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May 28, 2008
It's that time of the year again
Where has this year gone? It's end of May, going into June. You know what that means? You accountant friends get pre-occupied. Your business owner friends start navel gazing wondering whether to keep running on the track or stepping off. People and clients you've not seen in ages give you "hello" emails asking whether you could do this or that before the end of the financial year... Goodies appear for office purchase to beat the end of year closing of accounts.
This is also the time when autumn in Melbourne gets confused as to whether it is acting like spring or growing up to be winter. Yes, and the over-warm and then over-cold, put that on, take that off jacket thing we all do. Easier to catch a cold than a train and pass the echinicea please.
Forum traffic at the Bleeding Edge seems to be up in terms of interest and postings - people are dropping by to compare notes about the current generation of internet safety products, since Charles wrote about that armourall (oops, Online Armour thing).
I've just come face to face with a USB virus in the Flash. I've now got a stick that's pretty much off limits to my production desktop until I figure a way of getting some files out without getting infected. The Symantec corporate product installed on the student lab PCs did detect it once but didn't kill it fast enough for it to hop onto my stick and other machines in the lab (which also run the same product) don't seem to be able to protect themselves from the virus hopping off my stick.....
As they say, more details in the next issue.....
Keep warm, take care.
Ananda
Posted by Anandasim at May 28, 2008 09:53 PM
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Comments
Get a friend with a Mac or Linux Box to open up the Flashdrive and then copy and convert the documents to a format which can't harbour viruses. Format the drive to a native format - Ext2fs or HFS+, or whatever; it doesn't matter.
Stick the unusable flash drive back in your Windows machine and format it back to FAT and then use it to copy the sanitized documents back from the Mac or Linux Box.
File Format and Platform Diversity may make it difficult to share some data (such as those Excel Spreadsheets with carefully crafted VBA Macros;) but it also fosters diversity of Environments; which is necessary for a stable community.
Posted by: Dan Woods at May 28, 2008 10:55 PM
Thanks Dan. You're awake at this time too eh?
I run Linux rarely, but this time, yes the diversity is handy. I have wubi installed Ubuntu 8.04 on my production Windows XP machine. It had worked fine but recently I had been cleaning up some folders, although not Ubuntu folders. Anyway, when I most want it, it stops booting after the Ubuntu logo, stopping at ramfs.
So, I boot up the Ubuntu 64bit which I had just received from Canonical the other day. I'm not running Ubuntu like anything I know in Windows and ClamAV I can get but it's not doing what I want. In any case, I've stuck another clean USB Flash drive in and am copying files between the infected and the clean USB Flash.
It's not documents on the drive - this USB flash drive that is infected is my kitchen sink, chock full of utils. I kinda know what the infection is, so am studiously avoiding copying it to the new flash. And so to bed, will write more later....
Posted by: Ananda Sim at May 29, 2008 12:18 AM