The Gmail password hijacking incident: When so-called helpful apps hurt

An application dubbed G-Archiver backs up your Gmail account to a hard drive with a not-so-nice twist: It swipes your user name and password.

I was looking for a way to back up my gmail account to a local drive. I've accumulated a mass of important information that I would rather not lose. During my search I came across G-Archiver, I figured what the heck I'll give it a try.

It didn't really have the functionality I was looking for, but being a programmer myself I used Reflector to take a peek at the source code. What I came across was quite shocking. John Terry, the apparent creator, hard coded his username and password to his gmail account in source code. All right, not the smartest thing in the world to do, but then I noticed that every time a user adds their account to the program to back up their data, it sends and email with their username and password to his personal email box! Having just entered my own information I became concerned.

I opened up a browser and logged in to gmail using his account information. It still worked.

 Upon getting to the inbox I was greeted with 1,777 emails with account information for everyone who had ever used the software and right at the top was mine. I decided to go ahead and blast every email to the deleted folder and then empty it. I may have accidentally changed the password and security question to something I don't remember as well, whoops, my bad. I also contacted google to erase this account as I didn't see a way to delete it myself.

I come up with a different conclusion: You just can’t trust a lot of the software out there. What apps can you really trust? This G-Archiver thing sounds way helpful, but it isn’t by any stretch.

But what’s really worrisome is that Atwood’s tale shows how someone who actually knows code can take a hit. I couldn’t have deciphered that the application was hijacking my user name and password. A lot of people couldn’t.

If you add it up I can only come to one conclusion: Don’t trust software from companies you’ve never heard of. The problem: These incidents could have a big chilling effect on legit software companies.

Fixing The Firefox Memory Leak

in case you didnt know Firefox has a small memory leakage problems that can cause your pc to freeze up. basically what happens is when you minimize Firefox it stops consuming memory, however when you maximize it again the memory usage will increase, sometimes even doubling. fortunately, there is a small fix that you can implement.
heres what you do:

1. Open Firefox and go to the Address Bar. Type in about:config and then press Enter.
2. Right Click in the page and select New -> Boolean.
3. In the box that pops up enter config.trim_on_minimize. Press Enter.
4. Now select True and then press Enter.
5. Restart Firefox.
Now Firefox will stop eating your memory..........

How to Really reduce the memory usage in Firefox

After the release of Firefox 2.0, the memory leak has become an even more notorious problem than before. On average, FirefoxFirefox’s memorymemory leak problem in Firefox already. The reason why I’m writing another one on Vista Rewired is because none of those have worked very well for me. This one will be a little different because I’ve added a few of my ingredients in. should take up no more than 80MB of RAM. Any more than that and you can consider yourself a victim of leak. I’m sure you’ve probably already seen a ton of guides on how to fix the

Just to give you a heads-up, this guide is going to be quite long but it’ll cover everything you need to know.

Before we do anything, make sure you have the newest version of Firefox. If you don’t have the latest version, you can

1) Check your extensions and themes:
The most common cause for high memory usage for Firefox usually lies in the extensions and themes. If you overloaded your Firefox with extensions, you can expect high memory usage. Uninstall the ones you don’t need, and update all the ones you will be using. After that, you’ll first want to consult this list of problematic extensions that could be causing the problem. Make sure none of the extensions you are running are on that list.

After comparing with that list, if you still have the problem, it could be the result of a newly installed theme or extension. Experiment with shutting down suspicious extensions or switching themes.

2) Start Firefox in Safe Mode

If one of your extensions is not in that list, boot Firefox into Safe Mode to disable all extensions and themes. You can do this by going to Start > Run, and entering:

firefox -safe-mode

A box similar to the one below should appear.

Check Disable all add-ons, then select Continue in Safe Mode. Now, compare the RAM usage of when Firefox had it’s add-ons enabled and when they were disabled.
You can expect a difference of a couple megabytes since the extensions have been disabled. But if you notice a large difference in RAM usage, this may suggest a problem within your extensions or theme.

How To Recover Vista After XP Installation

If you have installed, say, XP, on a Vista machine, in the Boot Menu, you may no longer be able to see Vista as an option. This occurs because when a different version of Windows is installed, it rewrites the MBR to call its own boot loader.

So if you install Vista on a PC where XP is already installed, the Vista boot menu incorporates the options from the older OS’s boot menu. But, on the other hand, if you install XP on Vista, it will overwrite the MBR with one that does not recognize the newer Vista’s Boot Loader.

So if you find that Vista is missing as an option in a multi-boot computer, you can resolve this issue, as follows :

Open cmd in XP.
Run :\Boot\ Bootsect.exe –NT60 All
Where is the Drive letter.
Reboot.

You will now be able to see the Vista menu option/s.

Now To restore the entry for XP, open an elevated command prompt and enter this:

Bcdedit –create {ntldr} –d “Put Description of Menu here”
Restart Computer.