Microsoft announced today the release of Windows XP SP3 RC1 (Is that enough acronyms for you?)

If you are a Technet, or MSDN subscriber you can download it now

I have started testing it with a fresh XP install. No big changes over SP2. No speed increase or decrease either. It includes all of the latest hotfixes and patches so once this thing is released it will reduce your setup time for new XP machines considerably.

I will continue to test, and let you know if I find anything noteworthy about this release.

Another update to the IE6 and IE7 Virtual PC images that the IE Team at Microsoft makes available is available for download in the Microsoft Download Center. The previous ones expired on 2007-12-07; these expire on 2008-04-01.

My business requires me to safeguard the security of certain files. For years I have used Encrypted Magic Folders (EMF) from PC-Magic to encrypt those files, and to hide them from the view of an interloper. I loved it, because files were always encrypted on disk and yet were fully accessible to applications. However, when I upgraded to Vista 64, the new EMF crashed my system so completely that it was unbootable even in safe mode. I tried it twice, recovered twice with some difficulty, and gave up on EMF.

In the meantime I had heard about TrueCrypt, an open-source disk encryption package for Windows and Linux. It’s free! I must admit that after I downloaded it, I needed some time to get my mind around it.

Here are the basics:

• Using the TrueCrypt application you create a large “container” file on your system, larger than you will need to hold your encrypted files. It can be on any read/write disk, even a memory stick, and is initially filled with random data.
• The container file can be copied, moved, deleted, or renamed just like any other file. It’s not fragile. It can have any name and any file extension. You can have more than one.
• With the TrueCrypt application, you mount that container file as a disk volume with its own drive letter. You choose the letter.
• The TrueCrypt application runs in the background and manages TrueCrypt volumes.
• Within the TrueCrypt volume you create folders, or copy them in, and create or copy in any files that ought to be encrypted. A TrueCrypt volume behaves exactly like any other disk, even though it’s really just a file on your hard drive or mem stick. Every file within it is totally encrypted, including file names and even its file system.
• Unused space in the TrueCrypt container file is filled with random data which cannot be distinguished from actual encrypted files.
• When you open an encrypted file in an application, such as a wordprocessor or graphic editor, the file is decrypted on the fly so that the application sees it decrypted.
• The file is never decrypted on disk, however, unless the application keeps temporary backup copies, and of course you should tell your applications to keep those in an encrypted volume too.
• Backup of encrypted data is easy: Just dismount the encrypted volume and copy its container file, still encrypted, to the backup medium.
• If the backup medium is another disk, mem stick, DVD, or CD-ROM, you can actually mount that backup container file whenever you want without ever copying it back to the original hard disk.

That’s the simple view of TrueCrypt. There is lots more. For example:

• Anyone examining your system or your disk can tell that you use TrueCrypt, and can probably even identify the container files.
• However, you can host a TrueCrypt volume within another truecrypt volume in a manner that makes the internal volume both hidden and undectable even if the outer volume is mounted and visible. Really cool. The TrueCrypt people call this “plausible deniability,” and consider it quite important.
• Example: An adversary points a gun at you and demands to see your encrypted files. You can give them the password to the outer encrypted volume without ever revealing that an inner, hidden volume even exists. It’s invisible. I don’t actually see the need for a hidden volume in my business, but evidently some folks do.
• You can host a truecrypt volume on a public computer, or another person’s computer, without installing any software on that computer, so your encrypted files are portable.
• You can tell TrueCrypt to mount certain TrueCrypt volumes automatically at bootup, though you will be required to enter a password to complete the mounting process.
• TrueCrypt allows you to use any of eight different encryption algorithms and three different hash algorithms, making decryption by an adversary even more difficult.

I love it, and in fact am using it for my encrypted files on my new computer. It works very well indeed, even on Vista 64. It is certainly no more trouble than EMF was, and backup is much simpler. It is far better than Windows Encrypted File System (EFS) because: (1) EFS files are always available when you log on, whereas TrueCrypt files require you to enter another password; and (2) EFS files cannot easily be backed up in their encrypted form. TrueCrypt is also much simpler than Windows BitLocker encryption, which requires you to partition your drive and poses some risk of losing the entire drive if something goes wrong.

Surely it’s no news to you that we use Windows Update to continually deliver ongoing improvements to our customers so that Windows is always up-to-date.  Plus, doing so eliminates the need to wait for larger releases like service packs.  Some updates are released to the community for general feedback prior to delivery via Windows Update, as is the case today.  The Windows Serviceability Team today is rolling out another update on the Microsoft Download Center.  The update is categorized as a “preview release” and may be subject to change before it is released via Windows Update (we expect that to occur in January).
 
Today’s update preview release is geared toward improving reliability and performance in Windows Vista and we highly encourage you to install it.  It includes:

• Improvement of previous issues affecting going into or resuming from sleep/hibernate under some scenarios
• Update to address a previous issue with the disk spindown feature to improve battery life for portable systems
• Up to 15% improved performance of disk I/O (i.e., copying/moving/deleting large files)

I’m running this update on one of my systems — the one I’m using to draft this post, in fact.  I suggest you try it out and let us know how you fare.  You can find more information about today’s update preview release in this KB article.

Over the last few days I’ve noticed Digg.com has slowed to a crawl where it would take up to a half a minute to load each page. At first I thought it was Digg, but then I noticed “connecting to ads1.msn.com” in my status bar when apparently nothing would happen. Is there something wrong with Microsoft’s advertising network?

One of the many neat features in Firebug - a web-developer extension for Firefox - allows the monitoring of network traffic when loading a web page. This is extremely useful to track down causes for slow loading websites.

In this case, Microsoft’s ad servers (in particular, ads1.msn.com) is taking around 27 seconds to respond to the request for a simple 5KB Javascript file used to propagate websites with banner advertisements. In contrast, Digg’s server responds on average in less than 100ms.

On another site, Microsoft’s own Live Hotmail, the advertising banners served by ads1.msn.com and takes around 27 seconds as well to load. However unlike Digg, Hotmail’s ads are not placed at the top of the HTML so it does not hinder displaying the rest of the page’s contents.

Whilst this problem does not seem to affect everyone - otherwise Digg users would have already revolted - but at least two other Digg users also experience the same problem and are coming to the same conclusion. Furthermore, this happens more often then not, which means in few cases when it does load normally, it’s fast.

There’s something seriously wrong with Microsoft’s ad servers, whether that is a short-term technical glitch or long-term load capacity problem. In either case, Microsoft needs to fix it fast. If they plan to be second-to-Google, bringing down the internets serving merely Flash banners is not a good start.

Update: Microsoft.com Downloads seems to be affected too.

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