Leaving Windows Open
Leaving windows open always gets me into trouble, one way or the other.
I overheat easily, and so I tend to leave the windows of my flat open wherever possible. This is good, but it does mean I occasionally suffer from bugs coming in overnight and biting me in the arse. Somehow – and for the first time in my life – I’m having problems with mosquito bites, after leaving a window open let them in while I wasn’t paying attention.
Can you see the metaphor coming, kids? I’m sure you can. Nevertheless, the above actually happened.
Tuesday I made a mistake. Or, rather, a series of mistakes. The first was disabling the active scan of AVG (my virus scanner of choice) because it was fucking up the IO of something I was trying to do. The second was clicking on an EXE from a site I hadn’t used before without the above running. Nothing happened.
Then I got a popup saying spyware had been detected, and did I want to install AntiSpyware 2009?
Then my desktop wallpaper changed to “SPYWARE FOUND! DOWNLOAD ANTISPYWARE NOW!” and I lost the ability to change it.
At this point I ripped the network cable from my machine. I had left Windows open, and now I was being bitten on the arse.
My backup system works, which is fortunate. I have a combination of cygwin, rsync and a framework of scripts to sync my user files to an external location and a backup drive. Within my user files directory are windows shortcuts that the windows version of rsync can treat as symlinks, and these go to things I need to back up outside the general framework of My Documents (Actually, I have a C:Global (Which is also ~aquarion/Global and /Users/nicholas/Global depending on OS) which contains subdirs of Documents, Pictures, Music, Projects and Savegames and syncs up over the machines).
This notably doesn’t include stuff on my Desktop (which is just as likely to be downloads as in-progress stuff) or the contents of my Ubuntu VMWare image which I tend to develop in. I lost everything I hadn’t checked into svn recently, which is probably a good thing to make me do so more in the future.
Windows install was nuked from orbit (It needed doing anyway, it was over a year old) and now I have a couple of days of installing patches (from behind my firewall, natch) and reinstalling things and typing in CD keys.
All while attempting to splatter that fucking mosquito.
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Torstein:
Opening a harmful executable in whatever operating system. Blaming Windows for user errors isn’t fair play as the same could’ve happened in whatever linux distro.
Aquarion:
This is true, and I didn’t actually hide the fact that the actual cause of it was my own inability to pay attention, but the fact remains that this is is a far larger problem on Windows than it is on any other platform. There’s the popularity argument, yes, but if the same thing had happened on Linux (or OS X) it would have had to ask for my password (or Root’s) before being able to do install system-wide processes.