How To Check the Date Windows was Installed on a PC

There is a simple command that tells you what the “Original Install Date of Windows” was, on your PC. (Command works on Windows XP, Vista, 7 & 8 )

Open the Command Prompt and insert:

systeminfo | find “Original Install Date”

Sure, there are PowerShell commands too:

([WMI]”).ConvertToDateTime((Get-WmiObject Win32_OperatingSystem).InstallDate)

or

[timezone]::CurrentTimeZone.ToLocalTime(([datetime]’1/1/1970′).AddSeconds($(get-itemproperty ‘HKLM:\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion’).InstallDate))

For more information, head on over to the Super User community.

Thanks go to 7Tutorials.com for their post on this subject.

What is Google Takeout?

I like to backup regularly and these days we find a lot of our “stuff” in the cloud. From iCloud, Google Apps, Skydrive, Dropbox, etc.

I have used Google Takeout before, but thought I would share:

Google Takeout is a tool that lets you quickly and easily download data that you created in (or imported into) a number of Google products. It provides the data in a variety of open, portable formats so that you can easily import the data into other internet services.

Google Takeout is a Data Liberation platform that makes escaping from Google products as easy as possible. Takeout lets you take your data out of multiple Google products in one fell swoop. Moreover, you’ll find that all your data is in portable and open formats‚ so it’s easy to import to other services quickly.

Google Takeout supports the following services at this time:

It is pretty straight forward and allows you to either download it all or select a service to download:

After you are done selecting it all or just one service, just click on CREATE ARCHIVE and it will pack it up for download. If you have a lot of files up there, you can ask the takeout services to email you when it is done.

Ok, now click on Download and save. You now have that cloud backed up. Be sure to backup what’s on your computer too!

Why “They” Create Malware

First off, its fun for you until it goes into the wild and you get to call it cool names like Frankenstein.

The monstrous virus software, dubbed Frankenstein, was created by Vishwath Mohan and Kevin Hamlen at the University of Texas at Dallas. Having infected a computer, it searches the bits and bytes of common software such as Internet Explorer and Notepad for snippets of code called gadgets – short instructions that perform a particular kind of small task.

Previous research has shown that it is theoretically possible, given enough gadgets, to construct any computer program. Mohan and Hamlen set out to show that Frankenstein could build working malware code by having it create two simple algorithms purely from gadgets. “The two test algorithms we chose are simpler than full malware, but they are representative of the sort of core logic that real malware uses to unpack itself,” says Hamlen. “We consider this a strong indication that this could be scaled up to full malware.”

The research was part-funded by the US Air Force, and Hamlen says that Frankenstein could be particularly useful for national security agencies attempting to infiltrate enemy computer systems with unknown antivirus defenses.

What could possibly go wrong with that? Thanks for throwing your hat into the “Create More Malware for End Users” circle.

Frankenstein virus creates malware by pilfering code – New Scientist.

Data Deluge

Came across this article published by MIT. Fascinating!

The amount of data we create, replicate, and store in gadgets and the cloud is growing at a staggering rate. According to IDC, the total “digital universe,” or all the digital information that has been created or replicated, grew to 1.8 zettabytes in 2011 (a zettabyte is a trillion gigabytes) in 500 quadrillion files. IDC says the total size has grown by a factor of nine over the past five years. Handily enough, in August, researchers at IBM unveiled the largest hard drive ever, capable of holding 120 petabytes (a petabyte is a million gigabytes), or about 24 billion five-megabyte mp3 songs.

See IBM Builds Biggest Data Drive Ever, by Tom Simonite, and The Cloud Imperative, by Simson Garfinkel.

via The Year in Numbers – Technology Review.