September 2024 – asty.org

Malware is a Humorous Game About 90’s Windows Software Installer Add-Ons

Posted on September 20, 2024September 20, 2024 by chrisa

The question is how much fun can you extract from defeating evil software bundles?

When I saw the trailer for Malware, I was immediately transported back to the late 90s, when you just wanted to install a piece of Windows software, but had to navigate a hellscape of tiny additional checkboxes, each offering very vague but often ultimately useless or outright malicious ‘add on’ programs.

Virtual RAM ‘expanders’, download ‘optimizers’, offers to set your homepage to some website you’d never visit intentionally, ad ‘blockers’, which in many cases added more ads to your browsing experience, these were the inevitable add-ons (today we’d call them opt-out options) shoved into Windows software installers in that era. This originally started harmlessly of …

Watching my revenue crater due to IP changes, and hosting company policies.

Posted on September 12, 2024September 12, 2024 by chrisa

Apparently making your AdSense earnings crater is as simple as changing your IP address for your site. Wheee!

For those interested, I used to have a shared VM and did some hosting for my sis in law’s WordPress instance. Which is fine, but in the last few days she was soliciting help from someone on Fiverr to add some things to her website, and they apparently tried to install a backdoor on her site – I believe unsuccessfully – but it was enough for me. That was all the incentive I needed to split the sites onto different VMs, and ensure nothing we did affected the other. But now my earnings are in the toity, since in doing this the …