Smacking lusers with the clue-by-four (the new tech support thread)

[Dick]

You could try this trick: put the folder in some obscure folder, then set the folder name to the windows blank character code (alt+0255, I think) and then set the folder icon to a blank icon.  Then there won't appear to be anything there, but if you click in the right spot, voila.

[Good Intentions]

It's a cute trick Dick's got there, but since the folder still takes up a slot on the display, somebody could notice the gap in the list and investigate.

You can't just set a password in a case like this because if the person using the computer has root or administrator access, they have access to everything. If you are moving the physical hard drive from one computer to another, there's no way to stop that (not unless there's a tiny computer on the hard drive which itselfs grants or denies access, and you password-controlled that -- there are things like that out there). Encryption is different, because all the data is there and the other person can read it, it just makes no sense to them without the encryption key. But encryption is a schlep, yes.

[Good Intentions]

Password protection needs to be enforced by something. This is easy if you have a client-server architecture: the client asks for something, the server checks to see if the client has permission to get it, and asks for a password if necessary. You can approximate something like this if you have an administrative account on a computer, and a bunch of user accounts. Then you set the permissions with the admin account, which the computer enforces for everybody with user accounts.

But that doesn't work if the person you are giving your hard drive to (or has access to your machine) uses the admin account. There is no higher authority left to restrict the admin's use of resources. This is why, if you're using your admin account on Windows (like many people do), there is no point to hiding files. If there were other people using your machine with less privileged accounts, you could hide files, and set it that those people can't display hidden files (what the system was designed for). But if you're always on the admin account, you can just switch all those settings at will. The same goes for trying to password protect something in the file system. This problem is even worse if you move your hard drive from one computer to the other: you could manage permisssions on your own machine, but you can't manage them on somebody else's.

The only ways to get around this are to wrap the files you want to protect in some other kind of security, which is what encryption does.

[Little Sixes Little Nines]

right, but why can't the "other kind of security', be a general encryption system pre-built into windows which can be unlocked, on any windows computer, using the password the user supplies?

[Little Sixes Little Nines]

like how winrar has password protected zip files

[Good Intentions]

right, but why can't the "other kind of security', be a general encryption system pre-built into windows which can be unlocked, on any windows computer, using the password the user supplies?

It can. And Windows comes with an encryption system built in, since Windows NT.

WinRar (and WinZip, and any other compression utility) works because the contents of the file are gibberish unless you have the password. There's noting to stop the machine reading the file, but it can't make sense of it. That's the best and easiest way to password protect files.

[Little Sixes Little Nines]

exactly, and windows doesn't have that functionality. if i encrypt a folder, anyone on my computer (using my account) can access it and edit it as normal. what's to stop windows to make "the contents of the file/folder gibberish unless you have the password", exactly as winrar does?

[Good Intentions]

The built in encryption has that functionality. Looking at the help files, though, it looks like one hell of a schlep. You have to mess around with the certificates and keys in the certificate manager. I've never used it myself, nor do I intend to. Some of the more hardcore editions of Windows (crippleware that it is) has the more secure and finnickier to set up BitLocker encryption as well, so you have two options which come in the box (if you have the right box).

Doing it the default way would work out perfectly fine for davy, though.

[Little Sixes Little Nines]

yeah, it's a hassle, and i don't see why. you could zip it up, add a password, and delete the original, every time you want to lock a folder - a process which should have been redundant a long time ago.

[alistarr*]

maybe it's simply because they'd rather not deal with all the phone calls from people who have forgotten their password and can't believe that you would make an encryption program that doesn't have a way to recover your files if you forgot your password.

[Little Sixes Little Nines]

yeah, i think it's partly that, and partly because people would expect it to be 100% ULTRA IMPENETRABLE and then blame microsoft when it gets hacked.

[alex]

I've been having a very minor but annoying tech issue the last few days:

I've been in writing mode lately, which means that there's always a Word document open that I keep making changes in and that I try to save on a regular basis. But the last week or so, there has always come a moment at some point after doing this for several hours where, when I just routinely clicked on the "save" icon, I was suddenly taken into the menu that you usually get when you pick "save as". It was at this moment that I noticed that the window name says "[Title of Document] (Read-Only)". The weird thing is, the document obviously hadn't been read-only until a few minutes earlier - after all, I'd been making and saving changes all day. It's not a huge deal - I can just save the thing under a new name and it's all good. But I don't think I should have to do this, and I'm mildly concerned that one day I'm going to forget to delete the previous version and pick the wrong one the next time I open the document and thus lose some previous changes. But mostly I'm just lazy and don't like having to pick a new name for the same document every day. I can't say whether it also happens inside non-Dropbox folders on my work PC, because the only files that are important enough that I save them multiple times in the course of the day are the ones that are inside Dropbox.

Any ideas what that could be about? Under Tools - Options - Security, I can find no indication that the file is indeed read-only, yet somehow it shows up as such. The computer helpdesk at university cannot or doesn't want to help me on account of the fact that the file in question is located inside a Dropbox folder, and they don't support Dropbox. Could this indeed be a Dropbox issue? I don't recall having that problem on the other computer that shares this Dropbox account (my Macbook at home), only on the Windows-running work PC.

[alistarr*]

is dropbox a remote save location? you can probably work round it by downloading the file to your computer and then re-uploading it once you've made your changes. if you're opening it from a remote network drive/web server then it'll maybe be switching to "read-only" if you lose your connection to the remote location for a moment, forcing your computer to just hold it in temporary memory and prompting you to save to a "proper" location when you ask it to save because it can no longer write back to the remote location.

i'm not an expert so might be wrong.

[jess]

I've been having that problem too, just the last day or so, and yes, it's in my dropbox folder (on my Mac). Only had it with a couple of files so hadn't really thought anything of it yet, but I bet it's a dropbox thing...

And also, most of my dropbox files work just fine without this happening, so I'm thinking this is some sort of bug.

[alex]

It's definitely been happening with a number of different files (basically, all of the ones that I've been changing and saving on a regular basis), but yeah, it sounds like it might be a dropbox-thing then too, if others have had the same issue.

To complicate things, though, the Dropbox folder is actually located inside a remote save location itself - in fact, everything is running remotely here now, so while alistarr's explanation sounds quite convincing, it might in fact be happening on a higher level - in which case I guess the workaround might not help. Guess I'll just wait and see if it persists.

[Good Intentions]

The reason you won't find info about it being read-only in the Word menu is because if it's set by the file system (like it would be in the case al describes), then Word can't do anything about it.

edit: Actually, I'm tired from a pretty heavy day of workshops followed by a very heavy and satisfying meal, so I'm not at all sure that my brain is working right at the moment. The above might be wrong or irrelevant.

[mixed cats]

I am having a semi-regular problem at work with the touchscreens I put on laptops

Every once in a while, someone calls us up to say the screen isn't responding to touches, even after restarts/changing USB ports/whatever. So they send it back for me to look at. The first thing I do is reinstall the driver, and most of the time makes the TS start working again.

99% of the time, there's physical damage to the laptop - evidence it's been dropped on a hard floor or something like that. I only have seen one in the past year that hasn't had external damage, but it's also one of the newer unibody polycarbonate MacBooks, which don't show damage as readily as the old type. Usually if we ask the person about the damage, they are evasive or deny it, because they don't want to be at fault.

Could the damage and the driver problem be related? I've been tracking this for 3 years and I can't find another pattern. I can't really make sense of it - I'm good at installing this stuff but I don't know every single detail of how drivers and controllers etc work.

[elpollodiablo]

I just did an essential file backup and clean install of OS X yesterday, and damn. Damn. As a longtime Windows user, I'd gotten used to a grudging reinstall of XP two or three times a year. This is only the second clean reinstall of OS X I've ever done, and it makes such a *huge* difference. I don't think I ever truly experienced the performance that my new MBP was capable of when I got it back in July, because I migrated my old MB in its totality, along with all of its quirks and deficiencies. So while it seemed faster, I still thought nothing of the fact that it might take 10-15 seconds for Word to fully open, or that Chrome might bog down occasionally with a bunch of tabs open. Now, everything launches in under three seconds, and the general response time of the system is snappy as hell. I think maybe Time Machine and the Migration assistant work *too* well in that they preserve everything shitty about a well-used system; from now on, with all of my truly essential files living in Dropbox, I'm not going to even hesitate to a clean install when I notice substantial performance degradation. The actual reinstall takes about 45 minutes. It's a bit of a pain in the ass to re-copy the iPhoto & iTunes libraries, but nothing that you can't set up and then walk away from. If your older Mac is acting wonky and you've never done this, you should.

[FreddyKnuckles]

The gyroscope on a new ipod isn't working.  There's a little status icon of an arrow going in a counter clockwise circle with a lock symbol, but I couldn't find any settings to change it back

[mixed cats]

Double click the button. Scroll to the left. Unlock.

[FreddyKnuckles]

Gracias

[Bernard]

Any suggestions for transcription software/hardware?

[Maaik]

This is weird--YouTube videos aren't loading for me.  I've tried both Firefox and Safari, all I get is a black box--no spinning icon or Play/Pause button.  BUT they'll play just fine if they're embedded on a Facebook page.  Wat do?

[elpollodiablo]

Answer: fuck YouTube

[Maaik]

And I'll do that, but, y'know, later.