So... I'm at this social gathering last weekend. This woman starts talking to be about her computer because she hears I "do computers" from someone else. Man... That's an understatement. Anyway... she's telling me how she spent 12 hours last Friday "trying to fix AOL." I'm biting my tongue at this point. She can't make it dial. She does all this stuff... speaks to some HP person in India and has to pay money for them to prove her modem works. She calls AOL and they tell her to reinstall (the Windows way) and it finally "works" except now her AOL software pops up for no reason and does it constantly and all the time.
I'm sitting there trying not to let my eyes glaze over or smile and thinking to myself "you've got some sort of trojan horse or virus lady". What do you tell people and not either get yourself sucked in or make them have a heart attack?
Symptoms:
1. She's on dial-up and I'm sure AOL is configured to handle all of her internet traffic by default and offer to connect when there's traffic wanting to go out.
2. Her AOL software mysteriously stops working and needs a reinstall to fix
3. This stuff happens "all by itself and suddenly".
She's probably part of some script kiddie's botnet. How do you begin to explain that to someone? Sheesh! I don't want to be too negative, but I'm thinking "you need anti-virus software and don't have it - you got what you deserve".
Finally another woman who was there got sucked into the conversation. She "does help desk" and the woman with the trojan (man... that sounds bad) knew it. The help desk person says "that's easy to fix - stop using AOL". That shut the whole thing down. Help Desk FTW :-)
