Actually, it pretty much applies equally everywhere (that was a specific example of why the code changes, not of what you might have done wrong today.) Not that I'm an expert in British wiring, but I expect you have an electric code, and that it is revised periodically, and that you have electrical inspectors for exactly the same reasons we have them here in the U.S. If you have wiring done, you should have an inspector verify that it was done in a safe and prudent manner, following local best practices that were current as of the time of the inspection. That's pretty much universal, (although I suspect that in some countries the electrical inspector is little more than yet another corrupt official requiring a bribe.)
When visiting friends on the isle of Arran, Scotland, I remember seeing the "fuse box" and being quite frightened at all the exposed, uninsulated 220V hot wiring. It certainly made me appreciate the U.S.'s NEC all the more.
My sister bought the house from a widow in the mid 1990s. I don't know if the late husband was the perpetrator of the wiring I encountered, but if so at least the rest of humanity should rest a little safer knowing this was the last house he threatened. As I recall, the existing dangerous wiring I was working with was Romex that was date-coded 1989, making it quite likely he was the guy.
Actually, given the state of the wiring, I wouldn't be surprised to learn he died from electric shock!:-)
The guy in the cube next to me was rebuilding a PC from an original XP CD-ROM, and it was infected with Win32.Spybot before he applied SP2. (SP2 was located on a network drive, thus the network connection.) After lunch he asked me if I'd done anything to his comupter; I said no and went to take a look. According to the logs, he was infected just over one hour after the initial XP installation (he'd put in the CD and went to lunch.) This was at work, behind the corporate firewall where everyone is theoretically running a constantly updated Norton AV.
No bullshit. Idiots with personal (unprotected) laptops on the corporate network, antivirus vendors afraid of lawsuits from adware vendors, clever spyware writers who dynamically update their zombies to turn into infection vectors, and Microsoft made this one happen.
If you're installing from an official XP with SP2 disc, you'll probably have no trouble. If you're installing from an older XP (pre-SP2) disc, you're wide open to this crap unless you've got a strong, close firewall.
Well, there's an awful lot of stuff in the NEC these days. As the technology of the components changes, and as best practices are improved upon by the industry, these are adopted into the modern electrical code.
Smart people aren't always knowledgeable about other fields. As in computers, there are ways to make it work that don't necessarily mean they're done correctly. I was almost zapped earlier this year because I was working on some wiring in my sister's basement that had been put up by a previous owner. I discovered through the "spark method" that the guy had two separate circuits operating in the same box, coming in different sides and both on black wires. This made me extremely wary of anything the guy had touched, so I pulled the main breaker before continuing. As I ripped out his dangerous connections in order to put them together correctly I found other places where he used white wires to carry the hot side without marking them with black tape (as required.) I also found a case where he switched the neutral wire instead of the hot wire. Yes, the light was operated by the thing on the wall as you might expect, but no, it was not done correctly nor safely.
Also, what your smart friends may have learned in the 1970s and 1980s may no longer be legal for wiring today. For example, in the 1970s aluminium wire was legal for use in residential wiring, but it was later discovered that its coefficient of expansion was greater than that of copper, and that after years of expansion and contraction the wires could escape from underneath the screws that held them, causing arcing and fires. The code has been modified to explain how to handle existing aluminium wiring.
Does that mean your friends did anything wrong? Not at all -- they could have been very careful and safe, and put everything together correctly. Would they have benefited from an inspection? Think of an inspector more like pair programming, where you have a second pair of eyes to make sure you did things right.
I think it'd probably be of the most value if it were dynamically context sensitive -- hit the CTRL key, and "X" changes to "Cut", "C" changes to "Copy", "V" changes to "Paste". Each application would be offering its own shortcuts, each input box would be able to offer its own hints, etc. eInk would be too slow.
Actually, after seeing the movie Hackers I went and painted an IBM model M keyboard gloss black, several coats, followed by a clearcoat for wear, and then allowed it to cure for a month before using it. That was a long time ago. Even though the edges of the home row keys are finally wearing through, I still have never missed the actual symbols. For the years prior to my painting it, it had been in a keyboard pull-out tray pushed completely under my desktop where I never really had to look at it.
Surprisingly, it turned out not to be a big inconvenience to the people with whom I occasionally share my computer. I enjoy their initial reactions (it's always "how can you use that thing?"), but when they realize they don't need to see the keytops either, they get a big kick out of it themselves. Funny how little things like that get people to step out of their comfort zone; they enjoy it, but then crawl right back to their crutches.
Yeah, if this thing were a real computer keyboard, I'd be running some cool looking "keysaver" on it 24x7. Maybe a randomly shifting or rotating alphabet pattern -- now that would harm most peoples' ability to type!
From the article above, I first read it as "a sensor that detects if the fuel tank is present". That didn't sound too critical, because it's a "look-out-the-window-and-see-if-it's-still-there" kind of problem.
I used to have the same attitude, but I fortunately outgrew it once I realized the simple truth: these people have been sold computers.
There's a difference between buying a computer and being sold a computer. Buying implies that you know what you're doing, and that you have a purpose, and many other things including the willingness to learn, at least to the degree required that you mention above.
Being sold means being told "Oh, Grandma, you need a computer so we can send you baby pictures" or "Geez, Frank, why don't you just go to the web site to find the parts list for that snowblower?" Frank is a plumber. Grandma sells Mary Kay. These are not computer literate people, and have neither the time nor the inclination to learn. Yet they've been told by someone that it's "plug and play" or "just click here for your email, Grandma."
You can't hold these people responsible for having knowledge that they are never likely to be able to learn. An analogy is that today you can be a successful car driver without ever having opened your own hood. There was a time when it would have been unthinkable to not understand the Otto cycle and be presumputous enough to believe that you could successfully drive from New York City to Pittsburgh. So just as cars have become more reliable and simplified to the point where ordinary folks can drive them, computer makers have dumbed-down their interfaces so that Grandma can be successful at "clicking here for email."
And from the other side of the equation, why should Grandma have to know about a firewall, or spyware, or viruses? She doesn't have to know anything about a fan belt in order to drive her car. So why place these same expectations on ordinary people?
The reason is that computers were sold to the general public far, far in advance of their being market-ready. Only the simplest of embedded systems are really "consumer quality" -- toaster controls, elevator controls, etc. But we Lords of Technology have been trumpeting how great our lives are now that we're "on-line", and have been pushing everyone from your nephew to my grandmother-in-law to buy a computer. No matter that the systems bring up blue-screens-of-death, get infested with worms, and pop up little warning dialogs filled with humanly-unreadable arcana.
What should have happened? Should we have sat on our precious artificial monopoly as Kings of the Digital Age, with an understanding far above the Puny Mortals, denying them access to our CPUs of Great Power? We actually did for many years, but with the rise of GUI-based operating systems, we could no longer deny the spread. We kings now simplyh have to cope with the fact that the mortals can never be our equals, they'll never devote their lives to learning this trivia. So it's up to us to help them, at the very least to help them to the point where they can no longer do damage to us with their worms.
Well, I really saw only one unwanted program being installed, and I can't really label it adware (yet), so I'm glad you didn't prematurely blame the vendor.
Anyway, about AOL -- the thing I hate the most is that they add themselves to the computer's "most trusted domains" list. Now that's spywary activity no matter how you slice it.
Since it's somewhat apparent from your writing that English isn't your first language (I mean no offense as you write quite well,) it appears that you also missed that the original poster was not being serious. It was very obvious to most of us that he was telling a joke.
Nice documentation! However, after looking around it doesn't really look much like a true spyware installation to me.
It looks like it's installing Audible's AudibleManager, which according to their website is supposed to be an automated podcast-downloader-thingie. Now, I know nothing about this software other than what its stated purpose is: to automate the downloading of (primarily) audio file content. As far as I know, to use it you have to register with Audible to request certain content. It seems like they're trying to run a pay-for-play service. I don't see mention of ad supported media, although I'm assuming their non-premium content probably comes with audio ads. Plus, they aren't mentioned as a threat on the anti-spyware forums I frequent. While it seems to be a touch suspicious, it's not ringing all my alarm bells yet.
The registry entry Startup Guard caught for you looks like a pretty standard "we've asked you to reboot to install our drivers, and when the reboot is finished we're going to run the installer one more time" (I am assuming this because the program path is an InstallShield related path, and not a typical spyware folder path.) Typically this step is used to clean up temporary or intermediate files created during the installation process. The name of the startup task here implies that it might launch a window begging you to register your software. But being placed in the RUNONCE key isn't necessarily spyware by itself -- according to Microsoft
"By default, the value of a RunOnce key is deleted before the command line is run. You can prefix a RunOnce value name with an exclamation point (!) to defer deletion of the value until after the command runs. Without the exclamation point prefix, if the RunOnce operation fails the associated program will not be asked to run the next time you start the computer."
Spyware doesn't typically want to be auto-deleted -- it tries to run forever and ever. Sure, some spyware hides in the runonce key and continually restores itself there, but your particular install doesn't seem to fit the spyware pattern yet. You can certainly choose to block this extra step (as you did) without doing real harm to your machine, but you'll probably waste a few bytes of hard drive space by not allowing it to clean up.
I personally agree with you on this one and consider avoiding this kind of random software execution to be worth the waste, which is why I usually don't allow these to proceed myself. However, by preventing this step from running, you may have inadvertently allowed the C:\Program Files\Creative folder to go undeleted after the install! Just because you chose a different folder doesn't mean their installer is perfect: they may have hired a stupid installation-script writer who put everything to C:\Program Files\Creative\ and then cleaned it all up at the end by moving the entire folder contents to your stated "real" destination. (Yes, there are installation packages like that because InstallShield has an absolutely horrible script language that takes a long time to learn, leading to all sorts of stupid workarounds among people who haven't mastered it.)
The one real concern I see here is the four Ad-Aware critical objects. It would have been nice to have a screen shot indicating what those were. They might have been as innocuous as the AOL spam on your desktop, a few doubleclick or aol cookies, or (my least favorite feature of AdAware) additions to a "most recently used" file list. (AdAware seems to equate populating a "most recently used" file menu list with the installation of real spyware. It's a very poor discrimination between "privacy" and "spyware" that tends to frighten people when they see it. I prefer to turn MRU checking off completely.) But without seeing AdAware's list, it's hard to tell what it thought was wrong.
Please, enlighten us with this bastard company's name. You're not doing them any favors by allowing them to continue making work for the rest of us -- let's get them reeducated sooner, not later.
I found Brodcast / DSSAgent on my PC when I first started learning about spyware several years back. I realized this was the first cleanup I'd ever done, so I thought no big deal. But then, of course, I tightened the box down completely, and was far more cautious, and haven't encountered any on my box since.
Except Brodcast came back one day. I then researched it and found it came in on a purchased game CD from Mattel (I think it was a Carmen Sandiego title.) The CD was quite old, and it was just a "new concept in marketing" back in 1998, long before spyware became a word. Mattel got publicly spanked for this back in 2000, and their more recent releases are safe.
The spanking worked. A few of us still consider Mattel a bit "sleazy" for ever having tried it, but they did stop once it became widely known. Do them and us a favor and publish their name. The sooner they get spanked, the fewer computers will be infested.
However, please make sure your facts are straight before you go public. Make sure it was actually software on that particular CD that hit you and not a different product or a worm such as the Win32.Spybot worm. You should also contact the manufacturer and ask if it was deliberate -- it's possible that their master CD was infested with a worm like this just before it went to production.
I wish I remember where I saw it, but it was a business card for a spyware removal service called something like "My Cousin Frank". It was marketed to us geeks who are sick of cleaning spyware off our friends' computers.
The idea was that as a geek when you visit someone's house, they'll frequently ask something like, "Oh, John, you're in the computer business so you must know all about this stuff, can you stop the popup ad things on our computer?" With this service, you can lie and say "Well, I don't know much about the popups, but my cousin Frank knows all about them. I'll call him and see if he'll come over and take care of it." You then call My Cousin Frank and pay them something like $100. They send a guy over who pretends to be your cousin, he eats the crappy meatloaf dinner and smiles, looks at their kids' soccer trophies, tells them a few fake stories of your childhood, and then cleans up their PC. If they have any heart, he might walk away with a $20 tip, too.
It's a brilliant marketing concept. I'm thinking of hiring them for future cleanups of my sister-in-law's computer. $100 has got to be cheaper than the f'ing aggravation.
I think joining the "Yay spyware! Keep those fixit dollars rolling my way" chorus is pretty much an assurance that you already have no soul to be sucked.
Perhaps the better question is: how long can this gravy train last? Will Windows ever evolve to the point where spyware won't be a problem again?
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HAHAHAAHAAHAHAHAHAHA! Sorry, I knew I couldn't type that and keep a straight face till the end. Congratulations and I hope you make lots of money!
That depended entirely on the platform, but you're correct for most of the microcomputing world (although I did make extensive use of IBM's BASIC compiler in about 1982 or so.)
"GOTO" is one keyword, unless you're in some Bizzaroland twisted version of BASIC. Also, every BASIC dialect of that vintage that I'm familiar with didn't support mixed case keywords, it was uppercase or it didn't compile.
Actually many of the machines of the era didn't support upper and lower case. Several didn't have 8-bit character sets -- 6-bit characters were common; but there simply isn't room in 6 bits to include the lower case characters. Hacks did exist to trick the terminal controllers into emitting mixed case, but the machines themselves didn't speak full ASCII. And certainly no compiler writer would have wasted the extra bytes supporting mixed case! Heresy!
You can download the SP2 standalone executable and burn it to a CD. Or, you could order an SP2 CD for free from Microsoft. Or, you could pick up an SP2 CD for free from your local computer store. All of these options are pretty easy, don't you think?
While you and I may know these options are easy, that's a very arrogant viewpoint. They are neither easy nor obvious to a hairdresser, a plumber or a truck mechanic.
You're lucky that you live in a city where you have cable modems instead of rural telephone lines, and that you know what SP2 is and that you ask for a copy from the computer store when buying the new hard disk. Yes, I have SP2 on CD and carry it with me when I go to fix other peoples' computers, but most non-computer people don't have these luxuries -- they have to connect via dialup and hope that Windows Update will take care of their problems. Only the "better educated than most" have any idea that they can get infected before they can even get patched.
These are the people who are allowing zombies to run rampant over the net. They need our help, not elitist comments about how "this is not rocket science" or "just download a CD."
Because if you bought your PC in 2002 and it came with a bright, shiny XP (no service pack) disk and you're rebuilding it, you use what you have. You have to bootstrap to something in order to download and install SP2. In the time it takes to get Windows Update going, you're too late -- the machine is infected.
I see someone disagrees with you, and others think it's funny, but I have to say that was precisely my experience this very weekend.
As the family's official computer nerd, I'm called upon to fix all the infested and/or dead boxes. I've rebuilt my sister-in-law's box several times now due to spyware and virus infections. This last weekend I said "screw it" and refused to fix her stupid Windows ME box, and said it was scrap unless I could install XP SP2 and give her the windows firewall. (Before the Linux/Mac fanbois descend upon me like a horde, she uses some weird Windows software for work on this box, and I'm not Mr. WINE.) I've given my nice gnucleus, I've talked to her about downloading kazaa I don't know how many times, but still she downloads it, and still she screws the box over big-time.
So, evolution happened. ME is gone, and now she has XP SP2 with every defensive program I could find loaded up on it, along with a lock down of every incoming port. Firefox has replaced IE, and Spybot S&D has "innoculated" it against 4000+ pieces of spyware.
See the comments further down. It's actually caused by the enzymatic action of the pineapple juice (the active component in meat tenderizers) and not necessarily by the abrasion.
I can promise you that grinding wheel injuries hurt more than many other types of injuries. Although they're almost painless when they happen, they hurt like hell while you wait to heal. Unlike a knife or sharp implement, they remove skin and so leave no flaps to hold, tape or sew back together, leaving open wounds until they scar over. (I worked in a grinding shop from 1979-1985.) I wouldn't recommend trying the Dremel on your body parts. Ever.
And I thought the Scandinavian countries were much more sensible than this. Don't mean to be a troll but your country has always been viewed as more "liberal" than most. This doesn't improve your image.
Of course, here I sit in the U.S. of RIAA. "Pot, kettle."
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When visiting friends on the isle of Arran, Scotland, I remember seeing the "fuse box" and being quite frightened at all the exposed, uninsulated 220V hot wiring. It certainly made me appreciate the U.S.'s NEC all the more.
Actually, given the state of the wiring, I wouldn't be surprised to learn he died from electric shock! :-)
No bullshit. Idiots with personal (unprotected) laptops on the corporate network, antivirus vendors afraid of lawsuits from adware vendors, clever spyware writers who dynamically update their zombies to turn into infection vectors, and Microsoft made this one happen.
If you're installing from an official XP with SP2 disc, you'll probably have no trouble. If you're installing from an older XP (pre-SP2) disc, you're wide open to this crap unless you've got a strong, close firewall.
Smart people aren't always knowledgeable about other fields. As in computers, there are ways to make it work that don't necessarily mean they're done correctly. I was almost zapped earlier this year because I was working on some wiring in my sister's basement that had been put up by a previous owner. I discovered through the "spark method" that the guy had two separate circuits operating in the same box, coming in different sides and both on black wires. This made me extremely wary of anything the guy had touched, so I pulled the main breaker before continuing. As I ripped out his dangerous connections in order to put them together correctly I found other places where he used white wires to carry the hot side without marking them with black tape (as required.) I also found a case where he switched the neutral wire instead of the hot wire. Yes, the light was operated by the thing on the wall as you might expect, but no, it was not done correctly nor safely.
Also, what your smart friends may have learned in the 1970s and 1980s may no longer be legal for wiring today. For example, in the 1970s aluminium wire was legal for use in residential wiring, but it was later discovered that its coefficient of expansion was greater than that of copper, and that after years of expansion and contraction the wires could escape from underneath the screws that held them, causing arcing and fires. The code has been modified to explain how to handle existing aluminium wiring.
Does that mean your friends did anything wrong? Not at all -- they could have been very careful and safe, and put everything together correctly. Would they have benefited from an inspection? Think of an inspector more like pair programming, where you have a second pair of eyes to make sure you did things right.
If the developer was truly twisted, he could have some of them blinking "Press me!", and their neighbors alternately flashing "No, press me!"
Damn, I thought this would be hilarious but now it occurs to me that Sierra Games would probably do exactly that :-(
I think it'd probably be of the most value if it were dynamically context sensitive -- hit the CTRL key, and "X" changes to "Cut", "C" changes to "Copy", "V" changes to "Paste". Each application would be offering its own shortcuts, each input box would be able to offer its own hints, etc. eInk would be too slow.
Surprisingly, it turned out not to be a big inconvenience to the people with whom I occasionally share my computer. I enjoy their initial reactions (it's always "how can you use that thing?"), but when they realize they don't need to see the keytops either, they get a big kick out of it themselves. Funny how little things like that get people to step out of their comfort zone; they enjoy it, but then crawl right back to their crutches.
Yeah, if this thing were a real computer keyboard, I'd be running some cool looking "keysaver" on it 24x7. Maybe a randomly shifting or rotating alphabet pattern -- now that would harm most peoples' ability to type!
From the article above, I first read it as "a sensor that detects if the fuel tank is present". That didn't sound too critical, because it's a "look-out-the-window-and-see-if-it's-still-there" kind of problem.
There's a difference between buying a computer and being sold a computer. Buying implies that you know what you're doing, and that you have a purpose, and many other things including the willingness to learn, at least to the degree required that you mention above.
Being sold means being told "Oh, Grandma, you need a computer so we can send you baby pictures" or "Geez, Frank, why don't you just go to the web site to find the parts list for that snowblower?" Frank is a plumber. Grandma sells Mary Kay. These are not computer literate people, and have neither the time nor the inclination to learn. Yet they've been told by someone that it's "plug and play" or "just click here for your email, Grandma."
You can't hold these people responsible for having knowledge that they are never likely to be able to learn. An analogy is that today you can be a successful car driver without ever having opened your own hood. There was a time when it would have been unthinkable to not understand the Otto cycle and be presumputous enough to believe that you could successfully drive from New York City to Pittsburgh. So just as cars have become more reliable and simplified to the point where ordinary folks can drive them, computer makers have dumbed-down their interfaces so that Grandma can be successful at "clicking here for email."
And from the other side of the equation, why should Grandma have to know about a firewall, or spyware, or viruses? She doesn't have to know anything about a fan belt in order to drive her car. So why place these same expectations on ordinary people?
The reason is that computers were sold to the general public far, far in advance of their being market-ready. Only the simplest of embedded systems are really "consumer quality" -- toaster controls, elevator controls, etc. But we Lords of Technology have been trumpeting how great our lives are now that we're "on-line", and have been pushing everyone from your nephew to my grandmother-in-law to buy a computer. No matter that the systems bring up blue-screens-of-death, get infested with worms, and pop up little warning dialogs filled with humanly-unreadable arcana.
What should have happened? Should we have sat on our precious artificial monopoly as Kings of the Digital Age, with an understanding far above the Puny Mortals, denying them access to our CPUs of Great Power? We actually did for many years, but with the rise of GUI-based operating systems, we could no longer deny the spread. We kings now simplyh have to cope with the fact that the mortals can never be our equals, they'll never devote their lives to learning this trivia. So it's up to us to help them, at the very least to help them to the point where they can no longer do damage to us with their worms.
Anyway, about AOL -- the thing I hate the most is that they add themselves to the computer's "most trusted domains" list. Now that's spywary activity no matter how you slice it.
Since it's somewhat apparent from your writing that English isn't your first language (I mean no offense as you write quite well,) it appears that you also missed that the original poster was not being serious. It was very obvious to most of us that he was telling a joke.
It looks like it's installing Audible's AudibleManager, which according to their website is supposed to be an automated podcast-downloader-thingie. Now, I know nothing about this software other than what its stated purpose is: to automate the downloading of (primarily) audio file content. As far as I know, to use it you have to register with Audible to request certain content. It seems like they're trying to run a pay-for-play service. I don't see mention of ad supported media, although I'm assuming their non-premium content probably comes with audio ads. Plus, they aren't mentioned as a threat on the anti-spyware forums I frequent. While it seems to be a touch suspicious, it's not ringing all my alarm bells yet.
The registry entry Startup Guard caught for you looks like a pretty standard "we've asked you to reboot to install our drivers, and when the reboot is finished we're going to run the installer one more time" (I am assuming this because the program path is an InstallShield related path, and not a typical spyware folder path.) Typically this step is used to clean up temporary or intermediate files created during the installation process. The name of the startup task here implies that it might launch a window begging you to register your software. But being placed in the RUNONCE key isn't necessarily spyware by itself -- according to Microsoft
Spyware doesn't typically want to be auto-deleted -- it tries to run forever and ever. Sure, some spyware hides in the runonce key and continually restores itself there, but your particular install doesn't seem to fit the spyware pattern yet. You can certainly choose to block this extra step (as you did) without doing real harm to your machine, but you'll probably waste a few bytes of hard drive space by not allowing it to clean up.
I personally agree with you on this one and consider avoiding this kind of random software execution to be worth the waste, which is why I usually don't allow these to proceed myself. However, by preventing this step from running, you may have inadvertently allowed the C:\Program Files\Creative folder to go undeleted after the install! Just because you chose a different folder doesn't mean their installer is perfect: they may have hired a stupid installation-script writer who put everything to C:\Program Files\Creative\ and then cleaned it all up at the end by moving the entire folder contents to your stated "real" destination. (Yes, there are installation packages like that because InstallShield has an absolutely horrible script language that takes a long time to learn, leading to all sorts of stupid workarounds among people who haven't mastered it.)
The one real concern I see here is the four Ad-Aware critical objects. It would have been nice to have a screen shot indicating what those were. They might have been as innocuous as the AOL spam on your desktop, a few doubleclick or aol cookies, or (my least favorite feature of AdAware) additions to a "most recently used" file list. (AdAware seems to equate populating a "most recently used" file menu list with the installation of real spyware. It's a very poor discrimination between "privacy" and "spyware" that tends to frighten people when they see it. I prefer to turn MRU checking off completely.) But without seeing AdAware's list, it's hard to tell what it thought was wrong.
All in all, I'd say
I found Brodcast / DSSAgent on my PC when I first started learning about spyware several years back. I realized this was the first cleanup I'd ever done, so I thought no big deal. But then, of course, I tightened the box down completely, and was far more cautious, and haven't encountered any on my box since.
Except Brodcast came back one day. I then researched it and found it came in on a purchased game CD from Mattel (I think it was a Carmen Sandiego title.) The CD was quite old, and it was just a "new concept in marketing" back in 1998, long before spyware became a word. Mattel got publicly spanked for this back in 2000, and their more recent releases are safe.
The spanking worked. A few of us still consider Mattel a bit "sleazy" for ever having tried it, but they did stop once it became widely known. Do them and us a favor and publish their name. The sooner they get spanked, the fewer computers will be infested.
However, please make sure your facts are straight before you go public. Make sure it was actually software on that particular CD that hit you and not a different product or a worm such as the Win32.Spybot worm. You should also contact the manufacturer and ask if it was deliberate -- it's possible that their master CD was infested with a worm like this just before it went to production.
The idea was that as a geek when you visit someone's house, they'll frequently ask something like, "Oh, John, you're in the computer business so you must know all about this stuff, can you stop the popup ad things on our computer?" With this service, you can lie and say "Well, I don't know much about the popups, but my cousin Frank knows all about them. I'll call him and see if he'll come over and take care of it." You then call My Cousin Frank and pay them something like $100. They send a guy over who pretends to be your cousin, he eats the crappy meatloaf dinner and smiles, looks at their kids' soccer trophies, tells them a few fake stories of your childhood, and then cleans up their PC. If they have any heart, he might walk away with a $20 tip, too.
It's a brilliant marketing concept. I'm thinking of hiring them for future cleanups of my sister-in-law's computer. $100 has got to be cheaper than the f'ing aggravation.
Perhaps the better question is: how long can this gravy train last? Will Windows ever evolve to the point where spyware won't be a problem again?
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HAHAHAAHAAHAHAHAHAHA! Sorry, I knew I couldn't type that and keep a straight face till the end. Congratulations and I hope you make lots of money!
That depended entirely on the platform, but you're correct for most of the microcomputing world (although I did make extensive use of IBM's BASIC compiler in about 1982 or so.)
"GOTO" is one keyword, unless you're in some Bizzaroland twisted version of BASIC. Also, every BASIC dialect of that vintage that I'm familiar with didn't support mixed case keywords, it was uppercase or it didn't compile.
Actually many of the machines of the era didn't support upper and lower case. Several didn't have 8-bit character sets -- 6-bit characters were common; but there simply isn't room in 6 bits to include the lower case characters. Hacks did exist to trick the terminal controllers into emitting mixed case, but the machines themselves didn't speak full ASCII. And certainly no compiler writer would have wasted the extra bytes supporting mixed case! Heresy!
*Landspeeder not included.
While you and I may know these options are easy, that's a very arrogant viewpoint. They are neither easy nor obvious to a hairdresser, a plumber or a truck mechanic.
You're lucky that you live in a city where you have cable modems instead of rural telephone lines, and that you know what SP2 is and that you ask for a copy from the computer store when buying the new hard disk. Yes, I have SP2 on CD and carry it with me when I go to fix other peoples' computers, but most non-computer people don't have these luxuries -- they have to connect via dialup and hope that Windows Update will take care of their problems. Only the "better educated than most" have any idea that they can get infected before they can even get patched.
These are the people who are allowing zombies to run rampant over the net. They need our help, not elitist comments about how "this is not rocket science" or "just download a CD."
Because if you bought your PC in 2002 and it came with a bright, shiny XP (no service pack) disk and you're rebuilding it, you use what you have. You have to bootstrap to something in order to download and install SP2. In the time it takes to get Windows Update going, you're too late -- the machine is infected.
As the family's official computer nerd, I'm called upon to fix all the infested and/or dead boxes. I've rebuilt my sister-in-law's box several times now due to spyware and virus infections. This last weekend I said "screw it" and refused to fix her stupid Windows ME box, and said it was scrap unless I could install XP SP2 and give her the windows firewall. (Before the Linux/Mac fanbois descend upon me like a horde, she uses some weird Windows software for work on this box, and I'm not Mr. WINE.) I've given my nice gnucleus, I've talked to her about downloading kazaa I don't know how many times, but still she downloads it, and still she screws the box over big-time.
So, evolution happened. ME is gone, and now she has XP SP2 with every defensive program I could find loaded up on it, along with a lock down of every incoming port. Firefox has replaced IE, and Spybot S&D has "innoculated" it against 4000+ pieces of spyware.
I give her a month :-(
I can promise you that grinding wheel injuries hurt more than many other types of injuries. Although they're almost painless when they happen, they hurt like hell while you wait to heal. Unlike a knife or sharp implement, they remove skin and so leave no flaps to hold, tape or sew back together, leaving open wounds until they scar over. (I worked in a grinding shop from 1979-1985.) I wouldn't recommend trying the Dremel on your body parts. Ever.
You moderators who don't know the muppets should stick to talking like Charlie Brown's adults. "Wah woh wa wa wah whoa."
Of course, here I sit in the U.S. of RIAA. "Pot, kettle."