Your Uncle Wants Tech Support? Give Him This USB Stick
Posted: Thu Jul 12, 2012 8:47 pm
If you kick in $35 to help get them get funded, in November they’ll send you a cool-looking 8GB flash drive with their 200 megabytes of Jumpshot tools installed. Users boot their computer to the flash drive, and it launches a customized version of Linux, which connects with a Jumpshot internet service and proceeds to open a browser interface while it scans the computer’s hard drive for viruses, crapware and signs of misconfiguration.
Those who help with funding also get early access the Jumpshot service and get to try it for free (it will eventually cost money). But all this assumes that Jumpshot makes its Kickstarter goal of $25,000. So far, they’ve rounded up more than $11,000 in just two days.
There’s also a way to skip the USB drive and simply download and launch Jumpshot via the internet, Amini says.
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/20 ... Stories%29The tricky part was to write a tool — not unlike those used in computer forensics — that could scan the disk and figure out what was going on without actually launching Windows. This means nasty viruses and rootkits will have a hard time hiding from Jumpshot. “We’re interfacing with the raw bytes on disk as opposed to interfacing though the operating system,” Amini says.