I feel so dirty.

It all started, as so many things do, with geekery.

It’s been some time since I’ve played with Linux. I had a good time with various versions of Red Hat back in the day, but I left her for Mac OS X and Windows XP some time ago. I’m not sure what makes me miss that flagship open-source operating system, but miss it I do.

So, after confirming that my laptop—a Dell XPS Gen 2—would run Linux, I headed straight to fedora.redhat.com to pick up ISO images of the Fedora Core OS. A night of BitTorrent and an hour of CD burning later, and I’m ready to roll.

First things first: repartition the hard drive. I rummaged through my older desktop PC’s harddrive, on which I knew I had stored a copy of Partition Magic 8.0. I’ve always liked—and used—Partition Magic, so I confidently copied the zipped program archive onto my USB flash drive and then from the flash drive to the lappy. It installed without a hitch.

Running it, however, would not be so easy. As I start up the program, it kindly informs me that it will run in “demo mode” until I “activate” the program. I dimly remember being e-mailed a serial number for the product when I bought it from PowerQuest online. A quick search through my Yahoo! e-mail account turned up the message and the serial…

...which fails to activate the program. Hmm. And this is where things turn ugly. If you have a weak stomach, you may wish to leave the website. Put your children to bed before continuing.

I followed the program’s instructions for manually activating the program, which first involves a trip to PowerQuest’s website. Turns out, Symantec acquired PowerQuest some time ago, and PQ’s old activation website is now defunct. I spent a while searching Symantec’s site, trying to figure out how to activate this lousy program (which is, supposedly, still sold and supported by Symantec). After several minutes, I got bored, and decided to just crack the damn thing.

I admit it: I’ve used cracks—or should I say crackz—before. In the vast majority of cases, it was only to remove some irritating “feature” from a product I’d legitimately acquired, like the part of most computer games that requires you to have the CD in the drive while playing, even though every bit on that stupid disc has been copied to the hard drive by the installer. Anyway, I never had any problem with that in the past, and I considered this to be in the same vein.

I’m sorry—please give me a moment. This is hard for me. I generally consider myself to be a smart guy, and wise in the ways of tech, which makes all the more surprising—even to myself—what I did next. I Googled for “partitionmagic 8.02 crackz” and soon found a site that claimed to have a cracking program for exactly that product. I download the file and give her a double-click.

Then all hell broke loose.

A tool tip popup popped up in my system tray, informing me that Windows had become infected with spyware! Oh, no! Fortunately, all I had to do to fix things was to click on the tool tip. This initiated the download and execution of a program called SpySheriff, which purports to seek out spyware and remove it. What it really does, however, is pretend to search your computer for spyware, all the while making everything go haywire. Which it did. Rogue processes were running all over the place with my CPU clock cycles. Other processes started crashing violently. Browser windows popped up and loaded seemingly random commercial webpages. It was just plain weird.

Then I realized something odd about the tool tip warning that Windows had given me—and was continuing to give me, over and over again. An uncharacteristic grammatical flaw in the text—something along the lines of “Check as much options as you can.” Say what you will about Microsoft, but you know as well as I do that they speak better English than that.

Google again, this time for “SpySheriff.” Here is where I learn that it does more or less the opposite of what it claims to. Further Googling—this time in Google Groups—turns up some Usenet posts about how to get rid of the parasite. A kind fellow named David H. Lipman recommends the use of a little program called SmitFraud to clean infected systems, and I found others who vouched for its efficacy as well. Granted, it’s just some guys on the Intarweb, so who knows?

What the hell, I thought. What’s the worst this SmitFraud program can do? Break my computer?

It’s basically a zipped archive of a bunch of littler programs. It uses good old wget to download virus definition files, and another program to run a command-line version of McAffee Virus Scan, which it also downloads for you.

I rebooted into Safe Mode with Networking, and started it up. I am writing this from my desktop PC as it scans my laptop’s hard drive. It has, so far, found and removed five nasties, including the “StartPage IH trojan.” Currently it’s scouring my Cygwin directory, so this will probably have to run all night.

Ah, well. It’s nothing more than I deserve. And to think I call myself a geek…

A strong, almost overwhelming desire to abandon Windows altogether for Linux and/or Mac OS X is the only thing that assuages my guilt. Maybe I can keep my membership card after all.

I’ll let you know how the cleansing goes. Until then, I think I’ll sit and contemplate the irony of my situation: contracting a virus because PowerQuest was purchased by, of all companies, Symantec.