minutes viewed in mirror may be longer than they appear.

[celyste.livejournal.com]

2 users + 1 cable modem = 1 bored tech

From what I understand the user was begged by her son to purchase a cable modem and then he would do all the work to set it up. Sounds great. Except he is obviously possessing an iq just barely above dirt. So he left and allowed his somewhat elderly mother to call in.

After 23 minutes we finally got past the incredibly difficult task of taking the modem from the box, the power cord from the box, plugging the two together in the correct manner, and shoving the adapter in to the wall. Another 5 minutes we were really getting in the swing of things and had the e-net and coax connected... but for some reason kept getting a 192 ip. Look at the cables again... somehow we'd missed getting the coax attached to the cable outlet.

We get everything set up and ready to roll... I start registering the account... low and behold we're getting 404 and 403 errors everywhere. proxies are set... and they aren't going away. Since we are just to deal with connections I have to end the call at this point, and all I can think is... there was 1hr25 mins of my life I'll never get back, and I couldn't even get them online.

However, she did think I was a genius for knowing things like ctrl+alt+del (which thankfully brought her mouse back responsive), and ctrl+c / ctrl+v was evidently beyond belief.

I still think that we should take away people's mice for a week and make them all learn keyboard commands. Especially tab and enter. Spoiled little twerps.

Italics are my only edit in this wonderfully explicit email from a customer.

[jahbulon.livejournal.com]

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This feedback is about:
http://ourwebsite/easytouse/helpcentre/page-concerning-email-issue-with-all-relevant-info.html
Feedback : The answer just is not relevant to my question.

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I thought about replying "Hello, Thank you for your email. What is your question?"

Nah. Set it to solved : "no request"

Retardis : Infinite stupidity in a finite space.

(no subject)

[ladynisa.livejournal.com]

while waiting for a reboot...

CU: yeah, I bought the damn thing and had problems with it right away. Had to reisntall Windows XP in the first week

Me: thats horrible. Did you contact the computer manufacturer?

CU: yeah, they didn't say much...

Me: Really? Thats odd, normally they are pretty good about that sort of stuff, especially with a new pc. They didn't offer you a replacement?

CU: No, Walamrt said they couldn't replace it cause I couldn't find the receit.

Me: . . . Oh . . .

Begin uncomfortable silence as I try very hard not to laugh at this poor schmuck.

I'm new!

[shifuimam.livejournal.com]

I'm new. Hi.

I work at my university in the residence halls, doing onsite tech support for people who can't get stuff installed, can't get connected to the campus network, have viruses, etc.

Thought I'd share my favorite customer yet...

Background : she had a damaged datajack in her room. I put an order in at the campus NOC to have them come out and repair it. I was doing follow-up about three months later (I'm a slacker when it comes to that). Residents are required to run a CD before they can get a valid IP...this CD makes sure they have symantec, ad-aware, SP2, etc installed, as well as Windows Updates enabled. It's almost 100% automatic - a rock with moveable arms could run this CD. This girl has a high-end Compaq Presario laptop with everything extra possible (it's got like an 80gb drive, a gig of ram, dvd burner, widescreen, etc)

Me : Hi, I'm just stopping by to find out if your internet connection was working yet.
Her : Oh! I don't know...I haven't really turned my computer on since I moved in (which was when we found out her jack wasn't working).
Me : Well, bring it over here, and we can run the Get Connected CD, and get you up and running!
Her : Okay...hold on...

She proceeds to try and untangle the power adapter from behind her desk (which is on the other side of the room from the datajack).

Me : Oh, you don't need the power adapter. Just bring it over here.
Her : You mean I don't have to keep it plugged in all the time?!
Me : Uh, it has a battery...

This is a girl with two roommates, BOTH of whom have laptops.

Then there were the girls who lived in the room next to me a few years back, who were afraid that installing Kazaa AND iMesh would fill up their 40gb hard drives.

College freshmen are so stupid. *rolls eyes*

Spyware and Firefox: Testing in Virtual PC.

[coyoteden.livejournal.com]

It IS possible to get massively infected with spyware thru Firefox, but you have to be real stupid.

I fired up VPC with a fully patched XP SP2 install, fully updated AVG Free, Sun Java J2SE Runtime 5.0, Macromedia Flash 7.0 and Firefox 1.0. Regmon and Filemon were running in the background, and Undo disk was enabled so changes to the VPC could be rolled back.

I then visited a site I know will attempt to install a spyware  from xxxtoolbar.com. If you are running an old version of Firefox, it will either force an .xpi package install or it will prompt you to install it. 0.9 and 1.0 both block .xpi installs from non-whitelisted sites, so this vector is mitigated. The same site will also try to get you to trust a Signed Java Applet (signed by Thawte, heh...) from Integrated Search Technologies. Firefox will warn you the security certificate cannot be trusted. I don't know if IE will do the same. Signed Java Applets have access to local resources, as do .xpi packages.

In either case, the result is the same. If you allow the XPI or Applet Install2239.exe is written out to your user profile's temp directory and executed. It then unpacks about a dozen installers. Some are blocked by AVG, some are not, and within minutes IE pops open with plenty of new toolbars. Note that you still have to click yes to trust the applet, or in the case of the .xpi actually add xxxtoolbar.com to the install whitelist.

Visiting the same page in IE pops up the information bar asking to install the crack.zip ActiveX plugin, and a flash animation I like to call "how to get pwn3d for dummies." Hilarious!

Interestingly enough, the site never tries the Java applet under IE. This is surprising, as some older versions of the MS VM for Java do not warn about signed applets and have an exploit that lets untrusted code access the local machine.

WARNING: Do NOT go to this site or sites like it if you think your machine might not be fully patched. This site WILL exploit security holes in upatched versions of IE. I think it tries something against Firefox as well: The java applet runs immediately and will often cause Firefox to freeze at 100% CPU when you refuse to trust it.

( Check the screenshots behind the cut. )