Ernie's

I have subscribed to US-CERT Security Advisories, and several other related security advisory mailing lists for more years than I can count. Today, I received an Advisory from US-CERT titled ‘Keeping PowerShell: Measures to Use and Embrace, with a link to a PDF document of the same title, at ‘ Keeping PowerShell: Measures to Use and Embrace | CISA ’. In and of itself, this document is probably not of much interest to most home Windows 10 or 11 users, but reading it informed me that there is a newer and possibly more secure version of PowerShell available to the general public. The document linked above was not very clear about that, but the suggestion was there. I make it a policy to keep all the software on my computers as up to date as possible, based on the information I have at any given point in time, so when I learned that there is a newer version of PowerShell available, of course, I had to get it. WindowsPowerShell 5.1 comes preinstalled in Windows 10 and 11. Since it is needed...

I take my Internet safety and privacy very seriously. I live on a fairly limited fixed income, so I consider anything that has the potential to affect my available resources to be very important. Getting hacked, or having my identity stolen could have very serious consequences for me even though I don't have much to get got. Here are some of the steps I have taken to protect myself, online and off: I have enabled 2FA on all my Internet based accounts that support it. For those accounts that do not yet support 2FA, I have a few alternate email accounts (one for each Internet account that does not support 2FA, also with 2FA enabled) for the account's 'username'. I use Windows 11 with a 'password-less' Microsoft account (using the Microsoft Authenticator App on my mobile phone) and a Bio-metric scanner (backed up with a pin) for log in purposes. My Windows installation's security is hardened by enabling Ransomware protection, so even if some miscreant manages...

Any time we edit the Windows registry, we should make a current registry backup just before editing it. The Windows Registry Editor has a built-in back up feature in the 'File' menu, named 'Export...'. To open the Windows Registry Editor, search for 'reg' in Windows search. Choose 'Registry Editor - App' in the results list to open the registry editor. The registry has five main branches: 'HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT' 'HKEY_CURRENT_USER' 'HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE' 'HKEY_USERS' 'HKEY_CURRENT_CONFIG' When you choose to export the registry to create a backup, the Registry Editor remembers where you chose to store it. Here is what you have to do to back up the entire registry (or any branch you desire): If you want to back up the entire registry (recommended) make sure 'Computer' is selected at the top of the left pane. If you prefer to back up a single branch, make sure that branch is selected. Click 'File >...