Secure your system... recover hard drives... learn even more

[Chalenge]

I heard Leo Laporte on the radio one day a while back (way back) and I started listening to him and picking up a few things about technologies that have frankly gone beyond the questions I can pose. Leo is into podcasting (live.twit.tv and techguylabs.com) and yes he makes money advertising for people like Carbonite and ESET NOD32 and SpinRite (which I am about to link to) and so on and in his show you can hear from tech gurus like Paul Thurrott (Windows Weekly) and John C. Dvorak and on and on...

The best time to tune into twit.tv is weekend afternoons of course.

Anyway the Security Now spot with Steve Gibson is full of good information on securing your system (for instance) and he has an excellent program to help in recovering data off of 'dead drives'...

https://www.grc.com/default.htm

On that site there is a ton of information to sift through but if you do nothing else visit the security tab at the top of that first page and click on "ShieldsUp!" to test your security. Dont miss a single page because every bit of it is good stuff to know.

[ImADot]

Yep.  I used to listen to "Security Now" podcast with Leo and Steve.  I've lapsed quite a bit and haven't tuned in lately.  I do own Spinrite.  It's small (written in 100% assemler), has an old school DOS interface, but works like friggin' magic.  I run it on all new drives before I lay data on them, and as maintenance every couple of months.  Brought back a "dead" drive that Winblowz didn't recognize any longer and it's still working fine.  Steve's also got a cool little page on the site for generating as random a password as computers can.

[Denholm]

Thanks for the info. I've been using GRC's password generator for a while. Never bothered checking out their other services or products.