Wampum

You missed a perfectly good excuse and opportunity to switch to a Mac. Why do you Windows users put up with that s**t?

Thanks, Eli...when I come into 2K that I don't fucking need to put into my oil tank so my four kids don't freeze here in Maine, I'll take your advice.

There are few things more stressful than being a blogger with a trashed computer. My sympathies... I wish I was rich, I'd write you a check.

Whoa, MB, did you swear? You've got a mouth like a Vice-President. I worked an entire campaign by your side, which was subjected to a fair amount of pettiness and dirty tricks, and I can't remember you ever using gratuitous language.

Which begs the question: Which is worse, a rusty nail in your hand or a rotten virus in your CPU?

I guess both would give the blogger/victime lock-jaw, of sorts.

Mate

Don't feel bad, Jesus General's computer carked it, and he had to hold a "pathetic telethon".
If I can help out any time soon, I will.
Congratulations on your lovely family! Four kids!
They must bring you a lot of joy.

Yes, Tom, a mouth like a sewer, I know. Guess while my new drugs are successful at helping me drop ten pounds rather quickly, they haven't yet clicked in enough to overcome the stress of poverty (or unhelpful remarks.) So I guess I'll end up a thin, but bitchy, blogger.

Fake nominees? Damnit, I knew my entry was prolly some kind of mistake, but I'm not fake . . . honest. *sniff*

I have it on good authority that everybody who voted for somebody other than Norbizness was an Iranian agent, and I have the fuzzy aerial photographs to prove it. LOOK AT THE TUBES!

In any event, best of luck with the replacement. When my speaking fees start rolling in, I'll donate a few more bucks to the cause.

This email virus thingy is starting to be a common form a attack against lefty bloggers. They did the same thing to Jesus General and to JuliusBlog. They both lost their hard drives after posting articles the wingnuts deemed controversial. Now you guys too.

This really sucks. Seems like the other side of the political spectrum does not understand dialog and the free flow of ideas. For them it's all about squashing dissent and censoring those who do not support their fascist ways.

Just as long as you didn't lose any of our votes! :-)lol hey if you need any other hardware, let us know. We have some hardware at our office. Viruses are no joke.

Two things: First, any info on the emails that can help the rest of us avoid the same fate? (Not that I, hole-in-the-wall site that I am, expect to be attacked, but still, such things are good to know.)

Second, some things are just so, what's a good word, so cheap, so tawdry, that even denunciations give them more legitimacy than they deserve. This sort of attack is just ... it's just low.

This crime is beyond words. I sincerely hope that there is some way that you can legally go after whoever had the unmitigated gall to do such a thing. And I second Larry's suggestion: is there any more information you can give us about the emails you received? Maybe we should ask JG and Julius as well. I also thank my lucky stars that I am so insignificant in the bloggy scheme of things that I do not anticipate being a target of theirs.

Good luck to all of you here at Wampum and best wishes for a speedy recovery...

Count me as another who would like some details about this mail-borne malware. I thought that Outlook and Express were the only clients for which this sort of attack was possible.

It's always a good idea to set your preferences in your email program to read and write in plain text only, at least for your email addresses which are "public." That way those nasty virii have no way of being executed. At least it works for us at The Museum of Depressionist Art.

No. It is not just Outlook and Express (or any other comfortingly small set of applications for which alternatives exist) that are vulnerable. Nor are all attacks transported by email.

For this relief much thanks.

Nonetheless, how's it done? We crave details, no matter how little we may be able to understand them.

I was sent an email with a link, which has happened frequently during the awards, and after I clicked on it, my machine froze, never to be revived. I don't know if the link held the virus, or the website to which it sent me was boobytrapped with a bad cookie to infect my not-very-secure machine (I lowered my cookie protection during the awards because I was going to so many sites and it would take 10 times longer checking all the cookies you all have on your sites.)

If you can't afford a Mac (me either), for God's sake use Linux.

Dear Name:

Thank you for the helpful advice. My spouse has harranged me since we were married over this very issue, as he is a dedicated Linux user. However, the expense is not merely the hardware. The vast majority of software used today is Windows-based, and over the years, I have invested quite a lot of time and money in such software. Converting to Linux would mean essentially abandoning twenty years of work. You might think this an easy and inexpensive option. I happen to think differently, but again, thank you for your suggestion. I'm obviously so slow-witted (being female, perhaps?) that I never recognised there were other options.

Thanks for the continued coverage, MBW and EBW. I've had family members suffering damage to their home networks from unspecified malware, but with young adults in the house it's hard to determine either the source or the nature of the attack.

FWIW, the savvier of my two brothers lost a hard drive to a brownout (or so he says). I would have thought the problem was leaving the computer on all the time, but his solution was to buy a UPS.