I was hoping something interesting would happen during the past few days, but I must have missed it.
We got one of those scam calls from someone claiming that our Windows computer was sending out bogus data, or something like that. You know, voices that tell you they are in some call center in Pakistan, India or some other similar place. My wife turned it over to me in case I wanted to have some fun. I told the fellow we didn’t run Windows, only Linux. He said he was switching me over to their Linux department but I hung up because I was too busy to test the idiocy of the caller.
Meanwhile, for lack of anything better to do I’ve been reading about computer forensics. That’s mostly trying to identify and preserve data on a computer as evidence, but the skills can be applied in all kinds of interesting ways. Some parts of what I do overlaps into forensics, but I’m mostly identifying how the victim’s system was abused. I had to get really aggressive with this last client, chasing down running processes and deleting entire software directories. Normally I stop with running an appropriate malware scanner, but this time I had to make sure every trace was gone. Then I still had to fight with the router.
It turns out Windows 8 isn’t that much harder than Windows 7 for that sort of thing. The big problem is that the interface defaults to that stupid cellphone layout, but I’m figuring out how to avoid that crap. Otherwise, most of the chores are the same when cleaning up a system.
CentOS has released their clone of RHEL 7 this week. I’m waiting to see if someone packages XFCE or Mate for it. Otherwise, it won’t be on any of my systems.
But I’m praying I can expand my computer ministry to cover more folks. In the past, typical advertising did nothing, so whatever I do has to be different from that.
