These days there are plenty of reasons to have a second computer to do all those technologically “dangerous” tasks that could compromise a computer’s operating system integrity.

You might be downloading new software, either legally or illegally, which could contain spyware or viruses that could cause your PC or Mac to grind to a halt or leak personal and financial information.

Personal privacy is also another good reason for second computer, especially when you have family members or work colleges accessing your computer. Nobody needs to know about the tell-tale novel you are writing or the “special interest” websites you like to visit and download software or media from.

Coming to your rescue are two unlikely partners that, working together, can provide you with a little piece of mind: Microsoft Windows and TrueCrypt.

Virtually “Windows”

Microsoft have been providing their users with some fairly reliable and free virtualisation technology for desktop machines called Virtual PC. With the release of Windows 7, users can now download a free copy of Windows XP (or install your own copy of any Windows version) and run their “legacy” applications in a virtual environment hosted by your laptop or desktop.

All Windows virtual machines save their operating system and user data within a virtual hard drive container. This virtual drive is stored as a single [large] file on your host machine, much like a Zip or RAR archive …

This means that you can test out new or dubious software in a protected, virtual environment that doesn’t effect your desktop environment. If there is a problem then you can simply delete the virtual image and copy in a new virtual operating system image to start again.

A virtual life for the average user …

Traditionally organisations have used virtual environments to test their software under controlled conditions (usually with Virtual Server or Hyper-V), but for a regular user with a few odds and ends to hide a virtual machine can help then lead a relatively secret virtual life.

Just imagine having another virtual computer, hidden within your desktop, that allows you roam the internet, work on documents and download files without allowing other people or family members to access it. Even better, you can copy your virtual computer’s virtual hard drive “file” to any other computer and use it … In essence you can take your virtual computer to work and home again, all on a USB drive or key.

Opening your virtual can of worms …

… is not what you want people to do. Within your new virtual machine you might want your secrets or your private work hidden from prying eyes. Simply because your using a virtual computer doesn’t mean someone can’t mount your virtual hard drive container and browse it like it was a USB drive they found on the street.

With a little Googling, you’ll probably realise that the average user’s operating system (Mac users included) can have their login screen security bypassed and data pried from their hard drives with a screwdriver and an IDE/SATA drive cable. Someone may not be able to log into you virtual machine but, with a little bit of knowledge, they could examine the virtual operating system to see what you’ve been up to and copy your files.

Your desktop computer can suffer from similar attacks so it would make sense to apply “real” computer privacy solutions to your virtual world. In one word: “Encryption”.

Disk Encryption … Physical and Virtual!

Without going into the numerous encryption options available, TrueCrypt presents the best of many worlds. TrueCrypt is free, an open source, has a huge community following, provides whole disk encryption and supports AES and other cryptographically strong encryption algorithms. More importantly, we can TrueCrypt’s disk encryption with our Windows virtual machine.

Setting up TrueCrypt with Disk Encryption

There is plenty of documentation available via Googling and on the TrueCrypt website on how to enable disk encryption but the basic flow to get it up and running on your virtual machine is as follows:

• Log into your Windows virtual machine as a user with Administrator privledges.
• Download the latest version of TrueCrypt installer package from their website (www.truecrypt.org).
• Launch the package and install as you would any other program.
• Run TrueCrypt and select the “Encrypt System/Partition Drive” from the “System” menu.

From there you should be presented with a wizard to select your encryption algorithm, your pass-phrase and to create a recovery disk. TrueCrypt won’t let you encrypt your disk/partition without creating a recovery disk, just in case you forget you pass-phrase …

Once you have memorised your pass-phrase, DESTROY THE TRUECRYPT RECOVERY DISK! If your recovery disk is laying around then it won’t matter how strong you pass-phrase was because anybody (family, work colleges or law-enforcement) can pop it into an optical drive then decrypt and access your operating system … Which leads us back to one of our initial problems.

For a YouTube tutorial, check out this video.

The TrueCrypt Bootloader

Once you’ve been through TrueCrypt’s wizard and encrypted virtual machine’s partition, everything should appear normal. The only major difference you’ll notice is that when you start your virtual machine, you’ll be presented with a TrueCrypt boot screen to enter your secure pass-phrase. Get your pass-phrase correct and you log into windows, run your applications and you do what you normally do.

Forget your pass-phrase wrong and you are shite outta luck … unless you kept your TrueCrypt recovery disk.

Overall results?

No security solution is perfect, especially when there are so many factors we can’t control. From keystroke loggers to law enforcement monitoring your internet access from home and the IT department monitoring your internet access from work, we can’t control everything.

With the basic combination of TrueCrypt and Virtual PC you can control the storage of your data and hide your activities to a certain degree for both casual and persistent snoopers.

Remember, when you know you are in trouble just forget your password and delete your virtual hard drive file. Even if some authority was able to recover the deleted virtual machine file, they still need your password to get at the operating system and it’s data. Those really loooong pass-phrases are all to easy to forget sometimes, especially when you are under stress.

These “Green” WD RE4-GP drives implement an Idle3 mode which was designed to reduce power consumption, in part by positioning the heads in a park position (unloading the heads) and turning off unnecessary electronics, resulting in substantial power savings. The only problem was that as soon as Idle3 mode kicked in (after 12.8 seconds of inactivity) the ReadyNAS Pro woke it straight back up again with background system activity. This meant that the drive heads were being mechanically parked and unparked every 13 seconds … About 6,500 times a day!

Through a little Googling, with some trial and error I found a long lost Western Digital utility (WDIDLE3.EXE) which allowed you to adjust the amount of time before the drive went to sleep.

Many ReadyNAS users opted to disable the “Idle3″ feature, but this really defeated the purpose of paying the extra money for these Green drives. Instead, after setting my idle timeout to 254 milliseconds, everything went back to normal … The drives went into idle mode properly without be woken by the ReadyNAS, my S.M.A.R.T LCC attribute remained at sensible levels and my power bills stayed down.

Since then ReadyNAS’s RAIDiator operating system has been upgraded to 4.2.8 (x86) and now contains an O/S fix to prevent the WD RE4-GP from powering up prematurely. Problem now solved!

Regardless of this ReadyNAS Pro specific fix, I’ve had people on a weekly basis email me about getting a copy of the WDIDLE3 executable! Instead of me mailing it out each time, I’ve decided to bundle it up into a ISO CD that you can just boot off directly which you can download from wdidle3.iso.zip.

If you were too afraid to upgrade to RAIDiator 4.2.8 or you just want to revert their previous Idle3 firmare changes can follow these simple instructions.

WARNING! The following instructions and ISO worked for my own drives, but may not work for yours so use at your own risk. My own hard drive model numbers are “WDC WD2002FYPS-01U1B0″ and their firmware versions are “04.05G04″.

1. Download the WDIDLE3 ISO from wdidle3.iso.zip (294.2 kB).
2. Burn the WDIDLE3 ISO to CD.
3. Attach your WD RE4-GP to a PC and boot from the WDIDLE3 ISO CD.
4. At the DOS prompt type “WDIDLE3.EXE /S254” to increase your timeout or “WDIDLE3.EXE /S128” to restore it back to normal.
5. Power down your PC and remove your WD RE4-GP.
6. Insert WD RE4-GP back into your ReadyNAS and check your S.M.A.R.T LCC count isn’t incrementing wildly!

You can read more about this compatibility issue here at the ReadyNAS Hardware Compatibility page.

Back when I was at school a Megabyte (MB) was 1,024 Kilobytes (KB) or 1,048,576 Bytes. Well nowadays hardware manufacturers have a different IEEE take on what a Gigabyte is. For users like you and me, a Gigabyte is 1,073,741,824 (1024^3) bytes but for the manufacturer it’s 1,000,000,000 (1000^3) bytes. This means that the Gibibyte (binary) is the new Gigabyte and the Gigabyte is now … metric?

Needless to say I’ve been caught out a few times as to how much data you can actually burn onto DVD-5 and  DVD-9 media without getting the “Not enough free space” message. Burning TrueCrypt data files and WinRAR archives, I wanted to get the file size right when it came time to archive to DVD.

Pretty much most DVD-5 packaging touts 4.7 GB available, but as we well know this is based on the manufacturer’s Gigabyte definition (Base-10), not a computer science based Gibibyte definitions (Base-2). Your standard DVD+R actually ends up with 4.377 GiB (~2,294,800 sectors) and a DVD-R with 4.382 GiB (~2,297,400 sectors) with each sector having 2,048 bytes.

To be on the safe side, I’ve been creating 4.377 GiB archives which will fit on both DVD+R and DVD-R media. This means when I create my files, I’m limited to:

• 4.377 Gigabytes, or
• 4,482 Megabytes, or
• 4,589,617 Kilobytes, or
• 4,699,767,963 Bytes

Now go and burn your downloaded movie library to DVD you crazy kids! :p

You may not realise it but your computer system is under constant attack from internet entities, prodding and poking your IP address for slithers of information. Everything from downloading your favorite BitTorrent data to browsing websites draws attention from someone on the internet.

Coming to my rescue is PeerBlock, a powerful application with a small installation signature that actively blocks undesirable internet traffic from specific domains or IP address ranges.

PeerBlock regularly downloads updated IP address lists of advertising, nasty spyware, government and anti-piracy organisations. This means that applications or websites trying to contact addresses on these lists will be automatically blocked, stopping harmful data from being downloaded and any valuable information being uploaded (including being able to track you from website to website).

If you are a regular user of BitTorrent clients then this tool in invaluable in deterring unwanted attention from other malicious peers. PeerBlock plays a very important role for users who download pirated copyright material by blocking out anti-P2P traffic from copyright enforcement agencies.

Download PeerBlock for Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7 from www.peerblock.com

One of my eBay gems arrived today – The MD80 Spy Camera … Well at least the fake, cheaper version of it. For AU$15 I wasn’t expecting too much from this unit but I was surprised how good the knock-off quality was, both case construction and video capture.

The tiny 1.5″ unit takes a standard MiniSD card (8GB max) and requires a USB connection for charging and accessing recorded AVI movies (720×480). What’s great is that you don’t need to install any third party software or drivers to access the data on you MiniSD card so it really is a portable plug-n-play device.

I got at least 2 hours out of this unit which records 720×480 video @ 30 fps at the click of a button. Check out the quality of the output in this impromptu video.

All I can say about this “spy” camera is pretty convenient and super portable. Stick it in your pocket or gym bag and you can whip it out for cat fights or if you just want to critique your boxing style. Speaking of critique … I’ve been way too lazy over the past 6 months and really need to work on my right hook!

eBay Store: AROS Digital Store Original Manufacturer: AEE