I'm Back, Baby

Well, the home internet is back up. Apparently, a virus is to blame. I noticed a suspicious Windows alert popping up from my system tray last weekend. I say "suspicious" because, despite the many flaws attributed to Microsoft by its detratctors, poor grammar is not one of them. What I'm trying to say is, if you get a message on your desktop that says, "Windows has detected a virus in computer. Do you want to blocking this threat?" you can safely assume you have a virus of some sort.

I ran my suite of virus-killers and got rid of the problem (no more warnings utilizing the ebonics language pack) but suddenly couldn't connect to the internet. I ran through my internet connection knowledge store fairly quickly: the modem was reporting a good connection, I had a valid IP address that contained my ISP's prefix. I could release and renew the address. Turning off the firewall didn't fix it. After a brief bout of laziness coupled with having other things to do, I contacted the ISP to figure it out.

Basically, I had a couple of viruses. One was the laughably obvious one with the 2nd grade education. The other was of the trojan horse variety. It hijacks the computer and uses it as a bot. The problem was that it changed my browser settings to use a proxy server to report back to its evil masters. Removing the virus didn't reset the browser settings. You'd think I would have thought of this, being a computer guy and all. To that I say, shut up.

How did my pristine blogging machine become a veritable Mos Eisley of computer scum and villainy? According to my research, the most likely culprit was a "social networking site". Damn you, Facebook! Either that or the nazi midget lesbian vampire cuckold fetish sites I frequent.