Tron is the ultimate PC cleanup script

Your PC is misbehaving, and there’s no obvious cause? Then it’s usually time to start working through the generic "fixes": run an antivirus scan, clear your temporary folders, enter "sfc /scannow" and more.

But if you’ve tried everything you know, without success -- or you don’t have hours to spend in front of the keyboard -- then maybe it’s time to call in some heavy-duty support.

Tron is a batch file which automates just about every possible step in the process of disinfecting, cleaning and repairing a Windows PC.

This isn’t as limited as it sounds, because the package is more than a script: it also includes a vast number of freeware and open source tools. There’s antivirus (Malwarebytes, Kaspersky, Sophos), cleaners (CCleaner, FindDupe), archiving tools, updaters, Adobe Reader, Flash and more.

The end result does an enormous amount of work, including:

• Finding and removing viruses
• Repairing WMI
• Resetting Internet Explorer, network settings
• Cleaning junk files, Windows event logs, duplicate downloads, Windows Update cache
• Uninstalling common OEM bloatware and some Metro apps
• Removing OneDrive integration
• Defragging your hard drive
• Resetting Registry and file system permissions, file extensions
• Updating Flash/ Adobe Reader/ Java/ Windows

…and a whole lot more (the full list is here). It could take hours to run.

There are plainly some major issues here. Like, does the developer really have the right to bundle all these third-party applications, even in an open-source product? (Something tells us the answer is "no".)

Tron also carries out a lot of actions which you may not like, from the minor (reducing the space allocated for shadow copies) to the major (uninstalling apps and applications which in many cases are harmless, and are most unlikely to be causing you any problems at all).

Despite that, there might be a case for using Tron as a last resort, if your PC seems broken and nothing else has helped. Just keep in mind that the script could make your situation worse, so back up the system first, and read the instructions in full before you start.

If you’re not happy using the dubiously-bundled tools, there’s still plenty of value here. Tron has various command line switches to disable certain actions (-sa to skip antivirus, say), or you can just edit out actions you don’t like.

Even if you never intend to use the full script, Tron has plenty of interesting batch file snippets you can reuse. A lot of the repairs are carried out by the script and standard Windows utilities only, so you might reuse parts of it. And a host of supporting elements show you how a batch file can detect it’s running in Safe Mode, or as an administrator; identify the version of Windows you’re using; get and save free disk space; resume at the right point after a failed run, and a whole lot more.

Tron is a PC repair and cleanup tool for Windows XP- 10.

It's all a facade: Encryption may do nothing to reduce surveillance or increase privacy

Living in a technological age where there is a near-fanatical obsession with privacy, a move towards encryption seems to make perfect sense. While there have been calls from some governments to ban encryption and demands for decryption keys to be handed over, there is a drive by companies and online services to try to increase security and privacy with encryption.

But a new report (Don't Panic: Making progress on the encryption debate) from Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet & Society suggests that encryption may be all but pointless when it comes to curtailing surveillance. While governments and surveillance agencies make balk at the idea of people using encryption to 'go dark' online, and many people embrace the idea as a means of increasing their privacy, the report suggests that the task of surveillance is not going to be made impossible, and could be helped by the Internet of Things (IoT).

In fact, rather than the future being one that features less surveillance, the report suggests that there might actually be more opportunities for surveillance. Drawing on input from security and policy experts from academia, civil society, and the US intelligence community the report looks at consumer-level encryption and what this means for the ability to monitor the communication of criminals, terrorists and the like.

Despite increased take up of encryption, a huge proportion of web traffic remains fully accessible to law enforcement agencies. This includes not only communications which has not been purposely encrypted, but also metadata -- that staple of the NSA's diet -- which is unencrypted by nature. But more than this, the increased number of connected devices -- cars, home heating system, network cameras, smart devices, and so on -- actually means that there will be more opportunities for surveillance.

Intelligence and law enforcement agencies may be concerned that end-to-end encryption will make their job harder, but the report suggests that these fears are unfounded. It says:

End-to-end encryption and other technological architectures for obscuring user data are unlikely to be adopted ubiquitously by companies, because the majority of businesses that provide communications services rely on access to user data for revenue streams and product functionality, including user data recovery should a password be forgotten.

We have already seen that the likes of the NSA can gather metadata on a massive scale, and this is not something that is expected to be affected by increased awareness of encryption:

Metadata is not encrypted, and the vast majority is likely to remain so. This is data that needs to stay unencrypted in order for the systems to operate: location data from cell phones and other devices, telephone calling records, header information in e-mail, and so on. This information provides an enormous amount of surveillance data that widespread.

But the report also includes prophesies that will undoubtedly concern those with privacy fears. Any switch to using encrypted modes of communication will simply make those conducting surveillance pursue other channels. It notes:

Networked sensors and the Internet of Things are projected to grow substantially, and this has the potential to drastically change surveillance. The still images, video, and audio captured by these devices may enable real-time intercept and recording with after-the-fact access. Thus an inability to monitor an encrypted channel could be mitigated by the ability to monitor from afar a person through a different channel.

There is also the problem of fragmentation and a lack of standardization to consider -- as well as differing standards and laws around the world. One of the key points raised by the report is that the idea of 'going dark' -- that the ability to intercept and surveil communication -- is wrong. While current methods and techniques may increasingly fail, there are plenty of other opportunities for surveillance and privacy infringement available now, and on the horizon.

Image Credit: Maksim Kabakou / Shutterstock

Microsoft's aggressive tactics pay off as Windows 10 overtakes Windows 8.1

A month ago, Microsoft announced that Windows 10 was on over 200 million devices. It also claimed that Windows 10 adoption was accelerating, which seemed to be in clear contradiction of NetMarketShare’s monthly usage figures. The pattern there showed adoption of the new OS to be slowing month after month.

That wasn’t the case in January however, as the latest usage figures from NetMarketShare show Windows 10 starting the new year at a fair pace and finally doing something it’s been threatening to do for the past couple of months -- overtaking Windows 8.1.

The new operating system -- fueled by Microsoft’s increasingly aggressive tactics -- went from 9.96 percent in December to 11.85 percent last month, a climb of 1.89 percentage points.

Windows 8.1 pretty much stood still in the month, going from 10.30 percent to 10.40 percent, a slight 0.10 percentage point increase.

Windows 8 also didn’t move much, dropping 0.08 percent points. It now sits on 2.68 percent.

Combined, Windows 8.x is on 13.08 percent, which means it’s still ahead of Windows 10, for now.

Windows 7 was the big loser in January, falling from 55.68 percent to 52.47 percent, a decrease of 3.21 percentage points. I expect it will rally in coming months.

Windows XP users still stubbornly refuse to go anywhere, and the ancient OS went from 10.93 percent in December to 11.42 percent in January, a climb of 0.49 percentage points.

Can Windows 10 keep up the momentum in February? Place your bets and we’ll find out next month.

Photo credit: gyn9037 / Shutterstock

BlackEnergy 3 malware targets Ukranian power facilities

The BlackEnergy malware first appeared in 2007 as a relatively unsophisticated program that that generated random bots to support Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks.

Endpoint security specialist SentinelOne has detected a new variant of the program which was used last month to attack a Ukranian power facility. It also believes that this latest variant may be state-sponsored.

Udi Shamir, co-founder and CSO of SentinelOne says, "Our analysis of a new BlackEnergy 3 sample has led us to conclude that this latest rootkit is in fact the by-product of a nation-sponsored campaign, and likely the work of multiple teams coming together".

Although it has the same core components as earlier versions, BlackEnergy's changing attack methods make it hard for traditional antivirus products to detect.

The latest malware is launched via a new delivery technique using a vulnerability, CVE-2014-4114, in the OLE packager of Microsoft Office. It can be distributed using phishing emails with an attached Excel document that has a macro virus to launch the BlackEnergy 3 program.

Since CVE-2014-4114 has already been patched, SentinelOne believes that attackers are either specifically targeting a victim's machine that is unpatched, or getting an internal employee to either accidentally or deliberately execute the infected Excel documents causing the malware to propagate inside the network.

A full report on the malware is available on the SentinelOne blog.

Image Credit: Sergey Nivens/Shutterstock

How to perfect your email signature

Despite the fact that countless emails are sent every day -- both internally and to clients/customers -- many people don’t give their email signature the attention it deserves.

However, conveying the right corporate image -- big or small -- requires thought, so Cloud Solutions has come to the rescue by creating an infographic with some top tips for improving your email signature.

According to the infographic, 112 billion business emails were sent and received each day in 2015, with 48 percent of professionals lacking an email sign-off.

In this "signature cheat sheet", Cloud Solutions highlights seven easy improvements users can make, which include making it simple, keeping it short, informing your recipients and being consistent.

Have a look at the full infographic below and get your email signature up to scratch.

Published under license from ITProPortal.com, a Net Communities Ltd Publication. All rights reserved.

Photo Credit: Gina Sanders/Shutterstock

Personal computers approach retirement age

My birthday was this past week. When I came to Silicon Valley in 1977 I was 24 years old. Thirty-nine years later I am 63 and a lot changed around me in those four decades. I went from young to old. The personal computer industry, of which I consider myself to be a part, went from being two years old to 41 -- an even greater change than I have experienced. And the point of this column is to write a bit about how personal computers have matured and where they are going, because I am pretty sure the PC is going away. And I have figured out why.

It’s hard for those who weren’t there to imagine how different Silicon Valley was in 1977. There were orchards still in the valley -- lots of them. There were millionaires, too, but you wouldn’t know them. I met Intel founder Bob Noyce for the first time waiting in line at the bank when I asked him to put out his cigarette (he did). I knew Dave Packard because his daughter Nancy had been my wife’s roommate at Stanford. Linus Pauling lived at one end of my street and Edward Teller lived at the other end: the Nobel Peace Prize winner and the father of the H-bomb lived only a few blocks apart. Across the street lived Tennessee Ernie Ford. One night while playing Trivial Pursuits we called Pauling on the phone to ask him a chemistry question and he happily gave us the answer.

The big companies back then in the valley were Del Monte (canned fruit), HP, Intel, Atari, IBM, Lockheed, and Food Machinery Company (FMC) -- a maker of military tanks. Apple was just starting. Microsoft was two years old. Zuckerberg was not even born. There was no Internet. There was the Arpanet but it was strictly non-commercial with 50 kilobit-per-second backbone pipes. Tim Berners-Lee was a British schoolboy.

Who knew it would get so big? Not me and certainly not my parents, who I urged to invest in Bay Area real estate but they thought it was a bad idea. They were scandalized when I bought a house in Palo Alto that year for $57,000 and shocked again in 1999 when I sold the same house for $990,000 (it would be worth $3 million today). You can’t go home again.

Time passes and you go from being one of the youngest people to be doing what you do to one of the oldest, yet somehow that passage of time goes unnoticed. I don’t feel any different except some times in the morning when it hurts a bit to get out of bed. But time passes nevertheless and the effects, if slow, are insidious.

I wrote 25 years ago:

It takes society thirty years, more or less, to absorb a new information technology into daily life. It took about that long to turn movable type into books in the fifteenth century. Telephones were invented in the 1870s but did not change our lives until the 1900s. Motion pictures were born in the 1890s but became an important industry in the 1920s. Television, invented in the mid-1920s, took until the 1950s to bind us to our sofas.

We can date the birth of the personal computer somewhere between the invention of the microprocessor in 1971 and the introduction of the Altair hobbyist computer in 1975. Either date puts us today about halfway down the road to personal computers’ being a part of most people’s everyday lives, which should be consoling to those who can’t understand what all the hullabaloo is about PCs. Don’t worry; you’ll understand it in a few years, by which time they’ll no longer be called PCs. By the time that understanding is reached, and personal computers have wormed into all our lives to an extent far greater than they are today, the whole concept of personal computing will probably have changed. That’s the way it is with information technologies. It takes us quite a while to decide what to do with them.

I wrote that in 1991 and looking at the PC business circa 2016 I think I was correct. We still have PCs but fewer of them are being sold every year. Something happened, but what?

Personal computers went from being computational devices (spreadsheet machines) to communication devices (Internet gizmos and intelligent cameras). And because of Moore’s Law and our desire to put ever more personality into our computers we morphed our favorite 1991 toy from a desktop into a smart phone.

Put the power of a desktop into your hand and who needs a desktop?

And that’s why the PC, like me, is almost ready to retire.

Samsung rolls out OTA update to bring adblocking API to Android handsets

2015 was the year that adblocking became one of the central debates concerning the web, and this looks set to continue through 2016. Adblock Plus is one of the best-known names in the field, but Apple also got in on the action by permitting adblocking tools for iOS. Now it's Samsung's turn to get in on the action.

The handset manufacturer is today starting the rollout of an over-the-air update that adds a new adblocking API to Android. Samsung has partnered with Rocketship Apps, and the company's Adblock Fast is the first app to take advantage of the API -- and there is a claimed 51 percent speed boost to be enjoyed.

The partnership between Rocketship Apps and Samsung sees adblocking integrated into the Samsung Internet browser. The option to kill ads is compatible with version 4.0 and newer (the browser can be downloaded or updated from Google Play) and requires Android 5.0 -- although an Android 4.x compatible version will be available soon. You'll also need to grab a copy of Adblock Fast from Google Play and then you're in business!

Announcing the team-up with Samsung in a blog post, Brian Kennish from Rocketship Apps said:

Today, Samsung is rolling content blocking out to hundreds of millions of Android users with an over-the-air update and they’ve partnered with us to again make Adblock Fast the first free and first open-source ad blocker on this platform. Adblock Fast for Android runs just seven optimized filtering rules as on other platforms and, as a result, webpages in Android load an average of 51% faster according to our benchmarks.