I Was a Naive Fool

By David Ramsey

So I think I'm a big computer mega man, brimming full of gooey wads of hardware and software knowledge. I build my own PCs from scratch (we'll overlook for the purposes of this rant that these days that's only slightly more difficult than building with Legos) and I've programmed Mac and Windows and Java, and before that I wrote disk drivers for Apple ///s and Apple ][s and had a nice couple of years working with CP/M and dBase, and the point I'm trying to make here is that I've been doing this stuff for over 20 years now and while I'm certainly not up to the level of contributing anything meaningful to a discussion of Haskel monads, I do know my way around a damn computer!

So my Windows XP box, Columbia, she of the custom-painted case (www.smooth-creations.com) and highly overclocked components, was getting rather crufty. And since I of course have automatic full daily backups of all my computers I thought the easiest thing to do would be to simply nuke it, reinstall XP from scratch, and then reinstall the software and files I needed. A relaxing way to kill an afternoon as I'm sure you will agree.

So I reinstall XP, configure the network connection, and start restoring 8.1 gigabytes of data. About two minutes into this process, XP pops up a dialog telling me that the Remote Procedure Call service has terminated and that XP will reboot itself in 50 seconds.

And it does.

And after it finishes rebooting, it does the same thing not 30 seconds later.

So I think I have some obscure hardware problem and I set the clock speed back down to stock and switch RAM around and measure power supply voltages and everything seems OK except the damn system keeps rebooting.

Well I did some Googling (note to terrorists: the first step in bringing this country to its knees is to destroy Google), and guess what? I've been infected by the MSBLAST virus. Sure enough, there's PENIS32.EXE in my task list. Jeez.

Now I'm primarily a Macintosh OS X guy, and my PC runs Zone Alarm Pro (but wasn't at this point since it was in the middle of a restore operation), so perhaps I can be forgiven for not knowing that your Windows box can become infected JUST SITTING THERE, without you having to so much as touch Explorer or Outlook. And while I was considering the implications of this Columbia picked up a second virus (svchost1.exe)!

What I wound up doing was burning Zone Alarm to a CD, unplugging the Ethernet cable from Columbia (yes, I could have simply not configured the network interface, but by now I'm really nervous), nuking the disk and reinstalling XP again, then installing Zone Alarm, then plugging the Ethernet cable back in and configuring the TCP properties. Less than 30 seconds elapsed before Zone Alarm reported an intrusion attempt, perhaps because the previous successful infection attempts have put Columbia's IP address in a database somewhere.

Of course current Windows updates would have prevented some of this but that's not much help since your computer will be infected long before you can finish downloading and installing the hundreds of megabytes of "critical" and "recommended" updates for this vulnerability-ridden hell of an operating system.

So even though I never use my PC for e-mail and don't install Active X controls I bought and installed Norton Antivirus, which periodically brings my 3gHz hot-rod of a computer to a halt while it inspects the my multi-gigabyte download of Oracle 9i to make sure it doesn't contain any viruses.

Epilogue

I have several friends that I help with computer stuff, anything from software advice to building PCs for them, because it's fun and sometimes I get cookies. I'm sure many of you do the same.

But I've told all my Windows friends that they're on their own now, and that I can no longer in good conscience do anything to promulgate or support Windows. I honestly think that if you run Windows you should have to take an examination and have a license, because jeez after all these years we still haven't trained enough people to never open attachments, have we? And now that even the Department of Homeland Security runs on Windows (are you frightened? You should be.) this whole thing has passed beyond the point of humor and parody and has become serious.

If you are running Windows and are not running a firewall and a frequently-updated anti-virus program, then your computer is infected. It might be infected even if you are running this stuff. And you had better simply get used to little dialogs popping up saying things like "Program svchost.exe is trying to access the Internet. Allow?" and "The program is waiting for Norton Antivirus to scan the file" because that's simply the price of using the Typhoid Mary of operating systems today.

-- dramsey @ mac.com