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Dave gets punked, eats crow
By David Stewart (Intel) (129 posts) on December 20, 2008 at 6:12 pm
Just another day as the IT Manager of the Stewart Family. Youngest daughter, aged 17, runs up the stairs in anger and frustration - her computer won't work!
Now to be fair, when my kids were younger, I used to get this kind of complaint fairly regularly. After about the second or third time of completely reloading Windows, I finally got fed up. Why do they continue to download unknown software and install it? So on the final Windows reload, I created accounts for the kids and turned off administrative privileges.
Success! Of course, I got bitter complaints that they couldn't install whatever random download they wanted to, but I stopped needing to be called in to fix things on the computer.
A few years ago, I kind of let this policy fascism lapse, and allowed them to have administrative rights again. They continued to be much more responsible, and I thought smooth sailing was ahead.
Until this week. The computer was infected with something nasty, due to my youngest clicking on a link she shouldn't have. Now she had a whole stable of adware and popups which made her computer unusable, and I couldn't figure out a way to disinfect it.
I lectured her on how it's such a bad idea to click on links if you are not sure of the site. "It's not like I intended to get infected!" Yeah, right, but still.
Then yesterday, I was reading my gmail on my laptop, and saw a link from my Google Alerts that looked interesting. So I clicked on it, and...
Blamo! I realize that my computer is going through the exact same infection symptoms that my daughter reported. Panicking, I quickly closed the browser and hoped for the best. Fortunately, this time, I wasn't infected. I'm not sure if I was saved because of the panoply of anti-malware loaded on my laptop by my IT department. It was frightening!
- I don't blame Google or Google Alerts or Gmail for this. They can't filter out all of the suspicious links. And this one seemed tailor made to snare me in its trap - primo social engineering.
- Because URL naming can be pretty obscure, it's probably impossible to really determine if a URL is good or bad. And of course, URL shortening services make this even harder to deal with. But URL shorteners (like TinyURL.com) are really necessary to make services like Twitter usable. Long URLs break the 140 character limit of Twitter too easily without URL shorteners.
- Good anti-virus and anti-malware software is of course incredibly valuable. My non-technical brother-in-law tried to get by on his home computer with free anti-virus software, until he became so infected that he couldn't use his computer any more. Which is when I had to tell him, "don't be so cheap. Buy a real anti-virus suite."
- Of course, since I earn my living in Open Source, many of my friends on Twitter wondered why I allowed a non-open source OS in the house. Well, it's nice to think about, but at this point I'm afraid my daughter is a bit too addicted to the Windows lifestyle.
And so of course, I got to "eat crow" as we say in the US, and apologize to my daughter for being so hard on her. She took it with some grace, and didn't rub my face in it too badly.
Categories: Manageability, Open Source, Social Media & Virtual Worlds
Comments (4)
December 22, 2008 10:06 AM PST
 Garrett D'Amore |
Seems like you might be better served by running OSS (ideally OpenSolaris, but I'm admittedly biased) and using VirtualBox or other virtualization technology to run your Windows apps. Used in conjuction with VM snapshotting technology, you could restore to a known state easily, without having to resort to a full reinstall, and without worrying too much about the actual underpinning OS. It won't serve for hardcore gamers, but I'd think on a decent CPU (which surely you have access to), it would be enough for typical apps, or even some of the web games/realarcade style games that my wife and kids seem to enjoy. I confess that I let my kids use Windows, but only because my wife insists. :-( They don't have admin access though, and I think I've risked marital bliss enough with my chastisements to my wife on *her* browsing habits that she's gotten reasonably paranoid about browsing sites. (Though whether its paranoid *enough* is certainly a reasonable question.) |
| December 27, 2008 12:43 PM PST
Sergey | Friends don't let friends use Windows. Parents shouldn't let their kids run Windows either :-) |
| December 30, 2008 10:25 PM PST
Frank Kruchio |
Good honest story there ;) I setup my mother a NetBSD desktop that she uses to browse the web, look at family photos and of course email. She is a total novice at her 60+ age but learned the basics fairly quickly. OpenSolaris would have made a nice choice in your case, but granted often it can be hard to steer family members towards progress. In my case it was easy, she took a one week windows basic class, so I simply stated if she does not want viruses on her PC learn this system. |
zaki