Breaking Murphy's Law» Problems with Equipment Archive – Breaking Murphy's Law

Even the Gecko has technical difficulties

Lee Potts — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 04:19:01 +0000

Tech rule #1: Keep the boss away from the buttons…

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Categories: Problems with Equipment, Problems with Light, Problems with People, Problems with Sound, Problems with Staging, Problems with Venue
Tags: boss, buttons, Gecko, Geico, technical difficulties

"Even the Gecko has technical difficulties" was originally posted on Breaking Murphy's Law on July 02, 2010. Copyright 2010 Lee Potts and licensed for reuse under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0. All other rights reserved.

Promiscuous Sticks

Lee Potts — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 02:01:06 +0000

©iStockphoto.com/belknap

Last weekend, veteran AV pro Rick Pillars, a frequent contributor to BML and owner of It’s a Rap Productions, started a Facebook post with these dreadful words: “So, a bad thing happened yesterday. I plugged my USB drive into the show computer.”

I asked Rick if I could use the brief but instructive story he related. He was kind enough to send me this greatly expand version so I could share it with you here:

Recently I was on showsite as a Video Engineer/Graphics Operator. I put my thumbdrive in what I was going to use as the primary graphics source so that I could load up some powerpoint grid slides. I routinely use those slides to properly align the projectors. It proved very difficult to do. It turned out that my thumbdrive at some point picked up a virus. I plugged in two other thumbdrives I had that had the grid slides on them. All I ended up doing was infecting them as well. At the time, I was unaware that a virus was a problem.

It was about that time that the client came and handed me the thumbdrive with all the presentations on it. Guess what happened. If you guessed that her thumbdrive was infected then you guessed correctly. Here are some of the symptoms. It turns the drive into a folder. Then it won’t open the folder.

Here’s something else the virus does. It installs a trojan virus. Like the Trojan horse in the myth, this particular virus is tailored to get you, the user, to put something into your camp/computer and then insert it’s own commands. A trojan will allow the hacker to access your computer and utilize it for whatever they choose to do. They can access files. If your computer is part of a trusted network they can access and infect the rest of the computers on that network. They can make your computer do stuff. Turn on the video camera without you knowing about it? Sure. What they normally do is fill up your hard drive with illegal programs and music and install an FTP server for others to log into for downloading. Another common practice is to create what is known as a BOT net. Your computer would be one of several thousand BOTs in the net. Then they would use it and the others to attack web sites with the intention of bringing that sites servers. It’s called a Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS). The servers get hit so fast and furious that it slows them down until they just grind to a halt. Websites such as Ebay, Amazon, CNN, and others have all been attacked like this. Most of them quite successfully. It is estimated that those companies lost potential tens of millions in revenue. Your trojan infected computer would be just one of many involved in the attack. All without your knowledge.

So, back to the thumbdrive aspect. We use them all the time in the meetings industry. They are everywhere. Every presenter usually has their presentations loaded on one. If their drive is infected, it will infect your computer. If your computer already has the virus, it will infect every drive after that. Thus spreading that particular virus. How can you tell? If you go into folder options and check off the ticks that Hide System Files and Hide normal File Extensions and then look at the drives folder. If you see a file that says autorun.inf and a new additional folder that wasn’t there before, then you are infected more than likely. Mine said autoRUN.inf and the folder labeled cold. Inside the folder was the virus and it was labeled hott. The autorun file tells your computer how and what to do with the virus. If you delete the files off the thumbdrive and even format the drive, the infected computer will automatically re-infect the drive. If you get rid of the virus on your computer, the drive will automatically re-infect it.

One possible solution was that you could go into the group policy and turn off the autoplay feature. This is the feature where as soon as you plug something into a USB port and something in the disk drive, the computer automatically indexes what’s on it and opens it up for you. Then you go thru certain steps to use Windows Explorer to access the drive. Unfortunately, lately the virus writers have caught onto that and have amended the autorun file to also follow the instruction if they are opened that way as well. The security experts at the leading anti-virus companies are still working on a solution. Do a google search for USB viruses like I did and you will find out what I did.

What can we do? Stop dropping our thumbdrive into every computer drive that we see. Email whatever it is we need on the other computer. Why have a thumbdrive anymore you ask? Exactly the question I ask myself everytime I try and cleanse these four thumbdrives. My 32GB, 16GB, and 4GB drive. Plus, the client just told me to keep her brand new 4GB drive since I infected it.

Rick is right when he says thumbdrives are everywhere in our industry. My response to his post on Facebook was, “That’s pretty scary. How often do we do a job that doesn’t involve promiscuous sticks?” Unfortunately, I don’t think it’s all that easy to reduce their use. Many of the clients I’ve worked with were subjected to draconian restrictions on the size of email attachments they could send. And what do you do when the Wi-Fi in the hotel meeting rooms isn’t up to the task. Besides, I’m not sure how comfortable I would be dropping the computer/corporate equivalent of “no glove, no love” on a client.

I plugged my USB drive into the show computer.

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Categories: Guest Spots, Pre-presentation, Problems with Equipment, Problems with Software
Tags: autorun, files, infected, thumbdrive, trojan, usb, virus

"Promiscuous Sticks" was originally posted on Breaking Murphy's Law on June 28, 2010. Copyright 2010 Lee Potts and licensed for reuse under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0. All other rights reserved.

Cyberpunk: Being pros, they had a backup…

Lee Potts — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 02:40:45 +0000

Even fictional characters know the importance of the first principle — If you can’t do without it, make sure you won’t have to. Acting on this knowledge is what marks them as professionals in the eyes of the other character in this passage from my favorite early work by one of my favorite writers:

“Now,” Lucas said, “when Two-a-Day’s hired help, who are all in all a pair of tough and experienced console jockeys, when they saw what you are about to see, my man, they decided that their deck was due for that big overhaul in the sky. Being pros, they had a backup deck. When they brought it on line, they saw the same thing. It was at that point that they decided to phone their employer, Mr. Two-a-Day, who, as we can see from this mess, was about to throw himself a party.”

~William Gibson, Count Zero

I know. I’ve just betrayed a little geekiness in my ready habits. Just substitute “AV tech” for “console jockey” and “projector” for deck”. Okay, that’s still pretty geeky, but you get the idea.

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Categories: Problems with Equipment
Tags: BACKUP, william gibson

"Cyberpunk: Being pros, they had a backup…" was originally posted on Breaking Murphy's Law on November 04, 2009. Copyright 2009 Lee Potts and licensed for reuse under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0. All other rights reserved.

Overheard on Twitter: Should have brought the Kodak projector.

Lee Potts — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 01:07:13 +0000

Conference presentation is delayed. AV problems. Should have brought the Kodak projector. @SWsteven (Steven Widmann)

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Categories: Overheard on Twitter, Problems with Equipment
Tags: @SWsteven, AV problems, Kodak projector

"Overheard on Twitter: Should have brought the Kodak projector." was originally posted on Breaking Murphy's Law on November 02, 2009. Copyright 2009 Lee Potts and licensed for reuse under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0. All other rights reserved.

Bookmarked: The Oops Factor (Two Well Read)

Lee Potts — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 15:00:25 +0000

The Oops Factor (Two Well Read) – “It is a fact if you perform live, sooner or later you will meet with a genuine, bona fide onstage disaster. Generally, these seem to fall into two categories. The first is the self-made conflagration where lyrics evaporate into thin air, the high note that was there at sound check mysteriously vanishes in performance, clothing falls apart, and stools move themselves about the stage so that you find yourself in a heap on the floor. I could go on, but being the superstitious type I’ll stop here. The second is the stuff performance legends are made of, those moments where, despite your diligent rehearsal and careful plotting of every moment, elements beyond your control enter in and all hell breaks loose. Sometimes it comes from your fellow musicians onstage, sometimes from the tech booth, and sometimes from that ever unpredictable element, the audience.”

[Great stories in the post as well as in the comments. Artistic presentations oops are as much fun business presentation disasters.]

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Categories: Bookmarks, Problems with Equipment, Problems with People, Problems with Staging
Tags: disaster, music, musicians, onstage, oops, perform

"Bookmarked: The Oops Factor (Two Well Read)" was originally posted on Breaking Murphy's Law on October 10, 2009. Copyright 2009 Lee Potts and licensed for reuse under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0. All other rights reserved.