(Any savvy Internet user should be thinking, “Well, duh!” right now)

I keep getting e-mails to my GMail account… They’re caught by the spam filter 100% of the time, but always catch my eye. They used to read, “What a stupid face you have mwaggy,” but I just got one saying “mwaggy is a moron.”

The text is always something short, linking to a file called video.exe. The latest one just reads:

this is the proof, watch: http://{REDACTED}/video1.exe

That alone makes it pretty certain that it’s some sort of malware. You don’t download attachments from random strangers (just like “You don’t take candy from random strangers”), but you most certainly don’t download executable attachments from random strangers (just like, “You don’t take obviously-poisoned candy from random strangers”).

But I’m a curious fellow. Why did I keep getting this file, and what was it? I was pretty confident that I could download it with impunity from Firefox (which doesn’t automatically run programs, though IE doesn’t anymore either), save it to my desktop, and then virus-scan it. But I figured I’d err on the side of safety, and instead downloaded it to my Linux server (via wget), and then I compressed it. Compression isn’t normally meant as a safety mechanism, but with a .exe, I could accidentally run it. If I accidentally double-clicked on video1.exe.gz, all I’d get would be an error that Windows didn’t know what to do with a .gz file. I figured I could download it, decompress it into a directory but not open the directory, and virus scan it to see what it was.

But I was never able to download the file from my server! I entered the url for video1.exe.gz on my server, but Firefox popped up an error that the transfer was interrupted. I kind of paused for a minute, trying to figure out what had just happened.

And then I noticed that NOD32 had just popped up a red box. It had noticed that the gzipped file I was downloading contained a virus and aborted the transfer, moving the file into a quarantine directory.

NOD32 suggests that it’s a likely variant of the Nuwar worm. It makes it sound as if the infected machine will begin mailing itself to people in the address book on the computer, but the IP of the latest one comes back to a system in Florida, where I’m pretty sure I haven’t e-mailed anyone.

All the little blurbs I’ve heard about the new iPhone 3G made me want it badly. The “old” iPhone rocked, and the new one adds GPS, upgrades to 3G, and… something else, I think. And it’s supposed to be sold for $199.

The problem is that AT&T’s page has this little asterisk saying “For qualified customers,” which Ars Technica suggests may refer only to those who already own iPhones, and the rest of us start at $399. They don’t tell us that, though.

It’s also been widely reported that they raised the plans $10, but what I hadn’t seen before is that they also removed text messaging from the plan, so you have to pay extra for that.

This really aggravates me, to the point that I think I might just refuse to go along with it. The old iPhone plan was expensive but worth it. But now they’re jacking the price up and removing features?

And does anyone else think it’s preposterous that I could call someone and talk for quite a while, tying up a “whole” channel (or time slice) on them, or download hundreds of megs, for free, but to send a 160-byte message will cost something like 20 cents? They’re charging the most for the thing that costs them the least.

It’s really no different than on the Internet, really: imagine using Skype for VoIP, e-mail and web-browsing, and IM. And your ISP allows you 450 minutes on Skype, unlimited web-browsing and e-mail, but charges you 20 cents for every IM you send or receive. It uses the least bandwidth, but gets prohibitively expensive.

That alone annoys me, but the fact that they dropped the included text messages from the plan at the same time that they hiked the price seems like pouring salt in an open wound. I’ve been eying the Blackberry Curve [WARNING: Site makes sound.] anyway. Not nearly as good as the iPhone, but maybe the company won’t spit in my face when I’m interested in buying it.

With the christening of my newest static page, the tabs have become misaligned. It’s time to either find a new theme that doesn’t break with a large number of static pages, or to find an organizational structure restricting the number of root entries.