Nirenjan’s Space

By now, you are probably aware that a virus has struck the Yahoo! Groups. This virus is fairly intelligent because of two reasons.

1. It searches the address book and the inbox for the word “group” and sends fake mails to that group.
2. The fake mails have a subject which is very similiar to a previous thread in the group

This particular virus has one distinguishing feature. All the virus generated mails have a mail size of around 180K to 190K. Secondly, any virus generated mail, not just this virus, has a major distinguishing feature. The From column in Yahoo will display the mail ID, not the actual name of the person which is configured.

I received some suggestions in the mail as to how to combat the spread of this virus (or for that matter, any generic virus).

1. Create an address entry with the name “!0000″ with no e-mail address
2. Create an address entry with just the e-mail address “aaa@aaa.com”
3. Create an address entry with just the e-mail address “aaabbbcccdddnothing@yahoogroups.com”

Hopefully, with the above addresses in place (they should be the first 3 entries in the address book), the spread of the virus can be stopped.

You can also prevent getting infected by a virus. Avoid opening any attachment if you don’t know the sender or you are not expecting it. Just by looking at the From field is usually sufficient - if you don’t see the name of the sender but just their ID - Select, Delete.

Good luck!

Update: If you have admin access to your group, you can also disable attachements from being sent to group members, thus avoiding the spread of the virus. You can even go the additional step and block all messages totally, without deleting the group altogether.

Thathuvams seem to be the rage of the day. Everyday, I get at least 10 of them. Sample this:

Teaspoon vechu tea kalakka mudiyum, aana tablespoon vechu table kalakka mudiyumaa???

How’s a guy to survive an assault of these?

From an SMS:
Sister problemna Dheena paaru;
Family problemna Mugavari paaru;
Brother problemna Vaali paaru;
Selavillaama saaganuma Paramasivatha paaru

And vengeance from a Paramasivam bhaktan:
Sister problemna Thirupaatchi paaru;
Mother problemna Sivakasi paaru;
Brother problemna Bagavadhi paaru;
On the spot saaganuma Aathiya paaru

via e-mail

Even though I no longer have my laptop, I still have a state of the art machine from 1998. It’s blazingly fast…

As fast as a snail.

Seriously though, it is an excellent configuration for it’s time. Pentium II - 233 MHz, 64 MB SD RAM, 10 GB Hard disk, 1.44 MB Floppy drive (which incidentally, no longer works), 8x 4x 32x CD Writer (upgraded after the original 24x CD-ROM conked out, and the writer doesn’t work. It reads CD’s well though). What else? A 2 MB SiS 6215C graphics card (on which even Quake II won’t run, leave alone CnC Generals), a 10/100BaseT ethernet card, a Yamaha soundcard (for which drivers are totally unavailable, except for Windows 98, which brings me to the next point), Windows 98, and NO office software. Not MS Office, not StarOffice, not even OpenOffice.

As of now, the only thing this computer is good for is for playing Sudoku and browsing the internet. Oh yeah, and listening to music…

IBM called me up a couple of days back and gave me one hell of a heart attack. They said that the motherboard on my laptop had gone kaput and that it would cost about Rs. 54000, plus taxes, to get a new board. Hell, for that price, I could buy a brand new laptop!!! Naturally, I said no.

I collected my laptop yesterday morning and started backing up the data in the evening. Even though I was pretty certain that it wouldn’t power up, I still couldn’t resist trying to turn the power on. Surprise! Surprise!!! It actually turned on!

Even though it works, I still want to trade in this laptop for a new one. Any recommendations for a particular brand? I am thinking of continuing with IBM.