Time Immortal

Yeah, yeah, it’s an old joke. Here’s a new twist on it:

Also a good sendup of Keanu Reeves‘ acting in that movie.

It’s probably a tad premature to claim that Windows Vista has completely failed, as a market venture and as a product. But it does have a number of problems with it, and Jason Hiner enumerates these handily. Some of them are fairly obvious — Apple did an absolutely stellar hit job on Vista with their “I’m a Mac” advertising campaign, for example. Others aren’t perhaps as obvious to some — people in the IT industry, myself included, are fairly aware of the fact that Windows XP has nearly a billion users world-wide, and so is very “locked in.” People outside the industry, however, may not be aware of that fact.

But I find I most agree with Hines on his #1 reason: Vista breaks things and, what is more, makes security into a frustration. By comparison, Windows XP is fairly easy to both secure initially, and to keep secure. And on the odd time when one does get into trouble, one can actually run the software necessary to regain control of the system without being thwarted by the OS itself.

After Windows was targeted by a nasty string of viruses, worms, and malware in the early 2000s, Microsoft embarked on the Trustworthy Computing initiative to make its products more secure. One of the results was Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2), which won over IT and paved the way for XP to become the world’s mostly widely deployed OS.

The other big piece of Trustworthy Computing was the even-further-locked-down version of Windows that Microsoft released in Vista. This was definitely the most secure OS that Microsoft had ever released but the price was user-hostile features such as UAC, a far more complicated set of security prompts that accompanied many basic tasks, and a host of software incompatibility issues. In order words, Vista broke a lot of the things that users were used to doing in XP.

Related: if, O Reader, you are a Vista user…for the love of Pete, please disable UAC before calling your buddy to come over and troubleshoot the system for you. It’s just such a nuisance.

…I have to say that, sadly, this doesn’t surprise me one bit. In fact, I’m surprised that the number of people who have fallen victim to this piece of malware (I know Ars Technica classifies it as adware, but I am not so charitable as they in that regard) is not higher. I mean, I’ve had to clean out…I think I’m up to four…such infections in the last two-and-change months, and the impression I’ve been getting from others in the IT field is that I’ve been lucky and drawn the low card.

Which I can believe, all things considered.

XP Antivirus is not a hard program to remove — Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware can usually nail it in one pass, on Windows XP at least. It can also be removed manually, with a modest amount of effort, provided one is comfortable poking around in the registry. What makes XP Antivirus so dangerous, I think, is that it does a very good job of looking…real. Or…realish, often complete with a user interface that mimics the general layout of other anti-virus applications. The more malicious versions of the infection will display fake bluescreens (hint: a real bluescreen can’t usually be cleared by hitting a few keys on the keyboard!), error warnings in garish colours, animated cockroaches (kid you not!), and virus infection warnings.

And of course, the software offers the user a way to fix all these errors.

What’s disappointing, to me, is that whoever created this little piece of malware has probably netted on the order of 10 million Euros (~ $13.5 million USD) from users who fall for the messages and pay up. That won’t be the last charge on their credit card said users will see, methinks; anyone dishonest enough to create malware in the first place will almost certainly abuse credit card numbers handed over to their “care.” What this means, in the broadest sense, is that way too many computer users are not being cautious enough, and not exercising sufficient critical thinking about their computing security. Nor are they at all wise or capable enough to safely use a computer in this modern era.

It’s not absurdly difficult to avoid being infected by XP Antivirus: don’t open an email attachment unless you trust the sender, exercise caution when downloading music and movies. Better still (if you simply must download things rather than purchase them), use something like BitTorrent, and only download content which has been verified as safe (e.g. virus-free), at communities like BTJunkie or ISOHunt. Even better: buy the frickin’ album/movie! And above all else, be a skeptical internet surfer: learn to tell the difference between a spam/unsafe website and a legitimate one!

Is this so hard?

Well, for at least 30 million people…yes, it seems to be.

In the form of an extension to the Vista “downgrade” option for OEMs. Admittedly, this falls under the category of “rumour,” but the word on the blogs is that the new deadline for when OEMs can no longer make the option to downgrade Windows Vista to Windows XP has been bumped back to July 31, 2009, from January 31.

I can understand why they’d want to do this. I’ve encountered a most amusing problem with Vista on my sister-in-law’s laptop. She somehow got herself a MyWebSearch infection, and I’ve been trying to clean it up. I think I’ve killed it…finally. But I’m doing sweeps with AdAware, Spybot, Malwarebytes‘ Anti-Malware, and NOD32 just to be sure.

Normally, under XP, this wouldn’t have been that much of a problem: SpyBot, for example can swat the infection easily, but it does need to be allowed to “run on startup” in order to kill a couple of registry entries that are otherwise protected.

Vista, however, prevents programs from running on startup in that kind of prioritized fashion…which is a most absurd thing: Vista’s own security features actually worked against the killing of this infection.

So yeah…it’s not hard to understand why Microsoft keeps letting XP tag along.

Just wanted to say that Microsoft Virtual PC, running on my 1 GHz Powerbook G4, actually makes for a not unpleasant Windows XP experience. It’s not as fast as my work PC, to be sure, but it’s hardly unbearable, even with the overhead inherent in virtualization, and even given that my laptop dates back to 2003.

Don’t ask me why I’m experimenting with this now.