Note: you can use the reverse to transform a VPN connection from “private network” to “public network”, but that would be weird, so I’d love to hear your use case in a comment

Method 1: Via Network Settings

1. Open Settings :
   • Click on the Start button, then on Settings (gear icon).
2. Go to Network and Internet :
   • In Settings, click on Network and Internet.
3. Changing connection properties :
   • Click on Status in the left-hand menu, then on Edit connection properties under your VPN connection.
   • Under Network profile, select Private.

Method 2: Using PowerShell

1. Open Windows PowerShell as administrator :
   • Click on the Start button, type PowerShell, right-click on Windows PowerShell and select Run as administrator.
2. List network connections :
   • Type the following command to list all network connections:

Get-NetConnectionProfile

• • Note the Name or InterfaceAlias of your VPN connection.

1. Change network type :
   • Type the following command to change the network type to private, replacing Name or InterfaceAlias with the one you noted earlier:

Set-NetConnectionProfile -Name “NomDeVotreConnexionVPN” -NetworkCategory Private

OR

Set-NetConnectionProfile -InterfaceAlias “NomDeVotreConnexionVPN” -NetworkCategory Private

Method 3: Using Registry Editor

1. Open Registry Editor :
   • Press Win + R to open the Run dialog box.
   • Type regedit and press Enter.
2. Navigate to the appropriate registry key :
   • Access the following key:
   • HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\NetworkList\Profiles
3. Identify the network profile :
   • In Profiles, you’ll see several folders with alphanumeric names.
   • Click on each folder and check the ProfileName to identify the profile corresponding to your VPN connection.
4. Change network type :
   • Once you’ve identified the right profile, double-click Category.
   • Change the value from 0 (Public) to 1 (Private).
5. Restart network service :
   • Press Win + R, type services.msc, and press Enter.
   • Find and restart Network Location Awareness and Network List Service.

By following one of these methods, your VPN connection should be considered a “private connection” by Windows 10.

If your are a webmaster, you may even have received this kind of alert message from Google like this one :

Unsecure password collection will trigger warning display in Chrome 56 for “your site”

The password field is a specific HTML field type, that will automatically mask the typed in characters, like the one below (yellow background) :

password field hides typed characters

To avoid this warning, the best option is of course to move that page to HTTPS. However, if you cannot migrate the page to HTTPS yet because it is too expensive, or requires too much code changes, or you simply don’t want to implement HTTPS because it’s not worth the effort (nothing important behind this password field), here are 2 tricks to avoid the chrome 56 password warning message.

Avoiding the Chrome 56 password warning

The first trick below will hide the warning message as long as the password field is not used by the user. This trick is especially useful when a login area is embedded on all pages of your website, is the header or menu for instance.

To implement this trick, in the HTML source code, simply change the password field type to something different, and add a “onfocus” javascript event, that will revert to the actual password type field. here an example :

Regular password field in html before the change

After the change, the html input markup will look like:

Modified password markup

To implement this trick on your website, reproduce the changes from the “original ocde” above to the “modified code”.

With this trick, the Google Chrome 56 warning message will not fire until the fake password field is active.

If you want to avoid the warning message even with the fake password field in use, you’ll need the second trick below

Fully removing the Chrome 56 password warning

The ultimate way to remove the Googl Chrome 56 “not secure” warning is to … definitely change the field type from password to something else. I recommend not using the “text” type, to easy finding back the original password fields. I personnaly use the “novapass” field type.

As a side effect of this trick, the password will be displayed as the user type in, of course.

To implement this hack, change a typical password field like :

Regular password field in html before the change

By this kind of code :

Removing the password type removes the Chrome warning

We implemented this 2 tricks on several websites, and passes the Google Chrome 56 test. What about you ?

In a very detailed article, Mat Honan, a Wired.com journalist, explains how he’s digital life exploded in 15 minutes.

As he explains:

I realized something was wrong at about 5 p.m. on Friday. I was playing with my daughter when my iPhone suddenly powered down. I was expecting a call, so I went to plug it back in.

It then rebooted to the setup screen. This was irritating, but I wasn’t concerned. I assumed it was a software glitch. And, my phone automatically backs up every night. I just assumed it would be a pain in the ass, and nothing more. I entered my iCloud login to restore, and it wasn’t accepted. Again, I was irritated, but not alarmed.

(…) When I opened my laptop, an iCal message popped up telling me that my Gmail account information was wrong. Then the screen went gray, and asked for a four-digit PIN.

(…) By now, I knew something was very, very wrong. For the first time it occurred to me that I was being hacked.

All of this occured in few minutes. But was the result of a well prepared attack. And this attack deeply relied on Social Engineering.

Social engineering: finding the flaw in the process

The basic of social engineering is to find  a trick to gain access to a place where you’re not supposed to be. The place can be real (a concert, VIP lounge, a company restricted area…) or virtual (iCloud account, Amazon account, twitter account…).

Here, the hacker managed to spoof the identity of Mat Honan during phone calls toward Amazon and Apple hotlines.

But before that, the hacker collected some personal data around the victim, Mat Honan: email address (found on his website), personal address (found on the whois record).

Scared about the outcome? Read the whole article on wired, and see what you need to change if you don’t want to be the next one…

But this time, not only because this new version of Wordpress introduces very exciting features, but also because wordpress 3.2 drops backward compatibility with legacy browser (ie6), PHP engine 4 (PHP4) and Mysql 4.x (5.0+ required).

Some PHP and Mysql restrictions

Indeed, if you try to install a recent wordpress (3.2 or greater), you may face some error messages. Before proceeding, make sure your hosting plan offers :

• PHP 5.2.4 or greater (old requirement was PHP 4.3 or greater since WordPress 2.5 )
• MySQL 5.0.15 or greater (old requirement was MySQL 4.1.2 or greater since WordPress 2.9 , MySQL 4.x prior to WP2.9)

If you get a message like:

Your server is running PHP version 4.4.9 but WordPress 3.2.1 requires at least 5.2.4.

Don’t panic, you may keep your hosting plan by tweaking some settings. Indeed, some allow to “force” the version of PHP used. For instance, Alwaysdata will provide such an option in your admin panel:

Other hosting companies will allow to force php5 by using a specific command to be inserted in the “.htaccess” file located at the root of the web directory (usually “www”): “AddType x-mapp-php5 .php” for 1and1, “AddHandler x-httpd-php5 .php” for GoDaddy, “SetEnv PHP_VER 5″ for OVH, …

A bunch of new features

Wordpress 3.2 introduces a deep change in the backend: lighter, faster, easier to use… Just try by yourself or watch the video below.

For copywritters, a new editing mode where you get a “blank sheet”, without any disburbing icon or menu around.

And a brand new HTML5 theme, named Twenty Eleven, that embed nice features like the ability to have multiple rotating header images to highlight all of your favorite photos.

For all of this, have a look at the Wordpress.tv video:

Open a .iso file like an archive

As the title suggests, we’ll use a sofware able to read ISO file to explore the .iso file content. I’ve currently found the following tools able to read an ISO file:

• WinRAR, a shareware free to try.
• 7-Zip, which is free and opensource.

In both cases, you simply open the ISO file and access it through the embeded  explorer. You may drag/drop files from the ISO file to your hard-disk.

Mount a virtual CD drive

If you wish to access the CD as if you burnt it, you need to use a virtual CD drive. There are plenty of offers, here are 2 freewares:

• MagicISO
• Virtual CloneDrive

Other tools to manipulate ISO files

And you, are you using any other (free) tool to read or even create ISO files?

I’m not especially proud of this hack. However, I was getting crazy by how the category used for a post permalink is choosen. And I could not figure out a clean way to control which is the primary permalink (I hope it’s not part of Wordpress 3.0…).

You may need to set the primary category for permalink in two situations:

• First, you want some consistency among your posts, having them in the same primary category.
• Second, it’s never fun when, by adding an additional category to an existing post, it changes the post permalink!

If you wonder how the “primary” category for a permalink is defined by wordpress, the answer is quite simple: they are ordered by ascending ID. So, if you add an old category to an existing post, your existing post will have a new permalink. And if, like me, you’re using wordpressMu, you’ll discover that a newly added category in a blog may have a very low ID because this category (or tag…) has already been used by any of the other blogs.

The dirty hack

It’s really not a code-hack I’m proud of. However, as I needed something, I believe some others may need it too, that’s why I’m sharing it.

To be on the safe side, I recommend to leave this hack in a standalone file (with my active theme files, in my case), and include it in the functions.php file.

The idea is to alter the “the_permalink” filter. So, let’s add the filter:

add_filter('the_permalink', 'custom_cat_order');

Then, the custom filter function:

// Order by cat_order, otherwise by name, assuming it's a post permalink (dirty!)
function custom_cat_order( $content ) {
global $post;

// in case no post data found, do nothing
if ( @empty($post->ID) ) return $content;
// otherwise, assuming current post is the right post (dirty!)

// custom/primary slug cat order defined here (dirty!)
$cat_order = array("directory", "bonus", "blog");
// add all remaining categories (with duplicates, dirty!)
$all_cats = get_categories();

// Build an array with categories slug
foreach( $all_cats as $cat)
$cat_order[] = $cat->slug;

$cats = get_the_category($post->ID);
if ( $cats ) {
// Build an array with Post categories slug
   foreach( $cats as $cat)
   $post_cats[] = $cat->slug;
   $the_cats = array_intersect($cat_order, $post_cats);
   usort($cats, '_usort_terms_by_ID'); // order by ID
   $category0 = $cats[0]->slug;

   $the_cat = array_shift($the_cats);
   // Assuming category is in-between slashes (dirty!)
   $content = str_replace("/".$category0."/", "/".$the_cat."/", $content);
}

return $content;
}

So, basically, I’m defining the categories with higher priority in the $cat_order array, and at the end search/replace the old category slug by the one with higher priority.

As you can see, it’s quite dirty… So if you figure out a cleanest way to do it, please let me know!

Most of modern hard drives support a function called AAM (Automatic Acoustic Management), often disabled by default. Noise reduction is obtained by reducing the head speed, thus increasing the disk access time. If you prefer silence over performance you might want to enable AAM to decrease the noise level of your hard drive and slightly increase the access time.

Note that access time is about moving the head, not transfering data. So, activating AAM may have no impact to your overall system at all. Highest performance impact reported is around -5%.Thus, for a desktop computer (or notebook), it’s wise to enable AAM. In addition, enabling AAM (and thus reducing head speed) has a good side-effect: reduce the disk power consumption, especially interesting for a laptop.

Choose the best value for AAM by tweaking around the recommended one, depending on the silent level you target. Possible values depend on the drive itself (maybe from zero to 254, or only two states: 128 or 254 for instance).

Howto Enable AAM on a computer

Just download the freeware Hitachi Feature Tool, and run the setup tool to generate a bootable floppy or CD. Then, boot your computer over the created media to start the IBM/Hitachi Feature Tool. This tool makes it possible to enable, disable or choose a custom value for the Automatic Accustic Management feature, for any disk brand (not only Hitachi).

Howto enable AAM on a Linux box

Under Linux, you will need the hdparm utility. It is included in most Linux distributions, but on some “boxes”, like the Synology NAS, you’ll need to install it first.

Then, setting AAM is as simple as:

#hdparm -M 128 /dev/hda

to set a value of 128 (rather quiet) for drive hda. The higher the value, the higher the speed (and thus the noise).

The google analytics plugin for wordpress is useful: it allows to insert the google analytics tracking code without any change to the theme file.

There is however something very irritating with this plugin: each time I upgraded the plugin, I had to re-enter the settings. And more frustrating: as long as you don’t update the settings, your stats are not recorded anymore by google analytics. This is why I’m almost not upgrading it anymore

I got an even worst surprise after an upgrade of both worpdress and the google analytics plugin: I was unable to save the parametrs, each try ended with:

Google Analytics settings reset to default.

For an unknown reason, after saving, the corrupted settings were reloaded.

The only workaround I found was a bit drastic: in the MySQL wp_options table, I’ve simply erased the “GoogleAnalyticsPP” entry.

To do the same thing (at your own risk, of course):

• Access your wordpress database using phpmyadmin for instance;
• Search into the wp_options table the row where option_name = ‘GoogleAnalyticsPP’
• Edit this entry, erase content, save.
  

You should now be again able to save your google analytics parameters.

However, I could not find any ready to use PHP function, although PHP5 provides some interesting functions, like scandir().

After completing writting such a function, I decided to share it. So here is it.

Bare in mind it requires PHP5 (or later), as it relies on scandir() and on fnmatch(). Finally, this function while return the filtered directory content, regardless of the content being a file, a link or a directory.

Additional feature: by default, if you call the function more than once in your script in order to scan the same directory, it will read the directory only once: next times, it will use a cached content. To disable caching, set the third parameter to 1.

function searchdir( $path='.', $mask='*', $nocache=0 ){
 static $dir = array();
 if ( !isset($dir[$path]) || $nocache) {
 $dir[$path] = scandir($path);
 }
 foreach ($dir[$path] as $i=>$entry) {
 if ($entry!='.' && $entry!='..' && fnmatch($mask, $entry) ) {
 $sdir[] = $entry;
 }
 }
 if ($nocache)
 unset($dir);
 return ($sdir);
}

Did you find this small function useful? Do you have any improvment suggestion?

You may be tempted to upgrade your blog using the automatic function after discovering the exciting new feature included.

But, wait… There are some flaws in this release. So, you’d better wait for the patch version 2.9.1 (already available as beta).

However, unlike the 2.8.6 release, the 2.9 release is worth considering the upgrade, with new features targetting end-users, like

• Built-in image editor (crop, resize, rotate images),
• Batch plugin update (update all plugins at once),
• Trash feature for posts (now, you can undelete a post),
• Easy video embed (using a single link)

Themes designers will also get some interesting features (copied from the original announcement):

• Themes can register “post thumbnails” which allow them to attach an image to the post, especially useful for magazine-style themes.
• A new commentmeta table that allows arbitrary key/value pairs to be attached to comments, just like posts, so you can now expand greatly what you can do in the comment framework.
• Custom post types have been upgraded with better API support so you can juggle more types than just post, page, and attachment. (More of this planned for 3.0.)
• You can set custom theme directories, so a plugin can register a theme to be bundled with it or you can have multiple shared theme directories on your server.
• Specify category templates not just by ID, like before, but by slug, which will make it easier for theme developers to do custom things with categories — like post types!
• Registration and profiles are now extensible to allow you to collect things more easily, like a user’s Twitter account or any other fields you can imagine.