Scott Hanselman

Secure and Private Browsing

September 06, 2006 Comment on this post [10] Posted in Tools

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So, after the Browzar fiasco, I went looking for a simple, secure, private Portable Browser that I could use to surf the net in strange places with.

What I found is TorPark. It's a modification of Portable Firefox (a version of Firefox for running portably on USB sticks) with Tor built in. TorPark takes Portable Firefox and preconfigures a number of Privacy-related Extensions.

The more people who are using Tor at any one time, the more anonymous it is. It's basically a giant, distributed Proxy Server. Everyone gets pages for everyone else.

I tried it, and while it's slower of course than going directly, I saw that my traffic was routed through a number of countries, just by repeatedly visiting WhatIsMyIPAddress.com.

This seems like a much safer and reasonable alternative to Browzar if you're in the market for a portable, private browser.

Here's TCPView running while I run TorPark. Notice Firefox only talking to localhost while Tor.exe connects to random Tor proxies.

I also run my installation of TorPark on a TrueCrypt encrypted Traveller Disk on my USB device. I talk about TrueCrypt in this post.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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Microsummaries - Über Simple Syndication

September 05, 2006 Comment on this post [0] Posted in ASP.NET | DasBlog | Musings

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I'm still not quite sure why Microsummaries are useful...seems like USS (Über Simple Syndication - my term) to me. I've been meaning to add this to my blog since I heard about it a few months ago, but then MikeG added microsummaries to his site and I figured if a Luddite like Mike would support this emerging format, then I would too. :)

Basically this is how it works:

Add a <link> tag inside the <head> of your document like this.

<link rel="microsummary" type="application/x.microsummary+xml" href="http://www.hanselman.com/blog/Microsummary.ashx" />

In your Microsummary endpoint, return some text/plain with the text you want to show up in the live bookmark.
In FireFox Beta 2, either bookmark this site, or drag a link to this site to your toolbar:
If you've created the link in your toolbar, right click and select Properties and pick the Microsummary (or "Live Title"). If you've created the link via Add Bookmark, you should already be at this dialog.
Once the Microsummary has been selected, it will show up as the title of your bookmark or toolbar button.

This is easy to do to any ASP.NET site. Add an very basic HttpHandler with code like this:

using System;
using System.Web;
 
namespace Foo.Web.Services
{
    public class MicrosummaryHandler : IHttpHandler
    {
        public MicrosummaryHandler() {}
 
        public bool IsReusable{get{return true;}}
 
        public void ProcessRequest( HttpContext context )
        {
             context.Response.Write("Yay Microsummaries...get your summaries here. Get them anywhere.");
        }
    }
}

And add it to your web.config, of course:

You can also use Microsummary Generators that are basically formalized screenscraping of existing (x)HTML. You make an XSLT that yanks what you want and turns that into plain text suitable for a toolbar button.

Direct (free) support for this has been checked into DasBlog and will be in the daily builds if we ever get this g*dforsaken thing to ship. :)

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Coding4Fun Hardware Webcast - Available Offline

September 02, 2006 Comment on this post [1] Posted in Coding4Fun

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A few months back I did a Coding4Fun Hardware Webcast. I'll probably do a few more, but for now, I just noticed that it's available offline.

You can download the Webcast as a WMV. You don't have to get the Live Meeting Player unless you want the better quality output.

You have to jump through a few Passport hoops to get to it, but considering that it was a Webcast about Hardware, it's pretty good. I use the Webcam to take photos of what I'm doing, so you get a pretty good idea of what's up. It's more code and demos than slides.

All the demos and code are based on Coding4Fun articles from my column "SomeAssemblyRequired" there. I have two articles in the hopper I've already turned in with two more on the way.

Dan Fernandez has blogged that he's having trouble keeping up, but they are in the middle of a V2 of the whole Coding4Fun site. Be sure to visit his blog and give feedback on what you think can be done to make the site better. There's definitely a Hobbyist Renaissance at Microsoft right now. I'm having a blast, as I hope you'll see in the next four articles where I interface .NET with lots of hardware, some years old, some brand new, some robots and some bar code readers. Very cool stuff.

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A New Private Browser - I mean Browzar - does not work as advertised

August 31, 2006 Comment on this post [18] Posted in Reviews

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UPDATE: Looks like I was mentioned on the BBC. I'm afraid they miss the point:

However, some computer experts say they have already identified flaws in Browzar. Scott Hanselman, writing on his blog Computer Zen, claims to have been able to find records of websites he had visited with the program installed.

"Browzar, at least this version, is totally not doing what it says it does," he writes.

The newly released software is entering a market dominated by Internet Explorer.

Of course, the joke here is that Browzar is a wrapper around Internet Explorer.

I had a 2 gig USB Drive, but it was huge and I didn't use it as much as I could. Then I picked up one of these OCZ 2GB Flash for ~~$40~~ $31 after rebate (that's not a typo!) at Omar's recommendation. It's freaking small.

Then I secured it - you'd be a fool not to, IMHO. Now I'm getting all my Portable Apps moved over to it as well.

Portable apps mean that they can be run directly from a USB Drive without installation. There's a portable version of Firefox, for example.

However, I noticed this little browser, called Browzar, mentioned in this InformationWeek article, that is a single 265k EXE that basically wraps IE 5.5 or above (works fine with 7.0) and is a "private browser." That means it doesn't save cookies or history or autocomplete. Sounds like a convenient thing to have on one's USB drive if one didn't want to leave (blatent) footprints.

Well, since it's hosting IE, I want to see what it's doing. So, I fired it up and visited the naughtiest site I could think of, Pl*yboy, while running Filemon. Here's a screenshot of the cached naughty gifs going in my Temporary Internet Files folder. Notice that Browzar deletes the gifs as soon as it sees them.

Then I closed the browser...You can see here that it deleted a bunch of cookies and such, trying to clean up. However, while it deleted the cookies, it didn't delete the page itself, just closed it.

Notice here, later, I find the file in my IE Cache:

So, Browzar, at least this version, is totally not doing what it says it does. That's a bummer. Maybe next version.

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How to Programmatically Detect if an Assembly is Compiled in Debug or Release mode

August 30, 2006 Comment on this post [12] Posted in Programming

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Nagaraj from my company made this little util recently to run against a compiled assembly and see if it is a Debug or Release version. I added the DOS ErrorLevel return codes.

using System;
using System.IO;
using System.Diagnostics;
using System.Reflection;
 
namespace Foo.Tools
{
    class BuildFind
    {
        public static int GetBuildType(string AssemblyName)
        {
            Assembly assm = Assembly.LoadFrom(AssemblyName);
            object[] attributes = assm.GetCustomAttributes(typeof(DebuggableAttribute), false);
 
            if (attributes.Length == 0)
            {
                Console.WriteLine(String.Format("{0} is a RELEASE Build....", AssemblyName));
                return 0;
            }
            foreach (Attribute attr in attributes)
            {
                if (attr is DebuggableAttribute)
                {
                    DebuggableAttribute d = attr as DebuggableAttribute;
                    Console.WriteLine(
                       String.Format("Run time Optimizer is enabled : {0}", !d.IsJITOptimizerDisabled));
                    Console.WriteLine(
                        String.Format("Run time Tracking is enabled : {0}", d.IsJITTrackingEnabled));
                    if (d.IsJITOptimizerDisabled == true)
                    {
                        Console.WriteLine(String.Format("{0} is a DEBUG Build....", AssemblyName));
                        return 1;
                    }
                    else
                    {
                        Console.WriteLine(String.Format("{0} is a RELEASE Build....", AssemblyName));
                        return 0;
                    }
                }
            }
            return 3;
        }
 
        [STAThread]
        static int Main(string[] args)
        {
            if (args.Length == 0)
            {
                Console.WriteLine("Usage GetBuildType <assemblyName>");
                return 2;
            }
            return BuildFind.GetBuildType(args[0]);
        }
    }
}

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