Since my last proper post on 16 September, lots of stuff has happened…

Virus, again!
Yes, only after reformatting my computer I found myself reformatting it again! This was because the virus I caught spread to all Windows XP machines on the network (good job it didn’t affect Windows Vista machines, otherwise not only my parents would be infected but the neighbors too…). Anyway thats all sorted now.

Reformat, again!
Same style subheader as the previous. I turned my computer on. Avast wanted me to update and reboot, so I did. Only to then find when I log back on to my computer, as soon as the “Loading your personal settings…” screen disappears, the “Closing your network connections…” screen appears, and takes me back to the logon screen. I must have tried logging on fifty times, but no luck. This meant another reformat.

teen4m, coming along nicely…
Because teen4m hasn’t been release yet, I can’t expose too much information about it, but its coming along nicely to say the least.  Lots of word, over 2,000 lines of code and a very web 2.0 theme.

Yes! I’m back! Can you possibly believe it, my blog doesn’t take upto 30 seconds to load on broadband! This isn’t some sort of mystical magic doing its stuff, its because I’m not blogging on WordPress.com – I’ve imported all of my posts from my hosted blog to here so nothing has really gone.

Now I’m here at WordPress.com, I hope to write much more often since I don’t get put off by the slow speeds of my blog. Also expect the theme to change fairly often. If it doesn’t change in a while, then it most probably means; I like it!

Yep. I caught a virus, a nasty one aswell. First of all I noticed adverts keep on popping up in Internet Explorer windows, when IE wasn’t even running, then when I next booted up I was confronted with a fake anti-virus window and some thing telling me to download WinAntiVirus pro, so I did – not really, I wouldn’t download that. Anyway, next boot and nothing happened. I just logged on, and nothing came up. I hit “ctrl+alt+del” to bring up the “Windows Security” dialog box and opened Task Manager. Guess what, no “explorer.exe”! I hit “New Task…” and typed in “C:\WINDOWS\explorer.exe”, and I was confronted with a “You do not have the correct permissions to open this file” message. Damn! The main system file, and I couldn’t even open it. Something had to be seriously wrong, in the end I used IE’s file manager (similar to Windows Explorer) to back up my important files and decided to do a reformat.

Shame that I had to do one really, but thats viruses. When the installation was complete I loaded some crucial files and programs back on to it and immediately downloaded Avast! 4 Home Edition. Once it had installed, I was faced with 7 virus alerts! 7 virus alerts! My installation of Windows XP was less than 2 hours old, how could 7 viruses have got into my system? Anyway I moved them to the chest and everything seemed okay.

Lets hope it stays this way, since I’m on my forth XP installation in just under 2 years! Should operating systems really need reinstalling this many times?

Research

I did some research on the virus that I had caught, tracing back everything I had downloaded. It appears that the site http(colon)//www.theserials.com have changed their “textbox” attempt to a download.

I investigated where these downloads were coming from, it appears that the following addresses are spyware generators:

http(colon)//d.theserials.com/files/ANYTHING-HERE.exe
http(colon)//keys.thekeys.ws/files/ANYTHING-HERE.exe

If you type in a non-existing address such as:

http(colon)//d.theserials.com/some-non-existing-file/
http(colon)//keys.thekeys.ws/some-non-existing-file/

You will find that Apache (server) will return a 404 error for the server:

http(colon)//storage.ss.ru

Which obviously is a Russian server, not just from the domain extension but from the domain report, which says the server is located in St. Petersburg, running off the Davis Zao Network. The only whois information available for this is:

domain: SS.RU
type: CORPORATE
nserver: ns.avmgroup.ru.
nserver: ns2.avmgroup.ru.
state: REGISTERED, DELEGATED
org: JSC "Dewis"
phone: +7 812 5289637
phone: +7 812 5289685
fax-no: +7 812 5289637
fax-no: +7 812 5289685
e-mail: (removed)
registrar: RUCENTER-REG-RIPN
created: 1999.08.06
paid-till: 2008.09.01
source: TC-RIPN

Which really doesn’t tell us much about who owns this domain, note that the email address has been removed for anti-spam purposes. My conclusion is that the following addresses CNAME to http(colon)//storage.ss.ru:

http(colon)//d.theserials.com/
http(colon)//keys.thekeys.ws/

This is the end of this rather long blog post, but just be warned; think your safe without an anti-virus, think again!

So I got home from school, did what I do (drink a coke, and chill for a bit), and turned my computer on. All seems okay, I unlocked it (as I just hibernate, because its faster) and opened up MSN Messenger 7.5, my favourite MSN client. I hit “Sign In” and then to my disgust, I got a “You must upgrade to a later version to continue” message. WHAT! I downloaded, thinking it was some critical update and then I got a “Windows Live Messenger” installation window! ARGH! I HATE WINDOWS LIVE MESSENGER! Now I’ve had to download and install it, all of my settings have been lost, such as my tabbed conversations and the removed adverts. Its lucky I downloaded Messenger Plus Live! and MSN A-Patch to take care of everything.

I am still very angry at Microsoft for making not only me, most probably 100′s of others who used MSN Messenger 7.5 upgrade to what they think is a “better” product, I just think its silly, and why rebrand? Why rename MSN to Live? These questions remain unanswered, and Microsoft, you really are fools…

I admit it, I hate Apache, the whole idea of configuration files to edit. Abyss is the best web server in the world, but its not open source, so I can’t really use it on my USB Flash Drive. But Apache’ll have to do for now on my USB stick.

Then phpMyAdmin decides that PHP isn’t going to load the “mysql” extension, how suprendous. Anyway a MySQL database isn’t really that important, since I’m not going to be carrying round my own personal phpBB forum or my WordPress blog in my pocket, am I?

I’ve never really been much of a torrentor. You hear people say “I torrented this” and “I torrented that” but its not until lately that I personally found www.isohunt.com, I like to think of it as the much safer version of LimeWire, okay so I’m guessing that there are still viruses, spyware, adware or malware out there on the vast torrent network. I’ve downloaded a few keygens (can’t say what programs for though), and I’m downloading 3.94GB of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas for PC, but I’m not sure if it is the online edition. After several hours running uTorrent using my fairly fast internet connection, I still have a mere 15 hours to wait.

But I’m never the kind of person to sit and watch a progress bar (unless I have to like when Windows is booting up on my server because of that annoying ‘disk check process’ that you have to cancel within 10 seconds) so I like to go and do something else, most probably at this time do some serious coding on teen4m or some talking on MSN, how important! Thats if I decide not to play a quick game of either Star Wars: Galactic Battleforce or Midtown Madness 2.

Okay now the domain registration is secure, I own the domain and its pointing to my server, I can release that the name of the website that I am creating along with Mark Brown (compact-mac) is…

teen4m

 And its slogan is

Created by teens for teens…

Clever, eh? I didn’t want to release the site name before I purchased the domain for obvious reasons like someone might register it to annoy me and not use it, etc, you get the idea.

Hopefully we’ll have a teen4m Development Blog opened up soon that me and Mark will be able to post in (WordPress obviously ) to bring you news from behind the scenes of teen4m!