Browsers New Automatic Settings Slowing Site Loads Down

Blocking All Social Media Cookies and Trackers Seems To Be Slowing Down Chrome and FireFox

By Strictly-Software

I have had recent automatic updates for Firefox and Chrome to versions

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; Win64; x64; rv:71.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/71.0

and 

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/78.0.3904.108 Safari/537.36

How these two have got to versions nearing 80 so quickly is funny, when IE just rolls out a new version of it's browser every year or so not every time I try and open Firefox from my taskbar.

However these updates seem to contain some important settings, some may have been around for a while which I just haven't noticed. However it is the slowness of these browsers compared to Opera, that uses a proxy server in it's pretend VPN, so you are actually going through 2 servers to your site compared to the other browsers, that is doing my head in.

I liked Firefox, and Chrome when it first came out for their speed, and add-ons. However either my laptop is either deciding to slow down these 2 browsers for some reason and let Opera hop before loading a faster page or something else is going on.

My version of Opera with this "VPN" is:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/78.0.3904.108 Safari/537.36 OPR/65.0.3467.62

When I open it, it is faster than both Chrome and FireFox despite their VPN which when I check with a geo location website shows I have these details instead of my real ones:

• Your Public IPv6 is: 2001:67c:2660:425:7::dfa
• Your IPv4 is: 77.111.247.105
• Location: Amsterdam, NH NL 
• ISP: Hern Labs AB

I notice they have removed the word Opera and replaced it with OPR now, also nearing it's 70th edition. So not only does it protect my privacy a bit it is faster than Chrome and FireFox at the moment for me.

So today after upgrades to both Chrome (manual due to it's insane slowness) and an automatic update for FireFox that took almost 20 minutes, I noticed major slowdowns.

Chrome seems to always be showing a "resolving host" message in the status bar and loading in remote scripts from the big 3 spyware social networks, Twitter, Facebook and Google.

Of course site builders have put these outbound scripts into their code as they want people to Like, Follow and Tweet whatever crap they are selling and you may like seeing a Twitter scroller on the blog you are following and the ability to share the page to Facebook.

However I watched a video on www.darkpolitricks.com the other night about how many #alttnews sites are moving their videos from YouTube to BitShute. YouTube is broken and Google is an evil company. And it seems they are indeed.

It is all about how these niche news outlets had created YouTube making it the biggest video sharing site online, and although the company claims they are only 1% of all videos watched they still feel the need to de-rank these alternative views and put "authoritative sources" above your searches in their algorithm tweaks. These tweaks were all admitted by a Google employee who described getting those Up Ticks and Likes as a "drug" that ensures people continue with their outpourings of every thing they do in life on Social Media.

Yes we do want to see where Jane is having lunch, who with, where the cafe is located and then everything else she does that day as we follow her goings about on Facebook and Instagram.Well you may want to but I don't. However to do so you need to load in Facebook scripts from their servers.

However it seems if you delve into the privacy and security settings for Firefox you get to see that their default setting is to stop tracking cookies from cross site and social media trackers which obviously means if you are loading a 3rd party script from another location you could see as I did today on one site the "trying to connect to t.co" message appear dozens of times as the page tried to load. All the while the page was hung and unusable.

You can go into the FireFox settings and change your settings under Privacy and Security. The heading is...

Browser Privacy

Enhanced Tracking Protection

Trackers follow you around online to collect information about your browsing habits and interests. Firefox blocks many of these trackers and other malicious scripts.

The default setting will block Social media trackers, Cross-site tracking cookies, Tracking content in Private Windows and Cryptominers.

Obviously the latter few are definitely required but let me know if you have noticed a slow down with the standard setting that supposedly is "Balanced for protection and performance. Pages will load normally.", as they may load normally but they seem very slow to load, and off server scripts like Twitter and Facebook are attempted multiple times before a page is usable.

What happened to just loading the core code first to let the page be usable and load any off server scripts by Ajax in the background. It seems too many sites now use pure JavaScript and Ajax to load the content, probably to prevent content scraper BOTS however it does mean a lot of code has to run and be loaded before the page is usable. Have you had a look at the source HTML of www.google.com lately?

Apart from some META tags after the HTML tag the whole source is JavaScript and probably Ajax to load in the content for what is really nothing more than a white page with a different image every now and then above a text input box for searching.

The links to your Google account and Gmail in the top right corner are just that links. We could shorten the load time and the code to a few lines of HTML in reality. I really think Google have gone overboard with their API Jizz all across their systems as their need to stop scrapers has just caused slow loading pages it seems.

Would you like all 3rd party scripts and cookies blocked, or would you like the site to work and load quickly? It seems a dilemma these browsers are making over complicated especially for non techies who wouldn't know half the words in Firefox's Privacy and Security settings.

The difference between Standard which says "Balanced for protection and security. Pages will load normally" and Strict which says "Stronger protection, but may cause some sites or content to break" seems to only be the addition of:

• Tracking content in all windows - rather than standard mode which only blocks "Tracking content in Private Windows" and
• Fingerprinters (blocking Browser finger printing, logging your add-ons, window size and other ways to identify you from just your browser)

They don't actually explain what a fingerprinter is, and to the average user they would be scratching their head thinking about their latest Samsung phone and the ability to login using your fingerprint. However these two extra blocks seem to be deadly for a working website as they state underneath :

Heads up! Blocking trackers could impact the functionality of some sites. Reload a page with trackers to load all content.

So god knows how someone is supposed to manage the 3rd option which is a custom way of blocking things you don't understand or know why they would break a site.

Of course they have a number of complicated Knowledge Base articles  for you to read and get your head round to try and understand whether they need to use Private Windows for browsing all the time, and why the prevention of loading certain features is going to stop your site loading.

Of course Firefox has a "simple way" to help you understand what is going on by just clicking on the shield in the address bar you can change the mode of protection on or off. 

You can view this site with "Enhanced Tracking Protection is OFF for this site" or ON and if you don't know what the difference is they have helpful little graphs that tell you about their Enhanced Tracking Protection, how many trackers they have blocked over the week and ways to look for data breaches. All very interesting but not very helpful information.

They helpfully clarify the situation by saying "Social networks place trackers on other websites to follow what you do, see, and watch online. This allows social media companies to learn more about you beyond what you share on your social media profiles."

Of course you could just disable 3rd party cookies and JavaScript by default with a web developer toolbar and see if the page loads or not. If it doesn't work turn on JavaScript and try again before white listing the site so it can use JavaScript again.

It seems that as Windows in numptifying the front end of their latest operating systems and making it harder for developers to dig in and get into the back end like Windows 8.1r which I still have - now without Skype support - the browsers are offering their users far too many options they probably don't understand or need to know about.

What I want from a browser is for websites to load quickly, any 3rd party hosted widgets like Facebook or Twitter widgets to load in asynchronously and not prevent the working of the site. I want the browser to do the dirty stuff behind the scenes and I don't want 100's of options to play about with. They should block dangerous content, warn users about dangerous sites and stop anything that may have a dangerous effect on my browsing or privacy.

Yes - Ask me if I want to load this soon to be outdated flash movie or allow notifications but don't give me too much to tweak about with.

The speed of loading a site is the most important factor for most users and also affects the sites SEO. If they want to give us an option for being as private as possible or allowing tracking cookies then just have a single option "Privacy HIGH or OFF" option, and then use their own browsing logic to work out if a page won't load instead of offering the user a whole list of options to try out if a page doesn't load.

What is wrong with just keeping incognito windows that are private as possible, don't allow trackers or fingerprinting and the logging of pages visited with a clear out of cookies automatically when I leave?

It just seems that as Chrome enters the laptop world with it's Chromebooks, that as Operating Systems continually ask for your admin password in Windows 10+ when opening an application. Hiding all the nitty gritty that really slows your PC down behind automated "maintenance jobs". That browsers are trying to become their own little PC within a PC.

Just give me fast loading pages and if I want to hide what I am doing from sites and other users of my laptop then make the incognito windows as private as possible. Stop trackers, fingerprinting, 3rd party cookies, and anything else you are now making a "choice" for the user under the settings.

It is bad enough that as everyone moves to HTTPS we see the TLS handshake message in the taskbar constantly which is obviously slowing down the loading of pages and their content, especially if it's mixed.

Just give me a fast browser. I thought using FireFox today would speed things up as Chrome is just getting unusable and as everyone realises they are actually evil, I don't want to help Google pass on my data from their browser or search engines and analytics trackers to advertisers and god knows who else.

From now on Opera with its extra server hop is going to be my standard browser. The "VPN" offers enough privacy and whilst some pages won't remember certain settings due to my location changing the browser is fast.

Anyone find their settings too complicated nowadays and the speed an issue?

By Strictly-Software

© 2019 Strictly-Software

 

Remote Desktop Access Denied Error

Troubleshooting Issues with Remote Desktop / Terminal Services


This morning I tried remotely accessing my work PC which is always left on from my home laptop.
However after my first attempt I was met with the following error which appears om the login screen on the remote PC.

"the refereced account is currently locked out and cannot be logged on to"

I tried pinging the PC and could get a response fine but running the reboot command:


shutdown -m \\mypcname-r -f

I just got an "Access Denied" error.

I could login fine the night before and I hadn't installed anything new. I ran a virus scan which didn't pick anything up.

After connecting to the Virtual Private Network (VPN) I tried running the following command from the RUN prompt.


\\mypcname\c$

But it returned a popup screen with the following message.

"The system detected a possible attempt to compromise security. Please contact the server that authenticated you"

Obviously this was some kind of mistake and from searching the web it seems the problems comes about due to the machine I'm using to access the remote PC which was on a domain and was using different credentials than what I was trying to use to access the resource.

From Microsofts own Knowledge Base article 938457: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/938457

Symptom: When you try to include security settings for a user from a different domain in a local domain folder, you receive the following error message:

The system detected a possible attempt to compromise security. Please ensure that you can contact the server that authenticated you.

Note: This problem may also occur when you try to browse the Active Directory directory service listings for the nonlocal domain.


Cause: This problem occurs because the network firewall filters Kerberos traffic.


Resolution: To resolve this problem, configure the network firewall so that TCP port 88 and UDP port 88 are not blocked for either domain.

My Firewall was not blocking these ports but I had no idea what had happened the other end on the servers at work.

To get access back I tried terminal servicing into a different computer from my laptop which I knew I had access to. I could gain access to this PC.

Once I had remotely accessed another computer on the network I ran the following reboot command which when run from my own laptop gave me an "Access Denied" error.

I ran the reboot command

shutdown -m \\mypcname-r -f

I then tried pinging the PC from my laptop and couldn't access it so I knew it was rebooting.

After a while the PC came back online and I could re-gain access to it.

I checked the event logs on both machines and found the following items of interest.

On the Remote PC (I couldn't access)

The Terminal Server security layer detected an error in the protocol stream and has disconnected the client. Client IP: 10.0.9.121.

That IP relates to our server that manages domains om our network.


From looking at the event log on my own PC I could see the following errors at around the time I tried remotely accessing the work PC.

08:32.01
The server could not bind to the transport \Device\NetBT_Tcpip_{AE7A7B4B-3EED-4D2A-B123-1A4F4AB04698} because another computer on the network has the same name. The server could not start.

08:32.03
CoID={C5816EC8-C2E8-4710-A412-F7ECDBC25C42}: The user me successfully established a connection to OurCompanies VPN using the device VPN3-1.

08:32:08
The time provider NtpClient is currently receiving valid time data from domainserver.domain.company.co.uk (ntp.d|0.0.0.0:123->10.0.7.1:123).

08:32:12
The server could not bind to the transport \Device\NetBT_Tcpip_{AE7A7B4B-3EED-4D2A-B123-1A4F4AB04698} because another computer on the network has the same name. The server could not start.

08:33
The password stored in Credential Manager is invalid. This might be caused by the user changing the password from this computer or a different computer. To resolve this error, open Credential Manager in Control Panel, and reenter the password for the credential DOMAIN.COMPANY.CO.UK\me.

08:33.11
The server could not bind to the transport \Device\NetBT_Tcpip_{AE7A7B4B-3EED-4D2A-B123-1A4F4AB04698} because another computer on the network has the same name. The server could not start.


I have since managed to reboot my work PC and home laptop and connect successfully but I hadn't changed my password so I guess it was an issue at the company on their network that caused the problem and looks like an issue with the domain controller and Kerberos which is a network authentication tool designed to use strong authentication for client/server applications by using secret-key cryptography.

Here are some helpful articles related to the same subject if this method doesn't fix the problem for you.

http://www.bluemoonpcrepair.com/wp/?p=20

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/938457

Remotely Reboot Windows PC

How to remotely restart a Windows PC

I have been experiencing lots of problems with my work PC latley.

Usually these problems happen at the weekend and they turn my PC which usually performs like a bag of shit into a much larger and more non responsive bag of shit that makes any kind of work on it virtually impossible to carry out.

This means that not only does Sods Law come into effect which make me lose lots of money from my Betfair Bot not being able to place bets (why can it never fail during periods that I would have placed bad bets!). But it also means that if I manage to terminal service into the machine that it cannot connect to any other server on the network, access the internet, receive updates or send and recieve email.

I haven'nt got to the bottom of the problem yet but one thing I managed to find out today which might be useful for others to know is how to reboot a remote machine remotely from the command line.

If you can connect to the VPN that the remote PC is on and can PING the machine then you can try restarting your problematic PC. As we all know from any first line technical support a reboot is always the first port of call in any technical emergency and for Windows machines it seems to solve around 99% of all problems.

So this is the command I used from the command prompt.

shutdown -m \\pieceofshitPC -r -f

The -r flag tells it to restart rather than just shut down and the -f flag tells it to forcably shut down any running applications.

The other option is to just run

shutdown -i

from the RUN prompt and the Shutdown.exe application will open which will give you a graphical interface to manage the shut down.

This offers features such as being able to log a reason for the shutdown and specifying a time period for the system to wait before trying the reboot or restart command.

This GUI interface is just a wrapper to save those who are loath to open command prompts but if you want to use the command prompt the following flags are possible.

-i : Display GUI interface, must be the first option
-l : Log off (cannot be used with -m option)
-s : Shutdown the computer
-r : Shutdown and restart the computer
-a : Abort a system shutdown
-m \\computername : Remote computer to shutdown/restart/abort
-t xx : Set timeout for shutdown to xx seconds
-c “comment” : Shutdown comment (maximum of 127 characters)
-f : Forces running applications to close without warning
-d [u][p]:xx:yy : The reason code for the shutdown

Happy rebooting!

Problems connecting to Remote Desktop over a VPN

Troubleshooting issues with Remote Desktop connections

By Strictly-Software

I have just experienced and finally resolved a problem that started suddenly last week that prevented me from connecting to my work PC from my laptop at home using Terminal Services / Remote Desktop.

The problem started suddenly and it has made little sense for the last week. The symptoms were:

• A virgin media broadband Internet connection.
• A windows XP laptop connected to my broadband over a wireless connection.
• My laptop could access the VPN without any problem and it could also access the PC in question over a windows share e.g \\mycomputer\c$
• Trying to connect using a Remote Desktop connection returned a "this computer cannot connect to the remote computer" error message.

As far as I was aware nothing had changed on my computer and I first though that maybe a virus was blocking the port or a windows update had caused a problem. However when I brought the laptop into my office and tried connecting to my PC over the office wireless connection there was no problem.

I then tried this great little tool RD Enable XP that allows you to set up remote desktop access remotely as long as you have access to the computer and the necessary admin privileges. It requires that you have PSExec installed which comes with the PSTools admin suite and allows you to carry out tasks on computers remotely such as monitoring and managing processes.

The program checks that you can access the remote PC, that the Terminal Services options are enabled correctly in the registry and that you're not being blocked by a firewall.

I had already checked that the fDenyTSConnections registry option was set correctly so when the application hung whilst trying to set firewall exceptions I thought that there was a problem with my router and firewall.

I then tried changing the port number that Terminal Service connections are carried out with from 3389 to 3390. This is another registry setting that needs to be changed on the remote computer and then after a reboot you just append the port number after the computer name or IP address when connecting e.g strmycomputer:3390.

This didn't work so I was pretty annoyed as Virgin media hadn't been much help so I was about to give up until I came across a message thread related to the same problem.

One of the suggestions was to change the Advanced Network Error Search option which is something Virgin offers it's users and is described as follows:

Our advanced network error search helps you find the website you're looking for quickly.

We all make mistakes when we type in website addresses. Perhaps we miss a few letters, or the website doesn't exist any longer. If an address you enter doesn't locate a site, this handy feature will convert the incorrect address into a web search, so instead of an error message you will get a list of our closest matches, plus some additional related links.

This option is linked to your broadband connection which explains why the problem was related to the local connection and not the PC or remote network.

Low and behold when I disabled this option I could once again access my work PC over Remote Desktop again!

I have no idea why this option was suddenly enabled as I have never come across or even heard of it before tonight so I can only imagine Virgin decided to update their settings without asking their customers first.

It also seems to be pre-selected on newly bought laptops as I found out again tonight! Lucky I wrote this blog article otherwise I would have had to hunt down the original again!

I have no idea why this Virgin config option affects remote desktop connections but it obviously can cause a total block on this type of functionality.

If you too have similar problems related to Remote Desktop connections and are also a Virgin Media customer then save yourself a whole lot of time and go to this page first and check your settings: https://my.virginmedia.com/advancederrorsearch/settings