The Blag Switch

Okay folks, seriously: Four Rules.  There aren’t many of them, and they’re not hard to understand.  And when properly followed, they prevent you from blowing your jumblies off:

“A report of shots fired at 19th and Eye streets came in to police and responding officers found evidence that a shooting had in fact taken place. A call came in soon after from San Joaquin Hospital reporting a gunshot victim, police said.

Hasley was uncooperative when officers tried to interview him, police said. He may have been putting a gun in his waistband when it went off.”

Also: crammed in your waistband is NOT the way to carry.  Get yourself a holster that fits your weapon, has strong retention, and completely covers the trigger.

Okay, so I hopped on my parents’ Vista box last night, and kept getting plagued by these Windows Security popups regarding Spyware.ISpyNow.  Clicking on the only available button (labeled “Protect” or somesuch) simply bounced me to a glitzy page for purchasing an anti-spyware product I’d never heard of.

It is my official policy a.) never to buy a product off of a site I didn’t navigate to on my own and b.) never pay for a product when I can do the same thing on my own.  Good policies, I think, since I’m not pretty sure that putting my CC# into that site is exactly what the spyware folks were hoping for.

Googling the issue turned up nothing but a bunch of people experiencing the same problem, but with no solution.  The one post that seemed promising said that they’d tracked the alerts to an executable called dvvm.exe, which resided in the Google AppsData folder.  I found the executable and a seemingly related .dll, but couldn’t delete either of them, because something had a lock on them.

I first went and grabbed WhoLockMe, but it turns out that it doesn’t work with Vista.

I then stumbled upon the Unlocker utility mentioned in the previous post, and after some cajoling (it couldn’t see whatever process was locking the two files), I found its “delete on restart” functionality, selected yes, and rebooted.

Files are gone, as are the popups.

Well, it looks like this holiday season’s first spyware epidemic is underway. This time around it happens to be a sneaky little critter known as Spyware.ISpyNow. On a Vista machine it manifests itself in the highly clever form of a spoofed security alert, which directs users to the page of fake security product which it claims will solve the problem. I presume the scam from there is to get panicked and desperate users to punch in their credit card numbers, which the scammers can then use for Nefarious Purposes.

So, solution. (Note: this solution is Windows Vista-specific and I don’t know if a similar solution will work on other Windows flavors.) Here’s what worked to clean up the Vista machine I’m on:

0.) First go grab Unlocker here and install it.

1.) Navigate to C:\Users\*USERNAME*\AppData\Roaming\Google. You’re looking for the file dvvm.exe (that’s two v’s, not a w: delta victor victor mike) and one associated .dll. I don’t know if they’re always in this folder or not, but that’s where I found them on this machine.

2.) Highlight both files (I don’t recall the .dll name, as I foolishly didn’t write the name down before nuking it. Sorry. ) Right click on them and select “Unlocker” from the right-click context menu. From Unlocker’s drop-down menu select “Delete” and hit ok.

3.) At this point, Unlocker should give you a message about being unable to delete them at the moment (they’re locked, but trickily enough they’re locked by a well-hidden process that Unlocker can’t see.) Unlocker, however, is smart enough to schedule them for deletion on the next reboot. Tell it to do so.

4.) Reboot.

5.) You should now be clean.

6.) If you have any other info to share that might be helpful to others with this bug, please do drop it in the comments. Of particular interest might be whether this method worked for you and on what OS.

Thanks to Cedric ‘Nitch’ Collomb for his awesome Unlocker util.

List of what else I tried and how I arrived at this solution in a post to follow, if anyone’s interested.

UPDATE: forgot to include the Unlocker link.  Oops!  Added.

Okay, so this is several dozen kinds of cool: Scientists have snapped the first photographs of a planet orbiting a star other than our own.  Brothers and Sisters, can I get a “hells yeah”?!  For anyone who still somehow doubts that we’re living in the future, we just gathered photographic evidence of planets around stars over 100 trillion miles from Earth.

Seriously, Welcome to the World of Tomorrow.

For more, head on over to Centauri Dreams for the always-brilliant Paul Gilster’s analysis.

Well, I’m off to visit my great, good old friend Heather in Washington D. C., and I expect that I’ll have zero time for blogging.  So, you know, entertain yourselves until I return.  To that end, here’s an amusing little Yahtzee-esque dice game courtesy of Kongregate with which you can kill time until I return.

Washington State Elections turned out WAY better than I hoped.  Randy Dorn wins Superintendent of Public Instruction, which is a victory for education.  Rob McKenna wins Attorney General, which is a victory for personal rights.  Cathy McMorris Rodgers gets re-elected which is a win for energy policy and the energy economy of Eastern Washington.  Chris Gregoire gets re-elected to the governorship (and by a kvetch-proof margin this time, THANK GOD), which is a vote for hands-off governance.  (Some might say that’s a bug; I say it’s a feature.)

Even on the local level, Todd Mielke won, which should mean someone with a keen grasp of local economics in a position to help make some positive changes in the local economy.

Honestly, I don’t think I could have asked for a better outcome in local elections.

I hope you all voted.  You all know, I hope, that if you didn’t vote you made the baby Thomas Paine cry.

Also, you make Sam Adams have to get all up in your grill:

“If ye love wealth greater than liberty,
the tranquility of servitude greater than the animating contest for freedom,
go home from us in peace.
We seek not your counsel, nor your arms.
Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you;
May your chains set lightly upon you,
and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.”

–Samuel Adams

Happy Election Day!

So I’ve got a problem.  Or maybe not.  It really depends on how you look at it.  Let me start again:

I’ve got a situation.  See, I love video games.  I’m one of those crazy mouth-frothing nuts who thinks that video games are art and I take that art very seriously.  As a serious consumer of said art, I’m hampered primarily by the fact that I’m perpetually short on free time.  In a video-game-intense week, I’ll get in about 8 hours of playing, mostly on the weekend.  Now the problem I’ve encountered is that games I want to play get released at the rate of about one or two a week most of the year.  This leads to problem wherein I have more games that I want to play than I ever possibly could.

On the upside, this means that I will always have something to play when I have the free time.  On the downside, it means that I’m in a perpetual state of gaming triage, wherein I have to allocate limited resources to only those games that will best benefit from my attention.  Most recently this has meant my stop in at Game Stop to grab Fallout 3 and Fable 2.  Unfortunately, it also meant my having to pass up Far Cry 2 and will probably mean that I’ll be well-delaying Gears of War 2.  (Huh, it just occurred to me how many of my currently-coveted titles are in existing frachises.  Interesting, that.)

Maybe I shouldn’t complain, but it feels a bit Sisyphusean to go to the game store every month, see 5 games I want and only take home 2.

For some weeks, my good friends Trevor and Molly have been talking about getting a gun or two.  They’re newlyweds and have been thinking that having a gun for home protection might not be a bad idea.  Trevor decided that, for his part, he really wanted a shotgun, which for home defense is a superb choice.  Molly’s looking into something more in the handgun area, but in the meantime, Trevor decided that a scatter gun was in his future. So today, we met up at the White Elephant (a local sporting-goods/toy store) and, after I explained the principles between the different sorts of shotguns, we slung a few around to see if there were any he liked the feel of.

Finding the selection somewhat lacking, we shuffled our way a few blocks up the street to ARC, Inc.  Now ARC is by far and away my favorite gunstore in town.  It’s the local EBR/”Exotics” store, and it’s not unusual to find the walls adorned with AR-15s, M4geries, AKs, grenade launchers, etc.  (They’re also the best place in Eastern Washington to get a silencer, if you’re in the market.)  So it’s pretty hit-or-miss, and so I wasn’t expecting to find anything that was quite what Trevor was looking for. Fortunately, I was wrong.  In a place of honor on the wall they had a brand new Mossberg 590, with a full-length (7 round) tubular magazine and all-black furniture.  Trevor gave it a look, gave it a heft, and was sold.  After filling out the paper work and waiting for the ATF call-in, we through the gun and a couple of boxes of slugs into his car and off we went to the Spokane Rifle Club.

All I can say is: I suddenly regret that moritorium I put on buying any more guns for awhile.  After putting some hefty 73 caliber slugs down range, I suddenly got a huge itch for a smooth bore.  I don’t own any shotguns, and Trevor’s Mossberg convinced me in about 7 rounds that I’m pretty sure I need one. As for Trevor?  He’s extremely happy with his investment:

Within two boxes, all of Trevor’s slugs were landing within bad-guy-of-angle (the only really meaningful goal for a defensive gun) at 15 yards.  Next step for him?  The Defensive Shotgun course over at Sharpshooters. One more responsible, armed, (soon to be very well-trained) American citizen.