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salad days of shitware
Wednesday, September 15 2010
For the past few days I've noticed that Woodchuck, my main computer, has suffered from some sort of Google result hijack. I do a Google search, click on a link, and sometimes (though not often) I'll be taken to a crappy spammer result page. You know the kind: the colors are florid and garish and you just know someone in an East European basement is trying to separate you from your money in the fewest steps possible. Can you at least lick my nipples first? At some point the response of one of those East European servers was slow and I could see that it was a raw IP address: 78.159.105.220. Mind you, this is a computer I use, one I'm trying to get work done on. I don't have time for such nonsense. But I could find nothing nefarious in any of the usual places, convincing me that the problem was some sort of rootkit like Gretchen once had on Badger.
So I brought a different computer (a naked motherboard with power supply and hard drive) over close to Woodchuck and attached Woodchuck's hard drive to it, booted it, and went to look for stuff. I experienced a few problems initially related to detached cables and USB drives in USB ports, but in the end I was able to root around in Woodchuck's file system from a system that hadn't been booted by Woodchuck. But I didn't find anything suspicious. Evidently shitware designers have gotten a lot smarter since the salad days of shitware removal (2003-2006).
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?100915 feedback
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