1. Let’s get Firefox

That’s right, my PC is on MSIE 6. The whole company network is. Even the IT guys complain about this, but we’re stuck on Internet Explorer 6 and this might last still a while. There’s no running an installer here, so I went for the portable version, as usual.

First problem: exe blocked

First surprise of the day: no can download an executable file. This must be a new policy since it used to be possible half a year ago. Never mind, let’s get a zipped version… or so I thought. But I found out that it’d been a while since they last released the Portable Fox as a ZIP. Additionnally, although Protable Apps do list their old versions, they only list the exe ones. The easy solution is of course to zip Portable Firefox at home then bring it at home, but the I’m-in-a-hurry solution was to go find a zipped version. After a lot of disappointing searches (a lot of sites refer to portable firefox as a zip file, probably because they haven’t been updated during the last 4 years…), I resigned to get a pretty old version, 1.5.7, from sourceforge.
Edit (June 15): here is the current version (3.6.3) of Firefox Portable as a 7-Zip archive.

Second problem: configuring the connection

Firefox wasn’t able to connect to Internet. Which wasn’t really surprising since I knew my company requires us to go through a proxy. The problem was: how to find informations about that proxy?
In Internet options? → They’re hidden.
Use Firefox’s option “use the same proxy settings as MSIE”? → Should work but isn’t available in Firefox 1.5.
In the registry? → Good idea, but then how to launch regedit?
The run menu is disabled (Windows key+R returns an error), but there’s a cheap and easy workaround: batch files. Create a new text file, put regeditin it, change the file extension from .txt to .bat and run it. (NB: for the more generic command prompt, do the same replacing regedit with cmd) Now that we’re in the registry, we just need to browse to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings (thanks to the manual). In this key, the proxy is stored in the DWORD value ProxyServer, and the exclusion list (Firefox’s “No Proxy for” field) is stored in ProxyOverride.
If you don’t know or can’t figure out by yourself how to use this information to configure Firefox you probably shouldn’t be following this guide. But since I like unreasonable stuff I’m still pointing you to the direction: go to Tools → Options, then in General → Connection Settings. Then check “Manual proxy configuration”, enter your proxy in the HTTP proxy field, also add the port (that’s the part of the proxy address after the column, e.g. in myproxy.com:80 the port is 80 and the proxy is myproxy.com). Also check “Use this proxy server for all protocols”. Finally, fill the “No Proxy for” field as mentioned earlier. Click OK as many times as needed, and try again to load a website. If it still fails probably you did something wrong, but it’s also possible that your company filters which programs can or can’t connect (firewall…), and then sorry but you’ll have to stick with your corporate browser.

Finally, don’t forget…

…to update Firefox. The update package isn’t an exe file so auto-update should be able to download it. Because of performance issues (I’m, in May 2010, on a Pentium 4 2.8 GHz with 512 MiB of RAM – yes that’s like 7 years old), I chose to stay on Firefox 1.5 (so, 1.5.12), but the updater should be able to update to the latest Firefox version (and the launcher should keep working with it). If you want to stick with an old version, you can still use plenty of old add-ons since addons.mozilla.org, like sourceforge, keeps all older versions. For instance with my 1.5.12 version I installed the good old Littlefox theme, in its 1.7 version.
Edit: I just compared 1.5.12 and 3.6.3 RAM usage: when writing an e-mail in Gmail, 1.5.12 uses around 57MiB while 3.6.3 uses around 81MiB. So, it’s not that huge in absolute but it’s still a 42% relative increase.

2. Let’s get more portable stuff

In my previous tips to freedom I remained quite unspecific about the portable apps because there are so many of them. This time I’ll list a few chosen for their availability as a zipped (non executable) package (either an official package or one packed by myself for future use).

Opera

Unlike Firefox Portable, Opera Portable (actually, Opera@USB) is still being actively distributed as a zip version. You can get it there: http://www.opera-usb.com/operausben.htm.

R

Although it’s not distributed as a portable installer, R is natively portable (by this I mean, the installer can’t be run on a restricted computer, but if you just copy/paste an existing installation it will work and be 100% functional). So I simply packed my 2.10.1 installation into an archive. There: http://notepad.patheticcockroach.com/512/r-project-portable/.

Notepad++

The must-have notepad replacement with syntax highlighting for most common languages (notably R, too) is, as of today (version 5.6.8), distributed as a zip that might be usable as a portable version. To be verified… => http://sourceforge.net/projects/notepad-plus/files/. But anyway, here’s Notepad++ Portable 5.6.8 packed as a 7-Zip archive.

Name it!

I’ll add here a few things I pack for myself, but if you request some not too big ones I can do them for you, too.

Never share your password with anyone.

=> In case you’re stupid

Adjust your privacy settings to match your level of comfort, and review them often.

=> In case you aren’t curious enough to configure your account. Probably then you aren’t curious enough to be reading the safety center, but whatever…

Never share your password with anyone,

=> In case you’re stupid and you can’t read

and be cautious about posting and sharing personal information – especially information that could be used to identify you or locate you offline, such as your address or telephone number.

=> Don’t fill your profile

Report users and content that violate our Statement of Rights and Responsibilities.

=> In case you can definitely read… (and have some time to waste – which is likely to be the case since you’re on Facebook anyway)

Block and report anyone that sends you unwanted or inappropriate communications.

=> In case you don’t understand that receiving a text isn’t dangerous (I promise, it isn’t, unless you compile it or something)

Remember that while Facebook has always been based on a real name culture, and using fake names is a violation of our policies,

=> So don’t share your personal information but do share your name. Wait, isn’t that a personal information?

people are not always who they say they are.

=> In case you think your computer would refuse to upload a photo of someone else than yourself.

Use caution when accepting or sending friend requests, and keep in mind that it is always risky to meet anyone in person whom you don’t know through real world friends.

=> In case your parents never told you not to speak to strangers.

If you did learn something from the quoted texts (I seriously hope you didn’t), well, maybe you would like to keep reading. I actually learned something from this page: this post is getting me a cyberbullying point*. Hurray!

* or maybe actually a few. Damned, this test is harsh!

Want to install a specific piece of software?

Think portable. More and more software is available in a portable version. Notably, PortableApps.com has an ever growing collection of them (and they’re most if not all free as in free speech). With some portable software and in some environments, you’ll want to rename setup files to some other name not containing the word “setup” (yes, there are some administrators who think they can prevent you from installing stuff by blocking executables named “setup” or “install”). Some software isn’t distributed in a portable version but can still be made portable: for instance R can’t be found as a portable package, but if you install it at home and copy/paste the folder where you installed it, you’ll have a perfectly working R for your USB stick… or for work.

Need this cool Visio/[insert any commercial software there], but it costs money and needs a long request that may never succeed anyway?

Think Open Source Alternatives. For instance Osalt.com is a directory of commercial and open source software, which for every piece of commercial software lists the commercial counterparts. For instance you’ll find that Microsoft Visio can be replaced by Dia, StarUML or even… OpenOffice Draw. And the great thing is, most of these exist as portable apps (see previous chapter).

Want to keep your privacy when browsing around the internet?

This part is a bit more complicated. First you need a proxy with an encrypted connection. For this you can set up OpenSSH at home on Windows or on Linux, or for a faster connection on a dedicated server. Anyway we won’t detail this part (for instance on Ubuntu server you should have everything already properly set up right after installation) and we’ll assume you managed to get this proxy with SSH support. Now we’ll see how to connect to it, from Windows:

1. Get PuTTY
2. Launch it using a command like putty -D 9990 -P 22 150.127.5.5 where 150.127.5.5 is the IP of your proxy (it can also be a domain name resolving to this IP) and 22 is the port on which OpenSSH is listening on your proxy. You should create a batch file with this command to make it faster for the next times.
3. Now configure your browser (e.g. Firefox portable edition) to connect through socks proxy 127.0.0.1:9990
4. If using Firefox, in about:config configure network.proxy.socks_remote_dns to true (the default, false, means that any domain name you query will be sent unencrypted over your company’s network…)
5. Everything should be set up and working now, but you may want to check your IP to be sure you’re going through your proxy.

We’ll see in a later post how to configure PuTTY in the case where your company forces you to go through an HTTP proxy. For the moment, that will be all, folks.

… but, remember

You’ll still be vulnerable to key or screen loggers, and also your network admin will be able to see that you’re surfing through SSH, even though he won’t see what’s inside it. So stay reasonable!

Due to FeedBurner’s merging into Google, we will no longer use their service to mirror our feed. Thus we encourage you to change your subscription from FeedBurner to our Atom feed here.

Say thank you for (trying to) save you from yet another Google monopoly

Read on

Read more | Digg it

Full article | Digg it