2006 / december / 31
A dispatch from smalltown Italy (4)
In this small town, when a delivery van stops in front of your house and unloads some big boxes, everyone will know you have been doing your shopping elsewhere. Not everyone is prone to this kind of social control, but some people certainly do. Which can lead to a certain degree of unprofesionalism. Read and weep.
As a computer kind of guy, when visiting, I get called in to fix problems. It's hard to explain that my work does not involve anything remotely close to teaching how to set the background to an email message in outlook express, so I take it simply as a fact of life. If I can, why not? Though I tend to switch people over to Firefox in the process, so something good can come out of it.
I've just wasted four hours of my life trying to find a
way to at least install the security updates that came out
in the last 14 months, and found nothing that works on an
italian XP. Imagine! An XP machine, on the net without
so much as an NAT box, unpatched for fourteen months!
Spybot couldn't find anything, and
the process monitor or whatever its name in windows
doesn't show anything suspicious, but
I'm not an expert. The machine could very well be hacked.
Not to mention that every computer in town could
be part of a russian botnet.
It turns out that the local village computer
shop does not put official OEM-copies of windows on its beige boxes.
Everyone knows, but hey, it's cheaper, right? Right.
But of course, you can't go to windows update anymore, since
that checks the validity of the installed windows...
And this *@^@$ bloody shop doesn't care.
I am so pissed. Went round, and the computer guy promised to burn the patches on a cd for me. He didn't live up to this of course, and after dropping by and calling many times this week, I'm tired.
No matter how much I dislike the windows tax microsoft levies, I'm very, very tempted to mail the Italian BSA. Maybe they even find this blog entry - in that case it shouldn't be too hard to find the shop. Go ahead, make my day! Ma dai, I am so pissed at this bastardo.
A dispatch from smalltown Italy (3) | main | Last dispatch from smalltown Italy (5)
Posted on 15:28, 31 december 2006.
Categories:
