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Monthly Archives: September 2009

Favorite fake Windows Alert

I really feel sorry for the typical windows user.  You are surfing the web, and you come across this rather scary looking window which loads in your web browser:

virus_1

It has changing numbers, a moving status bar and everything.  Notice one other little thing, that is not a  windows taskbar running under there.  That’s KDE, and I don’t have a “C” “D” or any other lettered drive on my computer since I run Linux.  I am sure for a typical windows user, this looks pretty convincing.  It tries to download some ‘antivirus’ software, which I am sure either costs $100 a year or is actually a virus or trojan.  Here lies the problem with everyone running the same operating system with the same theme, it is very easy to trick uneducated users.  By the way, this is what my file browser actually looks like:

virus_2

No drive letters, thank goodness.  Drive letters are a really stupid hold over from Q-DOS from 1979.  It really restricts how many partitions and drives you can have.  Make everything a file or directory and be done with it.  It has worked for UNIX for 40 years.  I would show you what a virus alert looks like for Linux, but, alas, there are no in the wild viruses for Linux.

 

Posted by on September 12, 2009 in Uncategorized

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