I contacted this website’s host to see if they could migrate my 4.0.2 SQL database to 5 for me, dryly reminding them that when I built the blog back in 2007, it was on their own pages that they recommended choosing 4 instead of 5 because it was “well-tested and stable” instead of version 5 which was apparently scary and new for everyone back then. My host refused, telling me that I’d need to use phpMyAdmin to manually back up everything in my blog (a rather large 16 MB pile of text in SQL format; it takes Notepad 3 minutes to open it) and then reimport it into a new version 5 MySQL database.

That was back in February 2010, and thanks to lots of other irate users suffering from the same issue, there was no shortage on instructions for doing some SQL database tweaking. However, no one else seemed to have my problem, which was that re-importing into MySQL 5 destroyed all of my Arabic characters and replaced them with garbage text. Stymied, irritated, and in the process of getting ready for my trip to Egypt the following month, I decided just to stick with WordPress 2.8.6 until I got around to figuring out how to fix the problem.

Fast-forward to now. Sony, Sega, Nintendo, CIA.gov, Bank of America, and dozens of other big-ticket websites are being hacked on a regular basis, and script kiddies (talentless hackers who use pre-made scripts to hunt for websites with vulnerabilities, instead of doing the research/attack on their own) are coming out of the woodwork to infest any website they can with Trojan downloaders to ensnare people using Google and Google Image Search.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve winced as I’ve read these articles and thought of my own poor, dust-collecting HeiseHeise.com. I’m not so vain that I think that any hacker would actually target my site directly (if I was that shallow and self-centered/boring, I’d just use Twitter and tell you what I was eating for lunch and how cute my nonexistent cats are), but it would be simple for a coder to just use scripts to scan the internet for websites using outdated versions of WordPress. WordPress is, you have to remember, the most famous and widely used Content Management System in the world, and just like the Windows operating system, is a fat and juicy target for the sharks out there. If my site was discovered in an automated search like that, I didn’t want to be the unlucky discoverer of a remote takeover security hole, and own up to the embarrassment of not practicing what I’ve preached for years to friends, family, and students: I haven’t kept my blog software up to date.

That was this morning. I’m pleased to say I’m writing this to you from a brand-new database on a freshly upgraded copy of WordPress 3.1.3. It probably doesn’t – and shouldn’t – look any different to you. All of the improvements have been made on the administrative side of things, or deep within the system code to hopefully batten down the hatches. What was the fix I finally discovered? This lengthy page on the WordPress Codex* explained that before WordPress 3.0, there was no function in the configuration files to ensure that the blog’s database was being stored in the universal internet character set, UTF-8, so things were probably being written as ASCII, the outdated Latin-text-only character set which no one on the internet should be using anymore (it’s 2011; global village; internet should be in all languages, etc etc). So I ran the SQL command to convert all my posts to ASCII, then into binary, and then into UTF-8 and bam…it was solved. I couldn’t believe my eyes. I backed up the fresh MySQL 5 database and the WordPress 2.8.6 files, and while holding my breath, clicked the update button that I hadn’t clicked in over a year. No halt this time…”Update has completed successfully” greeted me within 30 seconds.

So there’s a bit of a load off my shoulders. It’s past midnight now, and I’m writing this entry after spending a couple hours going through some of my favorite old entries from Jordan, like biking in the Dead 2 Red, visiting Sheikh Suliman in Ghor Safi, and of course hiking the amazing wadis with my friends. Heck, I even read through the entry I wrote right after I had reformatted this computer and put Windows 7 on it after getting infected by the W32/Sality malware. It was a well-written article.

As a final note, I did notice that although the Arabic in my posts themselves was spared – thank goodness – after updating from 2.8.6 to 3.1.3 the non-Latin characters in comments vanished, and I had to go through and correct them by hand. Thankfully there hasn’t been many, but if you happen to see anything on the site that looks like ???? ???? please let me know – that probably used to be العربية – Arabic text.

*Why didn’t I use that page back in February 2010? If you scroll down on that page, you’ll notice an author comments that the page was completely revamped in October 2010 because it had gotten so out of date. The information that could have helped me probably did not exist when I was searching right after 2.9 was released.

Technically, the content is (currently) much like the former. But the potential for greatness is much higher!

I just finished off the Cycling Jordan website yesterday and made it live. The new site has some cool updates which I mention on its front page. Like the EntityGreen.com and WhitmanAcademy.org sites, they’re all based on the incredible WordPress open-source engine. I have to hand it to those guys, they really have brought personal web publication to the masses; I can crank out sites in 2-3 weeks with their software if I wanted to.

Saad and I first started working on this site back in January, though. I was really busy with some other projects at the time, namely the Training for Trainers (ToT) educational program for Iraqi vocational trainers. I gave him a ballpark estimate of a couple months, and although I got it finished within that time frame, between our two busy schedules and our friend Sari, who will be managing the site, we never got around to making it live until just now.

The old site was also WordPress, but the company that designed it were incompetent and also never taught Saad how to update it himself

So, if you’re ever in Jordan and looking for the best cycling experience that the country can offer. I’ll go so far as to say indisputably, because the other two (Tareef and Bike Rush) aren’t even in the same level of competition and don’t even sell bicycles.

When I taught my class, I would always teach my students about one virus in particular, the one named after a particularly nasty nuclear reactor explosion, the W32/Chernobyl virus which could actually eat into your computer’s BIOS and then tell it to overwrite itself into blankness. Unless you happened to have a BIOS flash programmer and the wherewithal to undo the solder joints holding the BIOS chip in place…this usually meant a completely fried motherboard, resulting in a new purchase. How many other viruses have you heard of that can actually physically damage computers? Not too many.

The one that has now merrily written itself all over my laptop’s hard drive is called the W32/Sality, variant AQ or AN, depending on which vendor you ask (in fact, it may even be something entirely new, which I’ll get to later). The Sality is one of the infamous types known as “Patching Viruses,” and their methods of spreading and eluding deletion are diabolical. Basically, a patching virus does exactly what it sounds like. When you hear of someone “patching” their own computer, it usually means with updates, like Windows Update, which overwrites or updates program and system files with newer, better versions. Sality does the same, except replace “better” with “evil.” It is able to actually insert its own viral code into a program’s .EXE file, which is how 99% of standard Windows applications start themselves up. Does this sound familiar? Once the program, any program’s .EXE file is affected, like Firefox.exe or Mspaint.exe, the sality writes itself into the last section of the .EXE file’s code and runs itself whenever that .EXE is run. Since almost every application, including antivirus systems, on a Windows computer is made of EXE files, this can be a problem.

To put it bluntly, there is 100% no way to remove this virus from within Windows. It’s impossible. Every time you try to scan it, it will merely eat your scanner and turn it into an infected virus-loader. The only possible chance to fight it is to use a program which can “disinfect” these viruses, but it has to be outside of the normal Windows operating system, preferably in a Linux boot CD that is immune to .EXE harvesting. I’ve always generically titled these systems “Alternative Boot Environments” or A.B.E. – or just ABE, for short (patent pending). Dr Web’s cleaner boot CD is particularly good ABE for evading .EXE patching. You have to be careful not to use a ham-fisted antivirus program that merely deletes everything it finds as a virus, because that would now mean deleting every program on your computer and somewhere a virus-writer would cackle with glee.

So how did this happen to a guy like me, with a decade of experience in the field? Well, I’ll be completely honest and tell you that I haven’t used antivirus programs in years on my personal computers, desktops or laptops. Don’t get me wrong; in my years at DoIT in Madison and working as a consultant, I have always been extremely diligent in making sure that computers are protected. But I always figured that antivirus programs are for people who make bad decisions and let their computers get infected.

And guess what? I’m still right…that’s exactly who they’re for. But this virus, Sality, outsmarted me for a split-second and that was all it took. I was down in Ayn al Basha doing some work on some photos for the Entity Green Training website with Lillie. I had made a shared folder on my laptop for her, named “Lillie” and we were passing around photos that needed to be re-sized for web use. I noticed a strange folder on my computer I didn’t remember making there, and figured that since she had write access to my computer’s shared folders, she had just made it. I didn’t notice until a second after I double-clicked it that the folder “icon” was a pixelated application icon, shaped like a Windows folder, and even more foolishly, that it was named Lillie.exe…not “Lillie” like a folder should be. I’m lucky that I had the “show file extensions” enabled on my computer – I still think that Microsoft disabling those by default is the dumbest thing in their history as software writers – otherwise, there would have been almost no way to visibly recognize this as a virus. It would have merely said “Lillie” and looked like a folder.

Seconds after I double-clicked that fateful file, my computer immediately betrayed signs that it was going into action. The hard drive spun up over my knee, the CPU usage shot up, and everything briefly slowed. Before I even drew my next breath I knew what I’d done and probably filled the air with a few expletives. It was too late by now, of course. The Sality had taken my computer, and now it was going to be a fight to the death, between the virus and my operating system. As many as 5/6 Sality infections result in the user or technician giving up and reformatting the computer. Literally, this was going to be a fight to the death – either I’d remove the virus, or the operating system would be erased to take it out.

Let’s go over the symptoms that have made me respect this fearful beast below:

1. Deletion of Safe Mode: As any technician knows, safe mode is the first tool against a virus; a safe(r) haven against auto-loading .exe files and lesser programs. The first thing Sality did was delete the following registry entries:  HKEY_CURRENT_USER\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\SafeBoot and HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\SafeBoot. These two keys control the computer’s ability to use safe mode, and with those deleted, my computer promptly blue screened with the generic 0x0000007B error whenever I tried to restart and get into safe mode.
   Resolution: utilizing the system.bak registry backups in an ABE to find the safeboot keys specific to Windows XP service pack 3 in the Dr. Web external operating system, and then exporting/reloading them into the main registry files again.
2. IP filterdriver Monitoring and Filtering: Of course, one of the first thing any user would do after infecting themselves is search the internet for how to fix everything. Sality’s got you covered there; it injects itself into the “ipfilterdriver” service and then actively scans IP traffic from all network connections, searching for any keywords of itself or antivirus tools. If you search any search engine or try to load any page that contains these keywords, Sality knows. It doesn’t block them outright, merely causing “page loading” messages to last forever.
   NOTE: This is much different then the old-fashioned virus trick from the early 21st century; filling your HOSTS file with antivirus websites linked to loopback address 127.0.0.1 – that’s child’s play to fix compared with this.
   Resolution: as before, getting the backup copy of the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\IPFilterDriver\Parameters registry key and then reloading it into the primary registry. Needless to say, we all might be a lot more screwed if later revisions of Sality are able to corrupt the .bak files that contain the backup registry hives.
3. Masking by “Admin” takeover: Like many modern viruses, the second thing that Sality did was try to (poorly) disguise that it had infected me. It does this by exploiting the registry yet again in the form of normal Administrator authority blocking keys, deactivating the all-important Task Manager, Registry, Folder Options, and the ability to view hidden/secret files (the latter being very related to the autorun files, which I’m mentioning next).
   Resolution: This one is easy to take care of if you have an ABE to work with. All the ways to remove those simple registry-key blocks are well-documented. Sometimes you can use the DOS-based “reg.exe” instead of regedit and batch files to fix this, but when you’re dealing with a Patcher, the inescapable fact that it’s reg dot EXE obviously isn’t going to help you too much in the long run.
4. Disk Replication: This one isn’t so special, but of course worth nothing. Like most modern viruses, Sality takes advantage of the fact that everyone uses USB flash drives these days to transfer files…often between multiple computers. Sality also knows that any executable program on a CD-ROM or flash drive that is linked to by a file called “autorun.ini” on the root of the drive will automatically be run by your computer, therefore silently and quickly installing itself onto any computer that USB flash drive is plugged into. Sounds like a really stupid security breach, doesn’t it? Guess what, Microsoft packaged it as a feature and this is still not disabled in XP’s third service pack. For God’s sake people, disable Autorun on your computers. At Whitman, I’ve seen minor virus infections decrease by 87% since I initiated a mass Autorun deactivation last spring. Update: If the United States Government says to disable, you must not resist.
   Resolution: In Linux or in ABEs, nothing is hidden, no matter what fake Windows Administors have put into my registry. I had an Ubuntu disk with me, and was able to verify that sure enough, Sality had helpfully added a few hidden and automatically-running virus files to my flash drive I was using at the time. My own computer has had Autorun disabled for years, so I couldn’t get reinfected from that, but unfortunately, Autorun disabling is still not the norm.
5. Network Replication: this is almost certainly how I got infected with the original Lillie.exe file. When it takes over, the third thing Sality does is search for every folder that your computer has listed as a public, network-accessible “shared” folder. Then it reads the name of each folder, and puts a copy of itself in each folder with that same name and an icon in the shape of a Windows XP folder. On an infected computer, Sality then waits for computers with publicly-writable shared folders to connect to the same network, and then does the same thing. I’m positive that’s how I got Sality in the first place; on any of the numerous networks I work on or coffee shops I’m at, any previously-infected laptop could have spawned Sality onto my computer, where it then lay dormant in my shared folders, waiting for my single moment of distraction to strike and cause all this havoc.
   Resolution: Easiest one of the bunch; after Sality was finally removed, went through my network shares and removed all the bad .EXE files.

Remember how I said earlier that this is possibly an entirely new version of Sality? I say that because besides carrying out the documented attacks written above, something new and very troubling happened. When I came to work at Whitman this morning, the secretary told me that her AVG auto-block was throwing a warning whenever she visited the school’s website, whitmanacademy.org. I checked her logs; it was an HTML/iFrame takeover. AVG did its job, though, and successfully shut down the infected website’s attempt to secretly launch her to the hidden websites. I didn’t verify exactly what would happen if she had gone there for obvious reasons, but upon downloading the wordpress index.php file for Whitman’s website, I determined that sure enough, it had been infected with two auto-loading iFrames.

Here’s the scary part. Then I visited Entity Green’s website, and then this one, HeiseHeise.com. AVG in the school’s computer lab blocked both of them, with the exact same errors and iFrames to the exact same bad websites. I checked the logs from 1and1, the web host for all three websites. At approximately 10:30 the night before, all three index.php files were overwritten at the same time to the infected version.

I’ve never heard of this happening before, but here’s my theory. My FTP program, FileZilla, is very widely used, and it’s probably attracted several virus writers out there. Of course, like everything else, it’s an .EXE – Filezilla.exe. I would not be surprised if the virus had been programmed to automatically load itself into Filezilla, automatically connected to all stored FTP websites, and patch these iFrame codes into the end of each site’s index.php file.

Needless to say, I have no idea if those FTP passwords are now in the hands of the virus writers, but of course they’ve since been changed. What’s more worrisome is that a virus could even do that. Unlike everything else written above which I’ve lifted from elsewhere on the ‘net, I’ve found no known link between current variants of Sality and iFrame hijacking.

So what have I learned?

Don’t use Windows XP anymore. As I mentioned in section 5, I picked up this hitchhiker through unguarded shared folders. Windows XP only has one switch for folders: sharing is either on or off. In Vista, Microsoft introduced “network types” that are either Work, Home, or Public. Anyone who has used Vista knows the (somewhat annoying) trait of the operating system to bug you within seconds of connecting to a new wireless location – “Do you want to make this a Work, Home, or Public network location?” Guess what – that’s an important setting, because if you choose “Public” (or cancel the dialog box) then it automatically locks down every shared folder on your computer as “no write-to permitted.” On a more annoying note, non-Microsoft verified .EXE files (like Lillie.exe obviously was) are double-confirmed by Vista before they are executed, which would have given me that precious “second glance” that would have saved me. If I had been using Vista or the drool-worthy new Windows 7, this never would have occurred. So…even though I’ve fixed the problem and my computer is no longer infected, it’s still time to wave a second farewell to Windows XP (I’ve said that before) and move to the latest and greatest.

Will I run an antivirus program? With some teeth-gritting…yes. I’ll have to start doing comparisons between the different options out there, but the whole reason I stopped (my arrogance aside) is because AV programs are system crushers. Norton in particular has been long-infamous for stretching its tendrils into every part of your computer and although it does a great job of keeping your computer safe, I wouldn’t use it, or most other AV products out there just because of the speed hit your computer takes. There has always been the choice between speed and security, no matter what – and I had just picked speed until now. Perhaps I’ll give the Comodo Suite a look, provided its free, lightweight, and speedy. A final note: Mac users, you made your own unconscious choice by picking an operating system that, while secure, doesn’t support standard programming APIs like DirectX and therefore is useless for speed-gaming purposes. You’re secure, sure – but useless for my needs and wishes. So don’t bother giving me that argument.

So there you go. My observations on battle with the W32/Sality virus, variant…well, possibly new/unknown. Maybe this will help someone out there; I can only hope so. This Youtube video, while long, was definitely helpful to get me started with the always-updated Dr. Web program, which really is an excellent virus-fighting ABE.

Good luck out there, soldier.

I got an average of 941 spam comments per month, from October 2008 til now. Interestingly enough though, in December, January, and February, I got less than 100 per month. I have a kind of morbid curiosity about which spambots find which blogs/forums and how. I wonder about the bot-writer who found my blog. He seems to speak disjointed English. Does he speak Arabic? Is that how he found me? He obviously speaks Russian, due to the number of Russian Viagra comments I’ve received over the years. How quickly did he share my blog with his bot-writing buddies…did he do so right away, selling off the information on a juicy new target for a few pennies. That’s about how much information is worth on the web these days. People like this circulate your stolen credit card information within an hour, and that gets about $5… IF the credit line is still good.

No, instead I like to think that I was special to him, and he kept my blog secret and all to himself, sending me happy messages of “Thanks you are blog good! I am add you to favourites now! CLICK HERE FOR AMOXICILLIN” in order to let me know he was thinking of me. Those were the good old days, when I only received a few drug-sales messages per day from my penpal-spam-buddy. I named him Raoul.

However, since he sold me out to the Russians (and Armenians; I’ve found a few spams using the Armenian character set in the past six months) though, things have gotten a bit more verbose. Askimet is a talented, very accurate spam-catcher, but you don’t have to be an expert piece of software to flag a comment that contains more than 50 product links and is over 27,000 characters long. That’s about seven pages in Microsoft Word. Come on guys, that’s just lazy if you think that’s going to ever get past ANY filter.

That last bit brings me to my blog-update related news. I added a new plugin tonight, “Greg’s Comment Length Limiter” which pretty much does exactly what it says. When I’m quickly perusing the spam folder to make sure that one of my dad’s comments with a few links in it didn’t get systematically filtered out, the last thing I want to do is wait for three dozen 27,000 character posts to load. My goal: perhaps this plugin can help nip those in the bud before I even load fire up the spambox.

If you like the idea, I encourage you to check it out at the above link as well. Some people have already warned that this plugin is more to prevent actual humans, using Javascript-enabled browsers, from putting typing-diarrhea on your blog. Spam-bots, because they usually don’t use Javascript in their robotic search-and-spam missions, would just beat their way right through. However, the key is in this plugin option: “Truncate – Forcibly Trim the Comment to Length, Then Let it Go Through.” The spam will still get posted, and it will still get dutifully caught by Askimet…but at least now, I only will see a small amount (3,000 characters, by my current whims) of its total length.

Your move, Raoul!

The site is not completely done yet (but then, what website ever is?) and I’d like to take some of the Whitman art students’ work and replace the default plant photos in the rotating PHP/javascript display, but that may take a little while to get ahold of digital copies of the artwork. And of course, the Gallery at the end of the menu there is still mostly empty, but I hope to fill it up as the year goes on with new pictures. I used the most famous Gallery program, the NextGallery plugin, and the thing is a pure dream to work with; couldn’t be happier.

As always, I enjoy using WordPress (obviously!) and I found a great theme to use, the Atahualpa. It allowed for completely menu-based CSS modification from a new menu in the Dashboard, which really made my life a lot simpler. I wouldn’t be surprised if the world sees a lot of themes based off of Atahualpa’s design and format out on the web soon.

My parents arrive in only a few hours now; I’m really excited to go pick them up from the airport at 9. It’s going to be one of the best couple of weeks ever!

You can already see this in action now, with any blog entry that has already been commented on. the problem is that in the process it also removed my stylization files for the comments section which means that your comments will have this tiny, unmatched little font with missing colors and weird “Gravatars.” The latter is starting to grow on me though, and I think I’ll keep them around even after I get everything else fixed again; it allows me to quickly see the beginning and end of a comment.

As always, my awed thanks goes out to the WordPress teams and the developers who make this all possible for the blogging world! It seems that anything is possible using their tools if you have some patience and Mountain Dew, and since the Arab variety is even more potently sugary than the American variety, it must be that coding in the Middle East is doubly effective!

First official concert for Dozan wa Awtar will be tomorrow – story and pictures to follow quickly – I promise!

Tired of spam, but like the idea of FREE email? With BreakThru.com, not only do you get started with a new email address, BreakThru.com blocks spam before it gets to your inbox – no matter how clever the spammers.

On BreakThru.com, there’s no junk in your inbox, because no junk gets through! All spam gets re-routed to a Filter folder! Sign up for FREE and check it out now!

I’m not entirely sure who they’re condescending to there, but I’m not sure that category of people even exists anymore. And even better – no spam? Ever? Gosh, I bet maybe, say, Google or Microsoft would love to buy that algorithm. How completely believable. Because this site was obviously a Friendster leech-site, I started looking for the catch for this amazing deal. I mean, there’s only so many time a site can pathetically scream out “FREE!” at you before you have to wonder when it’s going to ask for your money.

Well, nowhere on their laughably simple site was I able to find any measures of price, I found buried on their FAQ page one of the most laughable quotes I have ever read on the Internet.

Really? 5 Megabytes of FREE storage? Do you promise? Because I don’t know how I’ve managed to stay with Gmail for a year with 7 Gigabytes of storage. Or AOL before that with 2 Gigabytes. Or for crying out loud, even the original Hotmail back in 1998 with 200 Megabytes of storage.

I can’t even imagine what must happen when you somehow go through that huge amount of storage. Will they give me another 5? Will they ask for my credit card? I can’t even think of what might happen next.

Get off the internet, Breakthru. You’re an embarrassment to the 21st century.

When last I wrote, it was right after the choir concert and the 4-day long festival of Eid ul-Adha was about to start, marking a long, glorious week of lazing about (primarily), visiting with Haitham in Zarqa, a Christmas party with my coworkers at the Christian school, writing all the old postcards I meant to write before, and trying to catch up with my books. I’ve begun to read the Bible again, for the first time in 8 years, and I have an English translation of the Qur’an as well that I’m attempting to muddle through. Haitham warned me when I got it that even though it’s in English, it’s a literal translation and therefore, most of the metaphors are so flowery that I have no idea what I’m actually reading. I’m only on the 4th chapter so far (barely scratched the surface) but it’s the chapter on the treatment of women and sexuality, so it’s particularly interesting.

Of course, the vacation couldn’t last forever, and for the past few days I’ve been teaching again. Since we got the internet hooked up at the school, it seems like my job has simultaneously gotten easier and harder at the same time. It’s nice to be reconnected to information again, but of course it means that since I’m the IT guy, I have to be in a dozen places at once, trying to put out small fires here and there (usually not literally, hah!) – it’ll be nice when I have the proxy server finished, which should allow me to monitor and lock out file downloading, and inappropriate websites. We’ve gone through 7GB of data downloads in 3 weeks, and the service provider has dropped us to dial-up speed.

Qayssar continues to be extremely helpful to me, both in verbal translation and also now in written work as well. Because the class will need to continue during my two week absence in America, I’m trying to write out as many documents as I can, so Qayssar can take over as teacher in my place and have them to hand out as worksheets. Have you ever wanted to learn about computer RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks)? Of course you have! Now available in either English or Arabic, for your reading pleasure!

I should be able to write one more entry that’s actually interesting before returning to the snowy fields of southern Wisconsin; I’m going south to Aaron’s Tomb with Pat this weekend (or Lot’s Tomb, I can’t remember which one) and of course I’ll have my camera with me. Pat told me we’re going caving, which sounds fun, because last time I went caving back in high school it wasn’t as much fun because all of those American “safety rules” and “warning signs” that kept us from having fun – here in Jordan, they tend to follow a Darwin Awards mindset towards safety and security – “if you die, you probably shouldn’t have done that.” Should be a blast!

In other news…I got some pictures from Lauren from Thanksgiving in Wadi Rum. This one is by far my all-time favorite.

I have photographic evidence that I really did look as silly as I thought.

I signed up at me.com the day after it was offered so I could get a nifty little “zth@me.com” account (who doesn’t love short domain names when you have to type email addresses?) with Apple’s free trial offer. Instantly, I was plagued with bugs in Firefox 3.0 like being unable to log on, pages not rendering properly, being locked out of my account, and emails not being received from my new zth@me.com account. Since I was just testing it out anyway, I just stopped using it, sorely glad that I hadn’t actually paid money for the hunk of junk. But this led me to another thought: who wants to pay for email anymore?

I mean – seriously? $99 a year for a unified way to do what Google and Flickr can already do? The file storage, which is the obvious turnover from Apple’s now-defunct “.Mac” service, used to be a paid-for option anyway in those days, along with your .Mac email address. Yippee Skippee, another email address. Anyone with any sense doesn’t use web-based email clients anymore anyway, as they all suck and they all do the same thing (Gmail being the notable exception, as it sucks somewhat less and they tried to do something new with the concept of email, converting them into “conversations” instead).

So here’s my proposition to Apple: Divide and conquer, same as you did with iTunes and the original iPod – give out the cheap and easy stuff for free (the software) so that they flock to your hardware (the iPod Touch and the iPhone). Make a MobileMe and a MobileMe Premium – the difference is that the Premium would have the only thing worth paying money for: the online file storage, and maybe the pictures. The “basic” MobileMe service could be provided for free thanks to a registration code inside the box with your iPod Touch or iPhone, or at a relatively cheap price if you just wanted to buy it separately. You could keep charging the $99 for offering what MobileMe just offers now, except rebranded as “Premium.”

It’s easy for me to say this, because I just really want a free way to easily sync my mobile devices with a big calendar system in the sky, and a concise me.com account name like mine would be an added, small bonus. I don’t need or want online photo hosting or file storage from Apple, but I’m sure some people will. Plus, this would be a good way for Apple to apologize to its loyalists for screwing them over with the poor quality of the original released service.

Here’s the other gripe that happened to be on my mind tonight as I wrestled with the slow Mail.app program on the iPod – why didn’t Apple write support into iTunes 7 for synchronizing Contacts, Bookmarks, and Email Accounts with Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird? On my PC, it only offers syncing with “Windows Address Book,” (who uses that??), Internet Explorer, and Outlook/Outlook Express. Why didn’t Apple use a product they knew would have massive sales to put another slap in the face of their biggest rival? I haven’t used a major Microsoft product besides Windows and Office for years, and it would be so nice to just let iTunes take care of setting up all of my accounts for me. As a open-source “sideliner” in the battle between Windows and Apple, the well-deserving Mozilla Foundation would benefit from millions of users saying “huh, I should give Firefox a try.” Of course, perhaps Apple was worried it backfire in their quest to get Safari on every computer, PC or Mac. Limiting choices is a stupid reason…but we are talking about a company whose mobile devices can’t even natively SSH…

Oh well. Maybe Apple will get that beef of mine corrected in the upcoming iTunes 8.0, which has rumors about it flying that it’ll be released in just a few short weeks.

Web addicts who find themselves shut out of their favorite Web sites tend to fill blogs and online bulletin boards with angry invective about broken promises and interrupted routines.

I’m just as technologically-connected as the next person, and probably more so, but I think this connection has given me a calming perspective on what computers and the Internet are capable of doing for us. If a website is down when I try to access it, why is it such a big deal? Even if it’s down for a few days, like what many of these people seem to be complaining about it – is there any reason for you to feel personally put-upon? It’s not like the webmaster of the site wants you to leave; he or she would be quite happy reeling in your page views for advertising dollars. They’re working as hard as they can to get their site remodeling, or transferred, or working in general – this is not an attack on your pointless Twitter routine of telling people what you ate for lunch.

In this day and age of shared computing, server farms running countless backups of Google and Amazon, and broadband internet, it’s easy for some people to forget that they’re all just computers and hard drives, just larger and more spread out versions of what we all have in our own homes. This dependency that we have on technology and our favorite websites being available to us at all times may perhaps be expected due to the amount of time we spend on it every day, but it’s foolish.

Take Facebook, or MySpace, for example. People spend so much time on these sites, updating their profiles, building massive photo libraries and friend lists…but why? Facebook has only been in college for as long as I was, and it’s been available to the “real world” for even less time. For all we know, it could go the way of so many other large Internet sites and vanish in a few years, taking with it everything everyone ever stored on it. I’m not saying it’s guaranteed or even likely, but so many of my friends rely on Facebook as a communication device, even more than email it seems these days, that I wince a little whenever I see a friend or colleague sending important updates or communications through a proprietary system like Facebook’s messaging system. And in MySpace’s relation to Facebook, the company should take that as a warning: people are always quick to jump ship to another group that does the same thing that you do, better. There is no loyalty when it comes to free Internet services. Output is all that matters.

Instead of simply dumping the service and moving on with their lives, Twitter users have responded with an endless stream of rancor, creating “Is Twitter Down?” T-shirts, blog rants and YouTube parodies, and posting copies of Twitter’s various artfully designed error messages.

What would we all do if our favorite websites went offline for even an entire week for maintaince or something? Could we all just sit back and read our favorite books again, or pick up a newspaper or magazine? I like to think that I could, if need be (that’s the nice thing about speculation). We can all rest assured that the Internet (or whatever eventually replaces it) is around to stay, but as long as computers are computers, there will always be failures, site updates, browser incompatibilities, power outages (either at your computer or the server), and all those annoyances that still punctuate our online activities. So when I see (or read about) these thousands of angry, ranting bloggers complaining about their favorite forum being down, I worry about the 21st century population’s ability to be disconnected for when the inevitable inevitably happens.

It’s at times like these that we can always turn to SomethingAwful Dot Com for inspiration and guidance.

Thanks, SomethingAwful.