So I hopped into windows to view some of the wack ass animations on swma.net [archive.org link] (the Star Wars Modelling Alliance) and thought two things. The first was “man media player 7 blows hot and sweaty goat scrotum”. My $DEITY what was microsoft thinking when they released that piece of shit? It’s slower, more bloated, more buggy, and about as stable as an epileptic three legged camel on crack. I decided after a while that instead of just saying “run program from location” and then double clicking the .mpg in winzip, I would save it to my desktop and then run it from there (seems the only way to get media player 6.4 invoked). Now MS puts out some crap software, but as a mpg/avi player, media player 6.4 sucks less. It especially sucks less than media player 7.
The second think I thought of was “what if these are viruses?” Now I’m a Linux person, so I worry more about exploits than some lamer deciding to unleash something that’ll wipe out my registry… but I’d rather that not happen if I can avoid it. See, while most of the animations in the gallery [archive.org link] are zipped .avi or .mpg files, some of them are .exe. Wouldn’t be hard to slip in a little trogan that went to work while you were thinking it was loading a movie huh?
So I go looking for anti-virus software. Well, it’s next to impossible! Mcafee used to have a shareware or similar type idea program that was a great piece of anti-virus software… no more. Go to their download page and you’re asked to either make a purchase or prove you’ve done so already. A 10 day trial? Hardly worth my time. The other one was fprot, whose web page again gives you a choise of trail versions of old software, some “contact local dealer for a cd” messages for the linux stuff, and a free version of their DOS software. Wee…. Also both companies have gone on this subscription kick. Why is there no nice, free anti-virus software you can just download and install? I don’t even mind going out every once and a while and getting the updates myself! Got one that doesn’t suck? Tell me!
So in a fit of stupidity I thought I’d look for a warez version. A quick search on google.com turned up some warez sites which claimed to have mcafee stuff on them. I have never had to go through such BS to get something. Or in this case, not get something. I estimate in the two sites I visited approximately 20 browser windows popped up. I kid you not. Links to ads and other sites were very cleverly hidden so that what looked like a normal file listing was actually just links to other pages. Generally entering or leaving these pages involved at least 2 pop ups, generally to sex sites. Some of them put themselves in fullscreen mode (you know that wonderful explorer feature?) making it (slightly) more of a pain in the ass to close. Of course, closing these windows generally popped up more.
Some sites used the incentive of entering them to get the user to vote that site in what I assume is the top 5 warez sites of all times. On at least two the first page was “to view warez, click the vote 1 button, enter the site, click the vote 2 button, enter the site, then come back and click on the warez button to get all your 31337 4zz war3z d00d3!!!!” Clicking on the vote 1/2 more often than not took you to a lovely porn site, or another “click here for the top 5 warez sites on the internet” page. Finally coming back and clicking the “warez” button just took you to another warez “site” which seemd to only have banner ads and links to other warez sites. Closing it of course meant, yes, you did guess correctly, more popups.
Needless to say I don’t care about getting virus protection anymore.
Oh, and in case you were wondering, the rest of today kinda sucked too.