Category Archives: Software

Ever since I installed Firefox 1.5 (and later 1.5.0.1) I have had nothing but grief. Freezes. CPU spikes usually in the 50s — which meant it took 20 seconds for anything to happen — but sometimes much higher, verging on 100%, which meant nothing happened however long I waited. Even if I didn’t get a CPU spike, going away from the machine with Firefox open in a window, even in the background, would make it freeze up, requiring that I use the task manager to kill it.

The problem was especially bad when I loaded a particular large and complex web page that I use several times a day (no, not this blog) — not only did it load slowly, but it would bring Firefox to its knees every time. And yet it worked fine in 1.07.

My first Google search suggested it was probably a plugin issue. I duly changed from Adblock to Adblock plus. I used less aggressive Adblock settlings. I replaced my tab manager with something that had a better reputation for playing nice with others. I removed this plugin, then that one. (See below for a list of what I’m running now — an only partly restored list from what I used to use.)

Nothing worked.

I disabled the prefetch. I turned off Bfcache — the caching of recently viewed pages — losing the lightening back and forth which was one of the best reasons to upgrade.

And of course I followed the directions at InternetWeek to play with settings in about.config to reduce the cache. And I carefully followed the directions as to what settings to use in place of the defaults for the about:config setting in browser.cache.memory.capacity.

Nothing worked.

But at last I can report that I think I have found the magic bullet: Ignore the directions in the cookbook about setting browser.cache.memory.capacity to 15000 if you have up to 1 Gig of RAM, or maybe 32768 if you have a full gig. I have a full gig of RAM, and it’s not shared with my graphics card, and my problem only went away when I shrank browser.cache.memory.capacity to the absurdly small 8192.

That worked.

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Something called HTCPIP.DLL is trying to access 213.105.33.222:8080. My firewall blocked it. Normally when a new program tries to phone home, I do a search of my disk to find out what directory it lives in, to see if it is part of something I approve of. And I do a google search to see what other people say it does.

In all the years I’ve been doing this, this was the first time both searches turned up negative. Regedit reveals one entry with the value HTCPIP.DLL in the registry at My Computer\HKEY_CURRRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Explorer Bars\{C4EE31f3-4768-11D2-BE5c-00A)C9A83Da1}\FilesNamedMRU\000\ (Type REG_SZ)

This is of course as clear as mud.

So I ran an online virus-checker. The only thing worth worrying about was a downloaded file carrying something that identified as “Backdoor.Win32.Breplibot.v”… but there’s nothing with that exact name at google either. (The Backdoor.Win32.Breplibot family doesn’t sound very nice, though.)

Have I got a virus so new that no one has recorded it? Is it sitting in some Sony-rootkit-like partition I don’t even know about?

Via The Inquirer, the provocative Is your firewall spying on you?, pointing to this Infoworld item by Robert X. Cringley fingering my favorite software firewall, ZoneAlarm:

A Perfect Spy? It seems that ZoneAlarm Security Suite has been phoning home, even when told not to. Last fall, InfoWorld Senior Contributing Editor James Borck discovered ZA 6.0 was surreptitiously sending encrypted data back to four different servers, despite disabling all of the suite’s communications options. Zone Labs denied the flaw for nearly two months, then eventually chalked it up to a “bug” in the software — even though instructions to contact the servers were set out in the program’s XML code. A company spokesmodel says a fix for the flaw will be coming soon and worried users can get around the bug by modifying their Host file settings. However, there’s no truth to the rumor that the NSA used ZoneAlarm to spy on U.S. citizens.

To which the Inq adds,

In the meantime you can work around it by adding:
# Block access to ZoneLabs Server
127.0.0.1 zonelabs.com
to your Windows host file.

The hosts file on my windows XP setup would be c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts. [On a Windows 95/98/ME machine, look in c:\windows\hosts; for Windows NT or 2000 it should be at c:\winnt\system32\drivers\etc\hosts.]

Here’s what I’d like to know: By adding this line to the hosts file, will one also block other things from Zonealarm … like downloads of updates? And if not, how do I test if it’s working to fix the ‘phone home’ problem? (And if so, how do I know when it’s time to take it out?)

Lawyers especially will want to take note of this very useful document identified by Cory Doctorow. It seems the NSA’s Architectures and Applications Division of the Systems and Network Attack Center (SNAC) Information Assurance Directorate, no less, has released a long report on Redacting with Confidence: How to Safely Publish Sanitized Reports Converted From Word to PDF.

It’s released as a pdf!

TheInquirer.com claims that Firefox 1.5 is coming out today. But there’s nothing on the website yet.

My RSS newsreader of choice is something called feed on feeds (FoF), which is a light weight server-side aggregator with easily customized CSS. It’s certainly not for everyone — you have to have a unix-based server, it helps to be a bit of a control freak, and you absolutely have to hate glitz — but I really like it.

FoF was built to read RSS 1.0, then tweaked to read Atom feeds too. And it does that pretty well. But I have run into one bug I don’t know how to fix. RSS 1.0 reports the name of the author of a post in a field called “dc:creator”; FoF expects that and knows how to display it. But Atom puts the author inside nested “author” and “name” tags — and FOF just seems to ignore those. That makes it hard to read the increasing number of group blogs which only offer an Atom feed since you don’t know who the author is.

I’ve found the place in the FoF code where the interpretation of the dc:creator tag happens, but it seems linked to building and reading MySQL tables, and since I don’t speak MySQL, I know better than to play with that. I tried emailing the author of the FOF, but no reply. He’s commented on this blog in the past, perhaps because he has some sort of search going looking for mentions of feed on feeds, so that’s why I’m posting this here.

Hey Steve Minutillo, you still out there? Please?