Another application you might want several Pets for is your browser. You can have one Pet for browsing sites you trust, such as your bank and your stock broker. This Pet can safely remember your passwords, and you can save files you'd like to keep private in the browser's directory. You can have a second Pet for browsing sites you don't trust as much. This Pet won't have access to anything you've put into the first Pet. You'll probably want a third browser Pet if you use your browser to read files. Simply configure this one to launch when you open an HTML file. This way you can use your browser to read files, but scripts on web pages you visit won't have access to them.

There's one thing you need to be aware of if you have more than one Pet for an application. Some applications lock a file when they open it. If you try to open it again, you get a read only version. Polaris doesn't lock the file. However, if you open it outside a Pet, a Save of that file in the Pet fails. You'll have to do a SaveAs to save the Pet's copy. The problem is that two Pets that open the same file can both do a Save. That might be a problem, so be careful. At any rate, it's no worse than using an application that doesn't lock the file.

Re-Polarization

There may be times when you want to re-polarize an application. The simplest thing to do is start over from scratch, but that loses any customizations, such as tool bars you added and menus you moved around, that differ from what's on the version of the application that runs in your account. The most common problem is losing your browser Favorites/Bookmarks when you re-polarize. When you click the Polarize button with a Petname that appears in the list of Existing Pets, you'll see the following window.

If you didn't mean to use that name, click Cancel, and try again. If you haven't done a lot of customization, you should select Polarize from Scratch. This option is the safest because it creates a brand new user account. That means that any detritus left lying around by malicious code in the Pet account will be deleted. It also means that any settings, such as browser Favorites/Bookmarks or toolbar settings that are specific to the Pet will be lost. You can keep them by clicking Re-Polarize. You'll get a new Pet account, but your settings will be copied from the old one. Now you'll have your configuration, but you may also have settings made by potentially malicious code, such as a home page that you'd rather your children didn't see. How long re-polarizing takes depends on how much customization you've done. It shouldn't take more than a minute or so.

Network Authentication

Some sites on the network need to know who you are before you can use them. Windows passes your login information, but not your password, to these programs, so you don't have to type your password over and over. That information is also used when you use a printer on the network that is controlled by an authenticating print server.

Your Pets don't run with your identity, so that doesn't work for polarized applications that access these sites. You can tell Polaris to provide this authentication by clicking Configure Network Authentication on the main Polarizer window, which will bring up the following window.

You have three options. If you select No Authentication, any password Polaris has remembered for you will be forgotten. (NB: The following option isn't working right now. We'll remove this warning once it is.) Selecting Request Password At Boot means that you will have to provide your login password every time the PowerWindow starts. Normally, that will only happen when you login, so it shouldn't be too much of a burden. The password you provide will be stored in an encrypted file if you select Store Password.

You don't have to worry about your password being stolen. Polaris uses EFS, the Windows Encrypted File System, which computes an encryption key based on your login password. Only someone who knows your login password or is running a program as you can decrypt this file. To protect you further, your password is encrypted with itself as the encryption key. Hence, a scan of your disk won't reveal your password. On the other hand, a virus running in your account will be able to get your password. Of course, such a virus has lots of other ways to capture your password and do lots of other nasty stuff.

You will have to return to this window if you change your login password. Of course you don't have to worry about forgetting. All your network authentications will fail until you do. In this Beta release, you will need to restart the PowerWindow after changing your password. Right click on the PowerWindow icon in your system tray and select Exit to close all running Pets and the PowerWindow. Your new password will be in effect when you restart the PowerWindow.

Additional Authorities

The Polarizer does a pretty good job setting up the permissions for a Pet. However, there will be times when a Pet will need additional authority. That's what the Endowments are for. Click the Configure button to see what you can do.

We'll start at the top of the Endowments window and explain the items one by one.

Server Sites to Automatically Authenticate: Every program running in a Window's process has an authentication token. That's how Windows knows what permissions the process has. This token is also passed to network sites so they can know what permissions to grant. If you use a network shared drive, your token tells the machine what files you can read and/or write. Web sites on the Intranet also use the token so you don't have to keep logging in.

When you run a Pet, the process doesn't have your token. Instead, it has a token for the Pet account, which isn't known to other machines. Hence, the Pet doesn't have permission to access any resources on these machines. That's a GOOD THING. It means that a virus running in a Pet can't damage resources on other machines. It can also be inconvenient if you have to keep logging into a few sites over and over.

Fortunately, it's possible to attach the part of your token used for network access to the Pet's token. This section of the Endowments window allows you to specify those servers you want to recognize your pets as you. Doing so can be dangerous because a virus running in the Pet will have all of your authority on these servers and will be able to do anything you can do. However, the convenience may outweigh the risk, particularly if you only have read access to the data on these servers. Just fill in the domain names for each such site in the form server.company.com. NB: We are having inconsistent results with this feature. We think our corporate servers are doing a hand-off to servers we don't know about. Please let us know how well it works for you.

You will also need to provide your network authentication so that Polaris can add your network token to the Pet. You do that by clicking on the Configure Network Authentication button on the main Polarizer window.

Additional Applications to run in this Pet: There are times you want to run applications together. A common case is when you want to include a spreadsheet in a document. You can run Microsoft Word in the Excel Pet account. Simply provide the path to the executables you want to run in that account. There's no Browse option in this Beta release, so you'll just have to find the executable and enter the path directly.

When you polarize the application, you'll get a shortcut for the Pet, say ExcelSafe, and one for each application that will run in the pet, say Excel-WordSafe. This convention was chosen to put Pets that run in the same account close to each other in a sorted list of shortcuts.

Note that you may not need to use this option very often. If you are running Excel in a Pet and cause it to open Microsoft Word, Word will open in the Excel Pet account. However, you may find times when that doesn't work. For example, if you polarize your email client, you'll want the program that runs the synchronizer for your PDA to run in that pet.

Read-Only: Some applications use collections of files. The most common case is the browser, but it's special, so there's a separate check box elsewhere. A less common case is when you have a document that uses figures stored in some folder. If you open the document in a Pet, it won't have access to those files. Simply fill in the paths to the folders you want the Pet to have read access to. Be careful. The Pet will be able to read any file in the folder and subfolders.

Read-Write: Some applications need to be able to modify a collection of files. The most common case is a spreadsheet with links to other files. If you open the spreadsheet in a Pet, it won't have access to those files. Simply fill in the paths to the folders you want the pet to have read/write access to. Be careful. The Pet will be able to modify any file in the folder and subfolders.

Command Line Arguments: Some programs allow you to specify runtime parameters in addition to the name of a file. Specify them exactly as you would on a command line.

Check Boxes: There are five check boxes on the Endowments window. Each of them deals with a different, commonly occuring special case.

• Set as Default Web Browser: When you click on a web link in an email or in a document, Windows launches your default browser. You want that browser to be a Pet, so you check this box when polarizing your browser. Some software installations reset the default to be unpolarized Internet Explorer. You can undo this change by polarizing your browser again. Be sure to save your bookmarks before re-polarizing unless you use the medium risk option explained at Re-Polarization
• Set as Default Mail Client: (NB: This option is not yet working. We'll remove this warning once it is.) Many people depend on their email and don't want to risk losing productivity by polarizing their mail client. That's a wise policy, but it can be dangerous. There have been several attacks that get launched when you open or even preview a message. We've found that Outlook can be used effectively in a Pet. However, some functions, such as sending an email from your browser or Microsoft Word won't work unless you check this box.
• Allow Read/Write of Windows Temp folders: Some applications make changes in the Windows temp folder, which is usually c:\tmp or c:\temp. You can tell which name to use for sure by opening a command window and typing echo %TEMP%. Such programs violate Microsoft recommendations, but they are not rare. Clicking this box gives the Pet write permission to your temp folder and all its subfolders. Granting this permission may be dangerous if you store install programs in this folder. Malicious software running in a pet with this permission could replace one of those programs with a Trojan Horse that could end up running with administrator privileges.
• Allow editing the application execution folder: Some applications make changes in the folder containing the executable of the program being run, which is usually in c:\Program Files. Such programs violate Microsoft recommendations, but they are the primary reason you need to run with administrator privileges to get your job done. Clicking this box gives the Pet write permission to the folder containing the executable program and all its subfolders. This folder is the one in the path name you specified in the main Polarizer window. Granting this permission is dangerous, albeit far less dangerous than granting write permission to all of c:\Program Files, but it's the best you can do if you want to run the program.
• Read Only With Links: Some programs need access to other files in the folder of the file being used and files in its subfolders. We say these files are linked to the file you open. The primary example is a browser Pet used to display files stored on your disk. The graphics for the web page are often stored in a subdirectory with a name related to the name of your file. So, if your file is named c:\My Documents\myPage.htm, its graphics are most likely in c:\My Documents\myPage_files. If you simply open a browser Pet to read the file, you won't see the graphics because the Pet won't have permission to read files in the subdirectory. Normally, Polaris makes a copy of a file when it is being edited by a Pet. That would require copying an entire folder hierarchy for a web page to be viewed properly. However, a browser doesn't modify the file, so Polaris avoids this overhead by granting the Pet read permission to folder containing the file and its subfolders. Of course, if the person opening the file doesn't have authority to grant this permission, such as when the file is on a network share, then Polaris does make a copy.
• Grant Full Network Credentials: Selecting this option is equivalent to granting this Pet access to everything you can do on the network. A virus running in this Pet's account won't be able to do much harm to your machine, but it might be able to do a lot of damage to other machines you access. Be very careful which Pets get this endowment.
• Do Not Shut Down App When Windows All Closed: Normally, Polaris cleans up the Pet account when last visible window running in the Pet is closed. Polaris kills all processes running in that Pet, which prevents a virus from staring a long running program. Polaris also shuts down the file synchronizers and deletes the Pet's copies of any files you opened. That relieves you of worrying what data a virus running in the Pet might see. Unfortunately, this cleanup closes service routines that you may want to leave running. Check this box to bypass the cleanup. If you do need to force a clean up, you can right click on the PowerWindow icon in your system tray, mouse over Kill, and select the Pet you want closed.

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Using Polarized applications

You use Polarized applications exactly as you would any other program (except you can't drag/drop between Pets). Either launch the program from the shortcut, drag a document onto the shortcut, or double click on the icon for a file with the appropriate extension.

Your Pet will take a few additional secconds to start the first time you use a Pet after a reboot or when the Pet hasn't been used for a long time. Don't panic. Windows has to load the Pet's account information into the registry. Microsoft didn't optimize that path because they assumed it would only be needed at login. Most applications start in 10 seconds or less. However, we have seen delays as long as 30 seconds if a disk intensive program, such as a virus scanner, is running. Once the registry information is loaded, subsequent launches of the application will not incur any additional delay.

Polaris doesn't interact with your program in any way once it is running except for accessing other files. Any time you need to designate a file, such as with Open or SaveAs, you will see a file dialog box presented by Polaris. Because of the way this Beta release operates, you may see another dialog box flash momentarily on your screen before the Polaris file dialog opens and just after it closes. Also, in this Beta release the Polaris file dialog box may sometimes be under another window. Often, clicking the icon for the Pet in the task bar will make the dialog visible. If that doesn't work, hitting ESC cancels the request and returns control to the application.

There will also be times when you see two dialog boxes. The one labeled <<petname>> Open, where petname is the name of the Pet requesting access to the file, is running with the Pet's permissions. The one labeled Open for <<petname>> is the one you want to use since it has all your permissions. This label is very important. A file dialog box from an unpolarized application has a title Open, which gives you no indication of what application is requesting access. With Polaris, you know exactly which Pet will be getting access to the file.

Sometimes a failure occurs that might cause a loss of data, such as when you close the PowerWindow while a Pet is open. In such cases, Polaris saves the version from the Pet account area in a folder on your Desktop named PolarisRecover. You'll have to figure out if the version in that folder is the one you want.

You may encounter situations where you can't get your work done, apparently because of some strange behavior you think may be due to Polaris. Since you're using the Beta release, you may well be right. You may also be wrong. It could be a problem with Windows, or it could be that a virus has attacked the application and is struggling to get out to attack you, which has happened in our existing pilot program with the Alpha release. A virus not detected by Symantec AntiVirus corrupted a Pet, but could not corrupt the system.

It is possible to open the application the unsafe way, but before you go to this extreme, start the Polarizer and Polarize the application again under a new Petname. If the new Pet has the same behavior on a different file, it is probably not a virus. (The virus should be trapped in the original Pet). If the new Pet doesn't work either, you can see if it is a Polaris problem by opening the program the unsafe way. If you're opening the program directly, simply double click on the shortcut for the unsafe application (Found under All Programs under the Start button). If you're opening the program by double clicking on the icon for a file, then right click the document icon and select Open instead of the OpenSafe default. At this point you'll be as vulnerable as you were before you installed Polaris. When you find out that the problem isn't related to Polaris, you can go back to using the Pet.

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Differences from an Unsafe Desktop

We have worked hard to make using Polaris identical to using an unsafe Windows XP environment. We haven't completely succeeded, but we've come close. There are no differences for non-Polarized applications. The differences for Polarized applications are:

• Some Windows applications lock a file when you edit it. That means that you can only open it for reading while it is locked. Polaris does not lock the original file when you open it in a Pet. That means you can open it for writing outside the Pet. Don't worry. You won't be able to clobber your data. If you try to save a file that's been opened twice, the Pet will tell you to do a SaveAs. There is one exception. If the file is opened simultaneously in more than one Pet, you can get in trouble even if the application normally locks the file.
• Drag and drop to running Pets doesn't work. However, you can drag and drop onto the shortcut for a Pet or between windows running in a Pet.
• File dialog boxes have buttons along the left side and a pulldown menu at the top. The Desktop entry at the top of the pulldown points to the Pet account, not yours.
• Some extra logins are required when running from a Polarized browser unless you've configured your network authentication for those sites.
• Polaris doesn't detect non-standard file dialog boxes, such as those produced by some Java applications. You may not want to polarize these programs.
• Some extra steps are needed for editable, linked files. For example, you may need to grant read only or read/write permission using the Endowments window.
• Some classes of applications, mostly games using advanced graphics, won't run Polarized.
• Some ActiveX controls, in particular the one that launches MacroMedia Flash, don't work in polarized Internet Explorer. We are actively investigating this problem. In the interim, if you need Flash, say to watch a baseball game on MLB.com, use Firefox or your unpolarized Internet Explorer.
• You won't be able to open files using the application's list of recently used files, either from the File menu or from the task pane. That's because Polaris can't tell if it's you asking or a virus running in the Pet. Instead, use My Recent Documents from the Start menu. NB: We have a partial solution to this problem. Let us know if this feature is very important to you.

Other that this relatively short list, everything should work the way it always has, except that you don't have to worry about viruses. In fact, in some ways Polaris makes your machine easier to use.

• You can configure your settings to reduce the number of security related dialog boxes presented to you.
• You can safely use functions that are too dangerous in a non-Polaris machine, such as macros, web scripting, and launching email attachments.
• You can move or rename a file while you are editing it.

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Identifying Polarized applications

When the PowerWindow is running, it labels each window with the name of the Pet associated with it. So, windows running in your Excel Pet will have the label <<Excel>>. If the application is not running Polarized, the <<>> is absent. If you don't see this prefix on your Pets, it means you have to restart your PowerWindow. Since the PowerWindow doesn't reconnect to Pets that were running when it crashed, you should close any running Pets first. Note that we have not observed any crashes of the PowerWindow in our internal testing of this version.

You can make a more visibly striking but less reliable indication by using a poorly understood feature of Windows. Most applications use the new XP windows style with rounded corners. Polarized applications run with the old style windows that have sharp corners. If you change the color of the title bar, the change will apply only to old style windows. To make this change

• Right click on the desktop and select Properties.
• Select Appearance.
• Click Advanced.
• Click on Active Window in the upper area.
• Select Color 1 and Color 2 to your liking.
• Click OK
• Repeat for the Inactive Window and Message Box.
• Click OK when you are done.

Special instructions for specific applications

This section contains instructions that are specific to individual applications.

Adobe Reader:

By default, all PDF documents open in the same running instance of the Reader, even if they're opened by different users. That's pretty bizarre, but most personal computers only have one user, so you never notice it. Even more surprising is the behavior when you have previously read a PDF in your browser. Adobe Reader uses that instance even if you open the file from your Desktop.

The bad part is that this behavior can prevent you from using your Acrobat Pet. Say that you've opened a PDF document that you wrote. You know that's safe, so you opened it in your account. Next you open a PDF email attachment. That might not be safe. Since you're a savvy Polaris user, you'd like that document to open in a Pet. Adobe Reader doesn't want to do that. The Pet process starts, sees that there is a process running Reader, and sends a Windows message to that process to open the file. That message doesn't get through. That's a GOOD THING. Allowing such Windows messages from the Pet to your account would let a virus do anything you can do. Too bad for you. The document never opens.

Fortunately, there's an undocumented flag for Adobe Reader, /n, that tells the launcher to use a new instance each time Reader is run. To change this behavior,

• Select Folder Options from the Control Panel.
• Select File Types and highlight PDF.
• Select Advanced and highlight Open.
• Change the "Application used to perform action:" by replacing "%1" with /n "%1".
• Click OK twice.

This behavior also causes problems if you open PDFs by clicking on links in your browser. By default, Adobe Reader runs in the browser process, and the file is rendered in the browser window. We haven't figured out how to attach the /n option to the command, so bad things happen. Fortunately, you can configure Adobe Reader to open in a separate process.

• Open Adobe Reader from the Start menu.
• Select Edit and Preferences.
• Select Internet from the list of Categories.
• Uncheck the box labeled Open PDF in browser window.
• Click OK and close Adobe Reader.