How To Set Up Personal Firewall?

Question Of The Week

How To Set Up Personal Firewall?

A personal firewall is a module which monitors communications to and from a computer and permits/denies them based on a security policy. You would have already seen Windows Firewall in your PC's Control Panel. A personal firewall differs from a conventional firewall in terms of scale only. Personal firewalls are typically designed by users themselves. Personal Firewall alerts you about every outgoing/incoming connection attempts.

A typical example is the one offered by Eset Smart Security. An outgoing connection attempt is usually made by locally installed software (including Windows). Eset Smart Security will give you two options; 1.Allow, 2.Deny, either temporarily or permanently. If some unknown/new application (Spyware) makes such an attempt you can easily block it. An incoming connection is whenever a remote computer is attempting to communicate with your PC. It may be a well known server or a hacker. Just apply the above mentioned options. Please note that some applications like uTorrent, Firefox, Skype etc., will be making both incoming and outgoing communications.

To get such alerts and modify them yourself, you have to set Eset Smart Security in "Interactive Mode" (Set Up -> Advanced Set Up -> Personal firewall). Also note that whenever Eset Smart Security gives such alerts, it will give you a suggestion by projecting the alert in Red for NO, and in Green for YES. If you find it troublesome, go for "Automatic Mode with Exceptions". 

Personal firewall protection is especially useful for users with "Always On" connections such as DSL or Cable modem. Such connections use a static IP address that makes them especially vulnerable to potential hackers. Personal Firewall can hide your computer from port scans by not responding to unsolicited network traffic (Read about Angry IP Scanner, but don't try it because Port Binding is provided by every ISP nowadays).

The final touch is Personal firewall is not infallible because sometimes viruses can manipulate the firewall. When both are running on the same system, it may be possible to bypass or even completely shut down the firewall !!

Eset Smart Security

Program Of The Week

Eset Smart Security

This is an antivirus program rated among the top five in business. Believe me, I have tried Norton, Kaspersky, ZoneAlarm, AVG and Avast. Those who have experienced, will surely agree with me that Eset Smart Security is a beauty.

It has three components of protection: 1.Antivirus, 2.Personal Firewall, 3.Antispam module. If you visit Downloads section of Eset, along with Eset Smart Security you will find one Eset Antivirus, which contains only the first component above mentioned. Obviously, it is inferior to Eset Smart Security because it lacks Personal Firewall which is very essential to monitor every communication to and from your PC when the internet is on. The third component is only necessary for those who use something like Outlook Express to receive emails into their PC but not for those who use webmails (Yahoo, Gmail etc.,).

Whenever you try to visit dangerous websites which are already marked by Eset, it gives you a red alert in your browser and prevents you from visiting that site. There is also a special feature called Threat Sense which when enabled submits suspicious files to Eset lab and gets feedback.

The most important reason why I like Eset Smart Security is... when you start the computer, this antivirus program takes only a few seconds before allowing other programs to start functioning. There are some other antivirus programs which will make you go for a tea-break after switching on the computer because they take quite a few minutes. And don't forget that Eset Smart Security is quite efficient in its job.

Quillpad

Website Of The Week

Quillpad.in

If you are an Indian, and if you want to express your thoughts (while using internet) in your own mother tongue, you can use this fantastic website. It gives you a choice of ten indian languages including all 4 south indian. You just have to choose the language and then start typing in the box provided. Very useful one.

What is a sticky thread?

Question Of The Week

What is a sticky thread?

If you are a member of one or more internet forums, you would be familiar with this word. A sticky thread remains at the top of a forum and will not move down even if a new thread is posted later by the same or different person. Sticky threads are special because they are either updated regularly, have useful information, or are very important in some way.

The moderators of that section or administrators of that forum only can tag a thread as "sticky" to ensure it always remains at the top and doesn't go down the list to be lost in the shuffle. Of course, administrators and moderators can also make them un-sticky and move or remove these threads.

In fact, most of the threads tagged as sticky come from the administrators or moderators of that forum only. So, don't get surprised if some thread (of massive importance as you believe) posted by you or some other user is not made sticky!

Windows Snipping Tool

Program Of The Week

Windows Snipping Tool

I had already written about a software called Snapshot a couple of years back. Now, Windows itself has included a Snipping Tool in its armoury. START-> PROGRAMS-> ACCESSORIES. You can simply copy whatever part of screen you want by dragging the pointer. That's why your photos are not safe in any website, even if that website prevents copying of a photo by not giving "Save Picture As" option while Right-Clicking on it.

Policy Tiger

Website Of The Week

www.policytiger.com

When I was looking to renew my car insurance last week, I stumbled upon this website. It gives you a detailed comparison of all the premiums and other charges from popular Insurance companies in India. Moreover, it has sections for Life Insurance and Health Insurance Too. Once you choose the best which suits your needs, you can visit that particular company's website to purchase/ renew the insurance if you don't want to do the transaction through policytiger itself.

Tips Of The Week

Tip 1:
Solid State Hybrid Drives (SSHD) combine the features of SSDs and HDDs in the same unit, containing a hard disk drive and an SSD cache to improve performance of frequently accessed data. These devices offer near-SSD performance for many applications.

Tip 2:
You are likely to miss the availability of weekly once trains in both IRCTC and the official Railway websites, because you need enter a particular date to look for trains between any two stations. ERail website will give you all the available trains without forcing you for the date.

Tip 3:
Since HDD Mechanic software repairs the file system structure in a HDD, it may also work well with SSDs containing the same FAT and NTFS file systems. But please make it sure before making any trial attempt.

What is SSD?

Question Of The Week

What is SSD?

A solid-state drive (SSD) is a data storage device. SSDs have no moving or mechanical parts, which distinguish them from traditional hard disk drives (HDDs) which contain magnetic spinning disks with movable read/write heads.

 

Since SSDs have no moving parts, they are basically silent, do not require cooling and can tolerate shock and vibration. While the most important advantage of a SSD is lower access time with less latency, the disadvantage is that SSDs are about 10 times more expensive than HDDs.

Most SSDs use I/O interfaces developed for HDDs, thus permitting simple replacement in all machines with the 2.5-inch form factor for laptops and 3.5-inch for desktop computers. Typically the same file systems used on HDDs can also be used on SSDs. While HDDs are available up to 4 TB, commonly used SSDs are less than 1 TB only.

 

There are two different types of SSDs; 1.the SLC (single level cell) and 2. the MLC (multi level cell). An SLC SSD is simply built where 1 bit rests within 1 cell of the SSD. Conversely, a MLC SSD means there are two bits within 1 cell of the SSD. MLC SSDs are lower priced but slower and less reliable than SLC SSDs. While the life expectancy of a MLC SSD might be similar to that of HDDs, SLC SSDs have been estimated to live anywhere between 49 years and 149 years, on average!

 

Newer SSDs use NAND-based flash memory, generally require half the power of HDDs and retain data without power. Older D-RAM based SSDs require as much power as HDDs, need separate power sources, such as batteries, to maintain data after the system is shut down. MLC flash is most common and is often found in consumer-grade products such as cameras, phones, pen drives, memory sticks and portable music players.

 

SSD technology suffers from a degradation phenomenon where the NAND cells show a measurable drop in performance called write amplification. A technique called wear leveling is implemented to mitigate this effect, but the drive will inevitably degrade in a gradual manner throughout its life.

HDD Mechanic

Program Of The Week

HDD Mechanic

 

Have you ever encounterd a reading error in any of your hard disk drives? Does it say, "file system structure corrupted"? It happened to my 5 year old 160GB sata HDD, after I interrupted a partitioning process in Acronis due to powercut (I live in tamilnadu, boss). For nearly a month, I was wasting my time to repair it through Windows Checkdisk and Acronis. Both of them identified that disk as healthy but did nothing.

 

Finally, I found HDD Mechanic through Google. Actually it is meant for recovery of lost files, when you are not able to read/write in the HDD. Of course, I had all my files in another disk as backup. But, I did start the process through HDD Recovery Wizard without much confidence. After a few hours, it found some files in the disk. When I closed the program, I found that if had repaired the file system structure and the disk was 75% back to normal in speed and space.

eRail

Website Of The Week

www.erail.in

This website presents the information about trains in India. Of course, you can see all those details in official Railway and IRCTC websites but only for express trains. Erail is unique in its display of the list of trains by including PASSENGER trains between any two selected stations. If you highlight/ double click on any train, you can see the detailed schedule. Moreover, you are likely to miss the availability of weekly trains in official websites but not here. Very useful one.