Archive for: October, 2009

Of MySpace, penis-shaped lollipops and stupidity

Oct 30 2009 Published by Kyle Buis under Uncategorized

Two disturbing trends are growing in this nation: The illusion of privacy on the Internet and the idiocy of school districts with the Internet. And lucky me, a story came across the AP wire that kills two birds with one stone.

Churubusco High School suspended two sophomore girls for posting sexually suggestive photos involving lingerie and a penis-shaped lollipop at a sleepover to their MySpace pages.

There is so much facepalm in this story, I’m doing to divide it into two parts:

Learn how the Internet works before you file a lawsuit

The school district in question is going to lose this case barring some huge piece of information that’s been omitted over the course of the telling of this story. Let’s review the facts:

  • The pictures were taken at a sleepover that had no affiliation or connection to the school. If this was that one time at band camp, I’d say let them have it, but it’s not.
  • The pictures were posted to a MySpace page where the privacy controls were set to make them viewable to friends only. This was something you’d have to dig for and/or have access to.
  • No illegal actions were depicted in the photos. Unless you want to take the laws against child pornography to a new extreme and start regulating private photos teenagers put online the same way as the 20 or so pedophile rings busted in this area every year, it’s just a case of stupidity.

By the way, if this was just a suspension, maybe it wouldn’t be so bad, but the fact the girls were forced to apologize to a coaches’ board that happened to be all male means some money is going to change hands when all is said and done.

There is no privacy on the Internet

The other side isn’t in the right in this case completely either. What degree in stupidity do these girls have to take these pictures and then post them to the Internet? You want to try and act like little whores? DON’T TAKE PICTURES AND SHOW THEM TO YOUR FRIENDS!

I could blame this on TV for depicting so much sex, the Internet for the same thing, the school district for not curtailing such horrible deeds, the parents for not paying attention to their kids, the store that sold the penis-shaped lollipops and even the makers of the lingerie who peddled it to teens.

But in all reality, in the end, it’s a “YOU” thing. Not you the reader, you the idiot who performed a combination of 101 stupid things leading to your suspension from school.

The solution in this case is quite clear. The district should lose the suit, but any funds awarded should be contributed to an education campaign to help teach kids to be careful about what they should post online. That way this will hopefully be the last time I have to tag a story “penis-shaped lollipops”


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How to upgrade to Windows 7 in less than 100 hours

Oct 26 2009 Published by Kyle Buis under Uncategorized

I’ve been down a hellish road that I don’t want anyone else to follow. I write this tale of caution to make sure of this.

It all started simply enough a few weeks ago when I noticed an offer for a cheap downloadable version of Windows 7. Bear in mind I vetted the living daylights out of this site before even considering buying it, which you should do any time you’re getting a deal that looks too good to be true. In my vetting though I failed to notice that it wasn’t as simple as downloading an ISO and burning it to a DVD. Oh how foolish I feel now.

Fast forward to this past Thursday night: Launch day for Windows 7. I fire up my Mac and check my e-mail to download my copy of the software. Since I have DSL and the download was a couple of gigabytes, I figured the best idea was to let it download overnight on my desktop.

This was a great idea if the software worked properly.

One of the downsides right off the bat was the fact it was a .exe file, which means I had to download the software on my PC partition. Not so much a bad thing, just an inconvenience. At least that’s what I thought before realizing I was downloading an upgrade, not a full version.

Friday rolls around and I woke up to my clean, seldom-used Windows desktop having some kind of magical “setup1.box” and “setup2.box” file with a random .exe file chilling somewhere else. What’s not there? An ISO file for me to burn a disc with before heading to work and installing it there.

Not knowing what a .box file was off the top of my head, I popped open the .exe file because you should always open random executable files that you don’t know where they came from. That made a folder called “expandedSetup” which I had no freaking clue what to do with and an error that something screwed up with the unpacking. This would some back to haunt me later.

I retreated back to the e-mail the download link came in and saw the U-word: Upgrade.

This requires a search on all of my hard drives for my LEGAL copy of XP. A search that extended into Saturday. I have a lot of hard drives and one of these days I’ll get them all organized onto one drive with everything on it so it can fail and take everything with it.

After finding that copy of XP in the wee hours of Saturday, it was time to it on my machine via Boot Camp. Smart idea, until the process stalled out halfway through, leaving me with a hard drive that needed to be reformatted. Granted, it would have worked just fine, but in order for me to install Windows on it, the reformat was necessary.

I cloned my hard drive with a great piece of software called Carbon Copy Cloner. Easy to use, gets the job done and it’s free. Of course after it’s saved your bacon a time or two, you’ll feel guilty enough to donate to the company that makes this absolutely amazing piece of software.

After some Target Disk Mode magic, my hard drive was reformatted and cloned back to where it was, though one of my Photoshop plugins is still being a prig about registration (I hate you too, DRM).

Finally I was ready at work and burned a copy of XP to a disc and installed it. And then I tried to get online. And then I noticed I didn’t have the right drivers.

Profanities raced through my head the likes of which would make sailors not only blush, but likely give up the sailing business altogether. After furiously searching for them, I found a piece of information that meant my day was about to get even longer: I needed the Snow Leopard install disc. Which was at home. 30 miles away. The next stream of profanities probably sent those same sailors into the priesthood.

So there I was 72 hours later finally getting the proper drivers installed. After finishing that arduous process (OK it was just putting in the disc and letting it do its thing, but everything leading up to that was bad enough) I decided to let Windows Update run. I already had enough problems, I didn’t want not having Service Pack 3 to be the next problem.

Sunday bloody freaking Sunday finally came and I was ready to just click on a button and let the damn thing run. It wasn’t meant to be that easy. Every time I tried to unpack the .exe file, the error I mentioned earlier kept popping up.

Handy tip for any time you have a weird error pop up on your screen: Type it into Google. That’s how I came up with this mess I wasn’t looking forward to typing in.

It turns out the good people at Digital River who handled Microsoft’s downloads had a corrupted version of one of the files or something along those lines.

After downloading a handy utility from Microsoft called Oscdimg.exe it was time to fiddle with the command line. Word of advice to Microsoft: Installing an operating system shouldn’t involve tinkering with the command line.

I started with this beauty:

oscdimg -n -m -bC:\Users\USERNAME\Desktop\expandedSetup\boot\etfsboot.com” C:\Users\USERNAME\Desktop\expandedSetup C:\Win7.iso

…which was great until that last part where it didn’t work. Even running as administrator didn’t seem to fix the issue. However, by changing the path to lead to the Shared Documents folder, all the permissions issues went away and I was finally able to get an ISO to burn a disc to. This is about 96 hours after beginning the installation process. When I got home last night, I popped in the disc, let it do its thing and thankfully everything went smoothly from there.

I’ll be writing a separate post later on my thoughts about Windows 7 and why you’re a fool to upgrade to it.


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I hope Comcast Cares about this headache

Oct 12 2009 Published by Kyle Buis under Uncategorized

Normally I don’t work Mondays, but on this exception to the rule, I was greeted by a comment from one of our readers that instantly sent me into full-alert panic. Thankfully I didn’t pull anything in the process.

Chuck’s comment reads:

Question. When I clicked on an icon on the Colusa Casino ad yesterday on your website I got an immediate notification of a virus or trojan being present. It all happened so fast I wasn’t able to capture the description but it happened two out of two tries.
Any ideas?

Now when I saw it involved an ad on the site, my mind instantly went to a worst case scenario. A few weeks ago the New York Times Web site was serving an ad on its homepage which was infected with malware. That was because of the way the Times sold its ads though and wouldn’t affect someone clicking on a casino ad on our Web site.

While trying to verify it wasn’t something on our end something popped in my brain. Thankfully it wasn’t a blood vessel, just an idea. I noticed Chuck’s e-mail address was from Comcast.

Last week Comcast introduced a new system to notify users of any malware or viruses that might be present. You know, just like those companies that try to sell you malware by saying your machine is infected with malware already. But kudos to Comcast for at least trying to solve a problem, even if it’s only because they don’t like the way botnets clog up their networks. It might not be altruistic, but it’s a start.

So now the bad news that I’ve already had to deliver today. If you get one of these genuine ones that look like the image with this story, congratulations, you’ve got some work to do.

Now if you’ve been backing up regularly, you can restore your system from an known good backup. But as I felt when I told Chuck, this might not get the job done. If this is the first you know about the infection, there’s no telling when it actually started so you could either start from scratch by deleting everything and starting with a fresh Windows install, or you could take your chances with Microsoft’s Malicious Software Removal Tool. It’s a great piece of software, but me being the paranoid security person I am, I’d still be worried about some piece of malware lingering after running the tool. But if you don’t want to delete everything you have on your computer, MSRT may be your best bet.


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