I Still Don't Sleep At Night

GONE FISHING/BACK 9/19/03

IT'S TIME TO PULL THE PLUG

It just gets weirder and weirder and so do I. I spent yesterday on my bugged phone. I finally spoke with a Microsoft technician who said the words I dreaded hearing. There is nothing they can do for me. I thought maybe, just maybe, if I could just speak to a technician they would tell me some magic technique or refer me to some patch I'd overlooked. But no. I waited on hold for about an hour to be told that other than to do what I'd already done: re-format, re-install and get windows updates and security patches--there was nothing else to be done. Also they couldn't understand how it was happening if I wasn't hooked up to the internet. So again I was left feeling insane.

I called Dell and was on hold for, you know, and got a tech who was honest enough to say it was over his competence level. Either he was honest or just didn't know how to deal with crazy people. He transferred me to software. I was on hold for about an hour and then got disconnected. I gave up on that.

I called the Department of Computer Crime or some such thing in the Illinois State Police. I got reached a nice Officer Taylor who told me the crimes they worked on were of the sexual type to minors--no hacking crimes. But he did know a lot about computers and was willing to listen to my saga. He told me he had only one other case in all his years of computer crime solving where there were hackers and the computer wasn't connected to the internet. He said the man hadn't been out of the house for a year. His family told him that the man wasn't right. Nice, huh? I'm just nuts. I'm imagining that I receive letters and files that I've never seen before, that my desktop wallpaper selections were changed to all stone motif (as in jail walls) selections today, that I can't open the properties of the event viewer on my own computer, that I am allowed to go online but only to read my e-mail--not to go as far as the web, that there are 20 processes running on the task manager including explorer and the only one I'm using is the task manager, that I have no start menu, that I am not allowed to see the computer services, that the password on my main e-mail account has been changed and I don't know it, that there are files and files of code and script which are replaced as quickly as I delete them, that there is a new administrator with a password I don't know, that someone broke in my house and rubbed black ink over my speakers before disabling them and so on. If I am imagining all this I really am tripping.

Well it's neither here nor there. I've decided to take the advice of Officer Taylor, my friend Ellen, who told me I was addicted to the computer but should have added to the hackers as well. And I recently really heard the advice of Dale Favier who was kind enough to send me an e-mail advising me to unplug the computer. He wrote that when I get the craving to "practice calm abiding meditation (a.k.a. shamatha, a.k.a. sitting Zazen)." Dale is a Buddhist who keeps a practice journal online. You can read more of his wisdom here. I thank whatever God it is that looks out for me and that doesn't allow my god to be a computer.

Dale wrote about meeting his own addictions in his journal that it really was "chasing the mouse from one hole to another. It's all anxiety, fear of emptiness, fear of failure." I was able to take my dreadful addiction to the computer and turn it into an addiction to the hackers. Can you believe all the hours I spent playing those war games with them? It's just a computer after all. But it replaced earlier addictions--another hole. The mouse just found a new home.

And my God was I addicted to the computer! There were days I never dressed or went out of the house. Household chores never got done. I wrote about it here. My kids had to contact me by instant message before I got DSL and they could phone while I was online. I took off whole weeks from work because I couldn't bear to leave the computer for a whole day. I forgot to pay my bills. When the hackers came I was so obsessed I forgot to go to work because I didn't know what day it was. I later found out, much to my surprise, that I had also gone into work on my day off. I had no idea what I was doing. It was bad.

This will be hard too: I'm putting I Don't Sleep At Night on hiatus so I don't have an excuse to go seeking out a computer every day or so. Now I can focus on getting a job, as I was just laid off. I need to focus on applying to the school I say I'm starting in January. And I definitely need to work on my own spirituality. I need to follow the advice I gave to the hackers. Funny how we project.

Thanks for reading. I'll miss you more than you'll miss me. See you in a couple of weeks.

AND HOW WAS YOUR 3-DAY WEEKEND?

I spent mine playing computer war games with the hackers. The prize, of course, is my computer. My drunken pawns and I don't have much in the way of weapons with which to fight them. They have disarmed us rather effectively. But we think we are sneaky and clever. We sneak in by safe mode and get to the new toolbar which leads to the computer's menu. From there we can get to most anywhere, seemingly unnoticed, because there aren't any repercussions unless we do something very daring indeed.

This weekend I fought them at the task manager. There are lots of things you can do with it. It's almost like having a queen in chess. One of the most straightforward, and just out and out fun things to do with it, is to end their processes. I like to see what percent they're running at. Say they're processes are running at 90%. Then I go for the kill. I attack the processes with the largest KB's first, usually Explorer. Then the second highest KB and so on. Then I read the percentage their running at again: hmmm, 22%. What do you know? It's lights out for them. And then they turn off my lights and I'm logging off whether I want to or not. So I make sure to play that game the last thing I do.

I fought them through the registry which is now a crippled mess. That's how I came to the next battle: I fought them again through the re-installation of Windows. That's where we are now. They can't use the computer with the registry the way it is. The error message said Win32 was missing or something and the computer could not start. I tried over and over to format so that everything would be deleted. I deleted a lot but the damn computer continues to save their files. When we get to the point in re-installation where you can opt to have files taken from another place, I hit okay and indicate A:drive. They write that the windows installation is missing a file (which it isn't) and that it will be found in E:\1386 where they think their files are, except I already deleted all those files in formating. One by one I deleted them with the command prompt so I know they're gone. So we sit there playing another computer game that is mindless and repetitive. I hit okay for A:\. They change it to E:\1386. I change it back. Hours of this. I write "checkmate" and turn off the computer and decide no one will use it.

There was quite a good battle at the device manager, and I bet they were pissed. I uninstalled all their favorite toys as well as all network and monitoring devices. The best part was then that they couldn't reinstall them. They've made so many changes to the system that they are no longer compatible with whatever it is they're running and Windows wouldn't reinstall them. I must say I rather enjoyed myself when I turned on the computer and all the "incompatible, won't install" messages began to come up for so many different devices. I sat and clicked on "stop installation" for a couple of hours as the messages came up asking what I wanted to do about about an incompatibility in each device.

I fought them by deleting huge amounts of their code, scripts and files. My time for being able to fight these fights is limited. I learned yesterday that there is a new administrator with a new password that I am not privy to. Unfortunately I have gone ahead and changed so many permissions to "administrator only".


What's worse is that they directed my attention to the rules of the game they are playing. Apparently I am (or at least my computer is) to be cloned any day now. In fact I would guess from their file notes that my cloning is overdue. I have put up a good fight. I still intend to win too.

Whatever happened to good old dungeons and dragons? These kids are playing this ridiculously boring game that is based on an old document from Microsoft entitled, "Planning Migration from Microsoft Windows NT to MS Windows 2000--file name Dommig.doc," which is now updated to Windows XP. It is full of mind-numbing rules and regulations about domains and security and users and clients. Here's a brief sampling that I only copied because I thought it might be useful to me:

"...therefore memberships of users will not be restored in the destination domain by this script unless the users were cloned prior to running clonegg.vbs."(which is apparently the big program set to clone the computer when it's time).

More:

"The Tcpip Client Support registry value must be created and set on the source domain controller for both Windows 2000 (think XP) Windows NT (that's them). Setting this value enables RPC calls over TCP transport. This is required because by default, SAM RPC interfaces are remotable only on the named pipes transport. Using named pipes (all this must be referring to pipes in registry) results in a credential management system that is suitable for interactively logged-on users making networked calls, but is not really flexible for a system process making network calls with user-supplied credentials SPC over TCP is more suitable for that purpose. Setting this value does not diminish the security."

There's more. Much, much more. I tried to save it to a floppy but I don't have access to open the floppy at this public computer. But I'm sure you've had enough. They are insane. That's why I thought they were in the security business. There are all sorts of security rules and regs that they follow in this game. I wonder if they view it as a game at all. I mean they really do capture computers that they clone to become workstations in their domain. And there are many domains created within a gigantic super domain or something. That must be what their conventions of hackers are all about. I don't know, I'm trying to put the pieces of what I read in their files together with the pieces of the security bulletins. It's all very confusing.

I just know I want my computer back and these pimply overgrown Microsoft wannabees are playing King of the Domain with my computer. Why don't they find a nice young woman and take her out somewhere and have some fun? Or learn to shoot pool really well? Or read a bunch of excellent books instead of this crap put out by Microsoft in 1999. Or go to school? Get a job? Get a better education. Get a better job. Work on their spirituality. Get their heads out of their modems and their buttholes. There are so many things a young man could do besides waste his youth playing computer games with other peoples' computers. Don't you think?


Book du jour: Hacking Exposed: by Stuart McClure, Joel Scambray & George Kurtz. Read about it, order it here: