October 31, 2002
direct advertiser < teh suck

I found an article at mynetwatchman.com about teh suck messenger service spam. This piece of software (direct advertiser) is so annoying, because it uses the same ports as some essential M$ service, so it seems like a lot of people won't be able to completely and effectively wall off their machines from these spamattacks.

I'll be able to at home, but probably not at work, since we rely so heavily on win2k server stuff. I dunno, I'll talk matt and rick about it, cause they'd know better than I do.

It is possible to remove teh suck messenger though, thanks to mynetwatchman for the link.

Edit: M$ recommends in their ineffable document Q330904 - Messenger Service Window That Contains an Internet Advertisement Appears that users configure the firewall included with XP to block block NetBIOS and RPC traffic. That's probably good advice...but I still use Netbios to share files between my "good" pc and my old one, and kat's pc...both of which are still running Windows98 SE. That might mess stuff up. Guess I can always try it first and curse later.

Posted by illovich at October 31, 2002 08:35 AM