i'm wondering.

is there some misunderstanding that i'm going to change my gateway? well, you're not providing very strong incentives for me to do so....

i've been as clear as i can be that i will not be putting any computer that is of any value on the internet ever again, because it's not a safe place to put nice things. my recording pc will never be online ever again. 

so, it is true that i have a new machine that i haven't had time to set up yet. but, that machine will never connect to the internet. ever. 

the machines that will have network access will exclusively be older and less expensive ones, like this chromebook, or the 90s laptop, or the laptops with broken lamps.

so, yes, i want to shift gears. but, i will not be updating my gateway, as i do so, and if you're upset about that, you should blame yourself - look at what you're doing.

we're copying to the temp drive. 

i have a lot of space there, and am not worried about it. it's going to take most of the night, though. and, i don't really have a good idea as to what to do while i'm waiting, except maybe to try to plan out what happens when the machine comes back up. i could maybe get to the dmv in the morning, but this is more important in terms of focus. i should probably get to printing tomorrow or the next day, but i need to get back into my email, first.

how about this for weird - i opened the chromebook back up and the battery came back up to 91%. i dunno. so, if i'm testing to see what it is that drained the battery, the answer is that it didn't?

i guess that's something i can spend some time with tonight, too.

but, what i'm going to do is

1) get some fruit

2) sit down and sort through my blog and try to get a narrative of the last few weeks, for a vlog update.

3) work out what happens next, and make sure i'm not missing anything. like, i know i wanted to shift focus after i updated my liner notes for the november releases, and got journals up for december and january. and, i've just had computer problems for weeks. is that what's next? am i skipping anything?

i want to get back to the alter-reality for christmas. if i can get the machine up by the morning, maybe i can work out a plan for the next few weeks.

otherwise, this is life in late capitalism, and what i have to do survive in it, and if it's slowing me down, it sucks, but at least it's better than wage slavery.

if i don't have to appeal the divisional court ruling - and the oiprd doesn't - then i should be able to get that constitutional challenge in by mid-2020, along with my millions of dollars in requested compensation for the illegal arrest, search and detainment.

so, it slowly fell from 99% to 91% over weeks of use, and then crashed to 26% in 45 minutes when i put it to sleep, and is now at 26% solid, with no drain.

at least something was able to drain it!

but, i can find no evidence that it connected anywhere when it was down. 

let me test this - what happens if i disable wireless (as i have, now) and then put it to sleep. does the battery drain?

my deduction that it was using power for wireless came from the wireless lights being on when it was asleep. but, what if it just suspended itself, and the power loss in the battery was from the suspend state? 

i'm going to get to the reinstall on the other machine now, and we'll leave this in sleep mode while i do it.

so, i just closed the lid on this laptop for about an hour, and the battery went from 91% to 26%, indicating that something - apparently the wireless - was using it.

now that i've opened it back up again, it's stopped draining,

this was kind of my suspicion from the start - that i essentially don't have access to the battery, somehow.

i'm logged into this machine from a guest account, and posting from a fake account, so i again don't know what the point is. but, if somebody is trying to hack this machine over wireless, it would indicate that they're not very far from here.

everything consistently leads back to the idea that the guy upstairs is a cop.

and, it's clear enough that i'm going to have to find a way to completely reprogram this thing.

twenty minutes before show time....

so, what am i doing tonight?

i'm going to copy everything off of the install partition, format the drive, reinstall clean, delete the clean partition and then copy an older version of the install partition from last month that i still have backed up. 

then, i'll need to copy a few things from the newer partition, like the firefox user directory and the virtual machines.

but, i want the basic guts of the install from last month to get restored.

there are things i've done since then that i'll want to redo, after that.

and, then can i finally get back to working on my art, again?

why do this? because i'm convinced that the thing that happened last night was the update, and i'm not confident i can undo it.

it seems like i'd need to have a newer bios to do what i want on this machine.

and, note that i can't see the bios at all due to the burnt out backlight.

what i've seen of windows post-7 is a non-starter, so it's a matter of time, but not yet. 

i got a little sleep, and i've been thinking in bed since i woke up.

am i fed up with windows?

well, it's not like i really have a choice - i need windows for my internet gateway and typing machine. but, i can't have it updating when i've told it not to. i turned all of that stuff off because i don't want it.

the other option is that i could load a barebones linux install - something like puppy linux - as a bootstrap, and launch windows in a virtual machine from there. that will essentially give me the option to reset the machine if it gets compromised.

the cops are not going to go away. this is what happens when you become an activist, kids - the cops will harass you for the rest of your life. and, this has been happening for a long time. so, i need to find a way to adjust.

i will need to have to be able to clone the archived 64-bit windows 7 machine (as it exists on my desktop's hard drive) into a vm i can boot from inside a barebones linux.

and, i'll need to put time aside for it that i don't have.

i'm going to spend a few hours doing basic research on this and see if it's plausible or not.

i'm just very upset about these windows updates coming down. i don't want that. at all. ever.

i don't want a clean install, like i don't want a clean install, i want the machine to be a little bit broken, but what happened on sunday night was too much and is going to require me to wipe it and rebuild it.

ok.

so, as i sort through more and more of this, i'm coming to the conclusion that, for whatever reason, a windows update was pushed down on the night of the second, and it's had some pretty disastrous consequences that are continuing to unfold and are requiring i do things like run hotfixes, which i don't want to do.

i don't want to run updates.

i don't want to run hotfixes.

and, i don't want to want run "fix it tools", either.

what i want to do is roll back this update. of course, i don't have system restore on, either.

i'm just not going to feel comfortable with this system the way it is. there's something not right, here.

so, i'm going to format the drive again, rebuild the files and copy a registry from last month over. i won't be able to start that until after 19:00.

for now, i'm going to take a short nap.

there is no recent update in the install list.

the general feeling is that i've been placed on some kind of domain, and the machine has been slaved to some kind of network. i'm also getting a proxy autoconfig on the ipconfig.

so, i guess somebody would have pushed down an update in order to try to install something, and it seems like it errored out.

like, fuck off. i run a half broken machine on purpose, precisely so you can't do this. and, yes, we'll both be frustrated into perpetuity - or you can find somebody else to bother.

i'm not going to turn windows update on.

i'm not going to run a system file checker.

and, i'm not going to buy a fucking mac, either.

i'm going to keep nursing this half broken, fifteen year old laptop until it's unusable, and when it finally is i'll buy another one in the pawn shop.

you're answering your own question - this is exactly why.

but, how do i get the thing off the domain that i didn't sign up for in the first place?

i tried to lock the machine down in gpedit and i did it a little too well. so, i'm going to have to undo it. that's ok.

but, i've found a cbs log from last night that appears to have gotten me to the cause of the problem - an update. from windows.

but, i disable updates for exactly this reason; i haven't updated this machine since 2014, and am not sure if windows 7 can even receive updates anymore.

but, this is the entry that appears to be the root cause: "there has been a change in the health of windows update". this was accompanied by a lot of creepy messages about IIS servers, but that could just be how microsoft does it..

the problem is that i've explicitly told it not to do that.

and, it hasn't tried to do it since 2014. why now? if i can figure that out, i'm sure i'll be able to figure out why the machine rebooted, as well as why the firewall broke.