stories

Spyware Horror Story: Once is enough

Published by Aaron; Arlington, Texas

My dad and I run a little tech support place for our neighborhood (we work for food). We have seen some nasty things around this area, but this next story is the worst. One of our family friends came over with her computer, telling us it was a "little" slow. So, we dragged my huge 17-inch CRT monitor with built-in speakers across the house to our little shop (not fun) and turned on the infected computer. We waited and waited until it finally loaded.

She (the family friend) had Ad-Aware loaded at the time, so we ran it, only for it to crash. At this point, we should have given up and just nuked the hard drive with a little Department of Defense-level program that writes zeros to every cell on the drive three times. But we didn't, and rebooted the computer in Safe Mode.

We then took a look at Ad-Aware and noticed that it hadn't been updated in a year, but we ran it anyway. Over 10,000 infections were picked up on an outdated program. At this point, we toyed with the idea of just taking out our gun and putting the PC out of its misery, but figured the owner wouldn't like that very much. So we tried to fix it.… Read more

Spyware Horror Story: Computing blind

Published by Johnathan; Pasadena, California

Well, one day I was logging onto my computer when I noticed a virus alert. I had noticed a week or so before that the sites I visit (like Crunchyroll) felt a little slower, and a month before that my computer started restarting randomly and continuously. I had to turn it off for a day to fix it. After I saw the virus alert, the sites I go on took about 8 seconds a page compared to the normal 2 or 3 seconds.

That's not all, however; I found that I couldn't log … Read more

The 404 129: Where Natali is dressed like a school marm

Back by insanely popular demand, Natali Del Conte guest stars on today's pretty heartfelt show. Well, we start it off pretty naughty with a couple of stories about highly offensive T-shirt graphics and Mini-Me's "secret" videotape, but then Jeff's buddy Zach calls in with a heartbreaking story and we dish out advice on how to sustain a long-term relationship. E-mail or call and tell us your opinion! EPISODE 129 Download today's podcast

Spyware Horror Story: Uncool Web search

Published by: Bob; Boston

I have an XP Systemax unit that has worked flawlessly for two years. Until today. I checked my e-mail in the morning and noticed it was a little sluggish, so I rebooted--I admit, it had been a while since my last reboot. When the computer came back up, it was almost at a dead stop. Neither my ZoneAlarm nor AVG Anti-Virus would load. Any program I tried relating to anti-anything would not work, either.

After several reboots I was able to launch AVG and found hundreds of spyware files dumped on my system, from CoolWebSearch to … Read more

Touring Disney World the unconventional way

EPCOT CENTER, Fla.--Ah, lawyers.

I was sitting inside a small dome, antsy to get going on the special Segway tour of this famous theme park that I had arranged. But before they would let me or any of the others on the tour head out and ride around on our gyroscopic human transporters, we had to sit through more than half an hour of tedious, but entirely practical, training.

As our instructors told us how to get on and how to get off, how to speed up and how to slow down and so many other crucial things, I … Read more

Spyware Horror Story: Confounded by hosts

Published by Mesila; San Francisco, CA

I recently had unknown malware that was causing Windows to keep rebooting at odd moments. Another thing it did was install a kazillion services and then have all of them running at once. It wasn't something that any scanner would pick up--and being big on file sharing, I've made it a point to keep a whole army of antimalware programs around. I'm assuming the culprit was either one that was new at the time, or a variant that had morphed itself from an older version. Eventually, after a lot of fussing … Read more

NASA to put Buzz Lightyear on International Space Station

Talk about cross-promotion.

One of the closest things to Disney World's Orlando, Fla., home, is NASA's Kennedy Space Center. This is relevant because on Friday, it was announced that among the objects expected to be blasted into the sky with the planned Saturday launch of the Space Shuttle Discovery is a figurine of Toy Story space ranger Buzz Lightyear.

Disney World, of course, is where the new Toy Story Mania ride has just opened.

The idea behind putting Buzz Lightyear aboard the Space Shuttle has to do with the "Toys in Space" initiative NASA and Disney … Read more

Spyware Horror Story: Would you fall for this IM scam?

Submitted by Scott, Vernon Hills, Ill.

This past April, a friend of mine, Jeff, called me on a Saturday afternoon, letting me know that I was instant messaging him right then. I obviously wasn't. He said that after some lines of basic text, I acted panicked and asked for money to be wired to an African bank account, which Jeff knew immediately was bad news for the real me.

I immediately changed some passwords in key accounts and found that my Hotmail account had been mysteriously compromised. The evildoers had got a ton of my contacts and sent out … Read more

Spyware Horror Story: Stowaway pirate

Submitted by Peter; Cordoba, Argentina

I'm a writer, currently living in Argentina. My native (and working) language is English. Obviously, word processing software is a vital tool for me. I bought my last computer, a beefed-up HP 2200, in Cordoba, Argentina. Unfortunately, I had to accept the Windows XP Pro OS, in Spanish, that the vendors supplied it with. I specified that MS Office should be included and it was; alas, in Spanish. When I contacted the MS people in Redmond, Wash., about a download in English--there are complicated restrictions about getting CDs through the local customs--I was informed … Read more