Greg Jeschke

He's coming out on top! His hair is perfect!

Get It Try It

It's getting crowded in the Hall of Monkeys. Real fast. This week alone there have been so many people knocking at the door and demanding entry - and more than willing to demonstrate their unique levels of stupidity which they feel should make them qualified.

The fastidious proprietors of the Hall have their hands full. And the only way to alleviate the backlog is to take in everyone at once. So today's going to be more fun than a barrel of monkeys.

And not to give away too much already at the beginning but the most extraordinary of today's new members is one Greg Jeschke. To find out who he is and why he qualifies even more than the other colossally stupid idiots (who are fabulously qualified) you'll have to read on.

CreateRemoteThread

Anyone who's ever had to deal with infected Windows machines will nod in recognition at the tales told by Matt Knox in his recent interview with Sherri Davidoff.

http://philosecurity.org/2009/01/12/interview-with-an-adware-author

Knox used to work diligently to put malware on stupid people's Windows computers.

Most adware targets IE users because obviously they're the biggest share of the market. In addition they tend to be the less savvy chunk of the market. If you're using IE then either you don't care or you don't know about all the vulnerabilities that IE has.

PC warriors will pay especial attention to this bit.

Windows has this thing called CreateRemoteThread. Basically the semantics of CreateRemoteThread are: you're a process, I'm a different process, I call you and say 'hey I have this bit of code, I'd really like it if you'd run this'. You'd say 'sure' because you're a Windows process - you're all hippie-like and free love. Windows processes are insanely promiscuous. So we would call a bunch of processes, hand them all a gob of code, and they would all run it. Each process would all know about two of the other ones. This allowed them to set up a ring - mutual support, right?

Right. And it's exactly what PC warriors saw again and again with their naked eyes. And which explained why antivirus tools couldn't clean the machines. Take away one of the clones and the other two notice it right away and replace it - and possibly rename it and move it to a new location. This was easy to do - and required no polling - thanks to another great Windows API.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa364417(VS.85).aspx

And hadn't it been for tools like this which can kill off all clones at once those Windows boxes would never be cleaned.

Change notifications (see above ref) are dedicated synchronisation objects that work on Windows directories. Threads start them and automatically are put to sleep by the system scheduler and only wake up when something happens to the targeted directory. When they wake they check if their buddies are still around - and if not they take appropriate action.

[This API is totally OK and in widespread use in client/server products. It's the first API creating threads in remote processes that's the issue. Ed.]

Why Microsoft - besieged as they are by malware emanating from Rio and Russia - would want to further exacerbate their dilemma is good enough for the proprietors of the Hall of Monkeys.

Greg Jeschke

But today's leader of the pack is - hands down - Greg Jeschke. Jeschke's a news anchor on television in Madison Wisconsin. He gets in - gets in with honours - for a single (but extraordinarily classic) remark he made the other night.

The story has to do with Ubuntu - evidently a word the egregious journalists at WKOW TV in Madison find to be a pronunciation problem. [Somebody alert Mark Shuttlework immediately. Thank you. Ed.]

But starting at the beginning. One Abbie Schubert decided she wanted to go back to school and enrol in online classes at a fantastic institute known as Madison Area Technical College.

Here's the MATS site banner. They call themselves 'real world smart™'. Fear for the 'real world'. Start doing it now.

Schubert (who insists she's not related to the famous composer) ordered her school computer online. She bought a Dell.

She paid $1100 for it - more than she'd have paid for an Apple MacBook (which as everyone knows is more expensive). And she opted for the 'open source Ubuntu' model - ostensibly to save money.

From here on out the story gets muddled with layer upon layer of stupidity. The most merciful way of dealing with this is to provide a link to the WKOW video clip sponsored by the Westside Baptists of Gainesville Florida. The pain will then be over in three minutes.

http://www.wkowtv.com/global/video/flash/popupplayer.asp?ClipID1=3333881

Readers might be interested in knowing what type of courses Schubert wanted to take - and perhaps might be even more curious as to what computer hardware be required by the renowned MATS. In such case they need only partake of this screen dump.

Do They Hear Anyone?

The Verizon techies also want to get into the Hall of Monkeys. They claim their providing broadband hookup only for Windows can be enough to qualify. Their application is pending. When you have Abbie Schubert on film contemplating a photo of Albert Einstein you have to put what otherwise are outstanding candidates at the back of the queue. Especially with outbursts like this.

It defaulted to the Ubuntu operating system!

But what's a comment like that next to WKOW classics like the following?

Ubuntu comes with OpenOffice - and not Word!
Ubuntu might look a lot like Windows but it sure doesn't act like it!
Ubuntu pronunciation - she might have to work on that a little bit!

But the best of the day has to go to Greg Jeschke.

Jeschke's one of those prematurely embalmed US news guys with a hairdo even Sally Hershberger wouldn't love and enough hairspray in it to start a brushfire.

You know - a real 'with it' natural guy. Jeschke wraps up the segment with this slick classic.

What a huge hassle!

Abbie? Abbie? Can you hear us now? It's not your fault, girl! And good on you to go back to school! But for your own sake - get out of Madison now while you can!

Try Gainesville Florida - they're looking for webmeisters over at Western Baptists.