Be Safe Today

Like I’ve mentioned before, I don’t really like this holiday. I don’t mind the fireworks, the problem lies in the fact that I live just a few blocks from Pilot Butte and have a great view of the fireworks show (for those folks who don’t live here, thats where the huge fireworks display is launched in Bend). What that means is that everybody in Bend has a tendency to flock to our neighborhood to not only watch the fireworks that burn the Butte every year, but to show off their stuff with their own fireworks show that’s equally as loud (if not louder) than what they shoot off the Butte. And they’re usually at it all night long, nearly setting my house on fire on multiple occasions, and despite phone calls to the police nearly every year, nothing ever changes.

I just know that one of these days somebody’s going to get themselves killed within about two or three blocks of my house. I am glad, however, that these idiots don’t live across the street from me anymore, otherwise the night would be a lot longer and somebody would get killed much sooner.

It’s going to be a long night, and I’ll be enjoying the show from the comfort of my living room as we have a good view from my couch. And if you don’t have a fireworks show where you’re at, here’s the virtual show that I link to every year.

July 4, 2006

Where The Hell Did That Come From?

I’ve written here a few times about the various times I’ve removed malware from various computers. Generally you don’t hear about me actually having it on my system because I have a ton of safeguards in place. Today, that changed not because of what I did but because of what a co-worker did to my laptop (which is supposed to be off limits). Said co-worker just wanted to play a practical joke, as he thought he was just doing some harmless fun, I guess, or something. Actually, I don’t know what he was thinking, but if I were him, I’d be thinking he won’t have a job soon.

I’ve spent a total of 5.5 hours today eradicating whatever the hell it was (there were several that got picked up by AVG). It required this post (and the thread attached to it) to get rid of the more annoying one (most of that was spent trying to find that thread, as the file names were all different, but the unique key was the same). AVG managed to kill the bulk majority that popped up (which included Trojan horse Dailer.BZB, Trojan horse Downloader.Generic2.CWC, Trojan horse Generic WUE, Trojan horse PSW.Ldpinch.XL, Trojan horse Downloader.Istbar.4.P, and Trojan horse Dropper.Generic.FRP), though a couple of them were spawned from other processes that had to be manually scrubbed and scanned.

And the thing is, after thinking I have it all clean, something still pops up: Trojan horse Dialer.BZB. AVG is killing it from doing anything, but I guess I get to go find out what’s causing that.

Meanwhile, co-worker’s going to get a serious beating and I’m going to be locking my desktop if I’m away from my desk for more than a few minutes. Meanwhile, I want to find the script-kiddie who wrote these stupid things and shoot them. All of them. Seriously. I know I’ll sleep better.

Update at 4:15: OK, I think the Trojan horse Dialer.BZB is dead. There was a strange DLL tying itself into the winlogin.exe process upon start up. Looking at the properties for the DLL, it was totally blank, and a google search for the DLL’s name didn’t turn up anything. I unbound it from the process, ran killbot to get rid of it on next boot, and it hasn’t appeared yed.

However…. now Trojan horse generic.WUE is popping up again in the cache files for MSIE (getting an AVG popup), and I haven’t even used MSIE during this whole process and it’s not running in the background. Cripes….

Update at 10:20: I think the thing is finally cleaned off. I ran Trend Micro’s online scan and it found some stuff that none of my stuff on my hard drive found, and I think it irradicated the last of it.

My co-worker apologized profusely, and said he got the idea from a geek friend of his who gave him the file to download (he obviously have no idea what it was). I was the one that actually (unintenntionally) did the most damage, thinking it was a file I downloaded.

So as long as there’s no long-term damage (which there isn’t, so far), he won’t be getting an a$$ kicking — he just knows better than to get near my laptop now.

And as much as I’d like to retaliate, I can’t. I’m the only one in the office that has my own seperate system. We have a Citrix Metaframe setup at the office that powers every desktop in the office (they’re all thin terminals). It’s a stupid system, yes, but basically anything I do to him also (for the most part) gets done to everybody else. Obviously I can change that, but I’ve got better things to do with my time than to set him up in a seperate permission profile just so I can screw with him.

Update on 7/5: Forgot to mention, these are the ones that Trend Micro’s scan came up with, in addition to what I found before (I think the httpsniff is a false positive as I do indeed have an HTTP sniffer installed on here for troubleshooting):

SPYWARE_TRAK_ACEPSTL.12

SPYWARE_TRAK_HTTPSNIFF.A

SPYWARE_KEYL_BOSSEVERYWARE

Aliasnames: PAK:PEData (BitDefendr); Trojan-Spy.Win32.BewLoader.b (Kaspersky)

SPYWARE_KEYL_ASTLOG

Aliasnames: Tools.Nirsoft (PestPatrol)

ADWARE_ABETTERINTERNET

Subsequent scan have come up clean, so I’m assuming this got all cleared up.

July 3, 2006

Very Addictive Flash Game Of The Day

Don’t start playing Zwok at work, otherwise you won’t stop. Don’t ask why I know this. Thanks Susan for the link.

Update: This game is a bit of a system hog, and runs pretty slow on some systems. I’d recommend turning off the music and sound effects (clicking on the little icons in the upper left) and/or using this bookmarklet (drag it to your browser toolbar and click on it while the game is running) to set the flash quality to “Low Quality”. It runs much faster that way (hat tip to Jesse for that tip).

July 2, 2006

I’ve Been Hit By Digg.com

My Life Is Now Complete. This site has been hit up on Digg thanks to the morons who keep posting comments on this really old AOL story. So I’ve now been mentioned on Digg and the New York Times because of AOL morons because of this.

So welcome Digg readers! Feel free to post a comment here. And you’ll be happy to know that despite all this traffic, my server’s barely been pushed at all (thank goodness for MovableType’s static page creation).

July 1, 2006

What If Great Photographers Had Posted Online?

Interesting article and discussion asking the question: What if some of the world’s best photographers had posted their photos to a photo message board? Would they have been told to crop things out? Would they be told that the color’s wrong?

Link via kottke.

July 1, 2006

Great Journalism Project

Now these are the kinds of investigative projects I like to see. This is the project given to students and faculty from five major universities in a multi-year effort.

The American military is in the midst of a profound shift in strategy that is reshaping the military’s presence, and in many cases, its mission, around the world. Older, permanent bases are downsizing or being restructured; newer, smaller and more flexible bases, in places new to American troops, are being created. We are looking for ways to tell stories—cultural, economic, political and environmental—about the nearly half million men and women serving the security interests of the United States overseas.

I can’t wait to see how this project comes out.

Thanks BB for the link.

July 1, 2006

My Old Teacher’s Going To Be Miffed

I have an old high school teacher that I still keep in touch with. He’s into retirement now, and he’s been spending most of his time playing Freecell, and he goal is to beat all of the games. Too bad some of them are truly unsolvable, depending on which version of Windows you’re running (later versions include more games).

July 1, 2006

Google Maps In ASCII

Why would you do something like this? Because you can.

June 30, 2006

Where The Hell is Matt?

Here’s an entertaining video of a guy in various exotic locales around the world. The trick? He’s doing the exact same goofy dance in all those places.

(more…)

June 30, 2006

Central Oregon Sex Offenders

If you haven’t checked out the Oregon Sex Offender database (which was just released a couple days ago), be sure to. Otherwise, you wouldn’t know about all these lovely characters we have in the area.

June 30, 2006