Thursday, February 3, 2011

Observations from the Window 2.3

One of those bad days you would like to forget. A day when my virtual empire once again went into a virus induced meltdown. After six hours of wracking my brain, and all but pulling my black hair out by the roots, I think I finally have it cured but it's been enough to make me turn to the geek darkside. Yes I'm talking about switching to those Apple products. Supposedly they don’t get viruses because it isn’t worth the time it takes to write them because there just aren’t that many machines compared to Windows run ones. You get much more bang with windows powered machines. And the gods know the aholes that write these things want all the bang they can get for their trouble.

Till I was finished I had run more malware cleaners than I knew existed. I finally found that what I had was something relatively new and called the 'Google Redirect Virus' which most virus and malware programs don’t catch because it doesn’t leave trace files but worms its way into the computers settings than disappears. All I know is that it sucks big time, very big time. What it does is give you fake search results and than redirects you to websites that contain more viruses and trojans. I finally found a tiny free program made by Kaspersky called TDSSKiller that got rid of it in five minutes. But by than it had spread to two of my comps and threatened to give me something I have never had before, short hair. But all is well for now, until the next time.

Before the meltdown I had started writing about the protests in Egypt but I didn’t get very far. All I had written was this before the meltdown began.

"And why aren't you tweeting more Richard Engle? Anderson Cooper got beat up yesterday so he is quiet too. Don't give me that cell phones are out, just get a BlackBerry like the protesters have. A little bit of geek speak related to Egypt; it seems BlackBerrys are on different servers than the rest of the internet. Servers the government seems unable to find."

I feel stupid reading that because I now see at least forty reporters were beaten today and a big march is planned for the morning Egyptian time, or about three hours from now. Egyptian state television began broadcasting just pictures of flowers and it seems Friday will be a historic day, one way or another.

One prays for change yet dreads the cost.