Veazer

Just a guess...

For displaying video most programs use a method called hardware overlay or video overlay. Overlay is way for computers to efficiently display video by letting applications write directly to the buffer on the video card rather than bogging down the cpu. Unfortunately, some older video cards can only display a single instance of video overlay or hardware overlay. On these older cards that only allow a single window to use hardware overlay at any one time, attempting to start a second video will fail or fallback to older methods that use the cpu.

I'm wondering if the preview image for your webcam uses the overlay first and therefore prevents the incoming video from displaying properly. I'm not familiar with skype video, can you disable your preview video and only see incoming video? How about fullscreen mode?

If that doesn't help, you might try running an older versions of skype, I would try 3.2.0.163 first and if that doesn't work try 2.5.0.154. You can get both here.

You can test the video by calling videoecho123 btw.

Any connection to this by chance?

http://www.ytel.info/Phone-Card/FastWorld/...Access/THAILAND

...Of coarse it is a scam - the language tells you that...

Exactly.... the legitimacy of these emails can often be quickly determined by the use of english. I get the occasional email with "You must to be entering the eBay password of yours..." or something to that effect. How nice of them to make their scam obvious.

My USB flash drive causes my PC to freeze. It works fine on other computers.

I have various other USB leads connected at the same time, could this be the problem ?

Totster

I doubt this is the problem, but....

Last week i was fixing a pc for a local company and it froze when i inserted my usb key. 100% frozen, not even cursor movement. Then it happened again when i touched the open case with one of the metal side panels I had removed. It seemed to be a grounding issue of some sort. I had them replace the outlet with a three prong grounded outlet (and ground it of course ) and the problem went away.

I'm using TRUE in Chiang Mai (cable, not ADSL) and I've never had any issues with Wikipedia.

Intriguing considering the price, but a 7 inch screen running at 800x480 kills it for me.

...Different for Flash Drives and Readyboost USB Sticks, they need the full power ad all time and the power consumption is at all times on 100%!

That's not correct for SSDs, read the specs and reviews for some:

SAMSUNG MCAQE32G5APP-0XA00 2.5" 32GB IDE Internal Solid state disk:

"...A stingy 0.5W active and 0.1W idle power consumption is environmentally..."

For a another Samsung model the difference is even more dramatic (from here):

"When the unit is idle, power consumption is next to nothing, drawing only 0.03 W. While in operation, the power consumption was roughly 0.9 W."

That's would mean that the drive consumes less than 4% of the energy it uses when active, not even close to full power.

Sorry for the long delay, I had to take a trip out of town.

Oh, well i think you are very "conscious" at what you're trying to do and i see clearly where you want to get this would come handy for any non tech savy people.

I will give more of my thoughts on the subject there a some points you "may" need to take into account ...

Thanks, I appreciate any feedback I can get. While doing this project I have found myself repeatedly over focusing on one aspect while overlooking some obvious flaws in my thinking. It’s nice for me to hear other viewpoint on the subject

Some applications (like spy S&D, or spybot) may be easy for you to use but not the average person because these are power tools meant for power users even if they are advertised as "easy to use", it's not really the case : different gui across theses tools and detections system not always that "clear", of course some people will get to use them, but i can assure a lot of them may be stuck not knowing what to do.

I totally agree. I’m doing my best to find apps that are easy to use. Likewise, I’m striving to automate as much as possible with command line switches and what not. Anytime I can reduce a process to a few clicks for them is a success. I would rather be doing the work for them than teaching them what to do. There will be some training for users, but I still want the whole process to be as simple as possible.

I don't know what kind of scripting you will be using, i guess WSH/vbs/js scripts and these could be stopped from running at all if theses café computers got an antivirus running... and thus your customer will be unable to know what to do...

The same applies for computer protected systems like the ones in my internet café, any script/batch/exe/com/msi/pif or whatever can't be run from removable devices, though this example is not the most widespread i agree.

My scripts at this point are extremely simple .cmd files for moving files and adding registry entries as needed, as well as shutdown scripts that reverse the changes. I need to still test them without admin rights however… On a side note, I could probably get around the scripts on removable drive limitation you mentioned because truecrypt can mount drives as local disks instead of removable media.

Most Internet café software have a "monitoring" service that can take screen shots of what users are (a sort of VNC like system) doing : it's purpose is of course to check any "misbehaviours" on the part of the customer not to spy on them of course (but well you never know isn't it ?...), and thus the advanced tools may (or may not) have unpredictable effects on the Café software, like shutting it down through process killing, or making it unstable. <= Note this is what may happen "if", it seems like though that you only need to check that the computer is cleaned from well "know" malware.

More good points. The AKE utility I use fully blocks VNC but that might cause the café owner to come around and checkup on the user. Also, it requires administrator rights, and any café that is reasonably well setup won’t allow that. I agree that there is a potential for my software to mess up innocuous software intended for other legit purposes like timing internet sessions, etc. The best way to avoid that would be to use the drive in as many cafes as possible and whitelist every application like that.

Lastly say everything went smooth and the truecrypt software "mounts" the crypted drives, i know two kind of softwares of this kind : one that just encrypt the data itself (and thus the data is "visible" to user but unless you got the key it's impossible to access the content). The second one hides and crypt a partition in your usb key then "mount" the partition in Explorer so the content is accessible to your whole system after the right key is entered.

While key "stealing" might be very important in the first case, in the second one, the internet café owner can access the usb drive remotely when the encrypted partition is "mounted" because the software gave clearance to do so... these securities are great for stolen devices but in a networked environment you will likely get access to the files !, note that this is a possible loop hole in the security of such software, but if it (the software) is well designed it may have a blocking mechanism for remote access. You may dig into this and see if i am right or not, in case of security being paranoid is what saves ones from any troubles !

TrueCrypt uses the second approach by mounting it to a drive letter. By default, removable drives are not assigned default shares in my experience but as a precaution my script immediately disables the default share of the removable drive if it exists. Any file sharing dependant on that should fail. Unfortunately removing shares requires admin access as well.

If the C: drive of the host pc is NTFS I could also just remap the drive letter to a folder on C, like C:\Windows\Temp\Thumbdrive. It’s not rock solid security, but it’s much harder to find than an extra drive in explorer and very few people would expect to find the contents of the flashdrive there.

Even if there is no access across the network, I’m fearful that a local script could be configured to suck the contents of any attached drive. Because of this, I’ve considered using encrypted archives to store documents instead of folders but it is certainly far less convenient and it still isn’t 100% effective. Once the archive is opened, the contents are likely stored unencrypted in some temp folder.

Another option is TCExplorer that opens TrueCrypt volumes but doesn’t mount them anywhere, you only open the file(s) you need and the rest remain encrypted. It can also be configured to run Eraser immediately after to remove traces of the file in the temp folder. Pretty smart.

Yet another option is using Google documents. This would mean that the documents are never stored locally and can’t be recovered using un-erase programs, etc. The main problems with this is that it requires a connection to do anywork or access the documents, and internet access is often not reliably available for these users. Also, compromised gmail/google accounts are a problem to deal with. Even if you see that someone is in your account and change your password they still have access! I thought it would immediately cause them to logout but when I tested it they had access so long as they stay logged in. I hope google address this in the future, I see it as a security flaw.

Keep up the good work !

Thanks! I appreciate you thoughts on this.

Some of the Apparmet Building wit limited connection, special VoIP, it's because the App. make business with the in house telephone, they charge a quite high rate for calls over the house lines to public lines, like THB 5 per min!!

So you block VoIP service with the intent of forcing tenants to use overpriced phone service? Sounds like a shady extortion scheme to me and it saddens me that you're so willing to be a part of it by helping apartment owners implement these systems.

If a tenant was using voip for overseas business or keeping in touch with family (or anything else that's none of the apartment's business), how is some unreasonably priced apartment-provided service going to be of any use? It's not, they'll maybe use it a few times before they realize that it's far cheaper to use a decent cell phone plan or just move somewhere without these absurd restrictions. Ultimately you'll be left with a neutered internet service that benefits the mobile providers, not your customer.

Veazer:

Be a bit more carefull what your write, read completly before answering please!

Just to clear: I wrote ""Some of the Apparmet Building with limited connection, special VoIP, it's because the App. make business with the in house telephone, they charge a quite high rate for calls over the house lines to public lines, like THB 5 per min!!"" which means that the Appartment building/Owner of the../Manager of the... doing this NOT ME! Is that clear now? I wrote That I know some buildings who doing that!

I limit the traffic at my customer place if I get the order for to do so, that is a part of my job and my contracts I've to full fill.

Personally I don't like if an Appartment makes Business on this way but that is the choice of the App./Owner/Manager. If I or some one don't like it it's our choice the rent a different place!

My apologies, i misread your original post.

I guess if I were in your position I would tend to encourage the customer to implement a usuable voip system for tenants rather than interfering with their service. In the long run, they're likely to make more money renting and supporting voip equipment than they would with high rates.

In the end, you need to do whatever they want and whatever pays the bills.

But wouldn't it affect lots of other applications?

p2p and torrents won't work through proxy, Internet video broadcasts won't work through proxies, many programs, like Firefox, will need to be reconfigured, too.

I actually have a little .vbs script for proxy switching in just one click, it's on the notebook, though. As soon as I get to it, I'll post it here. It's a one page in Notepad file, you can edit it yourself, nothing fancy.

Beats going through all the Control panel/internet options/connections/lan settings/proxies windows every time you need to see wiki and it doesn't work.

If you're a firefox user, you could use FoxyProxy. You can setup rules for using proxies (or not) based on domain names.

Thanks for the replies guys, much appreciated.

@Kyosuken -

Sorry, my reply was poorly worded, when i said 'secure a cafe pc' i meant making sure any net cafe computer they use is safe [to a reasonable degree]. These USB drives are to be used in a place where few people have their own pc and net cafes cannot be trusted.

My current setup works like this:

After inserting their drive, the user starts a script which:

• Scans current apps in memory for keyloggers, viruses and malware (ClamWin + Spybot (Thanks Farma!) )
  
• Starts a memory resident app for detecting hook-based keyloggers, screen capture apps and clipboard 'thieves' (Anti-Keylogger Elite)
  

When the user is reasonably sure that the system is not recording their activity, then they can mount their Truecrypt volume containing all their data and applications. Only the anti-malware apps & truecrypt are on the host volume.

I have pre-setup apps for them on the truecrypt volume, like Thunderbird + Enigmail for encrypted email and Pidgin (Gaim) + OTR for encrypted IM. They just need to enter their user details. Because gmail currently offers encryption for every access method (http/smtp/pop/imap) I encourage them to use gmail accounts. I have also included PeaZipPortable so they send encrypted archives as attachents using non-secure email.

I know there is no perfect system that will detect everything, but I need to create something better than what they have now.

@Steve2UK

I intended to included KeyScrambler but unfortunately it is not portable at this time. Also, it doesn't protect them from keyloggers outside of browsing. My main concern is making sure that their truecrypt password is not compromised.

Thanks to everyone who has offered tips and advice, I appreciate your assistance with this project.

Regards,

Veazer

Some of the Apparmet Building wit limited connection, special VoIP, it's because the App. make business with the in house telephone, they charge a quite high rate for calls over the house lines to public lines, like THB 5 per min!!

So you block VoIP service with the intent of forcing tenants to use overpriced phone service? Sounds like a shady extortion scheme to me and it saddens me that you're so willing to be a part of it by helping apartment owners implement these systems.

If a tenant was using voip for overseas business or keeping in touch with family (or anything else that's none of the apartment's business), how is some unreasonably priced apartment-provided service going to be of any use? It's not, they'll maybe use it a few times before they realize that it's far cheaper to use a decent cell phone plan or just move somewhere without these absurd restrictions. Ultimately you'll be left with a neutered internet service that benefits the mobile providers, not your customer.

She said the internet is informally run by a student in the apartment who offers it for 150฿ per month. She's going to ask him if he does any special 'traffic management'. Perhaps his service is his way of getting other people to pay for his online gaming and torrents. I'll bet I can guess what priority the traffic from his pc has.

NOT bandwith but all just open some ports for incoming traffic but exclude VoIP and so on! I do that in system of my customers and I know some App-Buildings which doing the same!

Why would you intentionally block VoIP? It's one of the most valuable uses of the internet and uses a fraction of the amount of bandwidth. Downloading 1 big service pack for windows would use more bandwidth in a few hours than the average VoIP could do in a month. Any respectable ISP would give VoIP traffic the priority it needs and honor QOS tags to ensure the best call quality.

Looks like it doesn't really use Virus methods to stealth itself, thus Antivirus don't think it's a virus and don't bother with it, only way in this case is to check what is loaded in memory via msconfig...

There's plenty of non-viral keyloggers that are detected by nod32 and other apps. I don't know why this one isn't included.

The main problem is that the anti-keylogging apps can't see it either. I don't think it is using keyboard hooks.

A little more background... The software is intended to 'secure' a net cafe computer as much as possible so that the user can safely work on sensitive information. The security suite is going to be used by people who are not too technically savvy, so i can't really have them looking around msconfig. They wouldn't know what to look for, and msconfig doesn't include all the startup locations anyway.

The process is rkfree.exe (in the free version ) so my startup scripts kill any processes with this name. Unfortunately lots of keyloggers let you randomize or change the process name during installation so that won't work if the pro version of revealer has that feature.

EDIT:

@farma, thanks for that. you posted while i was still typing. I'll see if i can convert spybot to a portable app...

Does anyone know of a piece of software that can detect this app?

http://www.revealerkeylogger.com/en/download.html

I'm building a little USB suite of security software and having problems finding software that can detect this keylogger.

Thanks!

...but gmail is free for POP3/SMTP service.

and IMAP, though the labels vs. folders conflict makes things a confusing.

My girlfriend's apartment, or their ISP, seem to be doing some severe 'traffic shaping' with streamed content. Web browsing and downloads are fine, she can download at around 60-80 kBps from most sites without using a download manager, but she cannot listen to even a 24kbps station. I've tried various station with different codecs (mp3 and aac+) and all are affected. It's not 100% blocked, but it's not nearly fast enough to keep up. Proxies have no effect either.

Skype is also affected by whatever they are doing, i've had instant messages arrive 5 minutes late or more.

My only guess was that they've greatly deprioritized UDP traffic, but that's just a guess. I don't know if skype uses TCP for text messages or not.

Any idea how to get around this?

เว็บไซต์นี้เป็นเว็บไซต์ที่มีลักษณะเข้าข่ายหมิ่นพระบรมเดชานุภาพ หรือเป็นเว็บไซต์ที่ไม่เหมาะสม

จึงขอระงับการเผยแพร่ชั่วคราว จนกว่าจะมีคำสั่งเป็นอย่างอื่น

"This website contains content considered lese majeste or inappropriate material.

The site will be unavailable until ...... "

Not sure about the last sentence

In Outlook, go to File > Open > Outlook Data File. If you can see Archive.pst, select it and open it. Otherwise copy & paste the following line in the "File name" box:

%USERPROFILE%\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook\Archive.pst

Good luck.

i still stand by my previous claim no way was a 681 mb mp3 file converted to give a 792 mb wav file.

Yeah, you're dead right. It's not possible. This one puzzled me too, even a lossless format like shn or flac file would have a bigger difference between compressed and uncompressed. I think he must have done something else to the file.

MP3 started off a bit luke warm and wasn't helped by few companies who introduced low quality encoders. Combine that with inexperienced users who were told that 128 kbps = CD quality (Thanks Microsoft!) and you've got a flood of crappy sounding mp3s floating around the world. It's no wonder people associate mp3 with bad quality. Fortunately mp3 is still being actively worked on and has matured into a high quality audio codec. The LAME mp3 encoder is fantastic, give it a chance if u have time. It's just a command line encoder but there's a few decent GUI interfaces.

If you're interested in audio you should check out hydrogenaudio.org, it's the best resource for audio and audio compression I have found.

I think we've scared the OP away. He probably decided it was easier to just buy the CD (or CD set? )

...the length of the audio track doesnt matter, it is the file size that matters, because it is about to become uncompressed to its original size.

Most important point:

1) The OP wants a CD for his car in standard audio cd format.

Second most important point:

2) Standard audio CD (ie Red Book) format uses 1411.2 kbps or which amounts to about 80-82 minutes per CD.

The size of the file prior to it's new life of audio CD format is irrelevant. There is absolutely no reason to further compress the mp3, or whatever it is, to 64 kbps when the final stage is going to be 1411.2 kbps uncompressed. If it was 320kbps converted to 64 kbps just means that you degraded the sound quality for no reason whatsoever. The audio cd format uses 1411.2 kbps, period.

A 40 minute 20 kbps WMA will fill half of an audio CD

A 40 minute 256 kbps mp3 will fill half of an audio CD

A 40 minute 450 kbps ogg will fill half of an audio CD

Why? Because they're 40 minutes. The fact that those files differ in size, greatly, is meaningless. Sure we can take guesses at how big the uncompressed file will be but ultimately the only concern is playing time.

In fact,even looking at the file size of an uncompressed WAV file with the same specs as and audio CD (44.1KHz/16-bit stereo) would be mostly meaningless:

1411.2 kbps = 176.4 kBps, or 10,584 K per minute = ~10.34 MB per minute. That works out to be a over 826 mb for an 80 minute file. Should we be worried because we only have a 700mb CD? No, because audio cds don't use the same formatting scheme as data. They don't use the same error correction that data cds use and because of this can store 8/7 as much information, albeit with less reliability.

We only need to know the length of the original track so we can know how many discs it will use.

veazer

i dont think the op is giving us the correct information, either because he doesnt know or he doesnt understand.

there is no way a 681 mb mp3 file will be less than 80 minutes, even if it has a bitrate of 320, if it was 128 it will be even longer after converting to wav.

also i dont know what programme he will use, or the spec of his computer, ram etc.

This is what I said in post #4. He needs to tell us what the length of the track is in minutes.

i have downloaded 200 mb mp3 files, and after converting to wav using cool edit pro the finished wav file was nearly 4 hours long.

Why would converting to/from mp3 change the track length?

yes we can all do the maths, lets work on the worst case it has a bitrate of 64 kbps or a max bitrate of 320 kbps, this will tell us the longest and shortest playing time duration of the file after conversion.

in my humble opinion there is no way he will get it on a standard audio cd, he would probably have to fit it onto a dvd, however if his stereo doesnt play mp3 its unlikely to play dvd.

however until he gets back to us we can only speculate, i agree if the file has a playing time of 80 minutes its probably about 70mb in size and will fit on a standard disc.

Right, since we know what final format he wants (audio cd) we only need to know how long the track is and then decide what to use to split it. It would be best to use a CD mastering program like CD Architect to add track markers in. 1 track CDs are a nightmare to navigate.

I thought this might be good news for other gmails users:

http://mail.google.com/mail/help/about_whatsnew.html

Just a reminder, IMAP support in MS Outlook is less than perfect and locks up the app every time the network connection freezes during any imap activity. The solutions from MS, i kid you not, is to kill the outlook process in task manager. Give it a try under another client like thunderbird before you decided what you think about IMAP.

Outlook's poor support for IMAP baffles me. It's been bad since early versions and they just never fix, even when reviewers and users rant about it and point out the obvious flaws and lack of multithreading. I've heard the problem is still present in Outlook 2007.

I don't understand the replies. Everyone is suggestion bitrate reduction, sample rate reduction, changing codecs, etc. He already stated that he needs a standard audio cd.

All we really need to know is the length of the file. If it's around 82 min or less, he's ok. If it's longer than he needs to split the file.

I recommend Burrrn for audio cds from mp3. It's one of the few programs i've used that can create a gapless cd from separate audio files.

Are you sure it's really an mp3 and not a .wav with the wrong extensions..?

the max bitrate for mp3 is 320 kbps = 40 kBps

1 MB = 1024kBps therefore 1 meg = 1024/40 seconds = 25.6 seconds

681mb * 25.6 seconds = 17433.6 seconds = 290.56 minutes = 4.84 hours absolute minimum.