Tips on Breast Care for Mothers

Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Breastfeeding is a wonderful feeling that a woman can experience. It is beneficial for both the baby and the mother in several ways. But breast care is equally important. This will not only give a hygienic supply of milk to the baby but also help mother to maintain the shape and the firmness of her breasts.

This assumes that it is solely a lactating mother's outlook to sustain a good and healthy diet for her breastfeeding child. A mother who gives birth to a large baby that grows fast may experience difficulties in producing and sustaining enough quantities of milk. This is because the fat reserves she had during the pregnancy period can be lost soon after childbirth and eating well enough might become a problem for her.

Keep the nipples washed clean. Beginning from around the fifth month of pregnancy, a viscous fluid is secreted from the breasts. If this is not washed away properly, it may form a crust and the surrounding skin becomes reddish. To prevent this, clean the nipples well everyday with warm water - occasionally adding boric acid powder to the water and dry them by rubbing them lightly with a clean piece of cloth.

Proper breast care begins with the cleanliness of the breast. Women should devote a few minutes of their bathing schedule in pampering the breasts. Since breasts are a spongy mass of tissue enclosed by a skin, they can be washed with the same soap you use for the rest of the body.

Breast enlargement pills use the same concept. Mankind has known such herbs which stimulate growth since ages. These herbs are known to increase the bulk of the breast growth. These herbs contain the plant estrogen, called phytoestrogen. This phytoestrogen has the same function human estrogen has.

Though not proven to cause breast cancer, surgical breast enhancement technique has its vehement protestors. Not wanting to go through the rigors of a surgery and desiring an alternative to the artificial look and feel of a breast implant, more and more women are turning towards non surgical breast enhancement methods like the pill, pump, cream or a special brassiere.

Other common problems like sagging breasts and inverted nipples can be easily combated by proper and precise breast massaging techniques. Finally, breast massages increase the tone and breast and the bust size. This will work well to increase the confidence of the woman, and she will feel good about herself.

In case the nipples appear flat or inverted, it is advised to press the areola between the thumb and the finger to encourage the nipple to stand out. If the nipple sticks out, the baby will not have any difficulty in suckling. During the pregnancy period the shape of the nipple may be abnormal, but it improves as the pregnancy advances. This is because of the effect of hormones during pregnancy.

These hormones are called oxytocin and prolactin. The hormone called oxytocin is stored in the pituitary gland and acts on muscle cells. These muscles surround the milk glands where milk is produced. Oxytocin causes the muscles cells to contract in turn squeezing milk out of the glands into the ducts.

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Sandboxie: Blocking Web-Based Malware From Your PC

There is no safe neighborhood anywhere on the Internet. Even honest reputable sites, such as The New York Times, can inadvertently serve up malware. If you don't keep all the software on your computer patched with the latest bug fixes, you are constantly at risk – malware exploits known bugs to install itself.

Now that Windows does a reasonably good job of self-updating, the bad guys have taken to attacking other software, such as the Adobe Acrobat Reader and the Flash player plug-in, which don't automatically install patches as well as Windows does. And, up to date antivirus software only provides limited protection.

Enter Sandboxie, an excellent program that builds a virtual sandbox around your web browser, making it impossible for your computer to accidentally get infected.

When you run a program in a sandbox, you are really running Sandboxie and it, in turn, is running the program in a walled-off virtual box. Originally developed for Internet Explorer, Sandboxie can now put a sandbox around any Windows program.


Programs running a sandbox can, by default, see everything on the computer. What they can't do is make any permanent changes. When sandboxed programs try to read files, Sandboxie does not interfere. However, when they try to create new files, Sandboxie intercepts the requests and creates the files in another location. The running program is oblivious to this re-direction. It thinks it's talking to Windows, but it really is talking to Sandoxie. The movie The Truman Show offers a pretty good analogy.


If anything malicious gets accidentally installed on your computer while browsing with a sandboxed browser, it lives only in the sandbox. Specifically, the malware may think it got installed into C:\Program Files, but it actually lives in C:\Sandbox\youruserid\DefaultBox\drive\C\Program Files. Empty the sandbox and the malicious software is gone. This is shown visually on the home page of sandboxie.com. The initial state of a computer is shown below:




The top checkerboard pattern illustrates a hard disk with no sandbox. In the bottom one, the virtual sandbox is shown as a yellow box.

When a program runs, the changes it makes to the file system and the hard disk are shown as red boxes. In the image below we see that normally the red boxes/changes are scattered all over.




However, Sandboxie forces all changes made by a sandboxed program to live inside the sandbox. If any of the changes are not wanted, just empty the sandbox.

If this sounds like virtualizaiton, it is. But it's small, lightweight virtualization, whereas full blown virtualization products are large and cumbersome. Also, the changes Sandboxie makes to your computer are minimal compared to full-fledged desktop virtualization software like that offered by VMware. Has a problem occurred to you? Most likely, there is a simple solution. Sanboxie is nothing if not a well thought out program.

If you don't want malware on your computer, even if it's sandboxed, you can configure a sandbox so that all changes made by any program are discarded as soon as the last program in the sandbox shuts down. You can see this below:




There are two sandboxes on this computer, the default one and another called ThrowMeAway (I chose the name). As the name implies, all changes made in this sandbox are always discarded. If you really want a private browsing mode, this beats them all.

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Protect Yourself on Facebook

Tuesday, October 20, 2009

Love them or hate them; social networking sites are here to stay. And your users are going to find ways to use them from home, from work, from smart phones, from shared computers, or from anywhere else they care to.

The whipped cream is out of the can. Now what can we do about it?

So, how secure are these sites?

I’ve experienced several classic Web security issues in each of the sites I frequent, and without a doubt there remain many vulnerabilities to be discovered. But that hasn’t stopped me from using them.

Like any decision involving risk, I’ve studied the issues, minimized my own exposure, and I’m getting on with what I care to do.

Let’s start by looking at the issues briefly.

Web apps:

Well, for starters, they are Web applications, and as such they’re potentially vulnerable to a plethora of issues, from the OWASP Top-10 and beyond – and yes, there are far more than 10. And don’t think for a moment that all web application vulnerabilities solely place the application at risk. Many also put the app’s users at risk: cross-site scripting (XSS), cross-site request forgery (CSRF), and others can be used to attack the users quite easily.

As a user of a social networking site, you’re placing your (and your employer’s) data at risk.

Active content:

Long-time readers of this column (hi Mom!) have heard me talk about the dangers of active content many times. Javascript, Java applets, Flash, ActiveX, and many others are all examples of active content. And guess what? Every popular social networking site in existence – or at least with a significant population of users – absolutely requires active content in order for the site to function.

The bottom line: by allowing active content into your browser, you are trusting someone else’s code to run on your computer safely. Well, what’s the big deal? We do that all the time. Well, now the code is dynamic and maintained somewhere else, and you’re trusting it every time. Gulp!

Domain of trust:

Some of the HTML, Javascript, etc., that arrives in your browser comes from (say) Facebook. Fair enough, if you’re going to use Facebook, you’ll need to trust that content. But your browser isn’t so discerning. Some of the stuff that comes into it while you’re on Facebook might be provided by someone else: another Facebook user; an attacker; a third party application on Facebook. If your browser trusts Facebook, chances are it’s also going to trust that code. This extends the active content exposure pretty substantially.

User-supplied content:

Users put all sorts of content into their own profiles. URLs pointing to cool sites, photos, etc. If they link to something dangerous—perhaps inadvertently—and you click on it… Well, you get the drift.

Third party applications:

Most of the popular social networking sites have a third-party application interface for companies to generate their own content. Most of it is pretty innocuous and in the spirit of good clean fun, like a little app that lets you “throw” a virtual snowball at someone else. But, again, it extends that trust boundary in ways you might not want.

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