• uninstall Windows Mobile Device Center
• uninstall the unidentified devices in the Device Manager
• reboot
• install my motherboard’s “proper” USB driver (NEC)
• reinstall Windows Mobile Device Center
• Try connecting via USB again – it still failed, as before.
• Slap in my Bluetooth adapter and connect via Bluetooth. When I did this, it seemed to install the mobile device.
• I also had to delete my two existing PC partnerships before setting up the new one. Now it all syncs correctly.

Annoyingly, I still cannot sync via USB, but at least the Bluetooth works. I could have probably skipped to that, but I’m so used to syncing via USB that I wanted to get that working. I guess I could probably start sifting through the RNDIS driver error logs and see if I can find anything there, but considering that this whole epic saga started because I needed to sync someone’s address to my phone so I could mail them a package, I don’t want to get sidetracked too much more…

• We’ve both recently been the target of hacking attempts originating from China. Of course, the attack they suffered was much more serious and alarming than mine, which appeared to be a bot trying to log into my wireless router (running Tomato) and was mindlessly trying every entry in a password dictionary. I turned off remote access in the admin panel, and that was that.
• I own a Garmin nuvi 200, and got accustomed to using the Communicator plugin with Google Maps to easily input addresses into it without having to use the touchscreen interface. Tonight, though, I tried to use it and discovered that Google Maps no longer shows the Send link off of which the browser integration hangs. Not sure why it’s no longer there, and an update to the plugin didn’t change anything, so it seems like it’s just broken. Argh.

Windows 7 takes longer to boot than XP on the EEE PC, but performance is comparable once the OS is loaded — I have no complaints about the experience so far. The only other strange thing is that the video driver seems to have issues with coming out of sleep mode — the nice thing is that the Vista driver model allows the OS to completely restart the graphics system, so the machine actually recovers gracefully from this. I’m hoping that there will be future driver updates to solve this issue, but it’s not a big deal at this point.

I intend to split the hard drive such that I can dual-boot Linux and Windows — the hard drive on this thing is definitely big enough to accommodate both. When that’s accomplished, I’ll hopefully have a nice, portable netbook for both travel and (very) light development work.

Another thing that remains to be seen is how well games will run on this thing. I’m not expecting to run graphics-intensive games, but if I can run some decent strategy or turn-based games on this, I’ll be very, very pleased.

As it turns out, Opera released a beta version of Opera Mobile 9.5 a couple of months ago. I didn’t know about it until recently, and I only got around to downloading it and trying it out today. It is surprisingly good, particularly compared to IE Mobile and the earlier version of Opera that I had tried. They are clearly trying to emulate some of the Safari interface, albeit without a multi-touch interface. Double-tapping zooms in/out of pages, and dragging motions pan around the page. It’s unfortunate, however, that the reliance for the stylus for the preferred interface (particularly zooming) makes it less useful when navigating via the scroll wheel. The responsiveness on simple pages is good (which is essentially the only way I can compare performance against IE Mobile), and more complicated pages also perform well once they are loaded and the layout has been computed.

It appears to be based off of the same rendering technology as the Opera desktop browser (which is a change from earlier Opera Mobile versions). As smartphones and PDAs get more capable (with more memory and faster CPUs), this strategy makes sense — and as an end user, I appreciate the fact that I can be browsing the "real" versions of web pages instead of crippled or non-existent mobile versions. The JavaScript support is decent — most simple things I have tried have worked, although I couldn’t use the fancy WYSIWYG JavaScript editor that the latest WordPress ships with. (I would have been shocked if I had been able to use it, to be honest.)

So far, so good — unless I find something terribly wrong with it, I’m ready to use the new Opera Mobile as a replacement for IE Mobile. What’s even stranger is that, once it goes final, this might become the first Web browser for which I have ever paid money…

(If you want to try it out, you should actually be able to run it on the Windows Mobile emulators. I’m not sure about the actual utility of running a mobile browser on a desktop via emulation, but if you want to see how the other [non-iPhone] half lives, go right ahead…)

I didn’t find much helpful information through a quick Google search — a somewhat dubious eHow article that advocates stabbing the media through its retractable cover, an article that mentions shredding and degaussing (two options that are not available to me, given that I don’t want to spend any money on this), and a technology columnist who recommends shredding as well as “a large hammer and a stake.” Granted, I could slap each disk in and overwrite it according to security sanitizing standards, but that could take a very long time.

Instead, I decided to investigate simple physical destruction of the magnetic recording material. I was pleased to discover that you can quickly disassemble a disk, separate the recording surface from the hub of the disk, and then shred the recording surface in any ordinary office shredder. Here’s how:

1. First, lift up the metal shutter on the bottom part of the disk. It may be slightly easier to grab the edge of the shutter if you bend the disk slightly.

   

   Lift up the shutter

2.  Next, you can slide the shutter over slightly, and then rotate the shutter out of its normal track.
   

   Unseat the shutter by sliding it over slightly, then lifting

3. Pulling the shutter off may also release the spring mechanism that normally keeps it in place. If not, you can grasp the edge of the spring and pull it out, or simply wait until the floppy has been split open to remove the spring. Discard the shutter and spring.

   

   The shutter and the spring that holds it in place.

4. You can then pry open the floppy disk using the groove (normally covered by the shutter) indicated by my finger here. You can just use the tip of your finger — you don’t need to use a screwdriver or anything special.

   

   Pry here

   

   What it looks like when you begin prying the disk apart

5. When you have pried the disk open, you will be able to take out the actual media platter. Once you’ve done this, you can throw the rest of the disk into the trash.

   

   The media platter, removed from the split disk

6. Finally, you can remove the media ring from its metal hub by simply peeling it off. The adhesive should break very easily, leaving you with just the magnetic media itself. You can then feed the media into a shredder, or manually cut it into pieces.

   

   Peeling the media platter from its hub

As a bit of a pack rat, I tend to keep around old computer hardware, under the catch-all reasoning of “I might want to put another machine together!” This collection includes old hard drives, which naturally contain lots of my personal information thanks to their day-to-day usage in a personal computer. Getting rid of this information securely involves using a secure deletion program (such as SDelete, Eraser, or DBAN). These programs overwrite files and free space with a number of different patterns, to ensure that the data cannot be recovered easily, if at all.

(I also wound up using a partition editor program to reformat a drive’s partitions as NTFS — it used to contain a Linux distro. After the NTFS reformat, I then wiped all the free space on the hard drive, thereby achieving the same effect as securely deleting it in its original format.)

Techniques for overwriting data, and recovering data using specialized hardware, are described in this paper. Interestingly, it is practically impossible to completely remove all traces of magnetic reads/writes due to the lack of drive head positioning consistency in hard drives. However, modern advances in hard drive platter density apparently make the data recovery techniques in the article unfeasible for a reasonable number of random overwrites. (Of course, for top secret information, the sanitizing method of choice is still physical destruction of the drive.)

Overwriting entire hard drives, I have discovered, is extremely slow. Because of the need to use uncached disk access, wiping a 100+ GB drive (5400 RPM if I recall correctly) can take more than a day. However, it’s definitely worth it — there are quite a few articles out there describing data recovery efforts on hard drives acquired from swap meets, eBay, and so on, and the ease with which sensitive information is acquired is certainly a bit alarming. By taking these extra steps to sanitize my old hard drives before I get rid of them, I’ll avoid any unpleasant surprises down the road.

This whole thing is starting to take on a Y2K feel — here’s hoping for a similar sort of resolution (that is, quiet and unremarkable).

This exploit comes with the potential to do a lot of harm, because only the DNS server needs to be compromised (and can be done so remotely). In essence, it could be the ultimate man-in-the-middle attack, enticing thousands of ordinary users to cough up their personal details without so much as a glimmer of anything suspicious going on. This is undoubtedly the reason why extraordinary measures were taken to allow vendors to simultaneously patch the exploit and try to minimize its impact.

For me, there are a number of concerns here. First, naturally, is the security of my personal Internet usage:

• Is my machine safe? (Well, it’s completely patched up now, which is supposedly good enough.)
• Is my upstream Internet connection safe? A bit of Internet research reveals that the Tomato router software I’m running is apparently only vulnerable to DNS queries occurring on the LAN (br0). I took this opportunity to patch to the latest build of Tomato, just in case, although a new one with an updated version of dnsmasq is expected shortly.I assume that my ISP will also get their act together and patch in a timely fashion. If not, I’ll be on the phone with them.

Next up are concerns about the hosting for my personal and business sites. Depending on how a hosting business is run, there may be some additional obstacles that need to be negotiated to get things patched up. For example, Windows virtualization environments may need to have specific patches created for them, because they can’t use the normal Windows Update system. Right now, this front is “in progress.”

(One good thing that came out of this is that my paranoia finally pushed me into fixing the self-signed certificate for my business site, and properly installing it on my home machine. Properly-validated SSL connections should not be vulnerable to any shenanigans that may result from the DNS vulnerability.)

I realized the other day that the reason USB memory stick transfers were so slow on my machine was because my keyboard, a Microsoft Natural Pro, was probably a USB 1.1 device. Merely having it plugged into my machine would result in the USB 2.0 controller dropping down to a slower compatibility mode, which would also affect any other devices on the same bus — like a memory stick, external hard drive, or what have you.

I had difficulty finding information about my keyboard online — it was produced in 1999 and has been out of production for several years, as far as I can tell. I read online that the USB 2.0 spec was finalized in 2000, though, so I could infer that my keyboard didn’t support it. In the end, I decided to retire my keyboard, after about 7 years of ownership, even though it’s still working fine. My keyboard has survived several computer upgrades and a move across the state, but it bothered me that it was potentially slowing down other parts of the system.

Its replacement is the Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000 — I didn’t really consider many other brands, as I liked the layout of my previous keyboard, and the off-brand ones that I looked at seemed pretty flimsy or otherwise undesirable. So far my experience has been very positive — the additional angling provided by the removable shim underneath the keyboard feels pretty good, and the key action is a fair bit quieter than the old Natural Pro without sacrificing feel. My only complaint is that it seems like I have to press the ‘y’ key very hard — sometimes it misses a keypress — but that may be an acclimation issue rather than a technical fault.