Week of 7th January, 2013

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Monday, 7th January

New fortnight starts today, the only early shift I do. And the shift rota is back to normal after the holiday festivities.

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Tuesday, 8th January

The early shift is nearly all FCP work, packaging programmes for air. And though I don't specialise in this, I can keep my end up. A successful two days.

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Wednesday, 9th January

It has been decided that we're going to change around the loft, combining the two rooms up there into one. This will be ideal for Katy, now that she is back from Egypt. It'll not be cheap, though, even though we've instructed our tame Polish builder. Works start next week, so we've been moving stuff out of the rooms. And for once there's not much of mine there. Makes a change - even though Jane accuses me of spreading all over the entire house. A vile canard if ever there was one.

I've ordered the recovery disc set for Miles' Dell laptop - 2 discs, Dell branded - an install disc for WIN7, probably loaded with crapware, and a custom driver disc for the particular machine model. Once I get the machine restored, I'll probably point PC Decrapifier at it, to clean off all the trialware and whatnot. Discs should arrive tomorrow.

Bought more Christmas presents for me. Anne McCaffrey's "Tower and the Hive" series. I already had them in dead-tree, and the last in e-book, so I bought the others, in Kindle format, from Amazon. And then stripped the DRM and converted them to .epub for the Sony. I'll get to them shortly, after I finish David Weber's "A Rising Thunder" again. A month or so before the next Honorverse novel is released...

Then I ordered the "Vulcan 60th Anniversary" book from the VTTS online shop, and a big USB li-po battery (a Tecknet EP-387) from Amazon. Jane already has one of these, and she loves it. That battery used up an Amazon Gift voucher. But you can't use gift vouchers for e-book purchases. At least they tell you as much, up front, but why?

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Thursday, 10th January

And the discs did arrive - hand-delivered by an engineer, w ho seemed worried that I couldn't do the re-install. But I managed to reassure him, and he shuffled off, leaving me with the two discs.

Comes now a text from Simon. Apparently, his machine has picked up an infection of "System Progressive Protection" which claims that there are many problems, which it offers to fix, for pay, while blocking execution of McAffee and IE, claiming they are "infected".

It's all a false alarm, of course. Drive-by downloads of such things almost always are. This one appears fairly difficult to remove, from brief Googling, and since Simon doesn't understand such things (Miles is more knowledgable) I'll have to have a look. Tomorrow, after work.

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Friday, 11th January

So, in the evening, I pitched up to Simon's, in Ruislip. I had littleblue with me, since Simon reported an inability to open IE on his machine. But, of course, Murphy struck... littleblue's battery was nearly discharged, and the power supply wouldn't. This brick is from Maplin, and it has a figure-8 mains inlet. The non-captive mains lead I carry wasn't making contact, and Simon didn't have an equivalent.

No panic, though. On booting Simon's machine, everything worked. But I downloaded a malware scanner (don't remember which one, off-hand) and ran it. It found 360 items it didn't like, 350-odd of which were tracking cookies. But there was vetcas.dll, a registry key to run it, and Start menu items relating to System Progressive Protection. No actual executable, though. It looks like McAffee nuked the infection. But vetcas.dll is not a good thing - and it lives in C:\Users\%user%\Appdata, which isn't a correct place for executables or .dlls. The free version of the malware scanner will not fix problems, you need to pay for it to get automated repair. But given pointers, anyone could fix it, and I did.

But why did M$ decide, in their semi-infinite wisdom, to super-hide the Cookies directory? And then have Infernal Exploiter claim to delete them, while not doing so? But if you look in C:\Users\%user%\Appdata\Microsoft\Windows\Roaming\Low you'll find them, and can delete them. You'll need to type that path explicitly in Windows Explorer - you can't click your way to it. And they've done the same things to the IE cache, as well.

Then I installed Mozilla Firefox, latest version (18.0) and AdBlock Plus, with a filter subscription. I suspect System Progressive Protection came via an infected advert, since Simon claims (and I believe him) that he doesn't visit "dodgy" sites. But AdBlock should much reduce the amount of advertising, and the associated tracking cookies, that he will see. So that's good.

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Saturday, 12th January

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Sunday, 13th January

That's the weekend done - all FCP packaging, of course, on an early shift. Just the two more of those, next week, and then I start nights.

 
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