Bad Programmers
by Stephen on Mar.14, 2005, under Rant
Being a geek one of my jobs is to clean up peoples computer when things go wrong, they either get spyware, adware or a viruses, either are bad enough when they do their job, but what good is malware that just crashes your computer or causes a program to fail?
Surely no-one benifits from these programs, except the geeks like me that have to fix it, assuming they charge for their services.
I’ve seen toolbars that break explorer and stop the user from accessing the internet, and I’ve just cleaned a “search assistant” that stops explorer from working but allowed internet explorer to work.
As this caused explorer to fail and Dr. Watson’s post mortom debugger to open this is obviously not supposed to happen. Maybe a little testing before it was released would have fixed that and the malware would have gone mostly unnoticed, which I thought was the whole point.
For anyone thats found this rant with the same problem, you should be able to open IE and assuming you have xp sp2 you should be able to disable the BHO (Browser Helper Object) I disabled all of them to be sure. and everything started working again.
As I run a “If it might be infected, it doesnt get connected” policy I installed a copy of ad-aware from a CD to clean up any remaining problems.
I wouldnt say I always follow the best testing procedures but I’ve never released a program with such drastic bugs, I’ve violated system integrety (win 3.11) while testing a program(bad pointers) but I would never have released it with that problem, any program I write is tested against anything major and anything thats not working is usually because its not supposed to work how your trying to make it work.
If your program is designed to sit undetected then getting itself noticed because it breaks something obviously shows that you havnt tested your program and shouldnt be releasing it out to the public no matter what your intentions are.
