Swimming in the Pensieve

I’ve had a particular email addy for almost a year, now. I have never had a single piece of SPAM routed through this specific email address since I set it up…until this morning.

Now, it would seem that ‘Mrs Elizbat Warren, widow of late Mr Mahmud Warren, former owner of PETROLEUM AND GAS company, here in Benin Republic’ would like to send me ‘the sum of 25 million dollars (Twenty Five million dollars)’, five million of which is ear-marked for my personal consumption, as a ‘Child of God’, whom the fictitious Mrs. Warren has investigated to her Holy satisfaction.

Evidently I can be trusted to distribute the remaining 20 million bucks ‘to the development of charity in charities in Africa, America, Asia and Europe.’

Yeah. Whatever.

At any rate, SPAM is SPAM, I have a first for the email addy, and new filter rules have been added; but, how did it get into the clutches of the SPAMmers in the first place?

Actually, it’s my fault, and the answer is deceptively simple: I gave that particular email address to a windoze luser this past weekend.

HUH?

Yup.

Statistically-speaking, the majority of windoze lusers have compromised computers, and don’t even know it. The odds of being ‘owned’ approach near-certainty when one engages in the kind of conduct that the Open Source community has been unfairly painted with in the microsoft-sponsored press.

You know what I’m talking about: eDonkey, Kazza, the 2600 NGs, copying proggie CDs and DVDs, hunting up those ‘little ways’ of bypassing product activation and copy protection. As far as hobbies go, this one keeps millions of people busy with their browsers long into the early morning hours. Many have their machine hammered simply by hitting spyware tarpits, and others invite the exploits into their systems by downloading hacked software, applying patches and crackz, and peer-sharing.

In that vein, this particular individual is the windoze luser’s Windoze Luser.

He copies or downloads proggies, and searches-up crackz/patches/product activation keys for same (even his OSses are pirated); while rationalizing that the programs are too expensive to buy outright and that, in the doing, he isn’t hurting windoze software retailers.

Given the deep pockets most obscene-profit-margin-sporting, software retailers have these days; I really wouldn’t waste a lot of my time arguing with him over that last point. Frankly, given the crappy quality of retail software, for the windoze platform, I’m surprised anybody is willing to plop-down their hard-earned money for it.
It is an issue of ethics, and he definitely is hurting himself…along with me and every other Internet user.

Even though he would dispute it with his dying breath, there is no question about it: his windoze-based computers are thoroughly pw|\|3d–quite possibly with the ‘value-added’ features of a keystroke logger and smtp proxy. I hope that he isn’t doing his banking online, because his machines are giving-up more than just my email addy. I’d also wager that they’re relaying gluts of SPAM for our collective perusal.

There’s the dig: This guy fancies himself quite the educated and competent computer user when, in actuality, he’s merely accustomed to being used by windoze. He doesn’t know enough to realize that nobody uses windoze…windoze uses you. And he’s certainly not up to admitting that he has some problems keeping his machines out of the botnet population.

No. To hear him tell it, he’s NEVER had a problem with viruses, worms, trojans, spyware…none of it. Ever.

Then, there’s the regular OS reloads he’s had to do, because of weird problems with machines–usually ones that won’t boot–but he never runs exploit scans on any of his systems. Sheesh! You’ll never discover that you’ve been had, if you don’t look at the evidence in front of your nose.

Ignorance is bliss, I suppose.

Over the past couple of months, windoze system de-infestation and clean-ups have spiked in the pedestrian computer user venue. This guy is just the latest in a string of compromises and exploits that have–largely–passed under the radar of machine owners. I’m fairly certain that he’ll soon be calling me regarding a bit of data recovery.

Each windoze machine is merely E PLURIBUS UNUM. One among, potentially, millions of compromised machines, consuming staggeringly large sums of Internet bandwidth; wasting billions of dollars per year in lost productivity, maintenance and cleanup, and further monetary losses through identity theft and various other forms of fraud.

You windoze lusers are seriously irritating beasts to have around the neighborhood, you know.

The problem with ‘Windoze Lusers’ is simple: They exist.

_____________________[added]__________

After getting a couple of snooty emails, I thought I’d mention that my attitude toward windoze, and those who consider themselves to be windoze users/power users/geeks/whatever, is hardly unique. Knock-off the guff and deal with the reality that, with respect to computers, the overwhelming majority of you are basically blind and stumbling around us–unable to see what we see all the time.

If you were “All that, and a bag of chips”, you certainly wouldn’t have windoze installed on your machine(s). So, don’t expect the kind of consideration from us that you first refuse to give us. You are the drunken joyriders on the so-called “information highway”, and you keep getting in our way, after having ruined the neighborhood (beginning roughly around 1994).
Observe the comments of somebody else, with respect to windoze ‘users’…

1.  Does it work on Windows?
The program was designed for network security specialists who have a deep understanding of network topology and the inner

workings of internet protocols. Any network security specialist who is worth his weight uses unix in some variety or flavor.

Furthermore, by not writing it for windows users I keep it out of the hands of the non-serious and inexperienced users...

The program is open source, if someone wants to write a port for it to Windows, they can, but I WILL NOT.

...If you don't know how to do that stuff, you probably should not be using this. The software is meant for network security professionals.