-- A bad, BAD virus! ...and some old hacking.

Journal mcgrew's Journal: -- A bad, BAD virus! ...and some old hacking. 7

Journal by mcgrew on Wednesday December 22, 2010 @11:41AM

I changed the oil in my car, put four new tires on, changed the spark plugs and filters, and started the engine -- or tried to. A message lit up on the dashboard: "Your car has changed too many parts. You must reregister your engine before it will start".

Yes, that was only a metaphor. I hadn't done any real hacking since the eighties, when I'd attached a real keyboard to a TS-1000, and software hacked a TRS-80 MC-10 to get higher resolution graphics that allowed me to write a graphics program and video games. I'd written a Space Invaders clone, Moon Lander, a few other arcade clones with the higher graphics; these games wouldn't have been possible on that machine without the hack, which I'd been pretty damned proud of.

Gail had given me an old HP computer with the front cover laying on its top. He makes a living buying used stuff; all kinds of stuff, from garage sales, giveaways, dope addicts needing money, etc., and selling it for a profit. Once he had a clarinet in what looked to be in good shape he'd picked up at a garage sale for fifteen bucks. "Want to buy a clarinet?" he asked. "Your daughter plays clarinet, doesn't she?"

"Yeah," I replied. He pulled out the clarinet and I looked it over. He said "I paid fifteen bucks for this, I'll take thirty for it."

"It's worth a lot more than thirty bucks", I told him. He later said he'd gotten two hundred for it, and was really grateful to me. I told him "look, next time you get a musical instrument, show it to me before you sell it and I'll let you know what it's really worth." I mentioned that I was looking for a used computer I could hack into an analog to digital TV converter, since you can't find them any more, plus make a DVR and media center out of it.

"Hell," he said, "I get those all the time. They never work, I just throw 'em away."

"Well," I said, "next time you get one throw it my way." So he had. It sat in the living room for a couple of days before I dragged an old wireless keyboard and mouse, and an even older monitor out of the underground floor of my two story basement. I didn't expect the mouse to be any good, since it had an unremovable li-on battery and had been sitting downstairs in a box for the last couple of years, so I brought up one with a cord as well. I went to put new batteries in the keyboard, and to my chagrin discovered that I'd left batteries in it, which had of course leaked and corroded. Damn -- it was the only keyboard I could find down there. I'm sure there are two or three more, but I couldn't find them.

Fuck it, I plugged the wired mouse in and fired it up to see if it would work at all. It didn't. It came on for a few seconds -- "CPU fan inoperative, system shutting down".

*Sigh*. I decided to go to Felber's. "Ada" was there. Now, that's not her real name, the reson why I'm using a fake name will be clear shortly. "Luke" isn't Luke's real name, either, because if you knew who Luke was you'd know who Ada was. I'd made out with Ada at her apartment early in the summer, but hadn't had sex with her; It was right after Tammy had said she was my Tammy, right before I'd met Ms. Lady. A week later I was supposed to take Ada to D'Arcy's but had gotten into an argument with her after drinking too much at Felbers; she'd said something very unkind and I'd told her to fuck off. I didn't need any more drama.

So I was on again, off again with both Tammy, who was insanely jealous of Tami and got crazy when she was on her prescription pain pills, and with Ms. Lady, who I hadn't seen in months and who'd shown up at Felber's unexpectedly. A month later Luke and Ada were drinking at Felbers's, and Ada started ignoring Luke and talking to me. I saw Luke a day later. "The bitch is just using me," he said.

The next night I went to Felber's after going to the grocery store. Ada was there again, and after a few beers I offered her a ride home; she doesn't drive, and takes the bus everywhere. "I have to drop these groceries off at my house first," I said. "Want to come in for a beer and a joint?"

"Sure!"

We wound up making out again. I could tell she was getting aroused -- I was going to get laid. Unexpectedly she blurted out "I'm afraid of sex!"

"What?" I said, startled.

"I'm HIV positive!" Her late husband had died of AIDS. "With the medication they say I can live another thirty years". Pretty good for a woman almost my age, but holy fuck! Looks like we're going to be just friends; I don't trust a condom THAT much! We talked a while longer, and I took her home.

The next day I opened the PC case and investigated, and found the fan was just unplugged. Judging from the rest of the PC's insides it had been monkeyed with by someone who wasn't very good at working on computers; there was a CD burner sitting over the DVD burner, not aligned with the computer's front, and held in with a non-PC screw. Obviously they'd knocked the fan power plug loose putting the CD burner in and couldn't figure out what had gone wrong with it.

Or had just given up -- the plug was in a tight spot that was hard to see and harder to reach. I spent a good half hour with a needlenose vicegrip working on it before I finally got it plugged in. I fired it up, and an HP logo came on the screen for maybe twenty seconds, the screen went black, and gave an error message that the MBR was corrupted.

Ok, more searching, this time on the book shelf with the CDs. I got an old version of Mandriva Linux, circa 2005, put the first CD in and fired the PC up again. I got through the first part of the installation, and it choked. Looks like it wasn't just a corrupted master boot record, but rather the HD itself was bad.

Back to the basement. I brought up two other junk computers, one with a bad power supply and one with a bad motherboard. One of those three hard drives would work, and I hoped it was the one with all my MP3s. The first one worked, and booted up Windows 95. OK, it was probably only half a gig, so I shut it down and replaced the drive with a different one, and then set to work seeing if I could clean up the battery compartment of the keyboard. I got the keyboard functioning, and XP fired up. OK! I tried the wireless mouse, and to my surprise it actually worked. I restarted it and went into the BIOS to change a few settings -- shut off fast boot and turn on diagnostics, change the boot sequence so it would look for the CD first since I was going to install Linux on it, and a few other settings.

I took the video card out of the PC with the bad power supply and installed it in the HP, as it had an S-Video adaptor I could plug into the TV, and started it again. The boot sequence scrolled down the forty two inch TV screen. Life, the universe, and everything! XP came back up, and I clicked through all the "you have new hardware" screens. A message came up and said I'd made too many changes to the computer and had three days to reregister it.

I'd paid over a hundred dollars for that OS at Best Buy back in 2004 or 2005. No clue where the CD or magic number was. I ignored it; I was going to install Linux anyway. All I wanted from it was data on the hard drive -- backups of old games I hadn't played in years and years, my old web sites, etc. The MP3s must be on a different drive.

People wouldn't put up with this kind of shit with a car, why do they with a computer operating system? It's pure madness. Once again I swore never to go back to being Microsoft's customer until they stop being greedy thieving cocksucking buttfucking bastard dickhead sons of bitches, the assholes. God damn but it pisses me off that a paying customer is treated like a felon. You hear me, Microsoft? Change your God damned evil ways -- Win 7 is actually a pretty good OS, but I'll be damned if I put up with your anti-piracy bullshit again. You fucking owe me an operating system, fuckweeds.

If I decide to install Win 7 I'll get it from the Pirate Bay so I don't have to put up with your antipiracy measures, dumbasses. You're not inconviencing the pirates at all, but you're fucking over your paying customers. I don't expect any change, or you would have learned your lesson from when you tried your extortion tactics on Ernie Ball. Dumb fucks, you got a few thousand bucks from him, and lost that multiple times, since the Ball corporation is no longer your customer, having lost them to FOSS with your stupid, stupid, STUPID greedy tactics.

Dumbasses. No wonder they can't write decent programs -- they're apparently morons.

Did I mention that I'm not happy with Microsoft?

I put the Linux install CD in and went through the install process, and rebooted it, choosing Linux from the LILO menu. When it got to KDE, the TV screen turned to garbage. Damn. I'd forgotten how the Linux drivers for the card were borked when trying to get the picture on a TV screen. I shut it down, pulled the card, and restarted it, choosing Windows. I couldn't remember what brand of card it was, and none of the markings on it gave me much of a clue at all. I decided to put another of the drives in and see if my MP3s were on it.

After installing the second drive, Windows wouldn't start. "You must reregister Windows." Fuckheads were holding my data hostage! Dear FBI, please put Steve Ballmer in jail. Oh, right, I forgot -- rich assholes are allowed to extort like MS does, and allowed to root computers like Sony did. We have the best government money can buy.

Fuck it, I'll get in through Linux. Windows doesn't get malware, it is malware!

To be continued...

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