This evening I started work on the homilies of Eusebius of Emesa. Homily 1, De Arbitrio, is 31 pages of Latin in Buytaert’s critical edition – the only edition. I pulled these into Finereader, and ran the Latin recognition on them. Then started going through them, shrinking the default rectangles for text recognition to exclude line numbers and apparatus. I did 15 pages before I had to break off.
On Monday I’ll do the rest, make whatever minor corrections are needed, and upload it here. Then I’ll run it through some kind of machine translation and see what it’s about. Then we shall see whether it’s interesting.
Yesterday I was waiting for a webpage to load. Which was interminable. This has happened a lot lately. So I decided to find out just what it was doing.
First I ran a complete scan of the system using Kaspersky. After many hours this found nothing much. It did find an embedded KAK virus in 4 very old emails. This was a scripting language virus, in VB script, run when you viewed the emails in HTML mode. But at that time I never did. The email client I used didn’t support it. Anyway I just edited the section out of the old .mlog text files and that was that.
This afternoon I googled for some software that would show me what URLs the browser (Chrome; but I had the same problem in Edge) was accessing, while it was sitting there. I had a vague idea that it might be accessing some very slow advert site, and this was blocking the display. I found something called Charles, which I installed. It did indeed show an awful lot of URLs being accessed; but when the page was hanging, it just sat there.
While it was doing so, I went to the developer tools in Chrome, and clicked on the “Network” panel. And… nothing was happening other than repeated calls to Kaspersky.
Now I have run Kaspersky Antivirus and Firewall for a decade or more. Anyway I deinstalled it – I hope it *has* gone, because you used to need a separate tool for that – and, bingo! everything worked. I can only presume that the software had got corrupt on disk. I enabled the Microsoft Defender antivirus that comes with Windows instead. All good.
I’m dubious about using Russian software that has cloud links, to be honest. Our countries are engaged in a rather nasty proxy war with Russia, after all.
I did read an amusing observation online this week, tho. It was analysing a virus. The code checked if the Russian language pack was installed, and did not execute if it was! Food for thought.
My very old copy of Adobe Acrobat Pro is showing its age. I’d buy a new copy, but greedy old Adobe won’t let you. You can only rent access. No thank you.
So I was looking at PDF-Xchange. I evaluated it quite favourably, but I thought I would register when next I needed it. But no more.
While looking for these problems earlier, I was startled to find an update was running for this software. An updater that wasn’t in the Startup, and which I could not remove. No thank you. I uninstalled the whole package. Except… that didn’t get rid of it! I’d rebooted, and it was still there and loading on my taskbar.
I never did locate the exe. It is clearly hidden somewhere. But I removed everyone of the registry entries for it, and rebooted. It has not reappeared. Now this is malware behaviour. This doesn’t happen by accident. Go nowhere near this package. I have no dealings with companies that do stuff like this.