Wasting My Time

I'm not normally a violent man; that is to say, one who reacts to setbacks and frustrations by lashing out physically. But if I could find a way to get next to one (or preferably a whole roomful) of those utter shits who distribute viruses and malware over the Web I would cheerfully beat them to a pulp with an iron bar. Care to join me? No jury in the land would convict us. We'd be public heroes.

At around 5:00 this afternoon, it became apparent that my daughter had acquired a particularly evil piece of malware, merely by visiting an innocuous-looking website. She hadn't downloaded anything, she had merely looked at some maps of Seattle. Masquerading as anti-virus software, the malware then blocked every attempt to run any legitimate program, including the installed anti-malware and anti-virus programs. It was like having your path blocked repeatedly by some grinning bully.

The only remedy I could think of was to restart the laptop in "safe mode", use System Restore to roll back to a "restore point" dated before today, and then update and run a full scan with anti-malware software (I use Malwarebytes). After an eternity of multiple attempts (ever tried getting a Windows Vista laptop into safe mode?) and protracted waits, it seemed to have worked by 9:30 pm.

Of course, the frustration was compounded by having to roll back to a restore point. Every piece of software on the computer is now jostling to be first in the queue to be updated. Windows alone wanted to download and install 43 updates. It's not as if I'd back-dated the computer to 1995. If there's one thing that annoys me almost as much as evil, bullying, pointless malware it's the high-handedly casual attitude of software companies -- from Microsoft down -- to rolling out software updates, now that we're all connected to the internet.*

Barely a day goes by without some "important" updates to something downloading themselves, at length, which then require the computer to be restarted, and then install themselves, at length. It took Windows 7 forty minutes to download a Service Pack onto my laptop last week, which then took another forty minutes to install. I'd only turned the thing on to check my email! I have learned not to anger Windows by pulling the power plug on its interminable updates, though: the last time I did this a computer was rendered completely unusable.

I think it was Heidegger who said that "the modern world is revealed at the horizon of machines that are out-of-order". What did he know? The modern world is revealed at the horizon of machines that promise to be useful but just waste our bloody time.

Can anyone out there understand or explain the mentality of the writers and distributors of computer viruses? How anyone can devote so much intelligence and ingenuity to causing so much random, purposeless harm to ordinary people is beyond me.


* Run a close third by smug Apple Mac users who never get viruses. Don't go there, just don't...