House of Eratosthenes

The HP Mini that is used as the “blogger-book” has been intensive care these last two weeks due to spyware. Friday morning, something downloaded something, and it was put in a coma. So I lost half my weekend, but this time it seems I got it all out.

Parts: $80 (two software licenses). Services: $100. Labor: That would be my time…geez, I don’t even want to think about it. At one point I got snookered into downloading the Firefox install from the wrong location. Gyah, a newbie mistake. And we’re moving in the wrong direction here!

I described it in a letter to family, jotted down as the smoke was still clearing:

Wish there was some agency that would accept claims on this stuff, and then seek civil remedies against the vermin who write this crap. How wonderful that would be. “Okay Mr. Freeberg, we’ve filed a lein [sp] on Mr. Xxxxx’s house, and his paychecks for the next twenty years. Your share is $36, here’s your check, chalk the rest of it up to experience.” I’d take it.

That is pure CAS. Once again…it is somehow not do-able, even though common sense tells us it would either solve the problem relatively instantly, or educate us in some new way about its nature.

Whenever I start running this place, it shall be done:

46. Spyware is VANDALISM. Viruses are VANDALISM. We will return to our old habits of hunting these vandals down and prosecuting them to the fullest extent of the law.

I will expand the government to start a Bureau of Malware Damage Compensation. It will be responsible for filing civil suits against these guilty parties and placing liens on their property and income. It will accept and validate claims for anti-virus software licensing, computer services, and time lost by the victims, and as the proceeds of these liens are collected, it will compensate them. Persons and businesses.

Why do we have to wait for me to take charge, anyway?

Your new pet pit-bull shows signs of taking an unhealthy liking to human flesh…you get rid of it, now, with terror in your eyes. Right? Because you know you will be held accountable. Sidewalk in front of your house ices up, you clear it, because you’re afraid of some clumsy oaf ending up owning your house.

But the spyware keeps pouring out, like some spigot somewhere is rusted into the “wide open” position. The money we spend defending against this, treating it as some weather pattern that’s just plain striking at us whenever it’s a mind to do it, like a hurricane or something…it’s really a staggering amount. It’s actually pretty hard to measure.

We, generally, are pussies. We don’t punish anything anymore. Just arbitrary reports of some nebulous qualification for “racism” or “sexism”…or anything else that would justify, in some flimsy ramshackle way, a really, really easy collection of revenue. Everything else gets a pass. We don’t punish to actually correct behavior anymore; it’s got more to do with paying yesterday’s bills. We’ve stopped thinking about tomorrow.

Update: You know, I’ve often thought I should expand that list of things I’d do if the day ever came that I could be dictator. There are so many things that would go on it, if I could be persuaded to be as meddling, as nitpicky, as tyrannical as your typical liberal. If I was struck by lightning and the voltage somehow fried away the libertarian synapses in my brain, leaving everything else intact.

What if I were pre-disposed to run around like Obama just announcing this-or-that person is “acting stupidly” and telling them what to do? And running this place. All three branches of government in the palm of my hand.

If Morgan governed like Peter The Great, ordering all the men to shave off their beards…you know the first thing I’d do. Anyone with less than a ten mile commute who can’t give me a doctor’s note, m-u-s-t ride a bicycle to work. And I’m not interested in a healthy lifestyle, making people thin, any of that stuff. I’m interested in waste. When you ride a bicycle on a regular basis you become fixated on — things rubbing up against the tires, the spokes not being tightened right, the air pressure not being up to par.

We’ve lost this. And that is why the malware is floating around. We’ve become an eight-cylinder SUV society. For all the nonsense we babble about global warming and how worried we are about it, we’ve become a culture in which we just press the gas down when we want to go somewhere, and we really don’t care about the imperfections in the system that makes it all go until the bill for gassing it up again is ten dollars higher than what we’re used to paying. And then, we don’t fix anything until the power steering makes a godawful squealing sound or the transmission conks out. Then we bitch and cuss about how it cost three thousand dollars and the mechanic must be out to screw us over.

The point is that complex systems can run right, or they can run not-so-right. If they’re running not-so-right…in other words, your daily computing chores include as a component in the system some asshole freckle-faced kid four time zones away who likes to write malware…and isn’t getting punished…it becomes a pay-me-now pay-me-later kind of thing.

Stocks. Whips. Dungeons. Whatever it takes. We put up with behavior that, by rights, people should be genuinely afraid of doing.

I’ve just done a round of IOBot360 to remove enough so that I could successfully run Malwarebytes Antimalware, followed by Spybot Search&Destroy. Each was run three times, twice from a CD-ROM. This was all on the family computer. I told my wife that if the crap recurs, I will use Darik’s Nuke and Boot and wipe the drive clean.

What appears to be happening is that some scripts on websites I visit are getting hacked, and when I go there, I get infected by the hacked script. I have no other reasonable answer, as I’m more than careful about where I go and what I do with my PC. If public flogging were legal, and that were the stated penalty for authors of this crap, I bet that it dry up pretty quickly.
- Physics Geek | 01/10/2010 @ 14:06
I’m of the opinion that there should be a bounty on them, dead or alive. Perhaps offer a higher value on the dead ones as it’ll be less of a drain on the system.

but that’s just my opinion. I get kind of radicalized after cleaning this garbage off of others computers for the umpteenth time
- pdwalker | 01/10/2010 @ 18:16
Morgan, I’ve got a darker and more sinister possibility that I’d like to offer up. Far from the conventional wisdom of viruses/malware vs the applications that protect us from same, being akin to an arms race.

Someone I know recently suggested to me that the dirtbags who write this stuff, are actually “in cahoots” with the suits who run the companies which produce anti-virus and anti-malware programs. You could go so far as to say that virus writers are actually on the payroll of Symantec and McAfee. Ad nauseum.

Why not? Is it really such a grand conspiracy that it runs afoul of Occam’s razor? Think about it – it guarantees that these companies will continue to be able to sell their products. Your purchase or subscription is a bit like ‘protection money’ paid to some mobster. “Nice computer ya got there. Shame if somethin’ were ta….happen to it.”
- cylarz | 01/11/2010 @ 00:23
[…] are we constantly beset with malware and other horrible digital excrescences? Too much tolerance for things that go wrong, maybe: We’ve become an eight-cylinder SUV society. For all the nonsense we babble about global […]
- dustbury.com » The Web don’t work ’cause the vandals got a handle | 01/12/2010 @ 07:16
The problem is anonymity. Most operate in places like Russia or China where there is no rule of law.

I had the operating system corrupted just yesterday by something calling itself “Malware Defense” (as if!) and had to re-install.

You’d think if the spy- or mal-ware makers just wanted a profit, they’d advertise, pester or whatever, but not ruin machines.

In biological terms, the flu is a much better parasite than Ebola.
- Robert Arvanitis | 01/12/2010 @ 12:25
[…] just went through a malware adventure at the beginning of the year. What was plaguing me, I found out, was — for that instant […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 01/31/2010 @ 10:47
[…] commented last month that I had finally expunged the malware from my HP Mini notebook. My victory announcement was […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 02/15/2010 @ 12:44

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My Latest Malware AdventureSunday, January 10th, 2010

My Latest Malware Adventure
Sunday, January 10th, 2010