viruses can be quite cunning in the way they get themselves on to your computer. And if something does get past the security software, it can sometimes be quite difficult to know anything is there because it will sit in the background going about its business. One of the common areas of your PC malware will try to get access to, is the network connection to the outside world, transmitting private information from your system or receiving more malicious code from untrusted sources.

An important area of concern on networks is watching for unauthorized access on the TCP and UDP ports. Unauthorized open ports are a major security risk and leave the system prone and vulnerable to attack. A number of Windows programs and services listen on the network for incoming connections, but any other non essential connections need to remain closed as a precaution which helps to avoid anything sneaking in under the radar.

Some Firewalls can give you an idea which ports are open and what processes are currently listening for a connection, and the DOS command ‘netstat’ can also give you a rough idea, but it’s not in a particularly user friendly format. CloseTheDoor is a utility designed to display all TCP and UDP ports that are currently listening for connections and the connected processes and services. There are numerous options available for dealing with processes which you think might not be desirable. ClosetheDoor is available in installable or portable 7zip versions and needs no adminstrator rights to function.

The programs main window lists all processes and services current listening for incoming connections on the system. All relevant information is also listed including; the network interface and listening ports, the protocol (TCP/UDP v4 or v6), the associated process and its ID, any connected services, and information like company, product and description relating to the executable file. Malicious processes will often have no description or product information so this could be something to keep in mind when looking at the list.

The good thing about this little utility is there are a lot of helpful web resources built into the menus to help you gather as much information as possible about the process or port in use. Right clicking an entry will bring up a menu giving you three main options for dealing the process.

They are for opening a folder at the process location, terminating the process or listing and manipulating the connected services. Any service can be stopped, disabled or uninstalled so this option needs to be handled with care. As you can see from the menu, there are a number of options for you to gather more information about the port or process from a Google search or Wikipedia. The Port Authority Database will give more details about the port. Checking the usage statistics of the port can be useful because a sudden surge in activity could possibly mean a new piece of malware is attacking multiple systems.

There is a lot of helpful information and shortcuts to commonly used system tools available in the menu’s:

The ‘File’ menu allows for the export of the results into a CSV file, and there is an option to display a brief summary of all the listening endpoints for each connection.

The ‘Tools’ menu allows for quick access to (component) Services, Task Manager, Network Connections, MSConfig, Regedit and Local security settings. ‘Commands’ will open and export Network statistics, Task Statistics and Environment variables into a text file.

The ‘Internet References’ menu gives quick access to several website links covering a number of important topics that deserve further reading. There is comprehensive information concerning ports and their numbers, services information from Black Viper, Firewall and TCP/IP help from Microsoft and even GRC.com’s ShieldsUp! for checking the security vulnerabilities of your connection.

Because of sheer amount of help and information available at the click of a button, and it’s small and compact nature and effectiveness, CloseTheDoor is certainly a worthwhile addition to any USB toolkit.

Compatible with Windows XP, Vista, 7 (Requires .NET Framework 3.5)

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