Fixing My Dad’s PC

Maybe the title of this entry isn’t quite right, because my father’s PC (actually, 21st century Harold has two PCs… and they’re networked) did work. It just didn’t work right.

My first hint of trouble was the fact that Windows SP2 couldn’t be installed. The second hint came when Steffie was here last month. She complained about pop-ups and not being able to reach certain sites.

Two things struck me when I looked at the PC. There were lots of pop-ups and weird tool bars were installed on Internet Explorer. None of this was good.

I started to work slowly, quizzing my dad on what he did or didn’t use. Ad-Aware showed a fair amount of spyware, but AVG gave him a clean bill of health on virii. Neither catch everything.

Then I began to uninstall things that didn’t look right or things he didn’t recognize.

He said the tool bars hadn’t been installed by him. That very well might be true. More likely they snuck in when he installed something else. His permission had been gotten in one of those click through licenses no one reads.

By late this evening, enough had been uninstalled that SP2 (which I brought on a CD from home) went in without a complaint. Then I continued to bring the computer up-to-date.

Finally, I looked at the start up section of ‘msconfig.’ Holy mackerel! What was this stuff? Weirdly named programs were starting themselves up every time he hit the power switch.

Now they’re gone.

I’ve rebooted a few times, and the system seems to come up cleanly. If any of those files were critical, we’ll soon know. In the meantime, XP and my father are playing nicely.

Spam of the Day

Along with all the spam I’ve received today came one that stuck out. It is an email so removed from reality that I had to look a little deeper:

Our recent view shows that it needs usual of only 1.7

drinkings to make a katzenjammer. But my tablets

services you avoid hang-overs and awaken feeling immense from head

to belly and everyplace additional.

Push to read more

The ‘push to read’ line was an actual link in this spam which I will not publish here.

I wanted to know what all this meant so I clicked (all my patches are in and I am not using Internet Explorer making it a lot less risky to click away). The ad page that came up, for a hangover remedy, was in perfect English. Whether it’s a legitimate product or not is for others to decide. Since I don’t drink, I’m not in the target audience.

I’m trying to figure this out, but it makes no sense on a number of different levels. The email might be avoiding certain words to try and evade filtering (though I did pluck this from my spam filtered mail). Or maybe it was written by someone who is machine translating another language to English and ended up with words that literally mean what was originally written – just not in this context.

This goes to point out another one of the problems for all of us caused by spam. In any legitimate business setting, no one could afford to advertise this poorly. With spam, where the cost is actually born by the people who read your mail and those who provide them with mail service, it is cheaper to just send than to spend the money to send effectively.

I have yet to see any proposed solution to spam that I think will work.

Windows XP Service Pack 2

Over the last year or two, the Windows operating system has started to resemble the South Bronx in the early 80s. Yes, it’s intrinsicly valuable, but it’s also become dangerous. The young and innocent must be protected from predators.

Over the weekend, Microsoft slowly rolled out a massive service pack for Windows XP – the latest version of its operating system. Since I have a bunch of machines to update at home, I downloaded the 225mb version and then passed it across my network to all the machines.

The size of the download will certainly keep people with dial-up accounts from getting the pack. It will probably intimidate many broadband users as well. That’s a massive file to download.

I’m taking few chances, so it was installed on my spare machine first. I figure there’s nothing mission critical on this machine so I can survive should the machine be unhappy with what I did.

Microsoft actually expects to see some troubles, though I have seen few specifics. Since it closes holes in certain ports with its new firewall, it’s sure to break programs that communicate in a non-standard way – even if they’re doing so for a perfectly legitimate purpose.

After the download, installation took about 25 minutes. It didn’t ask for my help, other than clicking off on the EULA.

As far as I can tell the installation was a success. I immediately noticed my wireless network, which needed me to manually start it on every reboot, was now finding its own way to operation. I’m not using Internet Explorer or Outlook Express on that machines, and I know that’s where a lot of the security enhancements were aimed.

There are two things which trouble me. First, this service pack doesn’t address problems for people running Windows 98, a perfectly fine and usable operating system. We have two machines at home (Steffie’s desktop and my laptop) which are running Windows 98. Neither machine has the firepower to switch to XP. They will continue to be susceptible to all the same attacks that brought this service pack on in the first place.

My second problem concerns whether Microsoft will allow this patch to be used on systems with bootleg copies of XP. It would seem obvious that they shouldn’t support those who steal from them, except for the fact that many of the ills this service pack stops are passed along to legitimate users. So, no inoculation for them means they may make my computers sick in the long run.

It is certainly a quandary for Microsoft. I don’t know what I’d do if it were me. However, if viruses and spam from zombie machines continues because of Microsoft’s policies, I’ll be ticked.

It Can’t Happen Here

Some Microsoft webservers have been infected with a strange virus that infects user’s computers. It’s really dastardly because this can happen on well known, well respected sites where you’d never expect trouble.. Even though the threat from this particular exploit is now virtually nil (the website which was to receive the purloined info has been closed), it will definitely be the first of many similar attacks.

It’s just too lucrative a move for hungry thieves to avoid!

Just in case you’re worried, you should know it can’t happen here. This is an Apache webserver running on a Linux PC. The exploit needs Microsoft IIS servers.

However, this just continues to point out how vulnerable Internet Explorer is. The virus is passed along to individuals through IE.

Last night I downloaded Foxfire, a browser from Mozillla which can replace Internet Explorer. I guess it’s time to make the switch… while I still can.

Mac Users… I’m So Embarrassed

I compose this blog on a variety of computers. Most of the time, the typing is done at home on one of a few Windows XP machines, using Internet Explorer. From time-to-time I will also compose on my Linux machine at home (or if it’s a really slow night, my Linux machine at work) using Mozilla as the browser. Most of the time, the blog looks exactly as I want it to look.

Without going into all the details (since I’m not sure I totally understand it), a blog like this is only possible because of CSS or cascading style sheets. I can define the look of the blog’s component parts and keep things uniform through a master style sheet. That’s why the column on the left looks as it does, the main blog body and headers look as they do, and how

I can put text into a bounded box with mono spaced type by adding a few characters

I don’t own a Mac and never use Macs. I had no idea what this blog looked like on a Mac. Now I do, and I’m not happy. You can take a look yourself if you really want! That capture was sent to me by Michael Dreimiller.

I had somehow left out one tiny little command. It was a command that deactivated big type. Without it, every once in a while, big type would appear where I didn’t want it.

My Windows browser could care less. Unfortunately Internet Explorer really doesn’t follow the exact CSS protocol (even though it accounts for the vast majority of web browsers). So I was short changing Mac owners.

The fix took about 10 seconds. I’m still not sure if everything else is Kosher. For that, I will run the rest of the site through a ‘validator’ later tonight and see what changes are necessary. Though I started with a perfectly valid style sheet, I have modified it mercilessly over the months. Who knows what evil I have done.

Anyway, if you’re a Mac user, my profuse apologies. Feel free to reread whatever looked awful earlier. Everything should be fine now – I hope.