Friday, March 30, 2018

Nontechnical Intermission

Profiles in PC Poisoning, Part 10

At the end of the previous entry I said I would be moving on from my CTB-Locker ordeal but given the lengthy length of time between that post and this one I have a last few comments to make:

• As of this writing and to the best of my knowledge (I'll admit that I haven't searched to the ends of the Earth for this), no one has cracked the CTB-Locker encryption scheme.

• Re the end of Part 8's Deep 2 section, I was able to rescue six more .wps documents via a painstaking reinspection of those "clearly toast" D:\???\*.wps files.

• Re Part 9's As for the C:\ volume... section, I did finally go through all 3,244 of those C:\???\*.wps files and can report that there were five new .wps documents in the lot - how's that for a(n) ROI? - two of them were damaged, specifically, they were text-image hybrids and some of the image data was lost.

• Vexingly, something else has stricken my father's computer in the interim. I suspect its system was corrupted somewhat by a power outage, or maybe it's just on the way out: upon booting, it often stalls at the BIOS screen, sometimes it stalls at the Windows XP logo/progress bar stage, sometimes it gets to the desktop but then the mouse cursor freezes. (It's just like my Daddy used to say, "It's always something, if it's not one thing it's another," eh? ;-)) All I can say is, "I'm working on it."

More posts about music and food

The Reptile7 Metablog has been dormant for almost two-and-a-half years, a state of affairs that is simply out of order! It's time I spent a bit of time here, yes?

The "Profiles in PC Poisoning" series was more technical than I would like this blog to be, and I'll be writing about more 'normal' things in going forward. Ransomware is an important topic and I felt it was important to discuss my experience therewith in some detail but I probably should have done so at my other blog.

I hope to write posts on my becoming a motorist, playing the piano, my father and his dementia, coffee, and television in due course; in the following entry, however, we'll touch base with the familiar with a revisit to MP3.com.

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