Any time I get the privilege of cleaning up an infected machine, the first thing I do is stick the drive in an external enclosure and scan it from a different machine. But that's only the first step..
I keep a BartPE boot CD handy - this lets me boot from the CD and inspect the infected disk. I can mount registry hives and clean them if needed.
In an ideal world, all binaries would be digitally signed - this would make it possible to identify all corrupted binaries, and identify all binaries in the windows folder that don't belong there.
But at the end of the day, a reformat/reinstall might end up being the easiest way to clean things up. The users of the machine might object, but if they hadn't gotten the thing infected in the first place they wouldn't have had to deal with the rest. The problem is that the users will want to restore all kinds of stuff from the infected machine, and in amongst this could be the initial attack vector.
A few years ago, we went through the house to replace incandescent bulbs with CFLs, and we ditched the CRT TVs for new LCD models. And for that matter, I sealed up a bunch of air leaks.
The result? Our AC system runs quite a bit less than the neighbors. Now AC systems don't last forever - those same neighbors had to replace their system and that was fairly expensive. Just this weekend another neighbor had theirs replaced. And ours is still going strong - it won't last forever, of course, but if I can squeeze another couple of years out of the thing as compared to the neighbors who have made no attempt to control electricity usage, I can save a significant amount of money.
That may be, but we are all techies here, and you would have a hard time convincing me that there is no way that they can come up with a solution that addresses all of these needs. The only reason that they haven't done so already is that it hasn't been a priority for them.
The only thing they will listen to is if people were to turn in their boxes and tell the companies why when they send the box back..
If I get a spare moment, I might put in a service call to DirecTV for fun - just to complain that the box draws too much electricity and is throwing off heat. I could act dumb and claim that I was worried about a fire or some such.
We don't even have that choice. If I call the satellite company and tell them I need a box, they pick whatever they happen to have and don't give me a choice at all. The only choices are whether it is HD or not, and whether it is a DVR or not. Those are the only choices I have. Well, not having a box is a choice...
We got a few newer boxes a few months ago - I am in thie middle of a new audit with the Kill-A-Watt to see what the new box/TV combos actually use. I usually let each one go for a couple of weeks, so it will be a while before I have good data..
We have a satellite system, and some of the boxes use ~40W 24x7. Doesn't matter if you turn it on or off - the only thing that changes is the little light on the front goes off. My first clue that this was an energy hog was to see how much heat the thing was throwing off.
I asked/complained about this and got a number of explanations/excuses. The number one was that the box needs to keep the guide uptodate, but there has to be a way to handle this function without the whole thing running at full tilt. Many such boxes are now connected to the internet anyways, and thus could simply download the guide on-demand when powered up and not need to wait for
Some people put these things on power strips so they can power them off. Back when I had digital cable, I did this, but that box only took a minute or so to boot up. But the satellite boxes take over 5 minutes to boot up for reasons that are far from clear.
My view is fundamentally this. The cable/satellite companies aren't the ones paying the power bills, and thus they have no incentive to reduce the power consumption. The end users pay the power bill, but they get very little choices in terms of the boxes, and no ability to configure the thing to go into "deep sleep" mode. Even if a lot of people were to complain I imagine that they wouldn't do much about it - my only hope is in 2013 when the new EnergyStar standards go into effect.
You would be surprised at how little *some* modern electronics uses in a standby mode. I have seen televisions that are drawing 1W (wasn't measurable with the meter I was using). Other devices such as cable and satellite TV converter boxes are power hogs that draw the same whether they are on or off.
I must say that I am disappointed. We have the TED 5000 at home, which lets me monitor electricity usage in realtime - the Google PowerMeter is an addon to that product which let me view the information from the web, which in a sense was more of a gimmick than anything else. I suppose in the long run it won't matter all *that* much to me.
Yeah, it is easy to tell someone to turn off the AC (but those who say this probably aren't married). But optimizing things so that AC is only used when people are home is a trickier issue, and for that matter it is also the case that not all electricity is used by the AC compressor.
When we say sustainable, it means a lot of things. It means that we aren't overfishing the oceans. It means that we aren't over-extracting water from underground aquifers (google "Ogallala aquifer" as one example). It means that we no longer use petroleum, which means no petrochemical-based pesticides unless we find ways to cheaply make them out of something renewable. And it means no more fertiliizers where the nitrogen content consists of ammonia created from natural gas via the Haber process. Consider what happens to food production with more limited availability of pesticides and fertilisers.
And once you have considered all of that, then google "Overshoot". There are examples of this phenomenon in nature.
That is much clearer to me now, but at the time I got the thing, the store still had the G1, the Cliq, and a Samsung something-or-another I didn't care for very much. It amazed me that they still carried the G1, due to the age, so that was off the table right from the start. And due to an unfortunate laundry accident with my old phone, I was kind of in a rush, so I didn't have a lot of time to research the thing ahead of time, and it didn't occur to me that the T-Mobile store would sell me something that bad.
The main thing I dislike about the Droid is the slide-out keyboard is a piece of junk. The keyboard on the Cliq is far better, actually (one of the few things). My wife uses the touchscreen keyboard, but I really prefer a proper keyboard rather than hunt-and-peck on a virtual keyboard.
But the whole situation with the delayed/cancelled updates is an entirely different issue. Only folks in the US even got the official update to Android 2.1 - Europe, Latin America and Asia are still stuck on Android 1.5. Assuming they haven't rooted and installed their own ROM, or pitched the phone.
A Cliq, to be precise. And if I could, I would return the thing, but I only have 6 months to go on the thing and after that I can get another phone. And I can pretty much guarantee that the next phone won't be a Moto phone. The problem isn't the app store - the problem is that Moto builds crappy phones, and is then unable to provide updates in a timely fashion.
Some of the problems with Moto phones are just that they choose underpowered processors or more limited memory, and if you get too many apps installed the phone just dogs down. There are times that I press something, it takes a good 30 seconds before the phone responds. If I uninstall a few apps, it goes much better.
Motoblur is the 2nd issue I have with those phones. While Moto denies it, I suspect that in part it is the reason why they have such difficulties providing updates to the phones. My wife has a Droid and that doesn't have Blur, and they have no trouble getting updates out the door.
I can just imagine what would happen if Microsoft had written the software. You would have something like the office assistant come up and give you "helpful" hints. Then the robot's face would turn blue and you would need to reboot it.
Plus the robots would become easily infected with viruses.
I guess it is hard to say too much since I don't own any game system like this. But I have seen the general trend with tech gadgets in general, and the trend is not an encouraging one. Things like sloppy Q/A, tech support in some faroff country where they don't speak English very well, half-implemented features (probably caused by a rush to get something out the door), lots of gadgets really seem to be more aggravation than anything else. For many of them these days, I really don't *need* it in the first place. And if I don't buy it, then I have more money to spend on something else, and more time to do something else which is more likely to be fun.
There is something about Silverfish that causes Firefox to leak memory like a sieve. If I have a lot of tabs open, it exhausts virtual memory in about a day or so.
I have used Ad-Block+ to block some of the Silverfish scripts which 'fixes' the problems. Yeah, some things don't work quite right, but I don't care...
Even if the HDD were zeroed, the people would take their PCs in to the shop to be fixed or they would just go out and buy another. And then go back to doing the same stupid things they were doing before.
People have argued that the problem is a need for education, but ultimately that will never work on a global scale. There are too many people out there who view the PC as an appliance and just want to be entertained and not educated.
Even the Linux user is bombarded by spam. While they might not be vulnerable to attachments containing malware, it still clogs the inbox, and it still fills the disk drives until you get around to deleting it. And for that matter, a denial-of-service attack is just as debilitating to a Linux machine than any other type of machine.
But to tell you the truth, my first personal experience with hackers breaking into my PC was on a Linux box. They exploited some hole, gained root access, and compromised several binaries. They uploaded a hacked version of netstat (among others) that would hide the listening ports that they were using for a backdoor - I had noticed in/proc that there were additional listening ports that weren't showing up in netstat.
Ultimately being on the internet just isn't as fun as it used to be. It is a hassle to keep having to check for and install updates. It is a hassle to have to filter and delete spam. It is a hassle to have to go over and disinfect someone else's machine. They say that 85% of email traffic is spam these days. All of the extra capacity for servers and connections is all going completely to waste.
Nobody has a plan for how to fix this problem once and for all. Some might argue that a redesign of some of the protocols that are commonly used today is needed, but nobody wants to do it. In part because people value their anonymity, but people are also both cheap and lazy as well. So the problem slowly gets worse every year.
Yeah, until we get the phone call from someone who needs help disinfecting a Windows machine. Then it isn't quite as entertaining.
I am of the opinion that the internet is dying, precisely because of stuff like this. It just gets worse and worse every year, bandwidth requirements for spam and other garbage keep climbing, and nobody has a plan for how to shut these things down once and for all.
Well, my sister-in-law called and her computer won't boot. Another *&)(* rootkit/worm/virus, most likely. And I just disinfected it at Christmas. Who knows which one this time around. It could be a game that the kids downloaded, or it could be something else.
So in the end, running Linux hasn't helped me at all:-). If I could just get them to use Firefox, it would probably help some...
Customer service with Comcast might be bad (don't know - never had it), but customer service with Verizon is absolutely awful. We had a FIOS service outage, and it took them a over a week to get it corrected. To begin with, they are M-F, 9-5. Secondly, you call someone up, wait on hold for a while, and are told it will be back up within an hour. Nothing happens. Call back, get someone else, get another run-around, same story.
Finally are forced to get a new work order to get it turned back on, and they schedule an appointment send someone out. We didn't need any new equipment - we already had everything, so that was a waste of time.
And then to top it off, they started billing us for a new router even though we never needed one in the first place.
The impression we had of the folks answering the phones was that they didn't know what they were talking about, and they didn't really care very much if they were able to help you or not.
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I guess I have a couple of comments here..
Any time I get the privilege of cleaning up an infected machine, the first thing I do is stick the drive in an external enclosure and scan it from a different machine. But that's only the first step..
I keep a BartPE boot CD handy - this lets me boot from the CD and inspect the infected disk. I can mount registry hives and clean them if needed.
In an ideal world, all binaries would be digitally signed - this would make it possible to identify all corrupted binaries, and identify all binaries in the windows folder that don't belong there.
But at the end of the day, a reformat/reinstall might end up being the easiest way to clean things up. The users of the machine might object, but if they hadn't gotten the thing infected in the first place they wouldn't have had to deal with the rest. The problem is that the users will want to restore all kinds of stuff from the infected machine, and in amongst this could be the initial attack vector.
A few years ago, we went through the house to replace incandescent bulbs with CFLs, and we ditched the CRT TVs for new LCD models. And for that matter, I sealed up a bunch of air leaks.
The result? Our AC system runs quite a bit less than the neighbors. Now AC systems don't last forever - those same neighbors had to replace their system and that was fairly expensive. Just this weekend another neighbor had theirs replaced. And ours is still going strong - it won't last forever, of course, but if I can squeeze another couple of years out of the thing as compared to the neighbors who have made no attempt to control electricity usage, I can save a significant amount of money.
That may be, but we are all techies here, and you would have a hard time convincing me that there is no way that they can come up with a solution that addresses all of these needs. The only reason that they haven't done so already is that it hasn't been a priority for them.
The only thing they will listen to is if people were to turn in their boxes and tell the companies why when they send the box back..
If I get a spare moment, I might put in a service call to DirecTV for fun - just to complain that the box draws too much electricity and is throwing off heat. I could act dumb and claim that I was worried about a fire or some such.
We don't even have that choice. If I call the satellite company and tell them I need a box, they pick whatever they happen to have and don't give me a choice at all. The only choices are whether it is HD or not, and whether it is a DVR or not. Those are the only choices I have. Well, not having a box is a choice...
We got a few newer boxes a few months ago - I am in thie middle of a new audit with the Kill-A-Watt to see what the new box/TV combos actually use. I usually let each one go for a couple of weeks, so it will be a while before I have good data..
We have a satellite system, and some of the boxes use ~40W 24x7. Doesn't matter if you turn it on or off - the only thing that changes is the little light on the front goes off. My first clue that this was an energy hog was to see how much heat the thing was throwing off.
I asked/complained about this and got a number of explanations/excuses. The number one was that the box needs to keep the guide uptodate, but there has to be a way to handle this function without the whole thing running at full tilt. Many such boxes are now connected to the internet anyways, and thus could simply download the guide on-demand when powered up and not need to wait for
Some people put these things on power strips so they can power them off. Back when I had digital cable, I did this, but that box only took a minute or so to boot up. But the satellite boxes take over 5 minutes to boot up for reasons that are far from clear.
My view is fundamentally this. The cable/satellite companies aren't the ones paying the power bills, and thus they have no incentive to reduce the power consumption. The end users pay the power bill, but they get very little choices in terms of the boxes, and no ability to configure the thing to go into "deep sleep" mode. Even if a lot of people were to complain I imagine that they wouldn't do much about it - my only hope is in 2013 when the new EnergyStar standards go into effect.
You would be surprised at how little *some* modern electronics uses in a standby mode. I have seen televisions that are drawing 1W (wasn't measurable with the meter I was using). Other devices such as cable and satellite TV converter boxes are power hogs that draw the same whether they are on or off.
I must say that I am disappointed. We have the TED 5000 at home, which lets me monitor electricity usage in realtime - the Google PowerMeter is an addon to that product which let me view the information from the web, which in a sense was more of a gimmick than anything else. I suppose in the long run it won't matter all *that* much to me.
Yeah, it is easy to tell someone to turn off the AC (but those who say this probably aren't married). But optimizing things so that AC is only used when people are home is a trickier issue, and for that matter it is also the case that not all electricity is used by the AC compressor.
When we say sustainable, it means a lot of things. It means that we aren't overfishing the oceans. It means that we aren't over-extracting water from underground aquifers (google "Ogallala aquifer" as one example). It means that we no longer use petroleum, which means no petrochemical-based pesticides unless we find ways to cheaply make them out of something renewable. And it means no more fertiliizers where the nitrogen content consists of ammonia created from natural gas via the Haber process. Consider what happens to food production with more limited availability of pesticides and fertilisers.
And once you have considered all of that, then google "Overshoot". There are examples of this phenomenon in nature.
That is much clearer to me now, but at the time I got the thing, the store still had the G1, the Cliq, and a Samsung something-or-another I didn't care for very much. It amazed me that they still carried the G1, due to the age, so that was off the table right from the start. And due to an unfortunate laundry accident with my old phone, I was kind of in a rush, so I didn't have a lot of time to research the thing ahead of time, and it didn't occur to me that the T-Mobile store would sell me something that bad.
The main thing I dislike about the Droid is the slide-out keyboard is a piece of junk. The keyboard on the Cliq is far better, actually (one of the few things). My wife uses the touchscreen keyboard, but I really prefer a proper keyboard rather than hunt-and-peck on a virtual keyboard.
But the whole situation with the delayed/cancelled updates is an entirely different issue. Only folks in the US even got the official update to Android 2.1 - Europe, Latin America and Asia are still stuck on Android 1.5. Assuming they haven't rooted and installed their own ROM, or pitched the phone.
A Cliq, to be precise. And if I could, I would return the thing, but I only have 6 months to go on the thing and after that I can get another phone. And I can pretty much guarantee that the next phone won't be a Moto phone.
The problem isn't the app store - the problem is that Moto builds crappy phones, and is then unable to provide updates in a timely fashion.
Some of the problems with Moto phones are just that they choose underpowered processors or more limited memory, and if you get too many apps installed the phone just dogs down. There are times that I press something, it takes a good 30 seconds before the phone responds. If I uninstall a few apps, it goes much better.
Motoblur is the 2nd issue I have with those phones. While Moto denies it, I suspect that in part it is the reason why they have such difficulties providing updates to the phones. My wife has a Droid and that doesn't have Blur, and they have no trouble getting updates out the door.
But only if you have the iPhone and not the soon to be released aPhone.
If I only had a Facebook account I would try it out. Maybe I should register just so I can test it.
I can just imagine what would happen if Microsoft had written the software. You would have something like the office assistant come up and give you "helpful" hints. Then the robot's face would turn blue and you would need to reboot it.
Plus the robots would become easily infected with viruses.
It really isn't any of my business who a robot would want to have sex with.
I guess it is hard to say too much since I don't own any game system like this. But I have seen the general trend with tech gadgets in general, and the trend is not an encouraging one. Things like sloppy Q/A, tech support in some faroff country where they don't speak English very well, half-implemented features (probably caused by a rush to get something out the door), lots of gadgets really seem to be more aggravation than anything else. For many of them these days, I really don't *need* it in the first place. And if I don't buy it, then I have more money to spend on something else, and more time to do something else which is more likely to be fun.
If they can get two of these robots doing the rumba or the foxtrot, then I would be impressed.
when I first glanced at the title I read it as "Healing wounds with dynamite".
There is something about Silverfish that causes Firefox to leak memory like a sieve. If I have a lot of tabs open, it exhausts virtual memory in about a day or so.
I have used Ad-Block+ to block some of the Silverfish scripts which 'fixes' the problems. Yeah, some things don't work quite right, but I don't care...
Every time I fly, I bring along a book or a magazine. When I bring out the laptop, I use it for work and I don't need WiFi.
Even if the HDD were zeroed, the people would take their PCs in to the shop to be fixed or they would just go out and buy another. And then go back to doing the same stupid things they were doing before. People have argued that the problem is a need for education, but ultimately that will never work on a global scale. There are too many people out there who view the PC as an appliance and just want to be entertained and not educated. Even the Linux user is bombarded by spam. While they might not be vulnerable to attachments containing malware, it still clogs the inbox, and it still fills the disk drives until you get around to deleting it. And for that matter, a denial-of-service attack is just as debilitating to a Linux machine than any other type of machine. But to tell you the truth, my first personal experience with hackers breaking into my PC was on a Linux box. They exploited some hole, gained root access, and compromised several binaries. They uploaded a hacked version of netstat (among others) that would hide the listening ports that they were using for a backdoor - I had noticed in /proc that there were additional listening ports that weren't showing up in netstat.
Ultimately being on the internet just isn't as fun as it used to be. It is a hassle to keep having to check for and install updates. It is a hassle to have to filter and delete spam. It is a hassle to have to go over and disinfect someone else's machine. They say that 85% of email traffic is spam these days. All of the extra capacity for servers and connections is all going completely to waste.
Nobody has a plan for how to fix this problem once and for all. Some might argue that a redesign of some of the protocols that are commonly used today is needed, but nobody wants to do it. In part because people value their anonymity, but people are also both cheap and lazy as well. So the problem slowly gets worse every year.
Yeah, until we get the phone call from someone who needs help disinfecting a Windows machine. Then it isn't quite as entertaining. I am of the opinion that the internet is dying, precisely because of stuff like this. It just gets worse and worse every year, bandwidth requirements for spam and other garbage keep climbing, and nobody has a plan for how to shut these things down once and for all.
Well, my sister-in-law called and her computer won't boot. Another *&)(* rootkit/worm/virus, most likely. And I just disinfected it at Christmas. Who knows which one this time around. It could be a game that the kids downloaded, or it could be something else. So in the end, running Linux hasn't helped me at all :-). If I could just get them to use Firefox, it would probably help some...
Customer service with Comcast might be bad (don't know - never had it), but customer service with Verizon is absolutely awful. We had a FIOS service outage, and it took them a over a week to get it corrected. To begin with, they are M-F, 9-5. Secondly, you call someone up, wait on hold for a while, and are told it will be back up within an hour. Nothing happens. Call back, get someone else, get another run-around, same story. Finally are forced to get a new work order to get it turned back on, and they schedule an appointment send someone out. We didn't need any new equipment - we already had everything, so that was a waste of time. And then to top it off, they started billing us for a new router even though we never needed one in the first place. The impression we had of the folks answering the phones was that they didn't know what they were talking about, and they didn't really care very much if they were able to help you or not.
All of you guys owe me money. Oh, wait. This is slashdot. Never mind...