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Open Letter to a Digital World
jg21 writes "Exasperated after spending 5 hours removing spyware and trojans from his wife's Windows PC, sysadmin Chris Spencer has written an impassioned Open Letter to a Digital World. In the letter he reviews the 'elephants in the closet' - i.e. unfixed bugs and glaring security vulnerabilities - that Microsoft in his view hopes ordinary users will ignore, including some discussed in previous Slashdot stories."
I've found a quicker way to get rid of those files, identify the executables through task manager and the "run" keys in the registry, then change filepermissions to block the system and user accounts on those files and/or directories, kill processes, remove registry entries, reboot, delete files. No more respawning webrebates etc..
And if you haven't set the filesystem to NTFS, you need to be slapped silly.
home
You know, that's pretty funny if you ask me, because I can usually do it in about 30-60 minutes or less (give or take), and with no degrees and no professional training whatsoever.
Here's how you do it....
1. Run msconfig
2. Uncheck all startup entries that look suspicious
3. reboot
4. Update and run Lavasoft AdAware
5. Update and run Spybot Search and Destroy
6. If you have them, and you should, update and run your favorite antivirus scanner.
7. Make sure all the spyware leftovers and their folders, if any, are deleted.
8. Run msconfig again and reenable anything legitimate that you might have disabled
9. reboot
Now, why do you want to disable the suspicious shit with msconfig first? If you ever get really 'stubborn to remove' shit like Ebates Moe Money Maker and friends, they're practically impossible to remove just by spyware scanning alone. You have to stop them from loading in the first place before you can get rid of them.
Well, other than the fact that he's laughably inept at cleaning spyware, he's still got a very valid point about just how utterly shitty and insecure the Windows platform is. It's been woefully insecure for years, it's woefully insecure now, and it will be woefully insecure for the unforseeable future. That's not just my opinion, it's a well known fact that Windows has been full of holes since at least since Windows 95, and likely earlier.
So, here we have a company that doesn't give a shit about it's product, doesn't give a shit about it's customers, doesn't give a shit about the law, and still it abuses its monopoly after being convicted of such in court. And as much as I blame Micro$oft for all the ills of the computer world, I'm a lot more pissed off at the consuming public for being the lazy, complacent sheep that they are for tolerating this abuse upon society for as long as they have, and instead of sitting on their fat asses allicted with "Homer Simpson Syndrome", they ought to be complaining to their government enmass and threatening to vote out the whole of Congress itself if that's what it takes to get them to do something about Microsoft. Damn! It's almost like walking into a run down crime ridden neighborhood, and looking at the people in it acting as though it's all normal that the neighborhood is all run down, vagrants and junkies sprawled out on the streets, drug pushers on every block, and hearing the sounds of gunshots, security alarms, and police sirens all the time.
Total batshit insanity, man! Just total batshit! But I guess it's what the people want. They don't really want freedom or justice, they just want to sit on their ass, watch that braindead 'Survivor' or 'American Idol' bullshit and wait for the TV to reprogram them into wanting the latest 'excercise in a bottle' weight loss fad or the latest $50,000 SUV that gets 3 mpg, has a DVD, and increases your penis size a whole 5 inches! What an utter travestry!
Well, that's my rant. Probably won't do anything to change the world no more than that 'Open Letter to a Digital World' will, but who knows? It only takes a few angry and motivated people to get the ball rolling.
Let's face it, Windows XP (and to a lesser extent Windows 2000) is designed to be run as an Administrator. They tell you in the documentation not to run the computer as an Administrator but the first user who logs into an XP Home machine is an Administrator by default. Several popular CD burning applications will not run correctly without Administrator priveleges. Hell, Diablo II won't run if the user is not an Administrator.
I have a heterogeneous network of a half-dozen computers here, some Windows, some Mac, some BSD, some Linux. Don't get me wrong, after it's been properly secured I don't mind running Windows but explaining to my mom why she couldn't burn CDs, install software, etc. was causing more headaches than it was worth. Other operating systems (notably Mac OS X) deal with this sort of thing fairly intelligently, why can't Windows?
My username does not make me Apathetic. It's irony, get it?