Replies

Hi jscher,

I’ve been a little short of time at the office and also will be on Monday. I don’t want to delay the response so much, so I’ll tell you what I got so far.

First, the option you mention does exist in the Spanish ver as well. I used it, but nothing. Notepad and Wordpad weren’t of any help either.

Then, I played a little with SPYWAR~1.DOC. I went to the footer, forced Word to display field codes (Alt+F9), and once there, forced Word to convert the field code to its result (Ctrl+Shift+F9). I don’t remember exactly the outcome, but in some point it went “Error when opening the file!” or something.
The field code does point to the C: root, and I think it’s correct (it even has the double-dash stuff for field codes – besides, a zillion WOWsers woulda noticed before me if it were wrong).The name of the file is also right (“Mxyztplk.doc” courtesy of the copy/paste feature of course).

Hope someone can make something out of this. As for me, it seems I’ll keep scratching my head till tuesday…

Enjoy the weekend

I know you’re right, Howard.

Maybe disabling Windows’s File Swap feature would do, but you’d gotta rely 100% on your RAM resources.
In my case, I just want to be able to recover data in my home pc, and though it would be a real pain in the neck not being able to recover a certain file, I don’t store info that critical at home. I also do regular backups.

Yet, It would be interesting to understand why this piece of soft doesn’t do its work as supposed to. It’s very nicely laid out and the interface is pretty straightforward, but…. but… oh well.

Thanks for your input

Thanks BigAl.

You’re right, I’d rather stick to freeware for home pc data recovery purposes. I appreciate your input very much.

Greets

jscher, thanks a lot.

I really didn’t know what FAT meant, nor how it worked. After your posts (and not knowing how to eat them ) I had a friend explain FAT to me, and now everything makes sense (though I still don’t know why the data is misrecovered).

The soft doesn’t state FAT 1 is different from FAT 2; I believe it rather lets you choose which you want to use in case they differ.

Greets

I also believe that’s the best one can do. Using long, alphanumeric passwords, with spaces and non-alphanumeric characters in between (such as * ) will make it really difficult to obtain the pass.

After my post yesterday I’ve been reviewing the Virtual Signatures feature in Acrobat and (as far as I see) my advice would be:

1) create a regular pdf using pdf writer (so it won’t be protected and you can edit it later without changing the default security settings you set, which you’d have to do if you had created it with distiller). If you need the advanced features of pdf distiller (bookmarks / hyperliks / whatever), with some practical sense I’d set distiller with no password or security settings (continue reading)

2) open your recently created pdf file and sign it

3) when you are prompted to “save the signed file as”, before saving, “Security” should display “None”. Change it to “Standard”, select the actions you want to restrict, enter your password, confirm, done.

So, this won’t prevent crackers from taking the restricted actions (since as I said in my last post, the program can vulnerate protected pdf files in no time, without having to crack the password). BUT for commercial purposes, I believe if someone intended to vulnerate the secured file, the “Document Altered” alarm would be triggered and the signatures would show they are no longer valid.

When the document is forwarded back to you, you check the signatures and realize the pdf file has been tampered with.

Please, any other input on this would be greatly appreciated.

Greets

Hello everyone
I am using Adobe Acrobat at work too, and wanted to point out something regarding its security:

1) Acrobat lets you secure your document so
– A) it won’t be altered
– nobody can copy/paste info from that document (unless you allow them to)
– C) the document won’t be printed (unless you want it to)
– D) its fields won’t be tampered with

2) Additionally, you can sign documents for validation purposes. I am not much into this feature, but provided it works right, I think of many uses for it. It’s fairly well detailed in the help file.

Now, a warning:

When you protect a pdf file because it’s so important that some of the actions described in (1) are not taken, you should know that some software out there can leave your secured file vulnerable for edition, as if you had never protected it. It’s the case of Advanced PDF Password Recovery (I don’t know other, but there surely must be). Of course, this soft is not widely known among people (most don’t even know how a pdf file is generated – and I mean no offense). BUT if you need to be ABSOLUTELY sure that nobody can take the actions described in (1), you will be a bit dissapointed. APPR vulnerates security in less than you would say “do it”.

Still, Acrobat provides some security with digital signatures (2). Because Acrobat tells you if a document has been modified after it was last signed, vulnerating it with APPR would make it evident that the document has been tampered with (for further info on this pls post back).

And, one last thing: not only APPR can directly vulnerate security in a way that the document will show it has been altered. It also lets you perform several password-cracking attacks (such as brute force, dictionary, don’t remember if any other).

In this last case, after getting the password, you’d have to “save as” in order to decrypt it, thus triggering the alert that the document has been modified (as long as it was signed).

If you have some comments on this, pls post back. As I said above, I’m not much into virtual signatures, so maybe someone can add useful info.

I’ll give the .bat a try, with some guidance from a more experienced dude… don’t wanna ruin my OS when at it

So… guess this is it!! Doubts have flown very far away.

Thanks a lot for your time and in-depth responses

Thanks a lot

Your explanation was very clear. So when you say you delete the TIF folder on each reboot, you delete it from DOS? You do this by using a .bat file? I’m not much into DOS and don’t know .bat code either.
If you could tell me how to do it (presumably with autoexec.bat) and drop the line of code I’d apreciate it very much.

Again, thanks and have a good weekend!!!

rmrucker, U… er… ruck? Thanks for the input!

Still, I’ve got a couple of questions (I believe in my heart these are the very last!!! )

– I infer that by deleting the entire TIF directory, I won’t mess up my system. Right?
– If I delete the entire TIF directory, will my cookies remain there? I don’t want to delete ’em, as they make my navigation much faster.

Thanks in advance

Dave: I’m using win98 in both PCs.

rmrucker: Thank you very much for your detailed response. I’d like to clarify some points though:
– So, deleting the subfolders won’t mess up the system?
– What’s Index.dat good for? Why do you say I can confuse IE if I delete only TIFs without deleting Index.dat?
– Would I mess up the system if I delete desktop.ini from the TIFs folder?

I don’t feel the thing has gotten outta my hands yet… so if you got more, c’mon!

Thanks

Dave,

I’ve also been hit by lotsa spam with U-R in the TO: field. But I’ve also received mails with U-R in the TO: field from at least two friends of mine (that I remember). So maybe spammers do use some kind of Undisclosed Recipient generating software, but this is not the only way. My friend told me I had to send BCC recipients to get the Undisclosed-Recipient line. So he did it unintentionally. That’s why I believe it has to do with compatibility between mail clients and servers, and between servers. There must be something in the way they communicate that creates this.

I agree that people should get used to BCCing recipients. I tend to do this unless I intend recipients to ‘see’ each other so they can interact. A world campaign against spammers won’t eradicate them for sure, but will at least make their lives less pleasant .

Back to the Undisclosed-Recipients stuff… any other thoughts?
Thanks

Whoa!!! I don’t know how to feel: if mesmerized at your promptness or tackled by my lame incoming mail-spotting skills. The fact is I had my answer replied before I actually posted the message… GREAT!!!
As for Veritas Backup Exec, I’ll have to hang on a little till I get the money. Until then, I’ll test-run Karen’s Replicator.

Hopefully it will suffice, but still I’d like to know whether there are other freeware gems around the corner… Just in case the ‘Lord of the Just in Case-dom’ happens to hit the road before I grab the buckos…

Anyway, this is not urgent. Non-critical, home purposes only.

Thanks so much for all your help guys!!!

Thanks Big Al.
Since I don’t have the buckos yet I’ll give Karen’s Replicator a run. Seems to support incremental backups, so I believe it’ll be up to the task.
Anyway, should anyone else hear of another software for back ups, lemme know. I like handling more than one alternative (the allmighty ‘in case…’ tends to drop by every now and then)

Thanks again

Sorry for making this thread an even bigger heap of bits…
I know this is basic, but I can’t create the shortcut. I am prompted that notepad.exe cannot be found. I believe this might be because in fact notepad.exe is in the C:WINDOWS directory, and another fact is that I can’t find neither the hosts folder nor the hosts file… My directory goes as far as C:WINDOWSSYSTEM32DRIVERS, no etc, no hosts. Am I doing something wrong? I’m using win98.

Thanks a lot

Ok. Thanks for the info!!