Computing is Getting Worse

Editorial, Featured By Feb 05, 2013 2 Comments

The state of user interfaces has reached the point of diminishing returns. In retrospect, it is clear that many user interfaces reached their peak balance of ease and complexity in 2007. Since then, it seems that balancing new features has been a very difficult task for many companies. There’s a curious trend to hide functionality to an obsessive degree that…

PC ER: Downgrading Windows on an ASUS U47A

Featured, How-To, PC ER By Feb 04, 2013 3 Comments

It’s worse than I thought. The new ASUS U47A comes with a whole host of “security” features to prevent downgrading of the operating system, Windows 8. This particular U47A system was purchased in preparation for a federal criminal trial in Las Vegas in which I will be relying heavily on the system to serve up dense amounts of information. I…

Wow, Windows 8 is Really Awkward (Review)

I’m not one to be easily confused by UI decisions. Comfortable with the command-line, and having used dozens upon dozens of different distributions of Linux, and nearly every version of Windows since 3.11 for Workgroups (and MS-DOS before that, v. 6.22) — I can’t say I’ve ever seen anything like Windows 8. Granted, that’s how Microsoft wants it to be perceived….

Why Windows Vista (SP1+) is Better Than Windows 7

You’ve been brainwashed. Brainwashed by clever marketing and the classic underpromise-and-overdeliver strategy employed by Microsoft to fix the mistakes they made with Vista. I know, I know, everyone told you Vista was bad. You maybe even used Vista pre-SP1, on a “Vista Capable” machine way back when it launched and concluded that it was horrible. Or, maybe you heard all…

Is WPA/WPA2 Vulnerable to Brute Force?

Editorial, Featured By Aug 06, 2011 4 Comments

Just for fun, I attempted to bruteforce my own WPA2 (“Wi-Fi Protected Access”) network using Elcomsoft Distributed Password Recovery. Since I had rather awful results in the past with *.PDFs, I thought, perhaps I would have better luck with WPA cracking. The PDF algorithm doesn’t work with GPUs, but it does work with WPA, so I thought that maybe I’d…