THE VIEW FROM CHAOS MANOR

View 182 December 3 - 9, 2001

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Highlights this week:

• Worms and Trojans and viruses, oh my.
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This is a day book. It's not all that well edited. I try to keep this up daily, but sometimes I can't. I'll keep trying. See also the monthly COMPUTING AT CHAOS MANOR column, 4,000 - 7,000 words, depending.  (Older columns here.) For more on what this page is about, please go to the VIEW PAGE. If you have never read the explanatory material on that page, please do so.

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If you want to PAY FOR THIS there are problems, but I keep the latest HERE. I'm trying. MY THANKS to all of you who sent money.  Some of you went to a lot of trouble to send money from overseas. Thank you! There are also some new payment methods. I am preparing a special (electronic) mailing to all those who paid: there will be a couple of these. I am also toying with the notion of a subscriber section of the page. LET ME KNOW your thoughts.
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A long day with many deadlines. Sorry. I'll try to be witty tomorrow.

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Order Windows Version Reading TLC Now

A warning:

> -----Original Message----- > From: PDS Tech Antivirus > Sent: Tuesday, December 04, 2001 10:40 AM > Subject: McAfee Alert 120401: New Virus being seen in AT&T > environment > Importance: High > > IMPORTANT: > > A NEW VIRUS IS BEING SEEN IN THE AT&T ENVIRONMENT AT THIS TIME. DO NOT > CLICK ON ANY EMAIL MESSAGE THAT BEGINS WITH THE SUBJECT OF HI AND CONTAINS > A SCREENSAVER OF GONE.SCR. > > MORE INFORMATION TO FOLLOW AS SOON AS WE LEARN MORE ABOUT THE VIRUS. > > This message has been sent Bcc to the PDS All Associates, Desktop Central > GAL distribution lists and to the McAfee Alerts Public Folder (All Public > Folders\General Interest\AT&T Mcafee AV Alerts) > > PDS Virus Team > Foundation Architecture Technologies Team > http://pdsvirus.its.att.com  >

This doesn't look a lot different from the others that have been floating about for a week, but BE CAREFUL out there.

And this from Roland: yet another Microsoft virus...

http://www.antivirus.com/vinfo/virusencyclo/default5.asp?VName=WORM_GONE.A&VSect=T 

More 0n Goner in mail.

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I seem to have worked all day. Sorry

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Still coping with deadlines and other stuff.

I have this comment on friendly fire: 

It was a maxim in artillery that if troops weren't taking casualties from our own fire, the fire support wasn't close enough.  But that was long ago, when we didn't have the accuracy, and is one of the reasons they shifted to mortars and abolished cannon company in infantry regiments.

Today it remains true that calling in air support has considerable risks.

BUT: why must the air support be from a B-52 at 40,000 feet? 

USAF has deliberately put itself in a situation in which it can't support the field army without putting the ground observers at a far higher risk than they would be at if we had weapons platforms working more closely with the troops, and flying at altitudes from which they could see what is going on. It isn't the fault of the B-52 pilots, and God knows we need more heavy bombers in the inventory: it's the fault of the USAF generals who hog the close support and interdiction missions, but will not devote significant resources to doing them right.

I would be pleased to see arguments against this view: but for me, I'd find the USAF people who set up this easily forseen situation, and cut off their pensions. It was predictable, it was predicted, and it was pure service turf war that caused it. The US troops killed yesterday were victims of interservice rivalry: done in by Air Force generals who won't let the Army have close suppose weapons platforms but won't fulfill the mission they have kept  for political purposes.  I have put this as strongly as I can: I wait for counter arguments.

See mail for more.

You cannot believe how frustrating this satellite connection is: on the other hand with broadband companies closing right and left I suppose I ought to count my blessings. And weigh them against the curses.

Something has been nagging me for a couple of days.

The LA Times had an interview with a relative, I believe the father, of the Marin County kid who was captured carrying an AK47 and fighting as part of the Taliban : that is, had voluntarily joined an organization that, by the time he joined it, was known to have beaten women for exposing their faces, beaten men for not having a long enough beard, forbidden women any profession but prostitution, and in general make an unholy mess of things.

His relative said he really wanted to hug the kid and give him "a little kick in the butt for not keeping in touch."

Liberalism is a philosophy of consolation for the west as it commits suicide.

What stores carry XBOX games? Fry's is sold out. Staples never had any. I don't usually deal with any other computer stores, at least not around here.

Thanks to all who wrote on this. It turns out that EVERYONE local has sold out of HALO, and most of the other good XBOX games. Microsoft is sending a care package.

HALO is just plain great....

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Which proves that one can become good friends with one's former enemies, and we don't have to be just like each other to do it. 

The Post Office has managed to burn 90 pounds of mail by irradiating it, but they won't tell you what you should not put in the mail to keep it from catching fire.  As one reader observed, you can't make up things that funny.

IT will be in the lead for this month's column: GET AN XBOX and HALO if you like Science Fiction games. Or be sure you don't have one if you want to get work done.

I had to scrum my Pentium IV to get XP pro to work properly on it, but once I did that I never had an easier installation.  Interesting

And we have pretty well taken Afghanistan. Politics there will revert to what they always are there, but we don't have to be part of it. The Rangers are coming home. The Marines will follow. Be afraid, Saddam Hussein. Be very afraid.

And I am finishing my deadlines...

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There are some new spams from insurance companies that are about to destroy my system. I have a tone of them and they all link to other places, so that the effect is a denial of service attack.

I need to be careful here: I don't want to be charged with inciting riots. But I sure wish that something terrible and unpleasant would happen to these people. It's bad enough they send mail at all, but to send elaborate illutrated things with links is unconscionable. They can't do me any great harm, but the satellite system has these delays built in, and several page requests fulfilled or not can use up a lot of time.

Earthlink's spaminator gets rid of some of the stuff.  We will see how much. But I am I confess rather furious at spammers for wasting my time: how is this different from denial of service attacks, and why can't they be jailed?

I cann0t log on to Everquest. This may be popularity of the new Luclin expansion is swamping the system, or something else. If I try to get to the site using the satellite, it will do the "patch" and the search, and report that there are no more downloads: but of course I can't log on to the actual game server. If I switch to dialup, I get errors and I can't even run the program at all: Everquest.exe apparently just dies.

If I use the satellite to connect to the patch/download site, wait for that to finish, then switch to dialup, it all seems to work but I can't connect to the game sites.  

Sony has broken something: I have not changed anything. This may well cure me of Everquest, and I can protest their connect time charges to my credit card company since they aren't letting me log in any more.

Later:

Well this beats all. I can get logged on to Everquest, but only this way: first turn on the satellite. Run the patch server and download server stuff. Once that is done, then turn off the satellite and turn on the  dialup system. Otherwise the system crashes. This may be due to Windows XP but I don't think so: the update system check crashed Windows 98 too.

This is not really what they need...

And later still. The new animations are great, and after resetting and playing all kinds of weird games I was able to get on and see them. They have a lot to do with Everquest, but I guess they'll get there.

Earthlink has bought OmniSky and there is a move to revive Ricochet at least in LA and San Diego. Cheering, cheering...

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Well the column is done and on the wire. 

On the other hand, my web site seems to be down. It's not the satellite which connects other places. I guess PAIR.COM found I was trying to update my site and the critical need detector kicked in. Why not? But all it takes is writing something like this and it's fixed again...

And thanks to those who saw this and sent email to the effect that it wasn't down at all. Of course not: It's only when I am looking at it!

I suspect that despite having a "high volume" server site, the server gets overloaded. I also suspect that  have the bad luck to try to log on to my own site at the times when it's not working, even if those times are very short. Of course any failure at all is fatal unless I keep trying. Oh well.

Anyway I am coming up for air.

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