How To Fix ‘User Profile Service Failed to Start’ In Windows 7 (Quick Tip)

Say you boot up your Windows PC one morning and happen to see the User Profile Service Failed to Start error message when you try to log in?

The User Profile Service service failed the logon. User profile cannot be loaded

First of all, this is not a good sign, it means your user account is probably corrupt. A number of factors can contribute this, such as a software program you recently installed or driver or your computer was not shut down properly. Since we likely know why, we need to at least find a way to get into the account and recover our personal files.

If there is another user account on the computer, then you can try logging into that account and create a new user account and copy over your files to it. If you don’t have another account, then move on to the next step.

Restart in Safe Mode

Recently, Notebooks.com showed you how to start Windows 7 in safe mode, a special diagnostics mode of Windows that can be used to fix some problems. If you are unable to log in, you will need to load Safe Mode when the computer starts up. Just before the Windows operating system is loaded, press F8 multiple times on your keyboard until the Advanced Boot Options menu appears. Use the up and down arrow keys to select Safe Mode if it is not selected then press Enter on your keyboard.

Once in Safe Mode, log in. You might see some error messages popup, close those.

Open the command line. Click Start, type: CMD Right click CMD, click Run as administrator

We are going to attempt to create a new user account.

Example: net user Username Password /add

Where there is Username replace with the account name and where there Password replace with the desired password.

Example: net user adacosta2 pwhelp /add

Press Enter on your keyboard

You should see the following message The command completed successfully.

Type exit to close the command prompt.

Restart the machine and try logging into the new account.

Facebook Wants to Supply Your Internet Driver's License And new security measures protect everyone's data.

Although it's not apparent to many, Facebook is in the process of transforming itself from the world's most popular social-media website into a critical part of the Internet's identity infrastructure. If it succeeds, Facebook and Facebook accounts will become an even bigger target for hackers.

As security professionals debate whether the Internet needs an "identity layer"—a uniform protocol for authenticating users' identities—a growing number of websites are voting with their code, adopting "Facebook Connect" as a way for anyone with a Facebook account to log into the site at the click of a button.

Facebook introduced Connect back in July 2008, offering third-party websites tools to coordinate with the user information that Facebook holds, including logins. Thus websites had the option of allowing Facebook users to identify themselves with their Facebook identities.

So, for instance, the Web statistics vendor Alexa gives new users the choice of creating an account by entering a username and a password or by simply clicking the "Connect with Facebook" button. Well-known websites that also use Connect include the Internet Movie Database, Ask.com, and ESPN. Others will almost certainly jump on the bandwagon in 2011.

Facebook's identity system might very well supply something that VeriSign, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google have all struggled to offer: a single "driver's license" for the Internet. (This leaves aside the question of whether it's a good thing for one company to hold such a position of power.)

A unique combination of factors makes Facebook well suited to being the repository for people's identities on the Internet. Unlike many popular websites, it requires users to register and log in. And Facebook's terms of service require that "users provide their real names and information"—indeed, Facebook has terminated accounts that were created with seemingly fake names or for fictional characters. Since Facebook users invest their accounts with a tremendous amount of durable personal content—including photographs, contact information, and connections to their social network—they are likely to keep a long-term relationship with the site.

This persistence of real identity puts Facebook in a position to solve one of the most pressing problems on the Internet today—the proliferation of user names and passwords.

Contrary to today's practice, there is no reason for most websites to force their users to create usernames and passwords. Most websites don't need or even want or need to manage the identities of their users—they simply want a way to reliably identify their users over time. Media websites, for instance, want to be able to attribute comments and limit spam. Personal-finance websites want to give users a way to monitor highly personal information securely—for example, a portfolio of stocks that the user might enter.

What's more, maintaining a user-identity infrastructure has its risks—as was made painfully clear last month when hackers broke into servers operated by Gawker Media and downloaded the user names and passwords for more than a million of Gawker's accounts. Even though the passwords were encrypted, many were easy to guess, so the accounts could be readily cracked, according to an analysis of the attack by security researchers at the University of Cambridge. Following the attack several unrelated websites, including LinkedIn and Woot, sent e-mail to their users warning them to change their passwords if these were the same ones as they used for Gawker.

Facebook Login lets any website on the planet use its identity infrastructure—and underlying security safeguards. It's easy to implement Facebook Login, simply by adding few lines of code to a web server. Once that change is made, the site's users will see a "Connect with Facebook" button. If they're already logged into Facebook (having recently visited the site), they can just click on it and they're in. If they haven't logged in recently, they are prompted for their Facebook user name and password.

An interesting side benefit for website operators is that Facebook Login provides the site with users' real names (in most cases) and optionallya variety of other information, such as the users' "friends" and "likes." Currently, Facebook doesn't charge websites to use its identity infrastructure or access this additional information, though Facebook certainly could in the future.

Facebook is already well acquainted with Internet security issues, simply because it holds personal data for more than 500 million people. The increased use of the Facebook platform for things beyond social media—a bank in New Zealand, for instance, announced in November that it would allow customers to access banking information on Facebook—obviously raises new concerns. And if the company extends its reach to offer a universal login on the Web, the challenges it's likely to face will become greater still.

Car Theft by Antenna (Researchers beat automatic locking and ignition systems)

No key required: A researcher shows how an attacker could start a car using an antenna. A signal from the car is transmitted to a computerized key, which is tricked into enabling the engine ignition.

Credit: ETH Zurich

Car thieves of the future might be able to get into a car and drive away without forced entry and without needing a physical key, according to new research that will be presented at the Network and Distributed System Security Symposium next month in San Diego, California.

The researchers successfully attacked eight car manufacturers' passive keyless entry and start systems—wireless key fobs that open a car's doors and start the engine by proximity alone.

Srdjan Capkun, an assistant professor of computer science in the system security group at ETH Zurich in Switzerland, who led the work, says he was inspired to investigate the security of keyless entry and start systems after buying a car that had one. Capkun and Aurélien Francillon and Boris Danev, both researchers in the same institution, examined 10 car models from the eight manufacturers. They were able to access all 10 and drive them away by intercepting and relaying signals from the cars to their wireless keys. While they could relay the signals from the key back to the car as well, usually they did not need to because the key transmits its signals up to around 100 meters. The attack works no matter what cryptography and protocols the key and car use to communicate with each other.

Normally, when a wireless key is within a few meters of the right car, it detects a low-powered signal that causes it to issue a command that opens the car enable the ignition. The researchers used a pair of antennas to transmit these signals from the car to the key when the key was farther away, tricking the car into opening without the ordinary authorization. One antenna needs to be very close to the car, and one needs to be within eight meters of the key.

The researchers came up with two versions of the attack. In one, they ran a cable from near the car to near the key and used it to transmit the signals. They conducted the other wirelessly. Francillon says that the materials for the wired attack cost about $50, and those for the wireless attack cost between $100 and $1,000, depending on the electronic components used.

The researchers tested a few scenarios. An attacker could watch a parking lot and have an accomplice watch as car owners as entered a nearby store. The accomplice would only need to be within eight meters of the targeted owner's key fob, making it easy to avoid arousing suspicion. In another scenario, a car owner might leave a car key on a table near a window. An antenna placed outside the house was able to communicate with the key, allowing the researchers then to start the car parked out front and drive away.