BatFlattery

One of the great things about being an A-list blogger is that you can use your enormous power of influence to tackle issues of great importance. As I’m a Z-list blogger (if that) I am able to influence very few (probably just the two of you who read this blog, I suppose). Nevertheless, one does what one can, and I do have an issue of great importance to raise.

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I hate Hotmail. I really, really hate Hotmail. A few months ago one of my clients had problems with email being rejected by Hotmail. It seemed at the time just to be a bit of a scam to get people to sign up for their (expensive) implementation of the Sender Policy Framework, but by using a free SPF service, I was able to get things going again.

Fast forward to the present. Over the past few days, my client reports that a number of his clients with Hotmail accounts are simply not getting his messages. No bounce report, nothing. At first I’m quite skeptical that even Microsoft would just silently kill emails with no bounce report. But it seems I was wrong.

A lot of people are reporting just that. Microsoft’s SmartScreen is silently killing emails, and tech support won’t tell you why. Some people are reporting that email sent from Outlook gets through; other mail apps not so lucky. Sound familiar?

So is that SmartScreen, or We-just-can’t-help-baiting-anti-trust-laws-Screen?

OK, I’ve finally given up on Firefox. I know I’m supposed to like it, I know it’s the hope of the free world, the Rebel Alliance fighting the good fight against the Microsoft Empire, etc etc, but I’m just tired of it killing my PowerBook all the time. I’m tired of my Mac feeling like a 486 PC with 8 megs of RAM, struggling to run Windows. I’m tired of the exhaust fan coming on every time I move the mouse, because Firefox has eaten up all the free memory AGAIN, and OS X has to shunt more pixels into and out of virtual memory to redraw the screen. I’m tired of waiting for Gmail to catch up with what I’ve written. I’ve had enough.

It’s not like Safari is that bad, anymore. It has tabbed browsing. It doesn’t screw up so many sites anymore. And if you have to have a Mozilla-based browser, Camino is pretty darn good. I’ve been using it for a couple of weeks now, and I like it a lot. It uses the Keychain to store web passwords, which is really nice: it makes me feel much more secure about my important passwords, and I can find them easily if I want them for another browser. Plus, it has an “update stored password” function if you’re trying to log onto a site you haven’t accessed for awhile, and your first password guess turns out to be wrong: it simply notices that you’ve typed a different password the second time, and offers to update. Nice.

And it looks pretty nice too.

Of course I’ll keep Firefox on the machine, to check the appearance of my web pages, etc, but at the moment I mostly use Camino and Safari for actual web browsing. No more painfully-slow Mac. No more periodically shutting down Firefox just to get it to let go of all the memory it hogged. No more worrying about opening Photoshop with Firefox running. Oh joy!

This is probably just a coincidence, but shortly after Bill Gates’ frankly laughable accusations against OS X security (broken on a daily basis?? Yeah, right. Whatever.) the new Mac ads poke fun at Vista’s heavy-handed security model. I haven’t used Vista, but the satire rings true for anyone who has tried to open an Office document containing a macro: Microsoft’s idea of “security” is to shield themselves from responsibility by asking you if you want to allow the potentially risky action, without giving you any information that would allow you to make a meaningful choice. So you can choose yes, and get what you have to get done, done: if a virus is unleashed as a result, Microsoft can shrug and say “we warned you”. If you choose no, you’re safe, but you can’t actually do anything – but Microsoft can say it’s made you “secure”.

According to this article, the huge increase in spam over the last couple of months is due to a massive botnet controlled by a group of Russian hackers. So the inevitable has happened. As sysadmins and ISPs around the world have made it all but impossible to send spam from legitimate domains, so the spammers have gone for the weakest link: computers that are connected to the Internet but are hopelessly compromised by kludgy and poorly designed security. In other words, the Windows machines used by your parents, your spouse, your kids and your neighbours. Data obtained from reverse-engineering a botnet control client shows that many of the compromised computers are running XP Service Pack 2, the version of Windows that was supposed to represent a major tightening up of security. Guess that was more PR than substance, which is not, shall we say, unassociated with Microsoft. So even if you don’t use Windows yourself, you still have to suffer the consequences of Microsoft’s short-sighted design principles. Just wonderful.

So I just found out yesterday that the universal window-focus-rotation method on a Mac is the Command-~ combination. That’s to rotate the focus on the windows within a single app, whereas of course Command-Tab rotates through your apps. (Yes, I have had a Mac for nearly two years now. What’s your point??) So I’m happily rotating through my windows in Firefox, and Photoshop, and then today, I have Excel open, so I’m happily rotating through the… WTF! It doesn’t work!

Turns out that window-rotating in Excel for Mac works exactly the way it does in the Windows world: Ctrl-Tab. Now what you need to understand about Microsoft Office for the Mac is that it’s not a straight port of Office for Windows. Hell no. It’s a completely fookin different application (although it can share docs with the Windows one). But virtually everything is different, including all of the fargin keyboard shortcuts in Excel. Now when you’ve been using Excel in Windows since the friggin thing was invented, you get certain keyboard shortcuts more or less burned into your brain. Alt-= for the sum command, for example. F2 to edit the cell. And just hitting return to paste. Does that work in Excel for Mac? Fark no. Why would it? The famously hard-core Mac team at Microsoft have completely rewritten Excel for the Mac, dude! None of that Windows crap here!

Except for… the one thing where it makes SENSE to change, to fit in with the system-wide Mac way of doing things… oh, maybe we’ll leave that in.

FUCKWITS!!!

Ok, enough politics for awhile; I found a couple of interesting nuggets on Bruce Schneier’s blog. The first concerns Microsoft’s reaction to vulnerabilities, which depends on whether they actually lose money because of the vulnerability, or not.

If you really want to see Microsoft scramble to patch a hole in its software, don’t look to vulnerabilities that impact countless Internet Explorer users or give intruders control of thousands of Windows machines. Just crack Redmond’s DRM.

Schneier makes the good point that Microsoft doesn’t really stand to lose money from vulnerabilities in IE or Windows. So it takes its time issuing patches- unless those patches are for vulnerabilities in DRM software. Then, unsurprisingly, the patch is out there in record time, because that hole could cost it money. – Microsoft and FairUse4WM

The second bit is about hacking ATMs:

Last month, a man reprogrammed an automated teller machine at a gas station on Lynnhaven Parkway to spit out four times as much money as it should.He then made off with an undisclosed amount of cash.

The weird thing about this is how easy it is. The manuals for the machine can be found after a couple of Google searches. The manuals include the default passwords, which seem to be rarely changed. – Programming ATMs to Believe $20 Bills Are $5 Bills

Wow, I hate using Windows. It just seems so clumsy and irritating compared to OS X. Every time I need to find a file with the retarded Windows Explorer, I look for the Spotlight button- and then remember that I have to find the file myself, hunting through folder after annoying folder.

And why does Outlook treat the corporate address books and your contacts as two completely separate entities? Today I sent an email to a colleague with the same first name as one of the auditors, instead of the auditor, because I assumed Outlook would find the auditor’s name in my contacts, and if there happened to be a colleague with the same name, it would ask me which one I wanted. Silly me. Microsoft wants you to make a special effort to communicate outside the company. It can’t just be easy, you know. That would be too, well, Apple-like, I suppose.

I have been using my PowerBook for nearly a year now; it is pretty much the only computer I use when I am not at my place of employment (where I must perforce use a Dell desktop running Windows XP). My first computer, back in the mists of time (well, about 1978, anyway) was an Apple ][, the first real consumer personal computer. So getting the PowerBook was more of a homecoming than a Switch. Still, although I have been casually extolling the virtues of Apple and OS X to all and sundry this past year, it hadn’t really hit home just how great the differences for the home user are, until Wednesday evening last week.

You see, while I, like everyone else, experience unexplained errors and Exchange server crashes while working on my work PC, I simply log a helpdesk ticket to have it resolved, and it is handled reasonably efficiently, without my having to do anything. At home I never have to do anything with my PowerBook: it simply works. My flatmate experiences intermittent problems getting his Dell laptop to connect to our wireless network, and I poke around at it and usually get it working again without really knowing quite how or why. So obvious minor differences, but nothing too exciting, right?

Last Wednesday evening a friend brings round his brand-new IBM ThinkPad, a really lovely machine. Unfortunately it isn’t behaving in a very lovely way, and he is seeking my help. He shows me that whatever he sets as his homepage, the browser launches with what appears to be a search engine as the start page. This page also contains hundreds of links, some of them not very savoury. Straightforward browser hijack, right? That’s what I thought. I confidently downloaded Ad-Aware SE and let it do its thing. It promptly found an instance of CoolWebSearch, and deleted it. Great!

Well, not so, really. On reboot, IE launches with the same unwanted start page! Scanning with Ad-Aware reveals the same instance of CoolWebSearch, which AA cheerfully deletes once again. Reboot, same thing. It becomes apparent that something is reinstating the malware, and Ad-Aware can do nothing to prevent it.

A little googling reveals that others have experienced similar problems, and a program called Spybot Search and Destroy is recommended. Download, run. Finds CoolWebSearch (CWS). Deletes same. Reboot. Same behaviour. Run SS&D. Finds CWS. Deletes. Reboot. Rinse. Repeat. Hmmm.

Back to Google. A little more digging reveals that the absolute last word on CWS removal is something called CWS Shredder. Download. Run. Finds CWS. Deletes same. Reboot. CWS back again. Start to tear hair out.

I start to run each program one after the other, in safe mode, turning the computer off for thirty seconds between each round. No dice. I do a Windows update. No change.

By this time my friend has had enough. Leaving the laptop with me, he goes off home. I continue to search, obsessed by this fiendish obscenity of coding. Further web research suggests that the malware itself is contained in a DLL in the Registry, and is easily found, but there is another DLL, a “shield” DLL, that watches the first DLL, and recreates it if it is deleted. The shield DLL is created with such unusual permissions and ownerships that almost no registry editor can even display it, much less delete it. I go to bed, annoyed.

On Thursday evening after work, I do some more searching. I find a page of arcane instructions, and attempt to follow them. I download the only registry editor that can display the shield DLL, but it doesn’t seem to work. Either I have a different variant to the one in the instructions, or my shield DLL is too fiendish for even the super-registry editor. I start thinking about how much work reformatting the hard drive and reinstalling XP will be…

Fortunately I stumble across a fantastic site, Spyware Warrior. It’s basically a forum, where the knowledgeable volunteers generously help out the truly “last hope” cases. You need to have tried everything else first, and you need to create an account and post your query to the forum; email exchanges are not supported. But this was literally my last resort, so I thought, what the heck. I created my account, downloaded a program called HiJack This, ran it, and posted the log on the forum, together with a plea for help. I had a tutorial to attend at this point, so off I went, not expecting a reply until the weekend.

On returning from class I was pleasantly surprised to find that a forum denizen named Blender had already processed my log and posted detailed instructions for removing the pest. I followed the instructions, rebooted the computer, ran IE and…

All was well! It worked like a charm. I posted a follow-up log, and Blender confirmed that the machine looked clean. He also gave me some software suggestions to keep the ThinkPad that way, including IE Spyad, a little script that adds several thousand noxious sites to IE’s restricted zone, ensuring that the computer is on high alert should you stumble across them; SpywareBlaster, which prevents IE from installing ActiveX-based spyware, hijackers, diallers, etc; SpywareGuard, which alerts you if any changes are made to IE settings, an anti-spyware and adware hosts file, and of course the excellent Zone Alarm personal firewall, a lot better than XP’s builtin job, and still free!

So a very positive ending to a rather unpleasant experience, thanks to the good people at Spyware Warrior. (Just an aside: DON’T use Hijack This without their advice unless you really know what you are doing; it’s an immensely powerful program that could render your machine unbootable with a mouseclick. Please go to the forum and read the instructions or ask for advice).

And thank goodness for my Mac!