Rube Goldberg 3.0

Man, what a week! My aging laptop finally got a nasty infection, I'm hoping because I have let my AV definitions go stale (I haven't paid my fee).

So you were browsing porn then?

Well, of course! I don't go to gaming sites.

So, back to the title of this post.

Years ago, in a hazy state of mind, my friend and I came up with the concept for a bogus software application, named Rube Goldberg 2.0.

The great ironic part of this concept (as the name should suggest), was that there was in fact no software application at all.

What you talkin' 'bout, Willis?

The whole thing was an exercise in futility. The application was the "Installer" itself, which was a purposefully-designed maze that led to nowhere. Under no circumstances would the user ever be able to install any application (remember there was none anyway) and they would eventually have to give up.

Now in order to keep the user hoping for success, the whole thing had to be plausible, i.e. it had to look like the "installation" was making progress, and if you just confirm this one more scan, I will install, I promise.

What pure evil.

As I watched my infection unfold, the fake anti-spyware it installed reminded me exactly of this, as it pretended to find infections, and flashed across items from my filesystem (or maybe not even). It even prompted me to allow it to "clean" my system, or continue to work "unprotected".

Fortunately, I have a friend in the computer de-fecking business, and he has helped considerably. He instructed me as to what tools to download, etc. Which leads me to another supporting anecdote.

I had been infected at such a deep level, I was redirected to a bogus download page for one of the AV tools I wanted to install. In fact, this is how it got bad! I had never seen the real download page, so I blindly downloaded and installed Rube Goldberg 3.0! The journey was afoot.