And so from the 12th Annual Space Coast Birding and Wildlife Festival I have returned. Why the lack of posting from the festival you may ask? Well, while it was my sincere intention to upload a number of posts on everything from the festival itself, my representation of the Wingscapes BirdCam while there, and my assessments of the iBird Explorer Plus, I was prevented from doing so by what I logically assumed to have been an infestation of my laptop by a malicious software program commonly called “malware.” Thus I spent more hours than anyone should have to do exploring the inner workings of my computer in search of the mysterious program that was hijacking any Internet search I attempted with Google, Yahoo, or Live and directing my browser to a cheesy looking site bearing the address of “help-yield.com” which asked that I download a “cookie” into my laptop in order to be allowed to use the search engine from which my search was redirected (a classic technique of malware programs). My intention was to, as the undercover operatives phrase it “terminate it with extreme prejudice.”
While I am most happy to report that my battle was in fact finally won, it was something of a Pyrrhic victory as the opponent was in fact never there (at least not inside the workings of my laptop). The adversary was in fact far away at the other end of a network of cords and wires, residing in an ISP presumably in another state. It seems, according to staff at the hotel in which I was staying, that the ISP contracted by the hotel was “redirecting” searches from the major search engines to one of its own choosing. I would think that, absent of any notification to the guests using the wireless or wired Internet connections provided by the hotel, that this would be illegal; however my IT friends tell me that it may not be – just questionably ethical and certainly an act of bad “net citizenship.”
I will refrain from naming here the name of the hotel or the ISP as I plan to have a few discussions with them about the matter and all the time I lost pursuing “ghost” malware due to their redirection program. I have to think that the good people in the legal departments of Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft might be just a teensy bit interested in the fact that Internet users visiting their respective sites are being redirected away from them without those users’ consent. Be assured that developments will be posted here – as will be all the posts I had hoped to publish during the festival.
Peace.
