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

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.

Bookmarked: If You Only Listen to One PowerPoint Tip…(Overnight Sensation)

Lee Potts — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 16:20:31 +0000

If You Only Listen to One PowerPoint Tip…(Overnight Sensation) – “I did this once but had the good sense to save my file in an older file format just in case. When it loaded up, I was all excited – until I noticed that the system lacked the font I used and defaulted to different font. Normally, a different font isn’t a big deal but in my case the new font was spaced differently which caused 75% of my slides to have text falling off the screen. I was lucky that I also saved it in Adobe PDF format which preserved my fonts. Of course, even with some work my presentation didn’t fill the screen, lost its transition effects and I essentially scrolled page by page through the document. But at least the audience was able to get the full benefit of the presentation.”

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Categories: Bookmarks, Problems with Equipment, Problems with Software
Tags: fonts, PDF, PowerPoint

"Bookmarked: If You Only Listen to One PowerPoint Tip…(Overnight Sensation)" was originally posted on Breaking Murphy's Law on October 06, 2009. Copyright 2009 Lee Potts and licensed for reuse under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0. All other rights reserved.

Big screen blue screen of death

Lee Potts — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 16:28:33 +0000

Don’t you hate when you see something like this happen. You know someone, somewhere had a really bad night.

You can imagine the band’s management yelling into their cell phone as techs scramble to get systems rebooted or rolled over to backup while simultaneously updating their resume in their heads. There are hundreds of hands reaching for hundreds of phones to send pictures to roommates who decided to bail and stay back at the bar.

How many people in the audience are shouting, “Did you try control, alt, delete?!” Imagine the quiet thrill of the the elite handful who could actually knew what went wrong based on the error message. Disappointment soon followed for the elite of the elite who actually had dates as it slowly dawned on them that demonstrating this particular level of alpha nerdiness wasn’t getting them any action that night.

As much fun as it was to imagine all that, it’s not even close to what’s really happening. The big screen blue screen of death (BSoD) shown here was intentional. It’s actually part of the act and not a real OS error message. Turns out Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails is a serious Mac fanboy.

Does this picture bring back bad memories? Have you ever been unfortunate enough to see a BSoD on the screen you were supposed to be projecting something rather important on? Whether you’re the AV tech or a presenter showing your own slides, it can be a unforgettably unpleasant moment. Changes to Windows have (supposedly) pretty much eliminated the BSoD. I don’t know if that’s true but I’ll admit can’t remember the last time I saw one.

* * *

Sometimes I think we take for granted how much easier it is to recover from badly timed computer failures now than it used to be.

Remember what it was like during the time of transition as 35mm slides were fading away? We had this great, new technology that saved us all a huge amount of time, money and effort, but sometimes it seemed like this great, new technology wasn’t always so great. It often failed, often in ways we never experienced before. To make matters worse, we didn’t yet have the tools necessary to easily recover from these failures.

For example, there were no USB flash drives. How many times would our bacon have been saved if there had been a storage media with enough capacity to easily transports multiple presentation files. One that also worked seamlessly and immediately with any computer you connected it to.

Remember floppy disks? Remember only having 1.44 MB of space to work with? How about ZIP drives? More storage space, but they needed to have software installed before you could use them. They also weren’t completely reliable (I still find myself waking up in a cold sweat from a vivid “Click of Death” flashback nightmare).

It was also very unlikely that the ballroom where you were presenting had Wifi and many hotels didn’t have any kind of internet capabilities at all.

So not only was it more difficult to move content between computers, this was also before it was common for just about everyone in an organization to have a laptop with them at the meeting venue. If you got the BSoD, you couldn’t just grab someone’s machine and throw the presentation on it, or run it right from a USB drive, or download it from the corporate servers, etc.

Remember, and be grateful, as you’re planning for your next life-or-death presentation: you have tremendous advantages that weren’t available just a few years ago.

Just make sure you take advantage of them.

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Categories: Pre-presentation, Problems with Equipment, Problems with Software
Tags: 35mm slides, blue screen of death, BSOD, computer failures, nine inch nails, trent reznor, zip drive

"Big screen blue screen of death" was originally posted on Breaking Murphy's Law on October 05, 2009. Copyright 2009 Lee Potts and licensed for reuse under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0. All other rights reserved.

Bookmarked: 10 Things I taught my interns (The Hopkinson Report)

Lee Potts — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 18:00:08 +0000

10 Things I taught my interns (The Hopkinson Report) – “If you’re doing a presentation, something will go wrong. … Even with modern advances, getting everything to work right is still very difficult. Every laptop has a different set of key commands to change from the laptop screen to the overhead monitor. There’s never the right dongle to connect to a projector. The speakers are always too loud or non-existent. The internet connection doesn’t work or is too slow. I once did a presentation in front of 250 people involving a laptop hooked to a miniature camera on a tripod that was focusing on the beta version of live features on a prototype cell phone being held in vice grips. I was there an hour ahead of time, and checked everything over 5 times, and believe it or not, I was good to go. That was, of course, until 5 minutes before I went on, when the setup went dead. The unknown cause? The lamp on the projector overheated. … How can you overcome a nightmare presentation? Preparation and alternatives.” [Follows up with good suggestions]

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Categories: Bookmarks, Problems with Equipment, Problems with Software
Tags: cell_phone, presentation, projector, vise_grips

"Bookmarked: 10 Things I taught my interns (The Hopkinson Report)" was originally posted on Breaking Murphy's Law on October 02, 2009. Copyright 2009 Lee Potts and licensed for reuse under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0. All other rights reserved.

Bookmarked: Conference nightmares. The many faces of scientific presentations (LabLit.com)

Lee Potts — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 17:10:38 +0000

Conference nightmares. The many faces of scientific presentations (LabLit.com) – “Prof “Defeated by technology” provides good entertainment. … I remember well giving a talk at the Hammersmith Hospital in the early days of PowerPoint when, after loading the talk onto their computer, a message came up on the screen saying your talk is being modified by the MRC system. All my demure bullet point diamonds were changed to cheeky TV screens, thereby sweeping aside any gravitas I might have had. My favourite technology nightmare, however, comes from pre-PowerPoint days, back when slides were being used in a carousel projector. One presenter could not get the carousel to work and she was told to turn the carousel over and look underneath. She did this but forgot there was no lid on the carousel. She spent the next ten minutes reassembling her talk from the random pile of slides on the floor while the audience shuffled nervously and some escaped to the bar.”

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Categories: Bookmarks, Problems with Equipment, Problems with People, Problems with Software
Tags: carousel_projector, PowerPoint, slides, technology

"Bookmarked: Conference nightmares. The many faces of scientific presentations (LabLit.com)" was originally posted on Breaking Murphy's Law on October 01, 2009. Copyright 2009 Lee Potts and licensed for reuse under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0. All other rights reserved.