Good to bad in one day
Mar. 17th, 2010 09:58 pmWell, of course. It was Wednesday again.
The good happened in the morning, before work. I got that limited palette exercise finished and actually it looks pretty decent for what it is, a color sketch on a 9 x 6 sheet of watercolor paper. For details and a link to the picture over on DA, check![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
argos' journal.
Work went downhill though. Around 5:30, when everyone left but the director and myself, we discovered that someone had let a disgusting trojan into one of the circulation desk PCs. This thing masquerades as an antivirus program called "Antivirus XP" (and of course I know perfectly well we have nothing of the sort installed) and claims that your machine is loaded with viruses and spyware and is being "attacked" from various network ports "RIGHT NOW" to try to get you to agree to a "free scan." The supposedly free scan either does nothing or else it installs more crap that will need to be removed. It disables any genuine antivirus software and turns off the Windows Firewall. Fortunately we have a good external hardware firewall, so I knew the claims about being attacked through various ports that are blocked by that device were phony. That in turn proved that the entire thing was a scam. Apparently it builds up to convince you to pay for a "full professional" version of their software, which doesn't really exist. Removing it is no doubt a nasty job too.
I shut the thing down and marked it "out of order." Some one is going to get their ears burned tomorrow, though. Probably it will take my entire work shift to clean this mess up. I suspect I'm going to have to hide Internet Explorer on those machines, and make them use Firefox with popups blocked and AdBlock Plus active, since they just can't learn not to click on these stupid spyware things. I'd filter them down to a list of approved sites if I could get away with it, but I don't think the director will go along with that. Actually, I'd take Windows away and give them Linux, but so far I haven't been able to sell that either, despite the fact that other public service machines that the same staff have been using for three years now have only Linux on them. Most of them are blissfully unaware of the difference.
Weather was nice, sky was really clear. When I got home, Gary had left a note asking me to close the barn doors that he'd left open due to the nice weather. I went out to do it and saw the best star-studded sky I've seen in probably a couple of years. The moon is just a young sliver, so no light pollution from it, and the air was so clear that even the filthy commercial and subdivision lights from towns to the east of us was minimized. Orion and Canis major were blazing high in the sky like I haven't seen them in what seems like forever. If only so many neighbors weren't afraid of the dark, we'd probably even have our view of the Milky Way back tonight, it's that clear.
The good happened in the morning, before work. I got that limited palette exercise finished and actually it looks pretty decent for what it is, a color sketch on a 9 x 6 sheet of watercolor paper. For details and a link to the picture over on DA, check
argos' journal.Work went downhill though. Around 5:30, when everyone left but the director and myself, we discovered that someone had let a disgusting trojan into one of the circulation desk PCs. This thing masquerades as an antivirus program called "Antivirus XP" (and of course I know perfectly well we have nothing of the sort installed) and claims that your machine is loaded with viruses and spyware and is being "attacked" from various network ports "RIGHT NOW" to try to get you to agree to a "free scan." The supposedly free scan either does nothing or else it installs more crap that will need to be removed. It disables any genuine antivirus software and turns off the Windows Firewall. Fortunately we have a good external hardware firewall, so I knew the claims about being attacked through various ports that are blocked by that device were phony. That in turn proved that the entire thing was a scam. Apparently it builds up to convince you to pay for a "full professional" version of their software, which doesn't really exist. Removing it is no doubt a nasty job too.
I shut the thing down and marked it "out of order." Some one is going to get their ears burned tomorrow, though. Probably it will take my entire work shift to clean this mess up. I suspect I'm going to have to hide Internet Explorer on those machines, and make them use Firefox with popups blocked and AdBlock Plus active, since they just can't learn not to click on these stupid spyware things. I'd filter them down to a list of approved sites if I could get away with it, but I don't think the director will go along with that. Actually, I'd take Windows away and give them Linux, but so far I haven't been able to sell that either, despite the fact that other public service machines that the same staff have been using for three years now have only Linux on them. Most of them are blissfully unaware of the difference.
Weather was nice, sky was really clear. When I got home, Gary had left a note asking me to close the barn doors that he'd left open due to the nice weather. I went out to do it and saw the best star-studded sky I've seen in probably a couple of years. The moon is just a young sliver, so no light pollution from it, and the air was so clear that even the filthy commercial and subdivision lights from towns to the east of us was minimized. Orion and Canis major were blazing high in the sky like I haven't seen them in what seems like forever. If only so many neighbors weren't afraid of the dark, we'd probably even have our view of the Milky Way back tonight, it's that clear.
