One year ago, I posted on Slashdot that I do not run an anti-virus program on my computer. That spawned a very large set of comments, most of which were telling me how stupid I am for not running anti-virus. I promised one user that one year from that day, I would post the results of a virus scan here on my blog. (I also promised a malware scan, but I’m too lazy.)

Well, I’m a few days late, but no matter. A few hours ago, I downloaded the free AVG Rescue CD (well, the bootable USB stick version). A few months ago I used this program to successfully de-virus a neighbor’s aging laptop, and years ago I ran AVG as my computer’s anti-virus, so I feel confident trusting the AVG Rescue software.

The AVG Rescue CD is a small bootable linux image which downloads the latest anti-virus definitions from AVG’s servers and then scans your computer’s hard drives. It will then allow you to delete or quarantine any viruses it finds. It’s a pretty handy tool – I highly recommend you keep a spare USB stick around with this installed, just in case.

Now, I was quite confident I do not have any viruses. I booted from the USB stick, updated the AV definitions, and proceeded to scan both hard drives. (I had forgotten how long it takes to scan several hundred gigabytes of files.)

This is what I found:

Obviously I could not simply take a screenshot, so you’ll have to put up with what my iPhone 4′s camera could do, and hopefully you’ll forgive me for taking a crappy picture that cuts off the rightmost portion of the text.

“But wait!”, you’re saying. “There are some viruses found!” Don’t be hasty – allow me to give some background. First, I have not used Thunderbird since I switched to Google Apps (which I mentioned having done in my first post in that Slashdot thread). That switch was, as mentioned, before March 18 of last year. Note that these hits are all in Thunderbird directories.

The first two lines are referring to a file named something like UPS_receipt_8492.zip, and AVG says a virus named FakeAlert was found in the file. The last two lines are referring to another copy of the same file. When I looked at the full file path, my surprise faded — this was Thunderbird’s Junk folder! So, being junk mail, I have never opened it, and really I should have deleted it. (Well, really, I should have cleared out this old Thunderbird data entirely.)

The other lines all refer to a trojan horse called “Generic13.BBVH”. This is actually a false positive; the two executables in question (“64K Movie.exe” and “64K Movie2.exe”) are a pair of really nifty programs which procedurally generate a 3-d environment with some nice shiny eye candy and some accompanying music, all in an executable weighing in at less than 64KB. For what it’s worth, the e-mails containing those executable attachments were uploaded to my Google Apps e-mail account along with the rest of my (non-Junk) mail; Google’s anti-virus does not complain about the two files.

So you can see for yourself, I’ll mirror the two files for you here:

- 64K Movie
- 64K Movie 2

You can also google those and find other people’s mirrors. You can scan the two files yourself; some anti-virus programs will give false positives.

So, one year and counting running Windows with no anti-virus, and no viruses. It’s not hard, you just have to browse responsibly.

Dear SCEA,

Common sense tells us that when I purchase a product that advertises a feature, then I should be able to use that product with that feature. If I buy a deck of pinochle cards, I should obviously be able to play pinochle with those cards. If the manufacturer later decides that it only wants its customers to play three-handed pinochle, and they tried to take the issue to court, they would be laughed out of the courtroom, even if their package included an EULA saying they can do so.

I bought a Playstation 3, which advertised the ability to run Linux as one of its features. It also advertised the ability to play Blu-ray video discs as another feature. Common sense tells us that both of those features should continue to function for the lifetime of the product. Unfortunately, SCEA, you have decided that you are special, and that common sense does not apply to you.  You have decided that you can arbitrarily force customers to impair or disable one of those advertised features.

You recently filed a motion for a temporary restraining order against a few hackers who decided that when they bought a “Playstation 3 computer entertainment system” which advertised the ability to run Linux, they should be able to use it for that purpose.

You are filing charges against people for deciding that they should get what they paid for. You should be laughed out of the courtroom.

With the exception of a difficult and essentially worthless hack by GeoHot, these hackers were content to leave your technological measures alone, uncircumvented. It was not until SCEA removed existing functionality from already-purchased Playstation 3s that fail0verflow became interested in circumventing the restrictions built in to the Playstation 3.  Were they interested in piracy, there is no reason they would not have made these efforts years ago.

I’ll repeat that so it’s clear: nobody cared about hacking the PS3 until you, Sony, deliberately removed functionality that your customers had already paid for.

Smartphones can be legally jailbroken, despite the fact that jailbreaking requires circumvention of technological measures, and despite the fact that jailbreaking enables piracy. Why are you pretending the Playstation 3 is different?

My Dell laptop is a computer, and I am legally allowed to run whatever software on it that I wish. My iPhone is a computer, albeit a small one, and I am legally allowed to run whatever software on it that I wish, despite the fact that such use requires circumvention.

My Playstation 3 is a computer — you yourselves make that clear in your motion against geohot and fail0verflow — and I should be legally allowed to run whatever software on my Playstation 3 that I wish, whether or not such use requires circumvention.

But your real problem is that your motion pretends that 1201 (f) does not exist. Indeed, fail0verflow’s express purpose from the beginning has been to achieve interoperability (which they have made abundantly clear at all times), and their activities to recover the signing keys were specifically necessary to do so.

In other words, SCEA, circumvention required for interoperability is not subject to the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA.

Sony, no lawsuit you bring now will have any effect on how much piracy occurs. You cannot blame the results of your own actions on fail0verflow or geohot. If you remove advertised features from a device, then enterprising users will figure out how to get those features back.

Your antics are both absurd and amusing, and if the court does not decide against you, then others will take up the cause again and again until we can change the court’s mind.

I will end with a word of advice: the solution to your problems is to restore OtherOS. Hackers would again lose interest in hacking the Playstation 3, and you would regain an item for your feature list.

You obviously do not value the goodwill of your customers. Until you have demonstrated that you have reversed that position, I will not be buying any of Sony’s products.

After part 2 of my Mac OSX VM tutorial, I said I’d post an update for how to increase the screen resolution.  It’s pretty simple; there are two files to edit, and if you want a resolution higher than 1280×1024, a virtualbox command to run on the host machine.  I’ll do two examples, then; one where we’ll change the VM to 1280×1024, and one where we’ll change it to 1680×1050.

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Yesterday we set up the VirtualBox VM so it would be ready to install OSX on our Windows host. Today we’ll do the fun part

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A couple of months ago, I got Mac OSX working as a Virtual Machine running under VirtualBox on my Windows 7 host. A few weeks later, after a VirtualBox update, the VM stopped working for some reason.

I just got around to re-creating the VM, and since I’ve been having to piece this together from half a dozen sources, I thought I’d write my own tutorial. I’ve already done this once tonight (well, when this post is published it will be last night), so I know it works; I’m just going to do exactly what I did three hours ago, taking screenshots along the way. Since it’s kind of long, I’ll split it into two parts. Part two will go up Friday.

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