Tannin
Storage? I am Storage!
I just got spammed by microsoft through my browser.
Yup, fair-dinkum spamming, by Micro$oft themselves. (I usually avoid $pelling the ba$tard$ with a $ sign, but thi$ late$t bit of $cum-peddling make$ my blood boil.) Here is the sequence:
This is dead-set thin end of the wedge stuff. I am seriously angry about this one.
Yup, fair-dinkum spamming, by Micro$oft themselves. (I usually avoid $pelling the ba$tard$ with a $ sign, but thi$ late$t bit of $cum-peddling make$ my blood boil.) Here is the sequence:
- IE 7 suddenly, for no reason, popped up a message asking if I wanted to "allow active content on this web site". Now get this: I was browsing a page which I can absolutely guarentee is active content-free. 100% free. None whatsoever. How can I be so sure? Because I hand-coded the bloody thing myself. There is nothing but 100% pure, validated HTML 4.01 Strict and a validated style sheet. (Sometimes not validated, as I'm still adding the finer touches before I go live with my new site.) No Java, no Javascript, no PHP even, nothing but static HTML 4.01. No other windows open either. Four tabs open, all on the same static pure-HTML site on my hard drive. (And I never use Internet Explorer to go anywhere outside my own network, except Windows Update, Storage Forum (Tea uses it) and (just now) Housecall. Never, ever.)
- Eventually, I clicked "yes, allow active content", as I thought that I might get a hint about what IE thought the active content was. Nothing happened. Continued browsing and coding. No explaation was forthcoming.
- A little while later, I clicked on a dead link (to a page that I haven't written yet). Windows responds with the standard page not found plus an annoyingly loud error beep. WTF? It's never done that before. Repeated, tested, yup, does it every time. Closed IE, restarted, same thing. Went into options, looked for a way to turn it off, there isn't one. Looked in system sounds too, no way to do it there either. So I simply reset IE back to the factory defaults and restarted.
- IE took me to the standard first-run IE7 page on restart. (And a horrible arrogant f*cking yank thing that is too, by the way. How dare they ignore my system-defined global language settings and deliberately try to force me to use US English despite all the system setting saying otherwise? Typical f*cking Micro$oft arseholes.) I set the usual options there: no filtering, no reporting, no searching from the address bar, startup page = blank.
- This was getting spooky. Time to fire up Spybot and Housecall. Spybot reported nothing bar a few tracking cookies and two security centre disable notifies (which I set myself) - in other words, near enough to 100% clean. This, by the way, was the first time I've run Spybot or any other anti-virus/spyware package since about October. My system lives behind hardware firewalls, I take care with email attachments, I don't do filesharing or instant messaging, and I never, ever surf using Internet Explorer - always either Opera or SeaMonkey, and now and then Firefox as well — Never IE (except as noted above). Notice how clean a system this is: nothing picked up by Spybot after months and months of usage: clear evidence of excellent security practices. Housecall is still scanning, hasn't found anything.
- But after I did the first-time page and closed IE, then restarted to hit Housecall and continue working on my project, I opened a second IE window (leaving the first window free for Housecall) and it immediately came up to a micro$oft.com address without my permission. Yes, it was a micro$oft.com address (I checked and double-checked in case it was a fake site, you can be sure of that). They were pushing Window$ Vi$ta down my throat. Total scumbags.
This is dead-set thin end of the wedge stuff. I am seriously angry about this one.
