Those Miserable Bastards!

"It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step into the Road, and if you don't keep your feet, there is no knowing where you may be swept off to."
Bilbo Baggins

Those Miserable Bastards!

This isn’t a roadtrip, this is a rant! I'm back for the New Year after a frustrating month in PC computer hell. My old Mac laptop went bad due to some percussive events in its history. In other words, it fell off the roof of my car onto a parking lot a year ago. Tough little bugger though as it kept working for another year. It was fine up until mid-December and then, as I was sitting in a meeting with the little iBook open in front of me, a rainbow colored bar started scrolling up the screen.

I’d never seen this happen before and so far it’s been my experience that things you’ve "never seen before" on a computer are the equivalent of the kid in the horror movie who goes off into the night saying "I’ll be right back!" As I dreaded, this was not a normal event and within days the screen had blanked out and it was the old dance of "bring it in-we can fix it"-wait a week and – "sorry, we can’t fix it" -order a new one…and wait some more. And I just love how the sales people always try to sell me "Next Day Air" delivery! I explain to them that I live on an island and that there is no such thing out here. They laugh and say, “Of course there is”. Then I ask them if they want to put money on it and suddenly they notice that small footnote next to zip code 98250 that says “Next Day” does not apply here. Funny how they don’t mind wasting my money but are always so much more careful when there is a risk of losing theirs.

At first though, I wasn’t too worried. A friend had given me a perfectly good, though 3 year old PC desktop loaded with the latest Windows XP. Now, if this were that teenage horror movie that I alluded to nearlier the music would change to an ominous minor key as soon as I made that statement and you would know that something truly evil looms in the future! Unfortunately, our lives don’t get the soundtrack until they make a movie about us and I’m not famous enough yet so I received no musical warning. So I started using a PC that the friend gave me.

I have been working on a project with Rod Koons, the Director from the Port of Tacoma. We’ve been looking for ways to update the Washington Public Ports web page. I noticed an e-mail from “Rod”. No title or last name as showed up on all of his other e-mails. I figured that he must have sent it from home so I opened it. Hmm…nothing there except a link. Well maybe he wanted me to look at this site so I clicked it on. I vaguely recall a dialog box and something about a warning about something but like all Mac users, I ignored it and kept going. The site was a link to porn and casinos, and prescription painkillers with “no doctors visit needed!” I backed out and thought nothing of it until I clicked on my favorites list and saw some new sites listed: Porn, casinos, and pharmaceuticals! Hmmm, I went into the edit box and erased them.

Those of you using PC’S are rolling your eyes at my naiveté. I was like a domestic cat suddenly having to fend for itself in the wilds against real carnivores. I wasn’t hunting, I was dinner. My computer was infected with something called a Trojan auto-dialer that took over my "favorites list", my home page, and my screen saver. It also rewrote my call out number and name but disguised it as my normal ISP and so for a week I was blithely dialing up some 888 number and downloading who knows what to my hard drive every time I logged on. Virus programs couldn't erase it and neither could the spy ware programs I tried. It was frustrating and I came within seconds of pulling out my Colt .45 auto pistol and shooting the machine. It’s not a good idea to have a gun cabinet in the same room as an infected PC!

The damn virus was insidious. My favorites kept listing casino sites, sex sites, and spy ware sites...like I'd buy spy ware from the miserable bastards that took over my machine?! I'd erase the URLs and 10 seconds later they'd pop back. My virus program would detect and "eliminate" the Trojan auto dialer but it was a ruse and within a minute it was back. The virus had developed a resistance to the virus fighting software and I couldn’t win. I spent hours, frustrating hours trying to out fox the program and spent some money trying to fight it too. I'll try the XP's "Restore" tool I just found out about next and if that doesn’t work, then I'll play Big Nurse to this worm and perform a lobotomy on the hard drive and re-install the whole system.

In researching this problem, I found out some surprising things. The first was that this type of program isn’t illegal! Spam is but this malware (MALicious softWARE) can access your machine via a marketing pathway that was included in the original Windows. Microsoft felt that the ability to check up on you and your tastes would let providers tailor their pitches to your tastes better. For Microsoft to leave this backdoor in their product is criminal! It should have been closed long ago but wasn’t so it was with great glee that I caught the story of Bill Gates problems at the last Las Vegas consumer electronics show. Windows froze in the middle of a power point presentation! Just like the rest of us, The Bill had to deal with glitches. There is justice in the universe!

At night now, lying in bed with the lights out and the darkness letting the beast within my mind run free, I fantasized about tracking down the miserable bastard that wrote that code. I’d walk up to the steps of his house and, kicking in the door, stroll into his house and find the server where the virus lives. I’d pull out that WW2 .45 auto and unload a clip of good old analog 250 grain copper jacketed slugs into his computer! In my dream, I fire 6 rounds, saving one, while he watches in horror. Powder smoke mingles with electrical smoke as the sounds of the server cease and shards of hard drive and plastic settle to the floor. I turn and remind him that I have one round left and ask if he has any objections to my presence as the gun muzzle lingers somewhere between his knees and his groin.

I don't worry about arrest because I know that the prosecution could never em-panel a jury of 12 in this country where not one of the jurors had ever had any experience with spam or a computer virus. At worst it would be a hung jury. At best they'd say: "Not guilty your Honor and furthermore we, the jury, would like to thank Mr. Hertel for what he did and we've also taken up a collection for him so that he can buy more ammunition." I would continue my travels around the country supported by a cadre of eager volunteers giving me tips, addresses, and more ammunition! A middle-aged superhero seeking justice for his electronic brothers and sisters. The Digital Destroyer rides again!

Such are my troubled dreams on these waning winter nights. I need a vacation.

- The Old Squid

The Old Squid's email address is: oldsquid@sanjuanislander.com

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