On Mon, 5 Jan 2004 12:18:19 -0800, "jim price"

Corrolory: Always maintain an Undo path   :-)

I always assume 25% of what I do will be wrong, so am mindful of how
I'll undo whatever it is that I do.  That rules out (or at least,
against) most fire-and-forget fixers such as ChkDsk /F, autofixing of
registry, SR, "just re-install", registry cleaners and so on.

The more value you add to the installation and setup process, the
better your running mileage - but the more costly is anything that
forces you to scorch and re-install.

No, it wouldn't be.  You'd come to rely on the OS warning you about
what is imprtant and what isn't, and there's no way it can know that
(hint; 3rd-party applications you *run* on the OS).  

Rather know that when you swing the broadswoard, it's up to you to
know where the walls and valuables are!  

For that reason, I generally undo the patchy and inconsistent attempts
the OS makes to "mother" you, e.g.
 - warning of deleting .exe, but not shared .dll
 - hiding files you may need to see (such as dropped malware)
 - hiding .ext, making WYSIWYG risk assessment impossible

Perhaps the best example of lack of "big picture" awareness is hiding
"do these often" tasks such as Backup, Scandisk, and arguably Defrag
in the bowels of Properties, Tools, and then plonking FORMAT in the
middle of the rt-click menu between common tasks and Properties.

I remember a cartoon drawing illustrating an article on "bad
ergonomics": Reagan's desk, with two buttons right next to each other,
labelled "Launch" and "Lunch".

Yep.  Though I can't remember (or think of) a context where IE would
help resolve a troubleshooting or stability issue   :-)

The "can't d-n-d / copy-or-paste" mileage I've seen often when the
versions of various shell components get scrambled, as can happen with
failed IE upgrades, or a "just re-install" over newer IE.

On MIME-spoofing; yep, read the URL, it was written so I didn't have
to write the whole story in various posts every time.  Consider:
 - what the HTML says a file is
 - what the file name extension says the file is
 - what the icon says it is (but seriously, folks...)
 - what the file's internal header says it is
 - what it actually does

For WYSIWYG security (risk assessment), all of these have to be
consistent.  Whenever code fails to cross-reference these cues (which
are good tip-offs about likely hostile intent), exploit opportunities
arise, where the need for SE is reduced ("I thought it was a Word
document - I'd never have run it if it was code!") or removed.

  (SE = Social Engineering, as in: "Hi, I'm Bob from your ISP,
  just doing the rounds to ensure our service is reliable from
  our client's perspective.  Let's have your password so I
  can measure the login response time..."

MIME-spoofing breaks the rule that the MIME description that is used
to decide whether to "open" the file inline or offer a link instead,
should match what the file is.  So raw code gets "opened"
automatically by the HTML rendering engine, if it happens to be
described as a MIME type safe to render inline.

Other flaws are where Windows looks at the internal content of the
file for cues as how to "open" the file, and doesn't check this
against the file name extension (which is all *you* have to decide on
how much of a risk you are taking).  Some extensions are hidden
anyway, and raw code hidden within such files that are supposed to be
DOS shortcuts is run, because there's no type check there either.

A file that is MIME-wrapped as safe, named as safe, has a safe icon
<snort>, is internally of a safe type, can still be a risk if code
defects allow it to overrun unchecked buffers and run that way.

Why am I so dismissive on icons, which are ostensibly a more
user-friendly way of providing the same info as inscrutible file name
extensions?  Because the most dangerous file type of all - raw code -
can have any icon embedded in it, that's why!

It is a command line utility that is used to extract files from within
Microsoft's proprietary .cab archives; think of it as the MS
equivalent of PKUnZip, ARJ, etc.

Arj  X  ARCHIVE.ARJ  Wanted.txt
PKUnZip  BACKUP.ZIP  LostFile.doc
Extract /A  Win95_02.cab  Shell32.dll

Same concept, different vocabulary   :-)

That maths still sucks for some tasks, e.g. ballpointing a "to do"
note on a scrap of paper vs. Outlook, New, Task etc.

When Outlook 97 first came out, I really did try to get into it.  I
ended up spending 80% of my time on "meta-work", futzing over fonts
within pop-up reminders etc. instead of actually *working*.  

It's not that Outlook is bad at this (it's far worse at other things)
it's just that the tasks are inherently too click-rich to be done more
efficiently on the PC than by hand.

  "We have captured lightning and used
   it to teach sand how to think."