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So you forgot your power cord on your way to an important meeting or the coffee shop. We’ve all been there. There’s nothing you can do to stop your battery drain, but you can do a lot to slow its inevitable demise.

If you’ve got a laptop with a really old battery that drains in a few minutes after a full charge, there’s not much you can do to make that old thing last much longer‚Äîyou’ll probably want to replace the battery before you do anything else. For everybody else, these tips can help you keep your battery working at peak efficiency.

What Drains Your Battery?

In order to help maximize your battery life, it’s important to first understand what drains the power from your laptop battery, and in a modern laptop it’s pretty simple‚Äîthe LCD panel is the biggest culprit by far. Microsoft’s Windows 7 Engineering blog has put together a very useful chart that helps show you exactly what percentage each component will drain, which helps us know where to start when trying to maximize the battery life.

The one thing this chart doesn’t point out are add-on devices like flash drives, USB mice, and especially PC Cards‚Äîwhich are known to kill your battery very quickly. If you’ve got an unpowered hard drive plugged into your laptop through a USB port, it’s going to drain your battery more quickly than if you had a powered one.

Tweak Your Power Plan Settings

The first thing you’ll want to do is make sure that you have a reasonable power plan selected for when you’re rolling on battery power. The high performance plan is always tempting (you’re a high performance user, after all), but you’ll burn through your battery a lot more quickly, so select the Power saver or Balanced plans, and make sure it’s set to turn off the display quickly after inactivity, since that’s the biggest power drain.

Next, you’ll want to dig further into the Advanced Power Plan settings, and make sure that the On battery settings are set to maximize battery life‚Äîchange the plan to turn off the hard disk quickly, use the low-power mode for your wireless adapter, processor, and especially your graphics card. The System cooling policy setting allows you to specify whether the laptop will rely on fans for cooling, or slow the processor down when the temperature gets out of hand, and can definitely help your battery life, though at the cost of some performance.

Adjust the Screen Brightness

Since we’ve already shown that the LCD screen is the biggest drag on your battery life, the quickest way to save your battery life is to use your laptop’s hardware buttons to control the screen brightness‚Äîmost laptops require holding down the function key and using the brightness keys, and turning it down as far as you can (while still visible) is a good idea. It may seem like an obvious choice, but it’s worth emphasizing at the top of the list for one reason: Of everything you can tweak to improve your battery life, this one change alone is at the top of the list of tweaks that can dramatically improve your battery life.

Make sure that your power plan is set to turn off the display quickly when your laptop is idle, and don’t use any fancy screensavers that overuse the graphics capabilities of your laptop. Many web sites tell you to disable Aero to squeeze more battery life, and it’s true that you might get a very small bit of extra life, a couple of minutes at the very most‚Äîyou will be much better off adjusting the screen brightness and using aggressive screen blanking settings.

Optimize Your Hardware for Power Consumption

Does your laptop have a Bluetooth adapter that you aren’t using? What about IR? Each of these devices consumes power just by being enabled, and if you aren’t using them, you may as well disable them to save a little bit of battery. If you’re using your laptop on the plane, train, or somewhere without a wireless hotspot, use the hardware button to disable the Wi-Fi adapter if you have one, or just disable it manually in Control Panel.

Try to avoid using a PC Card adapter, as they can drain your battery quickly, and make sure that your USB devices are set to allow Windows to shut them off to save power‚Äîyou can find the settings in device manager’s Power Management property pane for the device.

You’ll also want to make sure that your laptop has enough RAM‚Äîif Windows has to constantly thrash the disk because you don’t have enough RAM to keep everything in memory, you either should consider upgrading your RAM or running fewer applications at once.

Kill Background Processes and Services

Runaway system processes can do more than just kill your PC’s performance‚Äîthey can also kill your battery as well. You’ll want to make sure that you close any background applications you don’t need to be running while you are on battery power, and disable any automated updaters, scheduled tasks, and especially search indexing.

Prime targets for removal are things like Windows desktop gadgets, and all of those applications that hide themselves in your system tray. It’s time for a cleanup, so disable or uninstall any application running in your system tray that you don’t actually need. (Only uninstall if you’re still plugged in‚Äîno use wasting extra battery life on that now.) It’s not just good for your battery life, it’s a good practice in general.

If you want an easier way to toggle settings on or off, you can use previously mentioned utility Aerofoil to help you automatically disable Aero Glass, switch between power plans, mute the sound, and even disable the sidebar, all with a tiny, lightweight icon sitting in the system tray.

Use Hibernate Mode When Possible

Using Hibernate mode instead of Sleep allows your laptop to completely power down and use zero power, so if you aren’t going to be using your laptop for another hour or more, put it into Hibernate mode instead of sleep mode, which still uses a trickle of battery life to keep everything in memory.

One of the other benefits of using Hibernate mode that many people don’t consider is that there are any number of ways that your laptop can be accidentally woken out of sleep mode‚Äîfor instance, a scheduled task for an application that pulls your laptop out of sleep mode to do backups, or just an unruly device that triggers the laptop to wake up. If you are using Hibernate mode, nothing can wake the laptop other than the power button.

Take Care of Your Battery by Avoiding Heat

Laptop batteries are always going to slowly lose their ability to charge over time, but when a laptop is constantly overheating or used in a very hot environment, your battery is going to die very quickly. Photo by JustinLowery

Today’s laptops use Lithium batteries instead of nickel, but there’s a lot of incorrect information out there about how to charge or drain your batteries, so let’s set the record straight: Nickel batteries required being fully drained before a recharge to optimize your battery life, but Lithium batteries are the opposite‚Äîyou do not need to fully discharge it before recharging, and in fact, if you fully deplete a lithium battery and don’t recharge for a while, it can become incapable of holding a charge.

You’ll also want to make sure that your battery is not always fully charged‚ÄîWikipedia points out that if your lithium battery is fully charged all the time, you will lose up to 20% of your capacity every year, no matter what you do. Make sure to discharge the battery sometimes, and if you spend most of your time plugged in at a desk, you would be better off running the battery down to half, and then simply removing the battery and storing it in a cool place. You can use Hibernate mode to save exactly what you were doing while still shutting down the laptop completely.

Linux/Mac/Windows: Google’s new utility, GoogleCL, allows you to access a handful of Google services from any *nix command line. Google’s services are pretty easily accessible in their individual webapps, but if you’ve got a hankering for the command line, this is awesome.

Having Google’s services at your fingertips in the Terminal may not sound super cool, but if you want to incorporate, say, fetching Google Calendar events, Google contacts, Google Docs, or Picasa photos into your scripts, GoogleCL is extremely handy (and long overdue). GoogleCL is a python program that can access and perform a number of actions in Blogger, Calendar, Contacts, Docs, Picasa, and YouTube.

Ubuntu users can download a .deb package and install it right away, though Mac and Windows installation is a bit trickier. If you’re the type that will be using GoogleCL, though, it’s likely not beyond your skills. Note that before you begin, you’ll need Python 2.5 or 2.6 installed, and Windows users will also need previously mentioned Cygwin. Update: It turns out Windows users don’t need Cygwin. Here are some Windows-specific tips for installation, though.

Install GoogleCL

Download both the gdata python client library and GoogleCL. Unzip the tarballs or zip files and note the location of the folders (for the below example, I’ve left mine in ~/Downloads). Then, open up a Terminal window and type the following commands, entering your password when prompted:

cd "~/Downloads/gdata-2.0.10/"
sudo python setup.py install
cd "~/Downloads/googlecl-0.9.5/"
sudo python setup.py install

When you’re done, GoogleCl will be installed on your computer. The first time you use it for a service, it will prompt you for your Google username. Type it in and hit enter, after which it will give you a URL that you can copy and paste into your browser to grant GoogleCL access to your account. Once you’ve done so, go back to the Terminal and hit enter to complete the authorization. You’ll have to go through this process for each Google service, but only the first time you use them.

You now have access to a number of different tasks in the aforementioned Google services that you can run in the Terminal or in shell scripts. You can post videos to YouTube, schedule new appointments in Google Calendar, create and edit Google Docs inside Terminal, export your Gmail contacts list, and more. For more information, check out Google’s example scripts, as well as GoogleCL’s manual page. Hit the link to read more and check out their page on Google Code, and share your favorite applications of these newfound commands in the comments!

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If you’re upgrading to a faster, stronger wireless router, don’t chuck your older Wi-Fi box. With the magic of DD-WRT, you can turn your older wireless router into a range-expanding Wi-Fi repeater to cover everywhere you need a connection.

The advent of wireless home networks grew slowly in the past decade, but reached the point at which nearly every home with a high-speed connection had a wireless router that shared Wi-Fi connections throughout the home. Now Wireless N has become the standard at electronics retailers, promising faster connectivity with your wireless devices, faster transfer and streaming speeds between devices, and better connectivity. So what’s to be done with your home’s first wireless router?

Our suggestion is to installed the open-source DD-WRT firmware on your router and turn it into a repeater for your main router, expanding your Wi-Fi signal to reach every nook and cranny of your house, and even into your backyard or garage, if needed. You’ll be able to use the same password and security scheme, you won’t need anything except a power outlet for the repeater when you’re done, and most of your devices will automatically switch between the two signals when needed.

We’ve previously run down how to install DD-WRT on a Linksys router to give it many, many more features, including the repeater function we’ll cover here. If you’ve already installed DD-WRT, then, skip to the section on repeater configuration. One notable difference in this guide, too, is that I’m installing a custom build of DD-WRT, the “micro” flavor, on a Linksys WRT54G ver. 6, or “version 6.” Adam wrote his original guide in 2006, with a fully-DD-WRT-compatible Linksys WRT54GL router, and at that point, those who picked up a blue Linksys box without knowing about open-source firmware were pretty much stuck. Now there’s a huge array of supported devices, and even my sadly restricted Linksys can run a Micro build, and Micro now includes a repeater function.

Update: A Note on Speed

Some intrepid bandwidth watchers, Will Smith among them, have pointed out that their own experiments with repeating signals has left them with slower connections. To be honest, I was using the repeater mostly for Google Reader in bed, and browsing and web working from outside the house, so I hadn’t seen a noticeable drop in speed. A few tests at SpeedTest.net tell the tale. Pictured at left here is the result from my main router, a Buffalo model with Wireless N (detailed here), connecting from my upstairs office to the downstairs living room, then Buffalo, NY to Toronto, ON.

This result is through the modified Linksys WRT54G ver. 6 router about 10 feet away, connected as a repeater to the Buffalo router downstairs, and then tested again through Toronto. There is, as you can see, a download speed difference, and if I’d been using my Wireless N modem, it might be even more severe. So take a repeater for what it is‚Äîa slight trade-off in speed for a greater reach, with your mileage varying based on your hardware and connection. You might also note, though, that using SpeedTest’s Android app, I actually received better download speeds from my office through the repeater than through the main router‚Äîfor a smaller antenna, perhaps, connectivity can sometimes win over latency concerns.

What You’ll Need

‚Ä¢ Compatible router: Grab that old-but-still-works router and flip it over. Get the model number off the label, and write down the MAC address, while you’re at it‚Äîthe locations for both, on a standard Linksys “blue box,” are pictured above. Type the first few characters of your model number into DD-WRT’s router database, and look for your model to pop up. If you get any kind of green “Yes” listed with your model, you’re in the clear‚Äîeven the most pared-down DD-WRT build, micro, supports the repeater function.

‚Ä¢ Firmware files for your router: In that same router database, click on the line that relates to your router model, then grab all the files listed there. You may not end up using all of them, but once you’ve taken your router offline, even if it’s not your main router, you’ll want to have all your files available offline.

‚Ä¢ Print-out of your instructions: There’s a good chance, if you’ve got a fairly popular router, that you’ll have access to specific router model instructions on the DD-WRT wiki. You’ll usually see a link on the same page as your firmware files; if not, go ahead and search the wiki. If you don’t have a printer, or hate wasting paper, use a print-to-PDF tool like doPDF or the Nitro PDF Reader for Windows, or the built-in PDF functions in Mac or Linux. The reason, again, is that you want to be prepared in case you lose internet connectivity on one or more routers during the flash process.

‚Ä¢ Ethernet cable & computer with ethernet port: Enough cable to comfortably reach from your computer to the router you’re working on, and a computer without any networking problems that you know of.

• A pen and paper: The paper for notes, and the pen for both writing and pressing and holding down the reset button on your router.

‚Ä¢ At least an hour’s time, and patience: Instructions for most routers are laid out in step-by-step detail, with very specific instructions. Even so, you do not want to rush things, or load the wrong file at the wrong time. Doing so opens the potential for a “bricked” router, one that doesn’t work and can’t be accessed or set back to its default, factory-fresh state. That’s not going to happen to the patient, cautious firmware flasher, though.

Get Started

As stated above, different routers will take different paths to installing DD-WRT. There are some common procedures, and a general path, to getting it installed, though, so you can read along as I follow the DD-WRT Wiki’s instructions for a WRT54G version 6 installation.

‚Ä¢ Do a hard (30/30/30) reset on your router: A “hard” reset, or a “30/30/30,” means locating the reset notch on the back of your router, then inserting a pen and holding it there for a total of 90 seconds‚Äî30 seconds at first with the power on, then yank the power cord and wait another 30, then plug the power cord back in and wait 30 seconds, all while still holding the pen. It seems a bit excessive, but trust me‚ÄîI’ve had friends with electronic engineering skills explain just how finicky, and sometimes random, physical memory chips like those in routers can be at holding their settings or otherwise not completely blanking out.

‚Ä¢ Set a static IP address on your computer: Most DD-WRT guides want you to set your computer’s IP address, the one it draws from your router, to 192.168.1.7, and set a subnet mask to 255.255.255.0. How do you do this in your computer, without the router being accessible?

Head to Windows’ Network and Sharing Center, usually by right-clicking on your network connection icon in the system tray, or heading there through the Control Panel. In the left-hand panel, click “Change adapter settings,” then right-click on your “Local Area Connection” offering and select Properties. Under the Network tab, select the “Internet Protocol Version 4 (TCP/IPv4)” and hit the Properties button. Now in the General tab, change the first radio switch button to “Use the following IP address:”, then enter 192.168.1.7 in the IP Address field, and 255.255.255.0 should fill itself in under “Subnet mask.” Make sure you’ve got the IP entered correctly‚ÄîWindows can skip the “7″ part if there’s only a single digit in the third section‚Äîand hit OK when you’re done.

Firmware Installation

Now we’re gonna get serious. Connect the Ethernet cable between your computer and the router‚Äîbe sure to insert the cable into one of the numbered ports, not the port labeled “Internet” that’s slightly distanced from the others. Turn off any wireless connection to your main router, unplug any broadband cellular modems, and so forth.

In the case of my WRT54G ver. 6, I had to create a customized flashing image for my router, with a designated MAC address written in. The MAC address is a supposedly unique identifier given to all computer hardware that can access the internet, one that allows networks to allow and block hardware based on this address. Your internet provider and the the cable modem they provided also tracks the MAC address of your router, and can deny service if a different router than the one the modem is used to servicing suddenly appears. So I followed the instructions for downloading GV5Flash.zip, unpacking its contents, then running the vximgtoolgui application and filling in the MAC address I wrote down from underneath my router, and pointing the app at a place to drop the resulting .bin file.

Now you’re going to pull off one of those “hard,” or 30/30/30 power cycles‚Äîhold down reset for 30 seconds plugged in, 30 unplugged, then 30 seconds again plugged in. When you’re done, wait a few seconds, open your browser (making sure your computer’s still connected by cable), point it to http://192.168.1.1, and you should get a prompt for a username and password. The default for my router in this mode is “root/admin”‚Äîyours can likely be found at RouterPasswords.com, or in your own DD-WRT instructions. After entering that combo, you should see the default router screen. A Linksys default usually looks like this:

In most cases, you’re next going to head to the Administration section (circled in the pic), then click the Firmware Upgrade sub-section. It’s usually a simple affair: a Browse button to find the file you want to upload, and an OK/Apply button to set it in motion. From here on out, unless you have my same exact router, you’ll possibly have a different set of one or two files to upload, in a very particular order‚Äîfollow your own DD-WRT customized instructions. In general, though, you’ll be doing a procedure along these lines:

• Uploading a “prep” file that gets your router ready for a new firmware.
• Waiting a solid five minutes‚Äîno cheating.
• “Power cycle” the router (a simple unplug, 30-second wait, then re-plug).
• Re-connect to 192.168.1.1, see the “Management Mode” window, then upload your (possibly customized) specific DD-WRT image and hit Apply.
• 
• After seeing this nice little “Upgrade Success” message, wait another full, honest five minutes.

• 

• Open a TFTP program, usually provided among your DD-WRT files, and point it at 192.168.1.1 (your router). Select your specific DD-WRT firmware (a micro build, in my case), then set the retries to 99‚ÄîBut! Before hitting “Upgrade,” power cycle your router, wait a few seconds after re-powering, then go for it. When your TFTP app has a green light and success message, wait another full five minutes, then come on back.
• Undo the static IP setup you put in place on your computer from the Network and Sharing settings. Unplug and re-plug your cable, then open a browser. If you can connect to 192.168.1.1 on your computer browser and see a setup page for DD-WRT, do a (final) 30/30/30 “hard” reset on your router, then check that you still see the DD-WRT setup. If so, you’re all set up!

Setting Up the Repeater

Now that you’ve got your oldie-but-goodie router set up with DD-WRT, you can set it up to pick up the signal from your primary router and re-broadcast it within its own radius. Here’s how to do that.

With your computer still hooked up to the now-secondary router, head into the DD-WRT setup screen. It will ask you to set a better password and username at first, so go ahead and do that‚Äîyou’ll probably want to set up the same admin/password as your primary router to avoid confusion. Once you’re in, your setup screen will look something like this, as my Micro setup on my Linksys appears:

First up, click on the Wireless tab, then choose Basic Settings. Switch “Wireless Mode” to “Repeater,” and the “Wireless Network Name” to the same as the main router you’re going to be re-broadcasting. Don’t worry about the bridged/unbridged radio buttons‚Äîthey’ll set themselves later. Hit the “Save” button at the very bottom, but do not hit “Apply Settings” just yet.

In the “Virtual Interfaces” section, below that main “Wireless Physical Interfaces” section you just modified, hit the “Add” button, then enter a new name for your repeater‚Äîdon’t use the same as your router, or else suffer the wrath of confused devices. Adding “Repeater” or “2″ to the end of your main router’s name is pretty sensible in most cases. If you prefer an access point that doesn’t broadcast its name, save that for switching off later‚Äîwhile we’re testing our repeater, we’ll be using basic settings to make sure the connection goes through. Hit the “Save” button at the bottom again.

With the main Wireless tab still selected, head to the “Wireless Security” sub-tab to the right. You’ll see two interfaces again‚Äîa “Physical Interface” and a “Virtual Interface.” In the “Physical Interface” section at the top, fill in the same exact security settings as your primary router‚Äîthe security mode, the algorithm (TKIP or AES, generally), and the password any device would use to connect. You might need to jump back into your primary router settings to confirm these‚Äîthat’s find, but do so from another device. Under the “Virtual Interface” section, set up the same exact security settings as your primary router, again. Hit the “Save” key at very bottom again and, again, avoid “Apply Settings” for the moment.

Jump over to the Setup tab at the very top, then scroll down to the Network Setup section under Basic Setup. The main thing to do here is slightly alter the “Local IP Address” from what your primary router is. If you connect to your main router at 192.168.1.1, for example, set this repeater router to something like 192.168.2.1, or another number that you can remember in the second-to-last position. Hit (you guessed it!) Save.

Finally, head to the Security tab up top, and in the Firewall section, disable the “SPI Firewall,” and un-check everything under the “Block WAN Requets,” except “Filter Multicast.” Hit “Save” at the bottom one last time. Finally, head over to Administration, double-check that you’ve got your administrator password written down or remembered, and hit “Apply Settings” at the very bottom. Your router will reset itself now, so give it time to do so.

Unplug your computer’s ethernet cable, turn on a wireless device, and see if you can find your new repeater bridge. Connect to it, use the same password you’d use for the main router, and you should have success. If not, run through the steps and double-check your settings. DD-WRT’s wiki page for WLAN Repeaters has a good deal of troubleshooting advice, so check there too.

You’ve now got a second Wi-Fi station in your house that picks up signal from the main router and offers it out to devices that are farther out. It’s likely not as fast a connection between devices‚Äîit’s wireless G, in most cases, as opposed to N. Then again, at this point, there are very, very few services or streaming applications that make full use of Wireless N’s crazy bandwidth potential, so your Hulu streaming, web browsing, and other usual internet life will be likely unaffected.

In my own case, my wife and I don’t have to use modern-day divining tricks in our very non-linear Victorian home to keep a spotty Wi-Fi signal to an iPod touch or Android phone, and a side patio has just become a preferred secondary home office for the summer. As a bonus, my closest neighbors now know that I’m a serious, serious nerd when they fire up their laptops. Here’s hoping you find similarly fun and free uses for a Wi-Fi repeater.

LINK

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A new, incredibly sneaky identity-theft tactic surfaced earlier this week when Mozilla’s Aza Raskin, the creative lead of Firefox, unveiled what’s become known as “tabnapping.”

Stated simply, tabnapping — from the combination of “tab” and “kidnapping” — could be used by clever phishers to dupe users into giving up passwords by secretly changing already-open browser tabs. All of the major browsers on Windows and Mac OS X are vulnerable to the attack.

Because most people keep multiple tabs open, often for long periods, and because they trust that the contents and label of a tab are immutable, tabnapping could become the next big thing in identity theft.

That open tab labeled “Citibank” or ” Facebook ” may not be the real deals, Raskin argued. But you may not know that…, so you enter your username and password to, you think, log in again.

Boom! You’re owned.

Tabnapping isn’t in active circulation at the moment, but the ease with which another researcher was able to sidestep a noted Firefox add-on designed to prevent such trickery doesn’t bode well.

What can you do if tabnapping shows its face? We have a few answers.

What should I not do? Don’t log-in on a tab that you haven’t opened yourself.

Since the tabnapping tactic banks on you trusting that you opened the tab — and that the site simply timed out — the best defense is this offensive move. In other words, if you see a tab that contains a seemingly-legit log-in form, close it, then head to the site yourself in a new tab.

Will browser makers patch this? Unlikely. Microsoft’s Jerry Bryant, a general manager at the company’s security response center, said the issue isn’t a security vulnerability per se, and that Internet Explorer (IE) falls for the scam because that’s the way browsers work.

“Working with [Raskin's] proof-of-concept, as written, is expected,” he said in an e-mail Tuesday when asked whether Microsoft had a fix in mind for IE.

Can my browser protect me at all? Yes.

Every major browser has a filter of some kind designed to weed out malicious sites and/or legitimate sites that are suspected of being infected with attack code. Presumably, those filters, assuming the blacklists underlying them are current and accurate, would block tabnapping attacks.

To kidnap tabs, a hacker has to get his tab-mutating code onto your machine somehow . Raskin pointed that out by noting the likely attack vector. “Every time you include a third-party script on your page, or a Flash widget, you leave yourself wide open for an evil doer to use your site as a staging ground for this kind of attack,” he wrote in his blog .

So the best defense browsers can currently manage is to warn you of potential attack sites before you reach them. That’s where filtering comes in.

But will my browser block tabnapping attack code from getting on my machine? Microsoft certainly thinks that IE will.

“Behind the scenes, [IE's] SmartScreen Filter also plays a role in combating this sort of hijacking attempt,” said Microsoft’s Bryant, talking about the anti-malware/anti-phishing filter IE included. “SmartScreen successfully blocks millions of views of malicious pages each month and would help protect the user in this situation.”

Microsoft has commissioned NSS Labs to conduct several studies of filtering efficiency, most recently earlier this year. Not surprisingly, IE regularly comes out atop the chart in NSS Labs’ ensuing reports, with Apple ‘s Safari and Mozilla’s Firefox far behind, and Google ‘s Chrome and Opera Software’s Opera even further back.

Other browsers have tools similar to SmartScreen. In Firefox and Chrome it’s called “Phishing and Malware Protection;” Opera dubs its filter “Fraud Protection;” Safari doesn’t give it a name, but simply offers a setting that reads, “Warn when visiting a fraudulent website” in the Security section of its Preferences settings.

Anything else I can do while I use my browser to stymie tabnapping? Yes, there is. Look at the URL in your browser’s address bar before filing in any form or giving out any personal information. Unless the attackers are particularly clever and able to exploit a vulnerability or flaw to “spoof,” or fake the URL, it won’t match the bogus log-in screen.

That’s your cue to close the tab immediately.

IE8 has a feature dubbed “Domain Highlighting” that helps here: The actual domain — the xxxxx.com part — is highlighted in black, while the rest of the URL is grayed out.

Any add-ons I can try that will help? Of course. Whether they work or not is a different question.

NoScript , the premier script-blocking Firefox add-on, stops Raskin’s proof-of-concept in its tracks, since his tabnapping relies on JavaScript. But it’s not foolproof.

Israeli research Avi Raff has created code that circumvents NoScript’s defenses in Firefox to kidnap a tab. Computerworld has confirmed that Raff’s code produces a tab change even when NoScript’s installed in Firefox.

What about password managers? Will they help here? They can.

Third-party browser password managers — RoboForm on Windows, 1Password on Mac come to mind — link saved log-in usernames and passwords to a specific URL. Assuming you saved the username and password while at the real site’s log-in page, you’re golden: The manager won’t enter the username and password into a non-matching URL.

I’ve heard that Chrome isn’t vulnerable. True? Nope. Although several sites initially reported that Chrome didn’t fall for tabnapping — Computerworld noted that Raskin’s tactic worked some of the time on production editions — it turns out that Google‘s browser had a bug that prevented kidnapping.

That bug was fixed in the Chrome developer preview build 6.0.408.1, said Raskin in a exchange of e-mails with Computerworld today. “Chrome is fully susceptible to this attack,” Raskin wrote.

Gregg Keizer covers Microsoft, security issues, Apple, Web browsers and general technology breaking news for Computerworld . Follow Gregg on Twitter at @gkeizer or subscribe to Gregg’s RSS feed . His e-mail address is gkeizer@ix.netcom.com .

LINK

Although I took an employee position a couple of years ago, I still retain some legacies of my days as a consultant. I have scores of books about development and seven suits in shades ranging from grey to black; I also have the U3 drive with tools that I either found on SourceForge or wrote myself installed on it. Yes, I said installed; U3 software isn’t something you write or get from SourceForge–it’s something that you download from U3 Software Central (Figure A).

Figure A

U3 Software Central

For the longest time, I’d hunt around U3 Software Central and hope that I’d find something reasonably close to what I needed. Unfortunately, more often than not, I’d leave disappointed. This lack of results usually meant that I’d have a folder full of executables on my drive that I’d need to navigate to. At least that’s what used to happen before I found a program called U3 Package Prototyper (Figure B), which takes an executable file and creates a prototype U3 package from it.

Figure B

U3 Package Prototyper

U3 Package Prototyper is pretty much foolproof as long as you keep in mind these three things:

• This utility is for prototyping not for creating packages that require multiple dlls, so if there is a single exe file, you’re good to go.
• If the executable is named release, then the name on the U3 LaunchPad will be Prototype of release, which is not very meaningful.
• A unique icon is a good idea.

In Visual Studio, icons can be added by right-clicking on the project and selecting Properties. You’ll get a screen like the one in Figure C; from there, you can hunt around for an icon that you’ve created, found on your computer, or downloaded from a Web site like Icon Archive.

Figure C

Visual Studio project properties

Using U3 Package Prototyper, I was able to create a portable version of my ApplyStyleSheets utility. I use it for testing XSL style sheets that may or may not have extension functions; it’s one of those things that I don’t leave home without. Having it installed on my U3 drive certainly makes my life easier.

However, U3 Package Prototyper does have several issues, the least of which is that it appends every program name with U3 Prototype of (Figure D). I could live with this annoyance, but what I can’t live with is the limitation of only a single executable. So, if I’m creating anything more than a quick and dirty U3 package, I use PackageFactory for U3.

Figure D

U3 Launchpad

PackageFactory for U3 is equivalent to U3 Package Prototyper in much the same way that a zip drive is to a stack of punch cards. It has a GUI (Figure E), and it has an Advanced Mode where it’s possible to add company name, version number, description, an application URL, and more executables (Figure F). With a little ambition I might be able to update the OpenOffice on my U3 drive to something a little more recent than version 2.0.

Figure E

PackageFactory for U3

Figure F

PackageFactory for U3 Advanced Mode

I’ve been using both of these programs for a while now without any problems–unless you think that buying a second 4 GB SanDisk USB drive is a problem or that pricing the 8 GB, 16 GB, and 32 GB drives is problem. My only real concern is my growing obsession with installing my own applications.

Edmond Woychowsky is a Network Administrator in the Healthcare industry. He is also interested in many geeky things, including science fiction, gaming, and technology.

By Brian Prince on 2010-05-10
Even with the economic struggles of the past few years, IT security is the one area that has been relatively resilient. Recent research from the first three months of 2010 by analyst Foote Partners noted a jump in pay premiums for IT professionals working in the IT security business. What certifications and skills are in demand? eWEEK spoke to analysts, researchers and representatives from ClearanceJobs.com to get a bead on the hottest security certifications job hunters need.

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