Taking those computer classes did get me one thing: an account on the university's unix computers and access to the internet. There was no Web in those days-- except maybe in the minds of William Gibson and those of us who loved him-- but there was a lot of ftp-ing going on. There was a sort of chat, too, although not irc; that came a bit later. We played Rogue. Lots. I still play Rogue. Best of all, there was netnews-- alt.humor, alt.humor-adult, alt.sex, alt.music, alt.fan-kate-bush. Hell, I'd look at alt.anything. We were big on the whole alt-dot-family. Like irc and even ftp, Usenet is still around, albeit choked with spam. As far as I can remember, there wasn't any spam in those days. Viagra had yet to be invented.

Viruses had, although they were mostly benign. Amusing, even. I remember one that spawned a message screen at random intervals that said "I want a cookie." If you didn't type in OREO prontissimo, you'd get booted off the network. Which was fine, unless you happened to be taking a bathroom break or were off grabbing a quick smoke, in which case it was annoying as all hell, especially if you hadn't saved your work before you left. I learned very quickly to back up my work, and to do it often, so I suppose it was a good thing, after all is said and done.

Once I was on the information highway, I just kept on cruising, telnetting hither and yon, making a quick stop-over at AOL before entering the superhighway proper. (And I'll exit that metaphor now, before I run out of gas. In fact, I've been coasting on fumes this entire paragraph, so I'd best cut it out right now. If you're lucky, I'll remember to edit it out before I post this.)

These days, of course, things are vastly different. We have a cable modem, now, and a wireless LAN in our apartment. I can even send e-mail and surf the Web from my mobile phone-- or I could, if the damn thing wasn't still in the Phone Hospital. ("Come back," I cry, "I miss you!" And yet, despite my increasingly pitiful pleas, I get no response. This is possibly because my phone is, in fact, broken. Also, it's a mobile phone. It is not sentient, and it sure as hell isn't telepathic. But I digress. Ahem.)

I'm still running Windows 98, but that is by choice. It's more secure than the newer Windows OS's-- or, at the very least, modern virus authors are too lazy to exploit an OS used by so few these days. In any case, I'm a very security conscious kinda gal. I hate cookies with a passion, and accept very few of them and only when necessary. I have a firewall, and an anit-virus program, and two other programs that track down and eliminate adware, spyware and other species of malware. What's more, I use them. I have them set to run at startup, I keep my definitions updated, I run scans. I'm a good girl, honest I am.

Which makes the recent events especially galling.

Yep, good ole' Sasser came and paid us a visit. It couldn't really infect Win98, of course, but it could (and did) attempt to use my computer to pass itself on, do other nefarious things, and generally create much havoc. Which is nothing to be ashamed of, really. It's a worm, after all, and it was easy enough to find and get rid of.

No, what really annoys me is that it wouldn't have gotten in at all had I not been farting around trying to get rid of the other things that were already causing much havoc here in Toshiba-ville. There were only a few of them, but they took their toll on my poor, overloaded system. Worst of all, they were the type of things that I must have invited in at some point or another. Maybe I even thought I had cleaned them out at some point in the past. They're getting clever, these malware bastards. Some of them even spawn "ticklers" when you go in and get rid of them, which allows them to meekly let themselves be deleted only to COME RIGHT BACK at some point in the future, triggered by God knows what. For all I know, they've hung out a little sign by my IP address: "Yo! Stupid person here! Come on in!" Which, as I mentioned, Sasser did at the first opportunity. The sad thing was, it took me far too long to find because the first thing I did when things went pear-shaped was to scan for viruses, and my virus definitions are bang-up-to-date. "Can't be a virus. I ain't got none of them."

I haven't been wasting my time, though. I now know far more about viruses, worms, adware, spyware, trojans, keyloggers, and myriad other types of malware than I ever really wanted to know. I now have the latest edition of everything, with the latest definitions, yada yada yada. I got yet another anti-malware program-- PestPatrol, which rocks-- and have actually paid for it and will therefore receive frequent and automatic updates. As long as I was at it, I took the opportunity to get rid of a few programs that were generally wonky, crashed without reason, made my system generally unstable, and the like. I switched from an RSS reader based on my desktop (which was itself generally wonky, and which I suspect was one of the sources of my misery), to a web-based reader-- Bloglines, which I also highly recommend. I registered other programs, and instructed them to notify me when there were upgrades and updates available: I haven't always done this in the past, and I'm certain this was another source of woe. And I did a bunch of other diagnostic and maintenance stuff-- cleaned out temp files, spruced up my registry, pared down the startup menu.

As a result, this morning I was good to go. My laptop was running at the peak of its possible performance. My hard drive was squeaky clean. I was ready to do some work. Write things. Be productive. My firewall told me that there was a new version of itself, one upgraded to fix certain security issues, just waiting to be downloaded. Following my new mantra of "Don't put it off, it will only get you into trouble in the long run", I hastened to do as it bid me. I performed what it calls a "clean install" instead of an "upgrade", because that was what it recommended, and followed all instructions to the letter. And during the approximately ninety seconds that I was without a firewall or anti-virus, FUCKING SASSER GOT BACK IN and hijacked my modem.

That bastard malware must have sent out an engraved invitation.

Also, I should have turned off the cable modem.

Sometimes, I'm not as smart as I think I am.