Being someone who “works with computers,” Family and friends quite often fling random personal hardware into my lap to “fix when you have some spare time.”

This is one of those spare times.

I’ve seen the patient (a late model Dell Inspiron, well apportioned with several hardware options, no signs of abuse or even heavy use) several time now for systems issues.

First it wasn’t showing local drives and had some permissions issues installing any new software, even if you logged in as an admin. There was a small trojan that had dropped a reg key to keep itself from getting uninstalled. I corrected the reg key, put some basic adware/junk filters in place, installed the software in question and returned it, advising a full backup of personal data and a dirty install of windows.

When the patient returned with complaints involving spyware blocking prompts, I thought that the basic crap filter had been left a bit sensitive. Signing on, I found a huge mess.

Starting with the usual review of startup processes, killing off of regular user clutter, I found the gremlin…

The now-famous trojan, Antivirus Home 2009 has been updated, and the patient is singing the Fake AV Blues. Loudly. From the back fence.

Our botnet buddies have included some familiar features, but have ramped things up. The install has become very worm-like. It has the usual home base, but any CPL “uninstall” or use of any of the usual removal tools in your tool belt will make it very defensive.

Even after killing off all of its processes, renaming its executables, and cleaning the tempspace, it sees mbam, spybot, and the stinger, kills them off, puts its OWN fly-by installer in place of the exe of the tool, and hides another install of itself using what looks like randomized names.

I ended up doing a manual kill, very similar to the list found at syschat, but with several new ones added to the list, including:

A load of registry entries that I should have logged, as they were all serial based.
_scui.cpl in a secondary location
lots of copies of a binary batch file, with names like asox, avaxo, tufija
reg files named ylifat, etc
inf files named like xehiger
and lots of copies of the same .dat file in all of the locations mentioned at syschat, but with names like jabocixevu, jihomuri, sevotif

After getting the polyps knocked down, I did a restart, then removed the installs and stubs of all the detect and protect tools because they are all suspect at this point.

Rebooting again, things look much better. For the first couple of minutes. Then a notifier bubble shows up from the task tray with a fake “malware detection” notification. Downloading and installing a fresh mbam install and running it kicks off a new install of antivirus 2010.

Back to square one.

It’s just a pet peeve, but when I hear people in media verbally giving out links, they make a couple of mistakes. These mistakes bleed over into the habits of non-media people,and it’s a really big mess after a few years.
Number one is the nomenclature of the symbols on the keyboard. The slash and backslash are completely different buttons. A slash (/) leans forward. You are reading this text from left to right, as you would in the vast majority of languages in use on this planet (left-to-right-reading languages like Hebrew and Arabic would likely have a completely different nomenclature for the slashes). It’s leaning forward, toward the rest of the line. A BACKslash (\), therefore, leans backward. The slash is generally next to the right-side shift key with the question mark. The backslash is usually above the enter button with the pipe(|) symbol. Since the backslash and pipe are rarely used, the button is generally ignored. In web addresses used in a browser to get to a website, the slashes are just slashes. Any mention of a “backslash” by someone in media to the general public wastes a syllable and confuses anyone who is paying attention. The character that you get when you hold the shift key and press the number 8 is an asterisk (*). Not “asterik”, not swastika.

I completely stumbled onto Alexa Ray Joel, and liked what I was hearing, before it started to dawn on me exactly *who* I was hearing. I have a feeling that this is the kind of thing she would prefer from new fans.

This is the first single from her second album, her first featured her own artwork, and sampled herwide range from folk/country to alt-pop, and into jazz. This track would sit gingerly in the pop-jazz area. Reminiscient of Corrine Bailey Rae and Billie Holiday, The writing has strong hooks and the arrangements are balanced.

As stated above, I got into the track for a while before finding out more about who she is. The tipoff to some of you would have been the Joel surname. She’s the daughter of Billy Joel and Christie Brinkley.

This week, I was listening to a band called Jets Overhead, who have a phychedelic, contemplative sound that combines current alt-rock with a strong nod toward the heavily folk-inspired seventies period of rock.

This year is the only time that VD will be coupled with the Unix epoch rolling to sequential number. Of course, the two are a few hours apart, but hey, any excuse to celebrate dorky geek trivia *and* being a more-or-less willing target for a heavily-armed, floating infant deserves a nod.

For the geek-deficient, here’s the executive overview:The epoch for Unix systems is 1/1/1970. To these systems, this date is the beginning of our current time. When you request today’s date, the create date of a file, or the last access date of a file, the system has that info stored as the number of seconds since midnight January 1, 1970. For the most part, this number is reformatted to the date style you are used to reading in your part of the world. Programmers, analysts, and administrators often use the raw number to do faster calculations of dates without t trouble of programming around things like leap years and daylight savings shenanigans. Yesterday evening, the number reached a sequential pattern. It’s like noticing that your car’s odometer has rolled to all 2′s (like mine did a few weeks ago)

Besides that, yesterday was Friday the 13th, and we have another Friday the 13th next month.
The new Friday the 13th movie was released last night. It’s supposed to be a remake of the first three in the series, so there should be lots of room for serious cheese. Hopefully, it will have some good scary, gory parts, and probably some t&a and drugs, but definitely a lotta cheese.

Oh, and on this VD, the floral industry would like to once again thank you all for creating an incredible demand for out-of-season product. They grow them artificially in greenhouses on another continent and ship them in at a premium, and them charge a premium to you. Thanks for looking out for the planet there. What if next year, everyone buys something local and in-season? Think of the transportation savings. Even more than that, think of how much fresher the flowers will be, since they won’t have spent so much of their little bloomin’ lives in a shipping crate. And you would be helping the economy in your own neighborhood.

That said, I’m going to share a non-mushy VD sentiment.

Well, I suppose it’s non-mushy. I didn’t actually poke at it to find out.

The preliminary screenshots of Windows 7 look just like KDE, so the guys at zdnet labs did their own take on the microsoft mojave project:

Thought I’d share.

Today is the inauguration of Obama as the 44th president of the U.S.

I was having some discussions about the job that he’s undertaking, and wanted to put some things down.

The job is not easy, does not pay an amazing salary, and changes the life of the job holder for life.

The primary focus of today’s happenings in Washington D.C. is the transfer of office from GWB to Obama, and the main moment is when he is “sworn in”. The oath of office is really rather short:

“I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

That sounds very simple and easy. It sounds like what military personnel, peace officers, and any public servant of any level would be striving to do. The second half, anyway.

The “office of the president” in basic, explicit terms is this:

“The power of the executive branch is vested in the President, who also serves as Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces. The President appoints the Cabinet and oversees the various agencies and departments of the federal government.”

This job is the embodiment of one-third of the government of the U.S. It’s the public vision of leadership and influence of a nation. It’s very different from similar posts found in other governments, with all the facets and responsibilities.

How does daily work of the US President affect your daily life? The policy he writes, the decisions made as far as the use of the armed forces, the diplomatic agreements made… It might not be immediate, but every president has made an impact in shaping things here in our melting pot.

what’s his daily life going to look like? Here is Time Magazine’s take.

The day after the general presidential election, I saw two articles that sort of fragmented a lot of the feelings about the day’s events.
I was reading this article about the new hope, the new era, the transformation in the daily lives of everyone, everywhere. This grand news showing that people really are people, that americans are finally showing signs that racism is dying off, and that anyone from anywhere can truly contribute, make a difference, and succeed in this world….
And then I read
this article about a surprising, brutal murder of an interracial newlywed couple, about how nice they were, how hardworking, what team-players they were, and that the suspects were all part of his daily team.

Of course, these are anecdotes, but it seems that americans still have a long way to tread. Looking at Prop 8 in California, and a whole year’s worth of headlines about homosexual unions and the discussion, oh, the roundabouts about legalities and rights. There are a lot of times in these discussions where I feel like the battle is truly lost. Not the debate, mind you: once a line (or any other geometrical shape) is drawn in the sand, everyone starts working up their arguments for their “side”, which is a great exercise. Then when the debates start happening, everyone gets bogged down in sound bites (misappropriated quotations), and the brewing of more acerbic arguments, and *that* is when the battle is lost. That’s the point when I start feeling like the discussion stalls, and no-one involved has a clear view of the facts anymore. The focus becomes the fight, rather than on perspective. The whole issue then boils bown to simple, constant, refutiation of the “other side”, which never settles anything except each side claiming that they are right, and there isn’t any progress anymore.