So I hopped into windows to view some of the wack ass animations on swma.net (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 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.