So solution to prevent this overlapping of menus:

Go to Tools → Options → Content → Click on Advanced button (opposite Javascript) → Check “Disable or Replace Context Menus” checkbox.

That’s it. Problem solved. This was tested on the new Youtube and a few other sites. The solution worked fine. Let me know if it works for you.

(source)

This article comes from GeekScribes

[Solved] Firefox’s Right-Click Menu Overlaps Flash/Javascript Menu

Passwords. So annoying, yet so critically important. Without passwords, your friends would be spamming your Facebook wall with lolcat pictures. Or worse… So, we need passwords. Better, we need strong passwords. A weak password is guessable, and a potential attacker could compromise your online identity and access your personal data easily. I’m sure you’d like to avoid that. I say avoid, not prevent.

Prevention is not really possible since even a strong password could be compromised if the site you input it on is insecure, or has some undiscovered vulnerabilities, such as the one that recently affected the Gawker network: its users’ passwords were exposed to the world. If the site takes appropriate precautions, you’re pretty safe, but still, the risk is there.

Without further delay, let’s see what’s a strong password, how to create one, what you shouldn’t do with passwords, what the guidelines are and how you can manage your passwords. A lot, yes.

What is a strong password?

A strong password would be a word of around 10 characters, made up of letters, numbers and symbols in some random order, and avoiding repeating the same characters. The longer and more complex your password, the safer you are, but the more difficult it is to remember and type. The trade-off is between security and ease-of-use, so try to find a right balance and see what works for you.

“Tough!” you say? Not really, once you know a few tricks to create such passwords. Before we get to that, let’s see the things you absolutely shouldn’t do when it comes to passwords.

The Don’t-Do-These List

1. “Password”

The cliché: put your password as “password”. Or some variation like “pa55word”. Don’t do it. Don’t even try it in reverse: “drowssap”.

2. Names / Personal information

Your password shouldn’t be your name, your wife/children/pet names or any other personal information related to them. So no birthdays, no nicknames, no house number, telephone numbers, addresses, National ID. Nothing related to you or people close to you.

3. Dictionary words

Don’t use passwords that can be found in a dictionary, such as “baseball”. Don’t try to use words found in foreign-language dictionaries too, like “manzana” (apple). There are programs out there that will take in a list of dictionary words and run through them, trying to find your password in those. Given enough time, they will find your weak password in their dictionary.

4. Consecutive letters / numbers

For example, “qwerty” or “mnbvcxz” or “34567″. Don’t use sequences of consecutive letters or numbers, especially those found on the rows of keyboards as passwords.

5. Don’t start or end a password with a number / special character

Some password crackers will strip off the first and last letter of your password before attempting to brute-force their way into guessing the remaining letters. So, you don’t want a potentially strong character to go to waste. So, don’t put a number at the start or end of your password.

6. Simple substitution

You could think that “pa55w0rd” is a great password, but it isn’t. Such simple substitutions are guessable and are often found in dictionaries used for brute-force attacks.

7. No passwords

It’s common-sense I think, but I’ll state it here: given the option, don’t choose to use “no passwords”. You’re only asking for trouble. If a system asks for a password, it’s not to annoy you: there must be a good reason. So, take the safer route, and choose to use a password. The only exception is if you’re using the system on some machine not connected to a private network, which is not connected to the Internet. Then maybe, you can get off with using no passwords for convenience.

8. Share your passwords in emails, text documents, etc…

You get an email saying your bank has just suspended your account and that the officer in charge needs your password to re-activate your account. Classic phishing attack. Don’t send your password! System administrators don’t need your passwords to do anything, they already have it in the first place. Also, they’re in control of the system, so they can do pretty much what they want without needing a normal user’s password.

Don’t send your passwords via email, SMS, etc… where somebody can read the password, or it can get intercepted easily. Treat your password as you would your bank PIN code.

9. Re-using passwords

Once you have changed a password, don’t reuse it for a long period of time. Say one year. Ok, maybe you can re-use them on sites you need one-off registration, but make an effort towards not re-using any passwords.

10. Same passwords for different sites

This should be avoided, especially for sensitive sites. There is an exception, and you’ll know about it in the next list. For now, remember not to use the same passwords for different sites.

11. Writing down your passwords

It’s an IT admin’s nightmare: walking around in the office and seeing that users have written down their passwords on post-its and stuck it to their screen. This totally defeats the purpose of a password. Don’t write your passwords on paper! They can and will be found…

Ways To Create Strong Passwords

So now, the fun part: creating strong passwords. Here’s 7 ways to get a strong password. Choose your favourite methods and create your own now!

Password Strengths are tested with PasswordMeter.

1. A sentence (passphrase) and emotions

Think of a sentence, say: “Steve Jobs makes killer presentations huh? Yeah great ones”. Now what? We’ll turn that sentence, called a “passphrase” into a password. Ok, here you can do pretty much what you want, but here is what I came up with: “StJoMkph?Yg1s”.

Alright, you don’t have to create such complex passwords in most cases. This example was just to show you how a very strong password can be made using a simple sentence.

You might find: “I would like to visit Paris one day” – “!wl2vP1d” to be a simpler password.

Do try to keep the passphrases short and complex. Long passwords are difficult to type fast and accurately, increasing annoyance!

Try to put in emotions as symbols in the passphrases. For example, you can use ! to mean surprise and @ might mean anger. For example, “That surprise birthday party today was great” might become “T!bEEp2wG” (That ! Bee party 2day was Great)

2. Based on the site name

Some people find it easier to remember passwords that they create according to the site they are on. For example, say your banking site is “mybank.org”. You could make up a passphrase: “I deposit money at mybank.org” which becomes: “Idepo$@myBank”.

The weakness with these passwords are predictability. You shouldn’t make every password the same. So don’t make your ebay account: “Ib5tuff@ebay” or similar. Try to vary the sentence if you’re using this method.

3.  Using generators

You can use password generators, which are available both online and offline to generate a strong password for you. I like ones that generate pronounceable passwords such as this one or that one.

4. Substitution in weak passwords

You could try to turn your weak password into a strong password, if you feel you’re already used to it. For example, “baseball” might become “9a5eb4L1″. Check the difference:

Another technique here is to think of a simple word for e.g. “fishpond” then substitute with letters and symbols around those letters. For e.g. I’ll alternate substituting letters and symbols to the top and bottom of the actual letter. “fishpond” becomes “” with some strengthening. The disadvantage? You’ll probably be typing this password very slowly and thus, someone might guess what the password is.

5. Keyboard patterns

If you’re a visual person, you can try to visualize patterns on your keyboard and then make passwords from those patterns. Here, say your birthday is the 28th day of the month. Let’s say you start the pattern on the numeric key 2 and 8.

From this pattern, your password could be: “2#4EsXc” or “6YJnhU87″ or something like that.

The problem with this method is if you have a different kind of keyboard, such as an AZERTY or DVORAK keyboard. You wouldn’t be able to use your pattern with those keyboards since the key layouts change.

6. Phonetics

You can make a complex password out of a few letters if you use phonetics. Here is an example: “3ct” might become “Fr3eSeeTeA”.

The Do-These List

1. Frequently change passwords for critical sites

This must be one golden rule when using passwords for high-security sites, such as your banking or online payment account. Try to change your passwords for those sites every month or so and don’t reuse passwords.

You could do a variation of the current password and set it as the new password. This provides some ease-of-use but is not recommended. Also, you can confuse between variations and end up forgetting your password, so better make a new password.

2. Layers of passwords – not-so-secured to secured

Do you really need complex and tough-to-remember passwords for all sites? Probably not.

You can create what I call “layers of passwords”. The layers might be: unsecured – secured – most secured. Or some other set of your choosing, like unsecured – a bit secured – secured – most secured.

Now you can create passwords based on these layers:

• “fishpond” – Unsecured passwords would be used for sites you register once just to download something or comment. You don’t really care what happens if the password is found. Think of those as throwable passwords. You can even re-use those if you want. (The exception I metioned in #10 of the Don’t-do-these list). For those sites, you may consider using fake personal data too.
• “FishPonD” – Use a somewhat secured password for sites you often access, but are not very critical. For example, some forum or blog where you usually go to ask questions or comment on.
• “F!5Hp0Nd” – Secured passwords would be used on sites you use frequently such as your blog, twitter or social site account. You’d definitely not want those passwords to be compromised.
• “EfF!5Hp0nDe3″ – Most secured passwords would be more complex than any of the other layer passwords. You’d only use those on a few sites which require high security like banks, online shopping etc… The less sites you use these on, the more secured they are.

Now hopefully, this will save you from remembering many of “strong” passwords (eveyone finds that difficult). You just need to vary the strength of the password according to the site you’re visiting and its importance.

3. Beware of people behind you

This “attack” is called shoulder-surfing. Basically, while typing your password, someone behind you is seeing what you’re typing and can try to guess the characters. There are a couple of ways to defeat this attack:

• Check if there is someone behind you: Kind of obvious, no?
• Type your passwords fast
• Use complex passwords: uppercase/lowercase letters, symbols, numbers – it becomes difficult to know which is uppercase and lowercase and whether symbols are numbers or vice-versa.

4. Don’t sign in on public computers

Another golden rule: to the extent possible, don’t use sensitive sites on public computers, such as those at libraries or schools. There are software (and hardware devices) called keyloggers that can record whatever you type at a keyboard and send this data to whoever planted the thing there. There is a high risk of finding keyloggers on public computers, so don’t access secure sites off public computers.

If you really must access a site in a public (you mustn’t!), do it, but change the password as soon as you’re back home and hope for the best. Don’t change the password right there on the public computer – the keylogger would record the new password as well – making the operation pointless.

Some sites have implemented sinle-use passwords which you can use on public machines, for example, Hotmail can SMS you a single-use password if you want. The password will become invalid after a single use. You must have registered a phone number in your account prior to using the service though.

4 Ways To Store Your Passwords

1. Software

You can make use of the many software password managers out there, such as open-source Keepass or the other 60+ available ones as listed on Mashable to store your passwords securely.

For example, Keepass will store your passwords in an encrypted database so no one can access without a password and/or a decryption key. It has many other functions too such as pasting your passwords to forms securely and suggesting (very) strong passwords to you. It’ll even tell you how strong your current password is when you create a new entry in the database.

The good thing about Password Mangers is that you only need to remember one Master Password to have access to all your other passwords. This means you can use a different, strong password for every site you visit, have the Password Manager remember those and when you need to login, just put in your Master Password and the software does the rest for you.

The other apps out there provide as many functions and sometimes even more, so find one you like and use it! If you want a cross-platform, mobile-compatible app, check out 1Password.

2. In-browser + Master Key

If you don’t want to make use of a desktop app to save passwords, you can have your browser remember passwords for you. If you’re using a cross-platform browser such as Firefox, you can even use addons like LastPass to sync your passwords across browsers.

If you’re using the built-in Password Manager in Firefox (or some other browser), make sure you’ve enabled the “Master Password”, otherwise everyone who can access your browser can see your collection of passwords. Not good. Oh, make sure you never forget that Master Password, or you wouldn’t be able to access any of the stored passwords!

3. Online

There are a couple of sites which allow you to securely store and access your passwords online. Personally I don’t trust those since they come and go really fast. And if tomorrow they decide to shutdown, they take all my passwords along with them.

But if that’s your thing, check out Clipperz and Passpack.

4. Offline safekeeping techniques

There are people who still want to write down their passwords, finding software annoying to use or not trusting online services. Maybe they know their passwords by heart but want to write them down for remembering, just in case.

There are a couple of reasons NOT to do this: the passwords can easily be found, and people who write passwords down don’t usually change them… Anyway, if you want to do this, at least follow a few security measures. Your passwords won’t be completely safe, but still safer than a post-it stuck to your computer screen!

4a) Encrypted

Devise your own coding scheme a-la Da Vinci code and use it to encrypt your passwords! You can use any of the coding systems out there for e.g. substituting ciphers or one from this page. This step will probably stop a snooping brother from finding your WoW account password, but it will not stop a determined attacker, since most of those “historical” encryption methods can be broken given enough time (e.g. through statistical analysis).

4b) Concealed

If encryption is not your thing, you can make an effort and hide that password sheet somewhere it’s not easily found. For example, among the pages of a book. Especially an obscure book no one is likely to open.

Lifehacker has a trick about storing passwords in an old dictionary margin. You could example write down your work password near “stress” or your school password near “mathematics”. Even if someone is patient enough to go through all the pages of the dictionary and collect all the passwords, they wouldn’t know which one applies to which site. This would demand some serious trial-and-error. Feasible but boring and time-consuming.

Ok! This is done! By now, I hope you have a fairly good idea on what a strong password is, how to create them, what to do and what not to do with passwords.

Do remember that no system is completely safe. For example, if you’re using a software to remember passwords, there might be bugs in it to allow an attacker to gain access to the passwords. However, taking some precautions is still better than nothing, and anything at all is better than using “password” as your password!

Thanks for reading! If you have suggestions, comments or other tricks, the comments section is open for discussion!

References:

• Lifehacker – The only secure password is the one you can’t remember
• 10 Windows Password Myths

This article comes from GeekScribes

Tips for Creating and Managing Strong Passwords

It may happen that you need a directory listing, that is a list of all the files in a folder. Unfortunately, there is no direct way to do this simple task in Windows.

Say you need to send a list of all the files found in a directory to a friend. You could take a screen-capture of the folder and send it to them. What if there are lots of files? You’d have multiple screen-captures and files will repeat in various captures. Not very elegant. So I’ll show you 3 methods to get a list of all files from a directory and save it as a text file.

1. Using Command Prompt

In my opinion, this is the simplest of the 3 methods. It’s portable since it uses in-built Windows tools. As the title says, we’ll be using the Command Prompt. No need to worry if you have no experience with command line interfaces. The commands are easy to understand and there are only a few. I’ll be using Windows 7 for this post, but it should work for all version of Windows, especially XP and after.

1. Open the folder which contains the files you want to list.
2. While holding down the Shift key, right-click in an empty space and select “Open Command Window Here“
3. A Command Prompt window will open. It usually has a black color, and you will see something like this by default: “C:\Users\your username>“
4. Type “dir /b > mylist.txt” then press Enter
   • The “/B” part means “bare”. It will only print the file names, while skipping all the attributes, file sizes etc. This is usually what you want.
   • The “>” sign means: “take whatever output the previous command produces and put it in the file that follows. Create that file if needed.”
   • You can try various options. Try viewing help first: “dir /?“
   • If you want to sort, add the “/O<x>” switch (slash-Oh) where <x> is: E – extensions, S – file size, G – group by directories. E.g. “dir /B /OG > mylist.txt“
   • If you want all file sizes etc… remove the “/B“: “dir > mylist.txt“
   • If you want to include files found in sub-folders too: “dir /B /S > mylist.txt“
5. After that, you’ll find a file called “mylist.txt” inside that directory which will contain all the filenames of files found in that directory. You can then open that file in Notepad to print it, or send it to a friend or whatever you wanted to do with the list of files.

2. Use File List

Alternatively, you can make use of the very simple utility called File List.

Just drag the folder which contains the files you want to list over the application. It’ll generate a list of files which you can then copy and paste, wherever you need.

To print the output, open Notepad, paste the contents inside and then Print.

You can also use the “…” button to browse to your required folder.

One thing I didn’t find in that application is the ability to list files in sub-folders. So you’ll have to do that manually: List each folder, copy and collate their outputs manually.

3. Use Karen’s Directory Printer

If simple is not good for you, try a heavyweight app when it comes to listing files: Karen’s Directory Printer.

It has tons of features and really customizable. You can list files on network shares, local files and files in subfolders. You can select to show files by attribute and decide how you want the files sorted. The greatest feature of it is to output file attributes such as date created along with names. After selecting what you want, you can customize the output it generates to some extent. Overall, it offers lots of customizations.

I found that it provided everything I wanted when it came to listing files. It hasn’t been updated since November 2009 (at the time of writing) but that shouldn’t be a problem since it runs fine on Windows 7.

My only complaint is that its user interface takes some time to get used to.

Whatever tool you choose, they’ll all provide you with a list of files at the end. Up to you to decide what to do with it.

That’s it for this post. If you use some other tool to do the same job, you can share it with the world in the comments below. Thanks for reading!

This article comes from GeekScribes

How To Easily Save Or Print A Directory’s Contents [Windows]

First post of 2011! Yay! So I thought I’d start with something that can help protect the environment and at the same time, save you some cash. Quite a good idea, no?

So as the title says, we’re going to try to have your printer drink less ink, and hence reduce the amount of money you invest feeding it. You should know that I tried and am still using those measures for a laser printer, but I believe that what works for toner should work pretty much the same for liquid ink. I have no idea about how dot-matrix printers will react, so don’t ask.

Don’t print!

Stop calling me Captain Obvious! I know that point is plain common-sense, but I didn’t mean you should not print anything – but that you should select what you are printing.

Say you’re printing a web page. I doubt you really need to print the all-black header followed by all the ads scattered everywhere, the fancy sidebar and the all-black footer. You can use tools to remove those, and we’ll see about them in a moment. First let’s see what we can do about text documents and PDF files, and assuming you only want to read a part of the document.

No need to print the whole thing, and waste ink. Turns out you can select a Print Range in the Print dialog, as shown below. You can select what to print in 2 ways:

• Highlight what you want to print, choose “Selection” then print
• Select a page range, say page 2 to page 5, then print. I find that one easier, since highlighting can sometimes be a pain.

Now what about web pages? You can use tools such as PrintWhatYouLike, PrintLiminator and PrintFriendly to get rid of what you don’t like off a page – like images, then print the result. You can see a before-after comparison of what the BBC news web page looks like after I applied PrintWhatYouLike on it. That should save quite some ink!

BBC News - Before

BBC News After

Oh, and by the way? Always, ALWAYS use the print preview feature before you print anything. This has saved me quite some ink in the past. Once, I nearly printed 50 pages of the wrong range. It only costs a few seconds to check if everything is alright, but will save you quite some cash on ink in the long run.

Thin Fonts / EcoFont

Turns out you can save ink just by changing which font you use for your texts.

If you haven’t heard of EcoFont yet, you can go check it out on its homepage. Basically, EcoFont is a font (duh!) with holes in the characters, so for every character printed, you’re saving a tiny bit of ink.

Some folks were not convinced (down at the time of writing). Why use a special font, when you can use thin fonts like Century Gothic or Calibri? Printer.com has an article on their blog about which font made the most savings with respect to ink, and the conclusion was using Century Gothic was even better than EcoFont. A quick Google search revealed several other articles claiming Century Gothic is the “greenest font”.

So choose whichever font you want, be it EcoFont, Century Gothic or Calibri (as long as it’s not Impact) and make some savings.

No bolding!

Avoid using “Bold” fonts. As simple as that. Bolding fonts implies making them thicker, and so more ink goes into the characters. While it may be impossible to completely stop using bolding, try to avoid it.

Instead, where possible, try using underlining or italicizing the text. If italics are not eye-catching enough, you can try increasing the size of the font a bit, or maybe even use a different font, like if you are using Century Gothic, use Courier New to highlight some text. Up to you to see what you like best. For me, underlining works best as the alternative for bolding.

85% Black

I’ve only tested this one with laser toners and it does make savings. If anyone tests this measure with inkjets and see it works, please report back. Thanks!

As the title says, instead of printing in pure black, just set the color of your text to 85% black instead. Or even less, depending on what you consider “readable” text to be.

How do you do that in Microsoft Word? Well just set your Text Color → More Colors → Custom, then set the RGB values to 60,60,60. (Those values work best for me. Feel free to experiment)

The end result (if you are using toners) is that you somewhat make every font look like EcoFont. If you look closely, you’ll see empty spots in the characters. Check the comparisons below, for 100% black vs the 60/60/60 greyish-black color.

While you are at it, make pictures lighter. You can do that in any picture editor by playing with the Brightness/Contrast settings.

100% Black

85% Black + Toner Save (printer setting)

Bonus: Green Print / Fine Print / Eco Print

You can also use desktop-based software to help you with some more savings. You can use the free version of Green Print or the paid Fine Print or Eco Print software to make some more savings.

These software allow you to extensively control your print job, such as giving you the ability to turn documents to grayscale, remove unwanted pages or images and especially, allow you to have a better print preview feature.

If you have the money, you can try investing in those applications. But I think the measures above should cause quite some savings on their own.

Well, that’s it for this first article of 2011. I hope you enjoyed the article and that you find it useful. If you have tricks that help you save ink, please share via the Comments below. Thanks for reading!

This article comes from GeekScribes

4 Innovative Tricks To Save Printer Ink

If you’ve ever read a long article online, you know that reading on-screen is not easy on the eyes. Some web designers do a good job at making their content readable. Some, well, let’s just say they want to keep to traditions and keeping simple.

Let’s say you have to read a long article on one of those traditional-looking web pages. You don’t have to subject your eyes to the torture of reading tiny fonts on a stark white background. We’re going to save your eyes using bookmarklets, which are bookmarks that use Javascript code to do some task instead of going to a page.

The bookmarklets in this post will change the look of the web page you apply them on to something that is more readable and easier on the eyes. Some of those bookmarklets can be customized to your liking, e.g. in terms of background color. So let’s start…

We’re going to use the Wikipedia entry for “Blogs” to test the bookmarklets.

1. Readability

In my opinion, the best of the bookmarklets I mention in this article.

Readability is simple to use. You just go to its website, you customize how you want the website should be changed in terms of style, text size and margin. Then you drag the bookmarklet to your browser’s Bookmark bar or menu for example. Then to use it, you just click on the newly-added bookmarklet and watch as the magic happens.

Why do I think Readability is the best? Because it gives fantastic results. You can what Readability did to our benchmark. Hopefully, you’ll find the “after” more readable. (I’m using the Inverse style of Readability here)

2. Readable

Confusing huh, Readability and Readable? Yet they are two different bookmarklets.

What I like about Readable is that it’s very customizable. Unlike Readability’s 3 customizable parameters, Readable gives you a dozen or so to play with. A major difference is that Readability got rid of the right sidebar, while Readable kept it, and formatted it. Also, I’ve tried to make Readable give a look like Readability’s for comparison. You’re free to adjust it, for example margins if you think the box is too narrow. Check out the result:

3. Purifyr

Purifyr is meant to format web pages into simpler versions for automatic parsing. But it works just as well for humans to read. The catch is, it’s not really meant to “purify” each and every website that you had to it.

They have a couple of demos on their website, which simply passes the website URL as parameter to their script. So you can just replace their passed links with your own to have your websites purified. It’s kind of hackish, and I don’t really know how long this trick will work, but in the mean time, enjoy. If you want a bookmarklet that does this link-replacing thing for you, just drag this link to your bookmarks bar or menu, and you’re done. When you want to clean the page you’re on, just click the bookmarklet and Purifyr will do the job for you.

Below is what a purified page looks like. Not very customizable, but the result is satisfactory.

4. Clippable

Previously called Readability 2, and as the author says, he “unceremoniously lifted code from the original Readability”, Clippable is a modification of Readable, with some added features and enhancements, such as the ability to use keyboard keys to adjust features. For example, using the left/right arrow keys, you can change the applied style, and Escape reloads the original page.

I have to say, Clippable didn’t work for me on Wikipedia. It did change the style, but for some reason, the arrow-keys were not working. I also tested on a couple of other sites, such as a Google search result page and Engadget. None worked, except the Clippable site itself responded as it should. I’m including the screenshot, if you’re interested. I’m using the darker style, after a couple of arrow-key presses.

5. TinyRead

This one is a bit… weird. In my opinion, it doesn’t make things easier on the eyes. Actually, it’s meant to format web pages for better reading on mobile devices. It just simplifies pages, removing ads and other extraneous content. TinyRead allows you to add the page you cleaned to your Read It Later list too, if you use the service.

Give it a try if you see that’s what you want. Result is below. Notice how the content gets stuck to the left side of the screen. If you have a large screen, it’s quite a problem. Screen space lost is never good.

Bonus!

You can find an interesting set of Bookmarklets that enhance page readability on this site. The more interesting ones are Zap Colors, Zap Style Sheets and Zap Cheap Effects. Take that, blinking monstrosity!

We are done! Now you have the means and know-how to protect your eyes when reading online. I’ve only listed bookmarklets here, but there are certainly other ways to change the look of web pages such as the GreaseMonkey addon and Stylish scripts for Firefox.

A word of warning before we end. Some bookmarklets out there may have malicious intents, so only use those from sites you trust.

That’s it for this article. Thanks for reading. If you have any tips, don’t hesitate to comment.

This article comes from GeekScribes

5 Bookmarklets To Make Websites More Readable