Sunday, July 08, 2012

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

So will I be posting tomorrow?  I certainly intend to, but apparently there's a computer virus which is going to cause a lot of people's internet access to disappear tomorrow, so if I fail to post, you'll know why.  In fact, it's not the virus itself which will cause this problem - it's the FBI!  The way it works (or rather, doesn't) is like this.  The virus itself was reasonably harmless - it simply temporarily redirected you from the site you were trying to access to another site which earned the virus writer money.  So if you typed in "www.xyz.com" for instance, the virus would redirect you to this money making site, and then a split second later, on to xyz.com.  You would have scarcely noticed the delay, and would have ended up where you wanted to be.  So what did the FBI do?  They wrote their own program to effectively take the place of the virus program. So now www.xyz.com would redirect to the FBI program and then on to xyz.com. Same effect as far as you are concerned.  But now budget cuts mean that the FBI are having to close down their program, so as from tomorrow for those affected, www.xyz.com will go nowhere, and that's the problem.  Just so as you know.

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