Infection

As some may have noticed, I've been away for a while.

I got infected.

BAD.

I picked up the Antivirus 2009 Trojan. The latest version of the tried-and-true "Fake Antivirus that finds fake viruses to sell you a fake update to a fake program to give money to a fake company owned by a real person." Of course, I'm not THAT dumb, but this particular virus strain proved to be highly resilient to my removal attempts.

AVG couldn't find it.

AdAware could remove it, but not REMOVE it.

Norton, McAffe and other popular programs have proved equally useless, according to my research.

So, HUGE props to Bleeping Computer and MalwareBytes' Anti-Malware for setting me straight.

I'm finally 100% again and will start posting again this weekend.

Comcast Issues

Apparently, Blizzard and Comcast are not getting along this week.

What SEEMS to be the issue is that, after a server crash Monday night, most, if not all, of WoW-playing Comcast subscribers are having lag issues. Comcast users are having no issues with other games, and non-Comcast players are not experiencing additional lag. The only ones who do are in former Comcast territories still running off Comcast servers.

Normally, I have a latency of around 100 ms. This weekend, I was at a constant 300-400, with spikes of up to 1000.

Blizzard has a post on their Tech Support forum here.

Now, I'm not expert once these things leave the local level, but it appears that once the data hits the AT&T owned hardware on the route, things get hosed up. So, there are potentially THREE companies that need to get together to figure this one out. I seem to recall a similar issue this summer with Time Warner, but I'm not sure how that turned out.