AVG existentialism



  • So I'm burning the midnight oil working on yet another emergency project, with AVG grinding away in the background doing its nightly scan, when...

     

    comes up. Not sure what I was typing at the time the scan completed and the usual "I'm done!" dialogue pops up, but whatever keys I hit must've reached into the mists of time and killed the test before it started.
     

    Powerful stuff, that midnight oil. Must learn to use in moderation. 


     



  • I wanted to reply to this thread, but it already did exist, so I did.



  • Post cannot be read because it already has not been read.



  • Test Paradox



  • The developers must have forgot to turn off debugging in their flux capacitor class



  • Clock going back for end of BST?



  • The image isn't coming up.  Not that we can't guess at its contents from the description, but there are a number of ways to present this sort of bad data:

     

    Scan started at 12:34:56 am

    Scan canceled at 12:34:55 am

     

    Scan canceled after -1s

     

    Scan canceled after 136y 70d 06:28:15




  • Aha, here's a working link to it:

     

     



  • @Alistair Wall said:

    Clock going back for end of BST?

    Saskatchewan doesn't do Daylight Savings, thankfully. Eliminates a whole lot of stupidity and miscellaneous crappy news report with bad puns.

    On the other hand, it means all my favorite TV shows will now be an hour later, since most of the cable feeds come from elsewhere. Bleargh... Time to jump on the DVR bandwagon, I s'pose.
     



  • @emurphy said:

    Scan started at 12:34:56 am

    Scan canceled at 12:34:55 am

    Scan canceled after -1s

    Scan canceled after 136y 70d 06:28:15

    Nice try, but nope. Scan starts at 2am, and usually finishes around 4:30am (around 800gig to scan, 500 of which are an external USB drive).  



  • @MarcB said:

    @emurphy said:

    Scan started at 12:34:56 am

    Scan canceled at 12:34:55 am

    Scan canceled after -1s

    Scan canceled after 136y 70d 06:28:15

    Nice try, but nope. Scan starts at 2am, and usually finishes around 4:30am (around 800gig to scan, 500 of which are an external USB drive).  

    You do know you can tell the scanner to exclude all those porn avis, don't you?  ;-) 



  • Our bug tracking system doesn't say "Invalid username" or "No such user" or even "Unknown user name". No, the message you get is: "You do not exist.". Existential angst.



  • "Void* is not actually void* - Best error message EVER!

     Nope. This loses to "Parameter is of type parameter.  Cannot be parameter."  But it's close :-)

     



  • @poochner said:

    "Void* is not actually void* - Best error message EVER!

     Nope. This loses to "Parameter is of type parameter.  Cannot be parameter."  But it's close :-)

    I always liked "Can't go mucking with a 'void *' " myself.

    Anyway, here's why I finally signed up after about a year of reading and enjoying this site... yep, to say something about language translation.

    It looks like Czenglish to me; Grisoft is a Czech company. It could easily be a mistranslation of "protože už neexistuje". Very broadly speaking, "už" means "by now" - depending on the context it could be translated as:

    "already" ("už jsem mluvil..." = "I already said/spoke")
    "now" ("už rozumím" = "now I understand")
    "any more" (with negations: "už neexistuje" = "it doesn't exist any more").

    Hope I got that right... "protože už neexistuje" returns 1320 hits on Google so it's probably right. (Mind you, "already doesn't exist" returns 1300 as well.) Corrections welcomed anyway.

    As to the cause, maybe the test was deleted after it was scheduled but before attempting to run it (total guess).



  • @phelyan said:

    Our bug tracking system doesn't say "Invalid username" or "No such user" or even "Unknown user name". No, the message you get is: "You do not exist.". Existential angst.

    Have you tried the Descartes workaround?  Convince the system that you think, therefore you are. 



  • @Quinnum said:

    @MarcB said:
    @emurphy said:

    Scan started at 12:34:56 am

    Scan canceled at 12:34:55 am

    Scan canceled after -1s

    Scan canceled after 136y 70d 06:28:15

    Nice try, but nope. Scan starts at 2am, and usually finishes around 4:30am (around 800gig to scan, 500 of which are an external USB drive).  

    You do know you can tell the scanner to exclude all those porn avis, don't you?  ;-) 

    They're probably the most likely files on your computer to contain viruses. 



  • @bstorer said:

    @phelyan said:

    Our bug tracking system doesn't say "Invalid username" or "No such user" or even "Unknown user name". No, the message you get is: "You do not exist.". Existential angst.

    Have you tried the Descartes workaround?  Convince the system that you think, therefore you are. 

    I tried, but it didn't believe me. 



  • @phelyan said:

    @bstorer said:

    @phelyan said:

    Our bug tracking system doesn't say "Invalid username" or "No such user" or even "Unknown user name". No, the message you get is: "You do not exist.". Existential angst.

    Have you tried the Descartes workaround?  Convince the system that you think, therefore you are.

    I tried, but it didn't believe me.

    You failed the Turing Test, eh?  Maybe it just thinks your personality resembles that of an automaton. 



  • @bstorer said:

    @phelyan said:
    @bstorer said:

    @phelyan said:

    Our bug tracking system doesn't say "Invalid username" or "No such user" or even "Unknown user name". No, the message you get is: "You do not exist.". Existential angst.

    Have you tried the Descartes workaround?  Convince the system that you think, therefore you are.

    I tried, but it didn't believe me.

    You failed the Turing Test, eh?  Maybe it just thinks your personality resembles that of an automaton. 

    ?SYNTAX ERROR



  • @Quinnum said:

    @MarcB said:
    @emurphy said:

    Scan started at 12:34:56 am

    Scan canceled at 12:34:55 am

    Scan canceled after -1s

    Scan canceled after 136y 70d 06:28:15

    Nice try, but nope. Scan starts at 2am, and usually finishes around 4:30am (around 800gig to scan, 500 of which are an external USB drive).  

    You do know you can tell the scanner to exclude all those porn avis, don't you?  ;-) 

     

    Aren't those the files it would be most prudent to scan?



  • @PerdidoPunk said:

     Aren't those the files it would be most prudent to scan?

     Well, there are lots of AVIs, but they're baby videos off the mini-DV camcorder that I haven't stuck onto DVDs yet. My wife'd kill me if I erased those particular films. I'd get AVG to exclude them, but since it's the free version, it doesn't give you that kind of fine-grained control over the scheduled tests. It'd probably shorten the scan by about 70% though...
     



  • You could just use ClamAV for scheduled scanning, and leave AVG to handle the on-access protection.



  • @PerdidoPunk said:

    @Quinnum said:
    @MarcB said:
    @emurphy said:

    Scan started at 12:34:56 am

    Scan canceled at 12:34:55 am

    Scan canceled after -1s

    Scan canceled after 136y 70d 06:28:15

    Nice try, but nope. Scan starts at 2am, and usually finishes around 4:30am (around 800gig to scan, 500 of which are an external USB drive).  

    You do know you can tell the scanner to exclude all those porn avis, don't you?  ;-) 

     

    Aren't those the files it would be most prudent to scan?

    They have viruses in movies now?

     



  • @Quinnum said:

    They have viruses in movies now?

    Windows media player has this delightful "codec downloading" facility that lets a movie tell the player to go download and execute some code...

    (Yes, it's been exploited already) 



  • Surely viruses can be put in absolutely any file type, by finding and exploiting a buffer overflow vulnerability in the application expected to open them.



  • @Quinnum said:

    They have viruses in movies now?

    AVIs have all sorts of embeddable content. Even if the AVI itself is virus free, it can be constructed to exploit a buffer overflow in some codec. There's also some kind of auto-open URL embedding capability, as I've had the occasional AVI clip suddenly fire up InternetExploder and load up various sites. And of course, once IE's hitting random sites, you might as well wipe the drive and reinstall from scratch.

    Remember the old Good Times virus hoax? You can thank Microsoft Outlook for having turned it into a mass exploitable practical reality. M$ doesn't release anything unless it's got an exploitable API behind the scenery.
     



  • @MarcB said:

    M$ doesn't release anything unless it's got an exploitable API behind the scenery.

    See also the famous meta file "exploit" that came before the JPEG exploit. It didn't consist of a buffer overflow or similar hacks, it was just that the developers of the WMF format, in all their infinite wisdom included a vector instruction for executing arbitrary code...



  • @asuffield said:

    @Quinnum said:

    They have viruses in movies now?

    Windows media player has this delightful "codec downloading" facility that lets a movie tell the player to go download and execute some code...

    (Yes, it's been exploited already) 



    Are you sure about that?  I'm guessing it only downloads Microsoft codecs since it fails to find many others.



  • @Cap'n Steve said:



    Are you sure about that? I'm guessing it only downloads Microsoft codecs since it fails to find many others.

    Well, it's supposed to hit only a Microsoft respository that carries only the codecs which have had Bill's Holy Water of Binary Goodness sprinkled over them, but it's going to be using the IE facilities to reach out, so like everything else IE, it can be spoofed/redirected/subverted. 



  • @Cap'n Steve said:

    @asuffield said:
    @Quinnum said:

    They have viruses in movies now?

    Windows media player has this delightful "codec downloading" facility that lets a movie tell the player to go download and execute some code...

    (Yes, it's been exploited already)



    Are you sure about that? I'm guessing it only downloads Microsoft codecs since it fails to find many others.

    It never really did work usefully, and the exploit was fixed a few years ago. I forget the details, but I think it was a classic "failure to validate that the field doesn't contain IE-tricking URL stuff" hole.


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