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The Old New Thing

The Old New Thing : The end of the scrollbar series: "Raymond Chen says:"
Why is that everybody assumes cheating? The Office folks are really smart. Startup time is all about minimizing disk I/O. So analyze your startup code to death: Track every page fault and work to get rid of it. Delay initialization of everything that can be delayed. (The fastest code is code that doesn't run at all.) Take all the functions that are called at startup and put them near each other in memory so you take fewer page faults. Use the /ORDER switch to do this. If you have a large function and only half of it is used at startup, break it into two functions, the part used at startup and the part that isn't. Reorder your data so all the memory used by startup is kept near each other in memory. With CPUs as fast as they are, disk I/O is the limiting factor in app startup."

Blake Ross on Firefox

Blake Ross on Firefox : "AOL, after months of extensive market research on the effects of the walled garden model on the distribution and consumption of interactive media, will rotate its logo by another 90 degrees. Chairman Dick Parsons will boast that the new logo reflects the new direction of our company, but founder Steve Case will make an impassioned plea in the New York Times to break up the logo into a circle and three triangles. " http://blakeross.com/

Spyware, Malware, Viruses, Trojans, Rootkits

So I've been handed perhaps the most infected PC ever. There were a smattering of different malware types present. When are the 'antivirus people' going to stand up and own the whole malware prevention pie? Seems that instead of declaring that Trojans (something that have long been part of the antivirus watch list) have gotten smarter by being by rootkits they (Mcafee, Symantec, the others) seem to turn a blind eye. Perhaos not a blind eye - perhaps there's just a lag to develop a "new" product that will help against these new threats.

These ARE NOT new threats. They are the same old threats. Instead of a trojan being installed under the guise of doing something good, and instead deleting my mail, they are claiming something good - and installing other viruses or spawning processes, etc.

I spent the better part of 5 hours tracing down what turned out to be a rootkit based malware. The two files involved were sffelide.sys and sposhx32.exe. Knowing this didn't help either - a google search on these filenames results in ZERO hits -- are people just that unaware of these types of exploits? Doesn't look like the current slate of antivirus/antispyware programs detected this. The anti-rootkit apps (unhackme) seemed to be able to detect it, but could not automatically remove it.

This sucks.