TechBlog

Music labels are fighting piracy with software, not just lawyers. Sony BMG and other majors now ship copy-protected CDs that install player software, limit ripping, and sometimes phone home to verify licenses. The packaging rarely explains what happens when you insert the disc into a Windows PC. That should worry anyone who manages desktops — including your own. Autorun Is the Real Entry Point Most of the friction starts with Autorun. Insert a CD, and Windows offers to launch an installer — often a custom media player with DRM components. Users click OK because the dialog looks official and the CD came from a retail shelf, not a download site. ...

Every power user eventually downloads something questionable: a codec pack from a forum signature, a “speed up your PC” utility, an installer from a mirror you do not fully trust, or shareware from an old CD-ROM whose publisher disappeared years ago. In 2005, full virtual machines are possible — Microsoft Virtual PC and VMware both exist — but they are heavy on typical hardware. A Pentium 4 with 512 MB RAM struggles to run a guest OS smoothly while you also browse and download. Sandboxie offers a lighter idea: run the program in a disposable sandbox and throw the changes away if things go wrong. ...

For years, Internet Explorer 6 was the default and often the only browser on Windows machines. Then Firefox 1.0 arrived in November 2004 with tabbed browsing, integrated pop-up blocking, and a community that cared about web standards. Three months later, the conversation has moved from “have you heard of it?” to “should I switch?” The answer for most people is simpler: install it alongside IE and use both. Why a Second Browser Helps Keeping Firefox next to IE is useful even if you do not switch full time: ...

My first websites did not start in a text editor. They started with Microsoft FrontPage 2003, CoffeeCup HTML Editor, and a lot of trial and error in Internet Explorer 6. That was normal in the early 2000s: visual editors lowered the barrier, and the web was still small enough that a personal page or a company brochure site could ship in a weekend. Here in late 2004, the tools are better — but the habits matter more than the brand on the box. ...

If you run support for a home network or a small office, 2004 has been a constant lesson in how fast email malware spreads once one person clicks the wrong attachment. Mydoom was the headline name, but it lived in the same noisy ecosystem as Bagle and Netsky. Different family, same outcome: crowded mail queues, angry contacts, and half a day lost to cleanup. What We Saw in Early 2004 Mydoom.A appeared in January and spread faster than most AV vendors could ship signatures. Variants targeted high-profile domains — including SCO and Microsoft — with DDoS traffic from infected bots. Mydoom.B followed within days with tweaked behavior. By spring, IT forums were full of the same question: “Why is our mail server queueing ten thousand outbound messages?” ...

If you spend a lot of time on Windows machines, you probably have a few jobs that are boring enough to be annoying but too small to justify writing a full application. Clicking through installers, copying log files, filling out the same dialog boxes, starting a group of tools every morning, or checking whether a window appeared correctly are all good examples. That is exactly where AutoIt is useful. AutoIt is a small Windows scripting language designed for automating the graphical user interface. It can run programs, wait for windows, send keystrokes, click buttons, work with files, show message boxes, read and write simple configuration files, and compile scripts into standalone executables. The syntax is BASIC-like, which makes it approachable even if you do not think of yourself as a programmer. ...

Most useful software in a small office is not a big platform. It is a tiny internal tool that removes one repeated pain: renaming files, collecting form data, creating a daily folder tree, or checking whether a service is alive. In 2004, Visual Basic 6 is still one of the fastest ways to build that kind of utility on Windows 2000/XP. Where VB6 Still Wins If the job needs a GUI and needs to ship quickly, VB6 remains hard to beat: ...