Friday, December 16, 2005

Spies like us

There is a must-read article in today New York Times about eavesdropping within the U.S.

The gist of is that by presidential order signed in 2002, the N.S.A. (National Security Agency):

...has been conducting some warrantless eavesdropping on people in the United States who are linked, even if indirectly, to suspected terrorists through the chain of phone numbers and e-mail addresses, according to several officials who know of the operation."

This is bad, bad, bad. I wasn't old enough to experience the effects of Vietnam War here on the home front, but this must be like deja vu for you boomers out there. The scandal back then [or rather, one of the scandals] was that the NSA was spying on Vietnam protestors. This so outraged the public that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was passed that explicitly forbids wiretapping and eavesdropping of US citizens without a warrant.

Undoubtedly, the focus of the expanded eavesdropping program under the current administration is potential terrorists. But guess who also is being subjected to privacy invasions without judicial oversight? That's right, it's Iraq War protestors. Here's an example from Infoshop News.

Here's another choice tidbit:

"The White House asked The New York Times not to publish this article, arguing that it could jeopardize continuing investigations and alert would-be terrorists that they might be under scrutiny. After meeting with senior administration officials to hear their concerns, the newspaper delayed publication for a year to conduct additional reporting. Some information that administration officials argued could be useful to terrorists has been omitted."

So what changed that made the Times finally decided to publish?

I'm all for using the best wiretapping and electronic surveillance methods available to help fight the war against religious extremism. But judicial oversight is critical to prevent abuses. Somebody has to watch the watchers.

Friday, December 09, 2005

World Cup Draw today

Ah, exciting news today from the most popular sport in the world. No, not NASCAR, I said most popular in the world. The World Cup draw is today:

When:
3 p.m. (EST)
TV: ESPN2, Univision.
Purpose: Divide 32 finalists into eight first-round groups for next summer's tournament in Germany. Each group gets one team from each pot.

Yes, the U.S. is fielding a team. What are we hoping for in this draw, you ask? Basically, we're hoping not be in the same group as Brazil the first round. As much of a superpower the US is in other areas, on the soccer field we have a long way to go to reach super-status. Brazil is like the NY Yankees of the soccer world. We're more like Oakland A's farm team. Which is wierd because our women's squad kick ass. The guys? Eh, not so much. Maybe if we had taken all of our professional athletes in football, baseball, and basketball and made them all play soccer since they could walk, we'd have a better shot.

Last time around, though, we upset Portugal 3-2 and made it into the quarterfinals run (the best we have done in 72 years).

Okay, here's another reason to watch the draw: Heidi Klum will be one of the co-hosts. Now you have no excuses.

Monday, December 05, 2005

Removing "SpyAxe"

The horror. I just spent 4 hours over the weekend disinfecting a PC from SpyAxe - a nasty piece of spyware/malware/trojan. This one snuck in while using Firefox, so you know it's nasty. The scurvy pigfu**ers who wrote this jem derserve to be the loaded onto the next CIA rendition flight to an undisclosed black site for advanced interrogation. But we don't torture (wink wink, nudge nudge), oh no, of course not. Or so claims Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice today. Yea right.

Anyway, the symptoms of this infection are: re-appearing SpyAxe desktop icon and annoying popups coming from the Taskbar. Clicking on the popup launches Explorer and downloads more crap. A check of processes running (Alt-Crtl-Del, click "Processes" tab) shows several rouge program doing God only know what: mssearchnet & nvctrl. Try to kill one of these manually and they just relaunch themselves. Not good. So here's the removal steps I followed.

  1. Backup, backup, backup! Anytime your system is compromised, rule #1 is to immediately backup any critcal data. That way, you are not totally screwed in the event of system failure. And I don't mean that you should backup your entire system since that would most likely also include the spyware/virus, just backup your latest project and/or key data.

  2. Disable Taskbar popups by right-clicking on the Taskbar, select "Customize." The annoying icon is called something like "Virus Alert". Select "Always hide" option to temporarily shut it up.

  3. Download HiJackThis and SpyAxeFix.exe

  4. Close all programs, run SpyAxeFix. This will restart your computer upon completion. After restart, check your taskbar - the Virus Alert should be absent (malicious processes are still running, however).

  5. Reboot the computer in safe mode (Go to Start > Run > type "msconfig" Under boot tab select Safebook, click ok, and restart.)

  6. Once in Safe Mode, remove SpyAxe program using Control panel > Add/Remove programs option.

  7. Go to C:\Windows(or WinNT)\System32 and delete mssearchnet.exe & nvctrl.exe

  8. Run HiJackThis, check entry that includes "HomepageBHO" and delete it.

  9. Run regedit (Start > Run> regedit) and find this key:
    HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoft Windows CurrentVersion policies Explorer run

    You’re looking for the mssearchnet and nvctrl entries - delete them outright (right click, delete).

  10. Reboot in normal mode (Start > Run > msconfig, deselect Safe Mode, click ok, reboot).