Thursday, February 3, 2005

Me Fail English? That's unpossible.

Microsoft, Microsoft, Microsoft...how we love to poke at you with
sharp sticks. This one takes the cake though as both the funniest and
dumbest thing I have seen on a computer in quite some time.

I use Microsoft SourceSafe for some of my development at work (which
really, really sucks). I went to use it the other day and it was
uninstalled from my PC. That seemed unusual since I didn't remember
purposefully doing it. Yesterday I ended up needing it, so I
reinstalled.

I also happen to have the Microsoft AntiSpyware beta running on my PC.
So far it has been fantastic, working much better than other
anti-spyware programs. Overnight, it detected that I had 1 instance
of spyware. This seemed unusual to me, since I only use Firefox now,
and I hadn't gone anywhere unusual. The program was SystemSpy or
something similar, and was supposedly a keylogger. AntiSpyware said
that I should immediately remove it, so I let it go ahead.

I then watched as it proceeded to blow away my SourceSafe
installation
. Now, I knew how it had been uninstalled originally.
I had been installing from an ISO of version 6.0d downloaded straight
from MSDN, but I borrowed someone else's copy just to make sure mine
didn't have a trojan or something. It didn't, the other version
showed up as Spyware as well.

Okay, let's recap. Microsoft's AntiSpyware program removed
Microsoft Visual SourceSafe. As best I can tell, this is
because source safe has executables and folders named SS which is
similar to how SystemSpy may appear.

I can't help wonder if some user didn't come up with this either
maliciously or through unknown stupdity, and then Microsoft just
rolled it into a definition update.

2 comments:

crturboguy said...

Interesting... I've not yet had the AntiSpyware come up w/ SourceSafe in it's spyware list. I'm running a full scan now to see if I get the same thing...

--Josh

---ryan said...

Remember kids, if you really hate Internet Explorer, just rename it ss.exe and Microsoft's Spyware Killer will whisk it away in a jiffy.