Gah, viruses

Wonderful, finally got my e-mail back.

 

The kid managed to get his laptop infected with all manner of rubbish Trojans which quite delightedly turned it into a spam relay.  This resulted in my IP being trapped by three separate RBL lists around the world, one of which my domain provider subscribes to…. Result is instant removal of mail sending privileges until I abased myself appropriately to the RBL maintainers and promised the root cause had been corrected.

 

The kid’s laptop is now running a nice Ubuntu install, he’ll be working a lot harder to get that infected.  All he needs is a browser, a media player, a word processor that can talk to Word and an MSN client, so this will do him just fine.   Funnily enough the latest Karmic Koala 9.1 build would not work with the Intel 2100BG inbuilt wireless, even with the NDIS wrapper and the real Intel drivers.  I went back to Intrepid Ibex 8.1 and it just works out of the box.

 

When I ran the XP boot up prior to nuking it from orbit, the thing was absolutely infested with crap, AVG was doing its nut over assorted infections, and there were all sorts of popups and background downloads going on.  I politely inquired how long it had been like that, and I got a shrug and “a few weeks”.  Carefactor zero as long as it still allows him to dribble on MSN messenger apparently.  Kid is now banned from all Windows machines in the house.  I’m just waiting for the update manager to finish, then I’m looking forward to the screams when he discovers the chat client he’s got is Pidgin – a *text* chat client.  It doesn’t do emoticons, smileys, bumps, multicoloured screen vomit or any of the other garbage that Windows Live Messenger does.