It’s been an interesting couple of days, by which I mean bad. After almost ten years of working as a technician including for both the University of Wisconsin and now here in Amman, I was (almost) beaten down by a virus. A particularly nasty one.

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:

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I noticed this afternoon that the WordPress Askimet spam counter for Heiseheise.com had a major milestone rollover recently: we’ve just hit our 10,000th spam comment. The wonderful spammers that clog and pollute the internet in general and blogs/forums in particular never take a day off. Here are some stats for my two and a half year old site (stat-keeping software is kindly included with Askimet, which is of course also free).

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!

Link to original article.

Pause for a moment after reading that. Let the bile clear from your throat. Think about where you’ve heard things like “no racial intermixing” before. Warning of the “dangers” of it, and how it’s an “unnatural phenomenon.” Things like America’s old Jim Crowe laws et al. come to mind, perhaps? How about this one?

Marriages between * and citizens of * or kindred blood are forbidden. Marriages concluded in defiance of this law are void, even if, for the purpose of evading this law, they were concluded abroad.

Where’s that from? It’s from the Nuremberg Laws, ironically. In the original Nazi-created laws, the asterisks were “Jews” and “Germans.” And, to throw the Israeli propaganda department a bone here, the second part of Nuremberg, Section 1, Number 1 has not yet come to pass; inter-religious marriages are only recognized by Israel if they are performed outside the country. Bizarre, isn’t it?

Let’s get a little bit more general here. This has (apparently) been going on for a long time in Israel, not just because of the perceived danger of “The Exploitative Arab” (Season Premiere at 9/8 Central!) to the “innocence” of the Jewess. If not for the fact that it’s vile and disgusting to degrade someone’s marriage “outside of the faith,” I’d find it amusing. You’d think that they would have at least waited a century before pulling literally identical propaganda tactics that their former Nazi persecutors did to them.

Sometimes with Cycling Jordan we do normal things, like our regular rides between Amman and Madaba, a distance of about 35KM or so. Sometimes we do extraordinary things, like create relay teams that cover 252KM between the Dead Sea and the Red Sea. Sometimes we do downright crazy things like burning-sands treks through 90KM of desert (and certain bicyclists feel like they’d like to lie down and die). However, none of us have ever cycled thousands of kilometers across dozens of borders to share a message of peace from the Pope to the Emir of Saudi Arabia. And that’s exactly what the men and women of the Rotary Club’s Cycle Tour for Peace is doing at this very moment.

Cycling Jordan has the honor of acting as the escorts and guides of this team of approximately 30 European cyclists for the next week, starting yesterday when they crossed into Jordan at the Syrian border. I was there with about 10 other Cycling Jordan guides and enthusiasts to greet them and cheer them on when they passed customs and were allowed to slide their slick-looking road bikes into the parking lot next to the Jordanian Border headquarters. Below, Sa’ad introduces my friend and colleague Sari as the trip leader for the week, summing him up as “thin but very strong.”

We certainly weren’t alone in welcoming them. The Jordanian branch of the Rotary club had pulled out all the stops to give them a hero’s welcome. Military officers standing at attention, media teams, a phalanx of Jordanian tourist police, and a 10-member band…with two bagpipers! It was all rather insane, but I knew it was going to be a good day when the ten of us riders, plus Sa’ad and his son Karim of course, were given official green and gold bike jerseys commemorating the event and our part in assisting them. I’ve never owned a jersey with sponsorship on it. It was so excellent that I feel like I should be sponsoring things all the time! (Written on a Dell Inspiron™ laptop.)

This stint brought to you by Jordanian Duty Free Shops™! (Are you listening, companies? I’m willing to sponsor your products!)

Anyway, it was quite the experience to join these weathered, tough-looking riders for the first part of their stint in Jordan. They were older than we thought, it’s true, but they were incredibly coordinated, organized, and enduring. For us Jordanian cyclists, we were a little shocked at first at how they smoothly glided in and out of perfect two-by-two positions to draft each other and always keep a fresh rider in front to keep a continuous pace of 25KM/h. It didn’t seem very fast while I was in the middle of the pack, but after one break when Sari and I were a minute late in getting back on our cycles, we found that no matter how hard we pushed ourselves, we simply could not catch them. Without a team to draft off of, the wind blew us backwards in every hill, and distance between us and the specks of green and gold grew wider every moment.

Leaving the Jaber Border Crossing behind and pointing our tires towards Amman

The reaction from the car drivers around us varied, between the usual honking and cheering, to complete open-mouthed dumbfoundedness, to the typical idiot drive-around-and-cut-off-cyclists-while-laughing-madly. Those people make me wish I carried a pistol. However, the joke was on them this time, because although people like that can get away with that 99% with Jordanian cyclists, this time we had police escorts at the front of the pack, so this time they were written up and ticketed. It felt so, so right to watch them get their just desserts.

I took this picture by holding the camera upside-down behind me and firing off madly. Out off 20 shots this was the least blurry one.

Although it seemed like both the Europeans and the welcoming team wanted to bike the entire 86KM from the border to Amman, they had to continue their debutante-like schedule and needed to be in Amman at 4PM to make a dinner party thrown by someone named Prince Hassan. As we had left the border at noon, there was no way we’d be able to get to the city in four hours, and their backup bus took them the rest of the way after about 40KM. I asked one of their riders if they’d needed to do that before. Her face twisted with regret and she told me that they had once in Greece, but they felt terribly guilty to do it, but unfortunately the Rotary Club required them to make all these meetings and parties and schedules for their sponsors.

I wish that I was able to join Sari in guiding this amazing team for the next 6 days as they travel south towards Aqaba and the Saudi border, and Sa’ad asked me a month ago if I would guide with him, but of course I have work responsibilities that prevented me from accepting their offer. I’ll just have to cheer them on from here in Amman – and of course, I have an amazing looking green and gold jersey to use from now on!

Click here for more information on the Rome-Mecca Cycle Tour

With only three days remaining before my parents returned to America, it was time to relax, reflect, visit holy sites, and slather ourselves with mud (not necessarily in that order). We had just left the Israeli/Jordanian border, and with Moumayez Taxi legally unable to pick us up anywhere outside of the Amman city limits (they apologized profusely to me about this over the phone), we were forced to pay 2.5 times more money for a half-hour ride to the Mövenpick hotel on the edge of the Dead Sea. C’est la vie.

Bear in mind as you read these next few paragraphs that Jordan has essentially no other industry besides tourism, and that the Dead Sea is becoming world-renown as not only a luxury resort location but also for its medicinal properties. Amusing to think that less than a kilometer away from the hotel giants of Marriott, Mövenpick, and Kempinski, young Jordanian men in their underwear are splashing about and drinking Pepsi from across the highway they bought for the equivalent of 50 cents. But hey, stop thinking about that! You’re a tourist and you’re going to enjoy this several-hundred dollar experience! (note: I’ve never done that whole underwear-and-Pepsi thing myself, but it’s nice to know that it’s available if you don’t mind being the white spot in a sea of tanned Arabs.)

Enjoying the sunset at the edge of the Dead Sea

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The Apartheid Wall of Bethlehem

The little white taxi left the shining city of Jerusalem behind, and dove down through the dusty crags of the Palestinian Territories. It had only taken a moment for the Arab driver to get his passengers through the Israeli checkpoint on the edge of the city – he simply needed to mutter, “Shalom” to the impassive guard, jerk a thumb backward at his customers and say, “American.” Without moving a muscle in his face, the guard directed a second soldier to quickly glance through the car’s trunk, and then nodded. The gate ahead rose, and we had officially entered Palestine…or at least, what the Israelis have allowed the original Arab inhabitants to keep so far.

It was only a forty minutes to get from Jerusalem to Bethlehem, and by this point the traveling of the past two weeks was sorely catching up with me. I nodded off a few times in the passengers seat of the taxi; all the weaves and curves lulling me to sleep before we’d go over one of the Arab world’s many speed bumps *WHAM* and I’d bounce awake again.

What are the West’s cultural and religious preconceptions about “Bethlehem”? I can’t speak for everyone, but as a child I thought of Bethlehem as a snowy, cold place that was just filled with hotels that all happened to be full whenever unfortunate pregnant women happened by. It’s impossible for a Christian to even think of the name without acknowledging the nativity, the shepherds, the Wise Men, and the whole set of wooden/plastic/ceramic figurines that they have somewhere in their house at the moment.

In the early 21st century, Bethlehem is…another Arab town in occupied Palestine. The name, when you break it down, is “Bayt Lehem” which is either “House of Bread” in Hebrew or “House of Meat” in Arabic. For me, it was like being in Irbid or in Eastern Amman…the same types of shops, quiet alleys, and people that I’ve come to know, trust, and befriend. I felt right at home again after the shoulder-rubbing tourism of Jerusalem. Our driver had no idea what I was talking about when I said “Rachel’s Tomb” but figured it out pretty quick when I said “Muqubar Raheel.” What I didn’t realize is that Rachel’s Tomb now sits behind the massive concrete walls that have become quite common has “protection” for Israel over the past decade. The driver took us to the edge of the wall, then asked a nearby gas station attendant for help. I cut in quickly and asked the attendant where the Bethlehem Bible College, al-Jamyeh al-Kitab Muqudas. It turned out we were only a minute away from it further down the street, and yes, thankfully…there was room at the inn. *cymbal crash*

My parents were feeling as tired as I was from all of the travel we’d been doing, but I was intrigued by the close proximity of the infamous wall that I’d heard of for years, and although it was nearly sunset, I retraced our path back to that gas station and the flickering, eerie green glow of the security lamps on the top of the wall high overhead. A thin, middle-aged man was walking nearby with a bag of groceries, shoulders slumped and head downcast. He glanced at me and my camera, and at the wall, but didn’t stop. He walked carefully and slowly along the gravel boundary of the wall, and vanished from sight around the corner.

I remembered why I joined the Campus Antiwar Network as I stood there with my camera, and I remembered why I wanted to come to the Middle East to work. There are so many injustices in this world, big and small, and although I was just one man with one camera and a blog, I was happy to have the honor to record the artful graffiti that other activists had left before me. It was easy for me to rage against the war, against Imperialism, while I was safe in America. But I know that over here, things are different. Protest doesn’t work the same way. There are brave men and women who come from the West specifically to fight against the Israeli oppressors, but I knew that now wasn’t the time for me to get tear-gassed and pelted with rubber bullets for doing something rash and impulsive.

Instead, I put my hands against the pitted, blasted gray pseudo-stone, bowed my head, and prayed. I don’t pray often; I usually feel uncomfortable doing it alone or without a pastor’s instruction. But here, in front of this monolith that for me represented sixty years of strife between two peoples that felt like the land we were standing on was their own, I simply asked Jesus to help his homeland out with wisdom, patience, and the ability to stop shouting and throwing things and just talk again…or at least to start out with his hometown. After a minute, I rose and walked back to the Bible College.

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