Raymond.CC Blog

Recently I was trying out a vbscript (.vbs) and it all worked perfectly on my laptop. However when I tried the same vbscript on my test system, things didn’t go as smoothly because for some weird reason it did not work. Then I found out it was due to User Account Control which is disabled on my laptop but enabled on the test system. The vbscript requires elevation to use Windows Management Instrumentation to enable and disable hardware on device manager. Right clicking on the vbs file and there is no Run as administrator option but this is still not a big problem because I can modify the registry to add the run as administration option for vbs file. The biggest problem is the vbscript requires to run together with arguments and it is best to automatically run it when Windows is booted up.

I can’t just create a batch file to run the vbscript with arguments and put it at Startup folder because UAC will automatically block that from working without informing you. Fortunately there is a trick to bypass the UAC prompt by using the Windows Task Scheduler.

Compressed archives such as ZIP, RAR and 7z is very useful in distributing multiple files in a single package that is also smaller in size because of compression. This would probably limit most people to download the whole package in order to get some of the files inside the compressed file. If you know how a ZIP format works, you can actually code a tool that previews the contents of the ZIP files and selectively download the file without downloading the whole ZIP file. There are such programs but most of them are shareware and is a part of download manager software.

Fortunately I have just found WOBZIP, a free online service where it can either download the compressed file from the URL that you specify or files that is uploaded from your computer, then WOBZIP extracts the archive on its server and finally output a list of files that are available for you to download. The best part is WOBZIP supports a huge list of compressed archive formats such as 7z, XZ, BZIP2, GZ, TAR, ZIP, WIM, ARJ, CAB, CHM, CPIO, CramFS, DEB, DMG, FAT, HFS, ISO, LZH, LZMA, MBR, MSI, NSIS, NTFS, RAR, RPM, SquashFS, UDF, VHD, WIM and XAR, thanks to 7-zip library!

Since it is the weekends, I am not going to publish anything geeky or technical today. However I want to share a website called The Restart Page which simulates unlimited rebooting experience from vintage operating systems. Basically the web page is created as a tribute to the most significant operating systems that has been part of our geek lives. The page contains 17 restart options where it will emulate the restart process of the operating system. It really does bring back some good old memories by just looking at the restart simulation…

The Restart Page simulates reboot for the following operating systems: Amiga Workbench, Apple II, Mac OS 7, Mac OS 9, Mac OS 10, Openstep, Rhapsody, Rhapsody DR2 MS OS/2 Warp, QNX, Windows 1, Windows 3, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows Me, Windows 2000 and Windows XP.

I noticed that if I visited The Restart Page before and opens the website again at a later time, I get stuck at “THE RESTART PAGE IS NOW LOADING…” and the progress bar doesn’t move. All you need to do is refresh the page the the progress bar starts updating and then load the page with 17 shut down options.

I am able to recognize only half of the restart window. How many restarts are you able to recognize from the page?

Visit The Restart Page

Recently I got to know about a software called TweakPrefetch which is able to do exactly what the name of the software and that is tweaking Windows Prefetch and also Superfetch. Honestly, I’ve heard of it and briefly know that it has something to do with caching to speed things up in Windows computer but never really bothered to research further on it. After reading the article about Prefetch and Superfetch in TweakPrefetch’s official website, I found that it is quite important to know what is it all about especially if you have a SSD drive.

Basically Prefetch is available in Windows XP, Vista and 7 while Superfetch only available in Vista and Windows 7. These two functions aim to reduce applications startup time as well as the operating system boot time by preloading it in memory. The author of TweakPrefetch claims that prefetching in Windows XP is better left at its default value and the same goes to superfetch on Windows Vista and 7. However if you are a gamer, have a solid state drive (SSD) or the system has less than 2GB of RAM, then you might want to consider tweaking prefetch and superfetch to improve the overall performance for your system.

Before you start reading this article, please be informed that this tool is only for advanced users and there are already a couple of detections (8/43) on VirusTotal flagging this tool as suspicious or generic. I can vouch that it is a false detection and not a virus. RansomHelper is a tiny tool coded by Xylitol, who is an expert in reversing and analyzing malware, to help him save time when analyzing ransomware. A ransomware is another kind of malware where upon running, it locks up your computer and asking the user to pay in order to obtain an unlock code. The ransomware automatically runs whenever Windows is booted up and even in Safe Mode, making it difficult to remove the malware. Since a ransomware kills the explorer.exe process and then locks up the screen showing only a page with instructions on how to pay, it could be troublesome to analyze the malware.

The beautiful thing about RansomHelper is when it is running, pressing the X and Y key a couple of times will put it on top of any top most window. For example, a ransomware is at the top most window where no program can be over it. RansomHelper can easily bypass this restriction and allows you to easily open explorer, regedit, task manager or any programs that you select from there. It can even kill processes and enable disabled regedit, task manager and command prompt. Those features are quite common on some malware removal tools and here is actually what I really want to show you.

After easily jailbreaking my wife’s iPad running iOS 4.3.3 from JailBreakMe website, I’ve never updated to any new version of iOS because there wasn’t any untethered jailbreaks after that. Recently I found out that pod2g has created an untethered 5.0.1 jailbreak for non-A5 devices which means my wife’s iPad is supported. So I upgraded the iPad to iOS 5.0.1 from iTunes, ran the latest redsn0w 0.9.10b3 for Windows and followed the simple instructions. At first I got stuck at exploiting with limera1n window then I found out I did not correctly enter into DFU (Device Firmware Upgrade) mode. I tried again and this time the whole jailbreaking iOS 5.0.1 process went without a hitch.

After rebooting the iPad for the first time after jailbreaking, I noticed that some of the icons such as Contacts, Notes, Maps, Game Center and Mail at the Springboard or Home Screen became white in color. I am still able to launch the application without any problems though.

I guess many of you must have heard or probably already using Adblock Plus. Adblock Plus is a very popular advertisement blocker plugin which works only on Firefox and Chrome. The reason why it is only available to Firefox and Chrome is because they are a plugin, and not a universal ads blocker like Ad Muncher where it can support all web browsers. I guess everyone could have gone with Ad Muncher if is it a freeware but unfortunately it is a shareware that can get pretty expensive if you go for the Premium Unlimited Updates, costing a total of $109.95. Come on, an ad blocker that cost more than a hundred bucks? Definitely not everyone can afford that…

Don’t be despair because I have a good news. Recently I got to know about AdFender, a free ads blocker from leofelix. AdFender shares a similarity with Ad Muncher which is it doesn’t require any installation of plugins to web browser, hence it works on most major web browsers such as Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera, Avant, K-Meleon, Maxthon, Lunascape, Epic and more.