I've been running Windows 7 for a couple of weeks now. Not on my main box--on the HTPC I've been setting up. On the whole, it has been relatively painless. I'm getting tired of security notification popups, but... c'est la vie, right? The price you pay for security!

Only... not.

Today, whilst perusing my tasks, I came across "iexplore.exe" running in the background (I use FireFox). What's more, the program name was "mIRC." Now, mIRC is a perfectly acceptable program to have running on one's computer, except that I hadn't ever installed it. And I certainly hadn't renamed the executable.

A little digging led me to a windows subdirectory where a small mIRC installation was chugging away, more or less harmlessly. I have no idea what it was doing--as far as I could tell, it had only downloaded a couple of corrupted ZIP files.

But here's the thing. I've got Ghostery, AdBlock, and NoScript running on FireFox, and AVG and PeerBlock running in the background. I suspect I know where I got the infection--I've been downloading DVD cover art from a television database and AVG has caught a couple infected .jpegs there. So I assume it just missed one? But this is amateur hour stuff, seriously. mIRC malware is so last decade--I cleaned up a lot of it while I was working at the BYU library, actually. Other than eating up bandwidth and disk space with downloaded files, it's practically harmless. It's usually easy to remove.

So why didn't any of my blockers catch it?

This is just one more reason to love Linux. Not that Linux is significantly more secure (it has been demonstrated, at least in theoretical terms, that most Linux distros are just as vulnerable as Windows boxen), but because most people run Windows, most viruses don't run on Linux. Some do, yes. But most don't.

There's a lot to be said for eschewing monoculture.

Anyway, sorry about the continuing geek updates. I'd promise to do better, but... I probably won't. d^_^b