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[part 2]

An associate of mine stumbled across something that pissed him off. These shots were taken at the back of Swanpack Stratford Ewaste, a sometime e-waste recycler here in Stratford.

Computer guys like me, and the public in general, trust these companies to take our dead computer junk and properly deal with it, not put it in a big pile behind some building. This is not proper storage of computer waste. Computers can’t be stored outside, exposed to elements, were they can corrode and break down.

When it comes to e-waste, you often hear the term landfill diversion but a better one might be environmental diversion. Dead computers, CRT monitors in particular, aren’t like scrap metal where you can pile it in a yard somewhere. Computers are filled with all sorts of nasty substances like mercury, lead and polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs). PBDEs are related to PCBs, they are suspected of causing brain damage, and nobody knows how long it takes for them to break down. Mercury is found in certain kinds of solder and the dangers of it are well known. But worst of all is the lead. Every CRT has at least five pounds of it in the form of lead oxide, which is water soluble. When it starts to leach out of the tubes and boards it goes right into the water.

The reason we don’t put computer junk in the landfill isn’t just because it is bulky and takes up a lot of space, but because it is hazardous waste and it cannot be stored in any location where it might sneak into the environment. At least at the landfill there is a clay liner to control the leachate — at the back of this building, there is nothing. Piling e-waste like this outside, uncovered, is a disgrace and it should be cleaned up.

[part 2]

It would seem that HRH Prince Harry of Wales has gotten his wish and is right in the thick of it, deployed with his regiment in the south of Afghanistan (the nasty part that keeps killing British and Canadian troops). He’s been there for 10 weeks. Good for him.

Prince Harry was once quoted as saying: “There’s no way I’m going to put myself through Sandhurst and then sit on my arse back home while my boys are out fighting for their country.” Even though he’s third in line to the throne of the United Kingdom, Harry decided he wanted real operational deployment, something the Royal Family could never allow his older brother William to do. This is not without precedent. Harry’s uncle Prince Andrew saw action in the Falklands War, including casualty evacuation.

“It’s very nice to be sort of a normal person for once. I think it’s about as normal as I’m going to get,” he said, adding that he doesn’t miss anything from home, even alcohol. The prince often made headlines for his partying.

It’s probably a pleasant change from being a royal prince. In Afghanistan, he’s nobody special, Troop Commander Harry Wales*, a regular 2nd Lieutenant carrying out his duties to the best of his abilities just like any other soldier.

And now some words for the reporters who leaked this story. Operational security, you fucktards! Ya, it’s cool the prince is over there fighting for his country, but you have now just made him, the Blues and Royals and anybody around them a prime target for every wackjob suicide bomber in the region. Good job fellas.

Update: CBC now has a photo gallery of HRH on the job. And for the reasons I mentioned above, the prince is going home.

* People unfamiliar with the Royal Family are often surprised to discover they have no last names. But they still have to put something on his uniform, so both he and his brother chose ‘Wales’.

How about drywalling a cat into a wall? Now that’s funny! They only found it because it started howling. There is a legend amongst computer technicians about something similar.

A big company is doing some remodelling and they’ve got the trades in there putting up drywall and the like and the place is a mess of tools and office junk. There’s a headless computer running Linux by a support pillar, a departmental server or something. The trades don’t touch it, because they don’t want to get in shit, so they work around it. One wall goes up beside it. Then another…

A long time after the work is done, one of the admins queries said box:

$ uptime
10:52AM  up 1337 days, 19:45, 1 user, load averages: 0.69, 0.65, 0.42

“What does that thing do, anyway?”

“Runs the web estimator thingy the sales guys love so much. The program is broke somehow and doesn’t work with newer versions of Linux so we never upgrade it.”

“Nice. When was the last time we checked the fans on it.”

“Not since I started. Get the new guy to go check on it.”

The new guy goes to check on it. He can’t find it. They look everywhere, in the server room, in closets, under desks. Finally they trace the Ethernet line from the switch, through the ceiling and to the back of a storage room where it disappears into the wall. The computer, still on, had been sealed into a tiny room without a door for years. No one noticed.

This is not a joke. This is really a multi-billion dollar company trying to entice you to buy its products with Lego-men-themed cartoon characters.

You can tell this is pathetic corporate marketing shit because of the names. It’s not “Vista Sensei”, it’s “Windows Vista Sensei” because the guys in marketing figured it was important to get the brand out there because the product needs the help. Kinda sad, really.

Still, I think it’s funny that the MSDN Webcast Guy looks like he’s holding a hip-flask. I would be too, if I was forced to work as a Microsoft shill. And yeah, I know COBOL. In fact, I’ve forgotten more COBOL than MSDN Guy has ever known.

Update: they have changed the site around. MSDN Webcast Guy is gone, and the characters no longer look like Lego people.  I have, however, included a picture of the little guy for your amusement.

Dan has set me on to a story which I’m sure will be largely ignored by the stupid BritneyObamaHillaryLindseyDubya World we live in these days, but this is bad, bad, bad. This is the Canadian government taking a page directly from the George Orwell playbook.

Silencing Scientists at Environment Canada

This is bullshit. Scientists being given approved “lines”? Outrageous! Muzzling the thinkers is exactly what despots, theologists and Third World dictators do. Silence the boffins so the minister isn’t ’surprised’? Okay, this is Canada, not some dodgy Eastern Bloc nation. We don’t do that. Not here. There’s no Ministry of Truth in this country. Not until now, anyway.

Open and accountable government? Yeah right.

You know, this really, really angers me. Angry like, writing Member of Parliament angry.  You don’t gag your thinkers ever, ever, EVER, especially not so you can sell a stupid election platform or whatever is so damned important to the Conservative party.

You know, I’d been wondering which party I was going to support in the upcoming election and this has helped me greatly. Now I know which party I’m not going to vote for.

The “upstairs” used to be this crappy place where I stored my junk (well, and my bike, which is not junk). Now it is the shop.

The foyer of the shop, just outside of the door. It is not quite this dark, but I definitely need to get a brighter light out there.

Those are real computer books, but they are all old and obsolete.

This is where the computers get fixed and built. The benches reborn! No more retail displays, just service area, the way it should be. Three circuits of power snake along the wall at belt level with plugs every three feet or so. Kenny, my electrician, suggested this and the idea was solid. It’s incredibly convenient, really, like having a giant powerbar along the entire wall.

The place is still decorated like a clothing store. I had thought about changing that, but the colouring scheme kinda grew on me so I decided to keep it, funny decorations and all.

Virtually everything is on open shelves so nothing is hidden from view. That way things don’t get forgotten.

I keep a certain amount of historical computer equipment around, I’m not sure why. Much of it still works.

At the back of the shop is the lunchroom/lounge. It was once filled with wedding gowns. Now it is the place where there is no work, which is important to the mental health of a computer technician. Every office needs a place for people to kick back and relax a bit because, honestly, eating at your desk every day just drains your soul. Flash photography doesn’t do the place justice. Because I’m still using the original spotlight track lights the lunchroom is sort of intimate looking, like a club or something. The shrine to the Commodore is at the left at the back. The C64 still works and is fully kitted out.

Even things like the bathroom (though a locked door off the foyer, down a hallway) have turned out to be not so annoying. It all came together to my satisfaction faster than I had hoped. I haven’t found a place for everything just yet and I still need to work on things like lights and more floor mats, but those too will get done in time.

Hi Mr Robert J. Young,

I ran into your blog by accident while doing a google search of how to get rid of hidden files.

I was wondering if you had some tips on how to get rid of annoying pop ups. I have the same one that keeps popping up. So I figured they loaded something onto my system.

It really sucks. Anyways I just figured I ask, have nothing lose you seem like a cool guy sharing this info like you are. I downloaded spybot and that was ok and also a pop up blocker called panic ware but none of these are doing the trick. For anybody else reading I found out where to download the two free softwares from G4 website ( I just typed in free software in the search box).

Well thanks in advance if you can help me and thanks anyways if you can’t. I liked reading your blog too!!

Vicky

What you probably have is an adware or spyware trojan which came with something you installed. They can be tricky little buggers to remove, but not impossible. I don’t know what your level of expertise with computers is, but here is an overview of what I do to remove adware and spyware infections from people’s computers — the secrets of the trade.

Uninstall the Offending Software
I know this sounds daft, but a lot of commercial adware packages have an uninstall feature that honestly uninstalls the program. You can find it in the Add/Remove programs applet in the Control Panel. Go down the list and remove anything you don’t know what it does, particularly programs that report their size as being under a megabyte.

Automated Systems
Obviously not all of them will go so willingly.

The first and easiest step to forcibly evict unwanted software is to go through your system with automatic packages. I use three:

• Grisoft AVG. Home users can download the fully functional free version
• Lavasoft Adaware. Get it at Download.com
• SaferNetworking Spybot Search and Destroy

Notice how Norton and McAfee are not in this list? That’s a whole other rant, that is. Between these three, you can kill off three-quarters of the bad out there. Another thing you can do is google the problem. There are a lot of forums out there and chances are someone else has had what you have. Bleepingcomputer.com and spywareinfo.com are particularly useful because their forum members often post detailed, semi-automatic fixes. I was able to beat down a nasty VirusBurst infection in record time thanks to their members. Removing it manually would have taken hours.

Manual Detection
If the stuff above doesn’t kill it, you have to up the ante a bit. You have to figure out what the bad program is called and where it is being launched from so you can manually delete the offending files yourself. For this I mostly use:

• msconfig, which comes with Windows (enter msconfig at the “Run” prompt
• the services.msc applet, which comes with Windows (enter services.msc at the “Run” prompt
• HijackThis and StartupList from Merijn, who has lots of little spyware killing programs
• prcview from Igor Nys, which shows running processes and modules

There are numerous others I use on occasion, mostly to save time, but I use these four constantly.

All programs in Windows must have names, if you can find the bad one you can often delete it after restarting Windows in Safe Mode. Like the demons of myth, knowing the true name of a program goes a long way to containing it. The trick is to find the name.

If you get the popups only when using Internet Explorer, the infection is likely a BHO – easy to get rid of. If you are getting spontaneous popups this means the program is running in memory. Those are trickier and unfortunately the trend amongst spyware writers is to use memory resident software. Some residents use droppers to start (eg. one program starts another). In such a scenario the dropper must come up on boot and it is the program you want to delete. Without it, the real infection can’t start, even though it is still on the system.

Use prcview to look at all the running programs. It will give you the true name of the program as well at the path it was launched from. A lot of the bad programs like to hide in the Windows system32 folder, which can complicate things because that’s where a lot of Windows components live too. A particularly useful feature of prcview is the ability to query a program for version information; a lot of spyware programs don’t have any version info, a telltale sign.

The services applet will also tell things about the programs it starts as services. Most legitimate ones have a name and description but most spyware services offer no description. This is not a hard and fast rule, as some Microsoft services offer no description and some spyware programs offer a deceptive description. Since the spyware wants to run, its Startup Type will typically be Automatic. Toggling the service to disabled does exactly what it says.

As for filenames, there are two main strategies for naming spyware these days. The first is a random jumble of letters or numbers, the second is give it an official sounding name so you think it is part of Windows. Some even have names which are the same as proper Windows programs, but launch from a different folder. Knowing what is normal and what is not has taken me years of practise, but when I get stumped I look up process names at websites like sysinfo.org or by simpling googling the name.

One method of detection is to use msconfig to turn off all the startup programs. Uncheck the boxes beside everything in the Startup tab and reboot the computer. If a program has reappeared, it means it was likely running in memory and put itself back in the list. Many spyware and adware systems do this, but on the other hand, so does Quicktime.

If the infection just happened to your computer, another method you can use is to go to the windows and the system32 folders (being certain to tell explorer to show hidden and system files), view the list by details and sort it by date. The files comprising the hostile software are often the newest ones.

A number of particularly nasty ones use a random name, but change the name every reboot. I found a blunt way around this problem by disconnecting the power to the computer so the program didn’t have time to alter its name.

Removal
Hijackthis can remove and/or reset a lot of bad stuff. It gives you a list of various startup vectors and other configuration data, most of which is not bad. As dangerous as this seems, you can get rid of basically everything it shows you without hurting your computer. In practise, though, only delete the stuff you think is bad. Anything labelled as a BHO can go. Any entry in the HOSTS file can go. Kill off anything related to the IE start page and its “reset” default. Carefully look for bad in the various StartUp groups. Check the boxes beside what you want gone and press “Fix Checked”. Then run Hijackthis again to see if anything came back.

If Hijackthis doesn’t work or you can’t use it (because some viruses will actually stop you), you can attempt to manually remove the bad. Windows doesn’t allow you to delete programs which are in use, so you have to stop them. Prcview is useful for this as it has a “Kill” function that terminates processes. Once killed, you can delete the file. It would be nice if it were always that simple, but the many of the spyware guys are smarter than that. They will run their nasties as modules attached to things you can’t kill, like explorer.exe or winlogon.exe (try killing that one some time). You can try running in Safe Mode to get around this, sometimes it works, and other times not. In extreme cases you can boot Windows into Recovery Console mode and delete the file from the prompt (this assumes you know how to use the shell). Here at the shop, we will often disconnect the infected drive, attach it to one of our workstations and delete the bad files from it.

And that’s about it. I’ve never been technically beaten by any adware or spyware system, though I have fought with some to the point that the Windows installation was so badly mangled that re-installation was necessary.

After The Bad Is Gone
Ideally, you wouldn’t run Windows, but I know that isn’t possible for some of you. So the best thing you can do is limit your exposure.

• Turn on a firewall, even if it is just the basic Windows XP one. Better yet, get a hardware firewall (a “router”).
• Go to Windows Update and download every patch they have.
• Patch out any application you use that connects to the Internet.
• Make sure your anti-virus program is up to date
• Run spyware scans with Adaware weekly
• Download and install Firefox and use it as your browser from now on. Always.
• Don’t download anything that claims to make your computer run better like registry cleaners, RAM speederupers, modem speederupers, temp file removers, etc… Big time adware vector.
• Don’t download anything which claims to make MSN Messenger better like smilies, themes or those annoying IMVU things. Also a big time adware vector.
• Don’t download free screensavers or cursors. Again, a vector for adware.
• Don’t click on anything that claims to help you search better.
• Don’t click on anything that claims to get you free porn or see x celebrity naked.
• Don’t click on anything that claims to help you make money.
• Websites that have a .ru on the end tend to be bad.
• Don’t click on anything that begs you to install it. Good software doesn’t tend to solicit you.
• Don’t click on anything claiming to give you access to the USENET.
• Don’t download any kind of music downloading software unless that software is Limewire.
• Don’t download any kind of bittorrent software unless that software is Azureus or uTorrent.
• Don’t look for cracks and warez unless you know what the hell you are doing.

I had an odd dream where, by chance, I ran into Johnny Dong and wound up being his sidekick for an adventure.

Who’s Johnny Dong? Why, the world’s most famous and enigmatic porn star, that’s who. He’s also a masked crime fighter by night, using his awesome kung-fu and strange gadgets invented for him by his uncle, who swears and cusses constantly, but only in Mandarin. Their secret base is under a laundromat, I found it by accident when I went to pick up some shirts.

I don’t really remember much of the actual adventure, I think it involved stopping some loony from dumping the entire U.S. Strategic Viagra Stockpile into Lake Erie (Millions of people will be fucked, kid!).

When things got rough and the bad guys were shooting at us I remember Johnny’s words of inspiration:

It’s like when you’ve been through a tough day of shooting and you’ve got three more hours to go. You don’t give up kid, you pop a Viagra, wash it down with a can of Rockstar and keep on moving.

I’ve never taken Viagra and I don’t do caffeine, Johnny.

You’re so wrong, kid, but that’s what’s so right about you. Let’s go!

Oh, I can just smell the Oscar from here. I’ll let you know when I’ve got the screenplay done. ;)

The customer had been slogging away with the same old hardware for some six years and the complaint I kept hearing was that the system was slow. Specifically, it took long time to get reports from the accounting system. Since nothing else was off with the computer, I plainly said, “you need a faster computer.” The speed at which the user wanted to work simply exceeded the computer’s abilities.

She said, “Not sure if the boss wants to spend the money.”

“Tell him to trust me.”

A week or so later, I introduced the customer to her new, modern Intel Core 2 Duo system with 2GB of 800MHz RAM and SATA all through — oh yeah, it was faster. Instead of it taking five minutes to do a report it now takes 10 seconds. I’m guessing that task was processor-bound. In the last six years, computer performance has doubled roughly three times, an 8-fold increase. The old machine was also a crappy AMD Duron, so the apparent speed increase is probably closer to 12 times.

Upon seeing what the new rig could do, there was surprise. Then awe. Then joy. Glee like a child at Christmas. I couldn’t be thanked enough. Told you to trust me.

Then the hard question. What if I work too fast and they expect me to do more?

That’s okay, I have a solution for this too. They can’t see what you are doing, so do the Montgomery Scott thing and tell them that whatever-it-is will be ready in an hour. When you tell them its ready in half that time they will think you are some kind of miracle worker. What you don’t tell them is that it took you fifteen minutes and you got in a few games of solitaire.

Some days it’s great to be the computer guy.

The CBC has a podcast interview with two members of “Anonymous”, a nebulous group of online shit-disturbers who have declared war on Scientology as of late. Think YTMND, only with DDOS attacks. It’s not just online bluster though, they are asking their membership, such as it is, to protest in front of Scientology churches in the meatspace on February 10th (think: V for Vendetta only without the Guy Fawkes masks). There is also an interview with the Wise Bearded Man, a real guy named Mark Bunker, whom many members of Anonymous look up to as a spiritual leader of sorts, despite his best efforts.

Maybe it was the Tom Cruise video and the attempts at its suppression by the CoS that set them off, who knows? If you haven’t seen the video, you need to, because Cruise comes off as a real nutter (even more than regular Hollywood types do). The CBC interview also doesn’t paint that great a picture of Anonymous either. The two guests come across as idiots swept up in a moment far beyond their capability or reckoning. I am not surprised.

This is not to say that I don’t agree with the protest. I’m not sure if this is the kind of thing I’d support directly — I do not post anonymously — but if the cause is more than simply shits and giggles, it is just. Scientology has hurt a lot of people over the years and they deserve everything they get. Read Operation Clambake for some fairly balanced information about the cult.

Update: some of their membership even went through with the protest, showing up in Guy Fawkes masks.