Tech Support HELL

McAfee by default blocks IRC.

...yeah.

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As a DEFAULT behavior, that's actually wise.

If you don't know how to frotz your antivirus, you REALLY have no business being on IRC.

If you aren't deliberately using IRC, it's really a good fucking idea to block your computer from getting to it (as best as you can), given that IRC is how zombies report in to Master.

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I know why they do it, it's just annoying as shit.

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Mm...

I don't agree with your "no business being on IRC" comment.
However, it does make a (little (tiny)) bit of sense to shut off the stoopid zombie bot CnC vector.

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So you would say IRC is a great, safe place to be for people who don't even know how their antivirus app works?

... shens!

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Is it worse than:

1) Email?
2) The WWW?
3) AIM?

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1) yes
2) yes
3) yes

The other three are more commonly occurring vectors for noobs because there are more noobs USING them, not because they are more or less safe.

IRC is a wretched hive of scum and villainy. Yes, yes, I know, you have fun there, blah blah blah - but it's about on par with Limewire for "noob safety", if not worse.

I am not saying "nobody should ever go to IRC", but I maintain that if you don't even know how your antivirus works, you should NOT be going there.

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trayce.livejournal.com

Agreed. In fact back in the day when IRC were more popular than it is now, the majority of people with compromised machines had zombie clients fuckin' shit up via IRC (and had no idea, either). I'd see that way more than DoS attacks or virii.

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So:
The IRC protocol can be used to control evil software, therefore chatting via IRC is to be avoided by noobs?

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IRC is a wretched hive of scum and villainy.

Why?

but it's about on par with Limewire for "noob safety"

Again, why? I sense that you have a point here, but are continually failing to make it.

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Seriously, are you kidding me? It's not, for the most part, a technical reason - IRC isn't inherently unsafe because of some particular protocol failing or anything - it is simply a wretched hive of scum and villainy. Full of everything from malicious kiddies telling noobs to delete system32 to script kiddies pawning trojans off on people to trojaned warez getting passed around.

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the-s-guy.livejournal.com

Is there any section of the internet - or life - which isn't?

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Y'know, there's an "acceptable percentage" of rodent feces in restaurant food, too, but that doesn't mean tossing a rat's salad is a good idea.

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kostika.livejournal.com

Except they don't need to click the accept button. You can jsut send the person to a webpage and it'll do it automatically without them knowing.

Seriously, IRC is no worse than spam with attachments or cleverly scripted webpages. Me things you must have gotten stung on IRC at some point.

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I've never had any form of malware on any computer of my own, period.

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kostika.livejournal.com

Never said you did.

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What about the fact that I don't run antivirus software?

(And don't use Windows)

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You, sir, are no noob: if some jackass convinces you to DCC some trojaned warez, I'll just point and laugh. =)

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Ironically, so would I... (Yes, I am not above laughing at myself. Keeps me from getting too jaded).

Now, these trojaned warez.. do they run under Wine...?

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Some of 'em do!

Actually I saw some pretty interesting articles a while back about some malware that did precisely that - people were running various browsers under Wine and getting Windows malware that RAN under Wine. Interesting, in a thoroughly repulsive way.

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vertelemming.livejournal.com

4) Life?

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Oh man.
That's the biggest virus/worm vector there is! Stay *far* away!

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ClamWin works great, as long as you don't want active hooks into your filesystem or mailsystem (ie, automatic scanning of everything you do). All ClamWin gives you is the ability to right-click a file or folder and scan it manually.

Which suits me PERSONALLY just fine, but I can't exactly recommend it to clients.

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That's way better than "Oh hai, taking up all your system resources now."

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It also does run full system scans, which you can schedule at specific times (like, when no one is likely to be using the machine).

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So noonish, for most nerds.

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Also known as Sushi and Sake time.

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superbus.livejournal.com

Hey, it works great for guys like us, that actually know their shit.

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trixtah.livejournal.com

Avast! works well. No crap that I can discern, and does the biz on Windows.

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coyoteden.livejournal.com

Avast once broke cmd so badly I couldn't get a prompt, let alone a messed up PATH.

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I've had decent luck with ClamAV/ClamWin.

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arinoch.livejournal.com

Unless it's your own computer and not a customer's, just leave 'em with whatever they're using. Every tech knows the AV software's only half the solution; a clue is the other half. I could tell you stories of the problems I've fixed that started with someone in my family alone saying "Oh, well I'll just disable the virus scanner.".

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coyoteden.livejournal.com

Oh, it's mine. Uninstall/reboot/reinstall of AVG cleaned it up.

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altorogue.livejournal.com

Ow, it hurts my brain. :/

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jjjiii

It's a nice houndstooth error message.

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ravenofdreams.livejournal.com

Well, it does look pretty. Annoying, I'm sure, but pretty.

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taleya.livejournal.com

Wow. That reminds me of the chaos patterns in the novel of Jurassic Park

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spooforbrains.livejournal.com

When I came to create a VMWare image of a running server, a while ago, I found the disk usage to be ~50GB higher than it should be. After some time* I managed to track it down to ... Trend Micro, which had 50GB of log files in its Program directory.

Seriously, WTF, Trend? 50GB?!

* Side question. When crap like this happens, I have to get the file size of each directory tree in the root and work my way down. Does anyone know of anything similar to Konqueror's file size view that would allow me to easily see where the disk usage is?

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major-error.livejournal.com

http://www.steffengerlach.de/freeware/
Scanner is your friend.

You're welcome :P

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the-s-guy.livejournal.com

I usually write a little script which pulls the disk usage of each subdir in the starting directory, sorts by size, prints the first one (size and name), and then takes the name of that particular subdir and recurses until it hits a directory with no subdirs.

(No, it's not particularly efficient. It'd be moreso if it pulled all the subtree data at once and then worked on the resulting file, but hey.)

I assume you're using something like "du -k | sort -n" at the moment? There's a du for Windows at sysinternals.com if it's just for the one machine. Or you could write something complicated in batch, or less so under WSH, or any one of a number of options. There's a bunch of third-party utilities which will do it, and I hear that Vista has folder size sort as an advanced option (but haven't confirmed it personally).

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