ARCIE AMDERWS

HA HI! I AM ARCIE ANDERWS AS YOU ALREADY KNOW! I LIKE DRIVING MY CONVERTIBLE AND GIRLS! I LIKE A LOT OF THINGS AND I HAVE TWO GIRLFRIENDS BETY AND VERONCIA! MY FREND JUGHEAAD IS THE BEST IN THE WORLD!

BETY COOPR

HI IM BETY COOPR! I LIKE TO HANG OUT WITH ARCIE AND DO OTHER THINGS TOO! I ALSO LIKE BEING WITH MY BEST FRIEND AND WORST ENEMY VERONCIA! MY FAVORITE THING TO DO IS BE WITH ARCIE AND BAKE COOKIES FOR ARCIE! SOME REASON HE ALWAYS GO TO VERONCIA MAYBE BECAUSE SHE HAS MONEY! I DUNNO!

JUGHEAAD P. JONES

HI IM JUGHEAAD! MY REAL NAME IS FORSITH BUT MY FRIENDS CALL ME JUGHEAAD BECAUSE I TOLD THEM TO! I LIKE FOOD AND NOTHING ELSE! I LIKE FOOD SO MUCH THAT I CRY WHEN IT IS GONE! I AM LIKE A FOOD EMO OR SOMETHING! I WEAR A FUNNY HAT AND I AM THE MOST PATRIOTIC PERSON HERE BUT DONT TELL THEM THAT!

WELL GUYS THE REST OF THE GANG COULDN’T BE HERE TODAY BUT MAYBE THEYLL SHOW UP SOMETIME! I THINK WE’RE PRETTY COOL, IF YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN!

- ARCIE ANDERWS

Whoa.

I got the game, started it up, got out of the Vault without killing the Overseer (he was punching me the whole time I was running away), looked around in Springvale, found a cool mercenary outfit and a neat hat, put them on, wandered around for a long time, broke one of my seven pistols, tried to save some random person from a Radscorpion, failed, got Radscorpion Poison Glands and a Brahmin-skin Outfit, went to the elementary school, took out a whole bunch of raiders (got spiked knuckles), found a Scavenger, sold some cigarretes, activated a radio station (Oscar Tango), slept in the sewers, and wandered around for a while.

I like this game.

I had him uninstall Avast so he could install NOD32, which I have found is much better and consumes less resources (important for a 1.8 gigahertz Pentium 4). For some reason, he couldn’t install it.

The nest day, he decided to ues Bittorrent to download Microsoft Office, because he didn’t want to wait for Openoffice.org to download. (It was already on his computer.)

The 73MB 7-zip self-extractor called “Microsoft Office 2003 Lite” was neither Microsoft Office or Lite.

Instead, it installed a downloader, which downloaded three similar scam “antivirus” programs. These popped up ads, slowed down his computer, and disabled access to the All Programs section of the Start Menu, as well as any other things except the often-used programs, the pinned programs, and the Shut Down option. It also disallowed access to the Display control panel (so that he couldn’t change the background, which had been changed to the default Windows XP “Bliss” picture with a fake virus alert on top of it), the Task Manager, and C: (from My Computer, anyway).

I started solving it by putting putting Sysinternals Process Explorer (which I now know is a valuble tool) onto a spare flash drive, and adding an autorun.inf file to automatically open it. Then I found the suspicious processes (Smart-Antivirus-2009.exe, MicroAV.exe, and a variety of randomly-named processes) and ended them, and downloaded the 30-day trial of Eset Smart Security. With Explorer.exe taking up most of the processor time (more about that later), it took most of the night to perform a full disk scan, finding 28 instances of various things in the end.

After a restart, almost all of the antivirus was gone, but it was still denying me access to the important things, as well as continuing to pop up fake “YOU NED SPYWARE PROTECTON OR YOUR COMPUDER WIL DYE” messages and Internet Explorer instances. I investigated this using the tool in Process Explorer that lets you find the process a window is attached to, and finding that they were attached to explorer.exe. Explorer was also sucking up 97% of the CPU, as well as behaving strangely (switching windows away from what I was doing randomly). I investigated its threads, and found several mentions of a very suspicious looking DLL which didn’t show up after a Google search. A look into the Windows\System32 folder (arranged by modification date) showed that some DLLs, their names consisting of random strings of letters, and a few other files had been added over the past day. I looked into one of the files and it mentioned a term (I forget what), which was revealed to be associated with a combination backdoor/downloader Trojan. I removed all the recently added DLLs, and restarted the computer. It fixed it partially (Internet Explorer stopped popping up), but everything else was still wrong.

Right now I’m reinstalling Windows. At the rates I run my computer business at, my brother would owe me $100, but I’m providing a 95% discount because I’m nice.

Whoever wrote this combination of programs, I admire your programming skills and your ability to turn a general-purpose computing device into a dedicated advertisement machine, unfixable by an ordinary user. I pity you because you felt you needed to put your programming skills to use like this, holding people’s computers for ransom.

The time is “22:37: VIRUS ALERT!”, according to my brother’s computer clock. I’m going to bed.

Username: Pandora

Password: password

Root password: password

Sorry, but this is for 32-bit Windows only (because I don’t have access to any other systems right now).

You’ll need 7-Zip or an LZMA-capable archiver to open this. It’s been virus-scaned, so don’t worry. :)

Please don’t use up all of my bandwidth:

http://eagleswingscoop.org/junk/qemu-0.9.0-arm.7z (thanks, JavaJake!)

It’s called the Aerialsonde: a compact, lightweight board for monitoring purposes.

Included in the board (there might be several variations): a radio transmitter (amateur or perhaps cellular), an altimeter, a small camera, and logic.

It could be programmed to transmit on various frequencies (via actual programming or swapping out of parts, I don’t know), to broadcast pictures at intervals, and do any number of other things.

They could be attached to balloons or kites, or dropped out of airplanes with parachutes.

They might  be useful for wind monitoring and research (extra monitoring gear could be designed in for this), or for seeing where they go, or just for taking pictures from high up.

I may or may not be developing this. Expect a website for it if I do, though.

This is neat. Maybe once I get better at programming and learn how to do something more than make an array, I’ll write a simple Twitter client to suit my needs.

My Twitter account is here, if you want to look at it.

I think that maybe with the beat combined with the other tones, it acts like a clock signal does in circuit design and puts my brain in synchronization with itself. If I have ADD, my brain being out of sync might be part of the problem – different parts aren’t thinking about the same thing.···

I’m going to try various different sounds, like binaural beats and a solo percussion track with just C64-style noise drums and see if it still works.

Wish me luck. I’ll report my findings here.

My answer:

Go and find a star that’s near collapse. You ought to be able to do that; if you can’t, why are you needing so much of the element?

Use one of your advanced methods to accelerate a cloud of dust at relativistic speeds towards the star. It ought to be pretty big.

Wait for the dust to hit the star and blow it apart. Then wait for everything to cool before you wade into your new artificial nebula.

Now go and collect the material that got spewed out of the star you just ablated apart. You ought to be able to find enough of whatever element you need.

Say you have a ten-megabit connection. You start downloading a Linux ISO torrent (of course), and the connection shifts to have much more download than upload speed.

You leave your computer and your disc image finishes downloading. Your Bittorrent client starts seeding, and the connection shifts to 9.5 megabits of upload speed, because it’s doing almost no downloading.

What would also be cool would be manual mode, which could be controlled with a software program or a physical slider. Imagine reaching over to move a control to adjust your bandwidth proportions.

I like this idea. I also like controlling computers with more physical controls than software controls. They fit perfectly!