so, the drive is backed up in as clean a state as i could imagine it, although that may fade as more is learned.

i think i should be back up soon.

meaning i lost a day.

yeah, i think that was much faster than i imagined it would be. everything just copied over neatly.

i'm going to leave the catroot files in place. i think they ought to be unnecessary, but i can't stop random processes like windows activation from happening. that's what i'm going with right now - the activation runs as an update locally, and causes internal havoc by running roughshod over the broken update files. so, the operating system goes looking for a file in the activation process, and it can't find it, and it bluescreens; i may claim that i wouldn't otherwise need to look for that file, but as i can't turn the activation off, i'm forced to leave the file in place.

i'm otherwise going to load the thing back up on the laptop, tweak it as best as i can and then clone it away somewhere. 

i'm not a slow learner - i understand that i need to get used to this. so, hopefully that image will be easy to clone and easy to reinsert, so that when i do need to do this again, it's a thoughtless process.

to be clear.

they ended chapter 11, which is in truth because the jurisdiction is better in the wto. what the end of chapter 11 means is that the wto is taking over that role.

but, they kept chapter 19, which the canadian side actually insisted on. 

so, yeah, i know they ended chapter 11. sort of. but, i actually meant 19.

let me clarify a point.

i'm not saying we should try to squirm our way out of nafta, or something. i fully grasp the importance of nafta to the economy, for better or worse. i grasp the imperative to not end nafta.

but, i think we could have waited this out, and i think our timing for ratification is based more around the personal ambitions of the actors than the actual interests of the country. this could have been an election issue, and might still be one. there may be a better deal at the end of this.

i mentioned before that, from what i can see of it, it's a wash - the focus on lifting mexican labour standards is long overdue, but the continued insistence on these investor-state dispute mechanisms, instead of courts, could threaten local sovereignty near the border(s), which are also disproportionately indigenous. you would have to do some complex modelling to try to balance these things, and the few studies i've seen essentially do balance them out - i think the general perception is that mexico will be a tad better off and canada a tad worse, but it's round-off error on both sides. so, you have to just kind of go along with it. as mentioned, the important thing is making sure the deal doesn't collapse.

i'm still in favour of moving slowly on ratification, and letting the process play out, fully.

so, boris johnson won a majority government and andrew scheer resigned in a money funneling scandal. hey, maybe he could use tax dollars to buy his kids spots in universities, when he's prime minister. i meant scheer, not johnson. 

the things you miss when you're under cyberattack. yikes.

listen, maybe i should put this down - i don't care that much about any of this shit. i don't post on brexit, and i don't care about the impeachment. the ongoing story for me is the democratic primary. and maybe nafta.

but, like, i can post from here.

you've stopped nothing.

so, i seem to have come up cleaner than i expected to.

the thing that i did immediately before the update, which i know happened after 14:00 due to the timestamp in the catroot directory, was clear the registry out of an rdp listener that was running at startup, and for who knows how long. it was just corporate microsoft listening software, for like a domain server, which goes together well with the general feeling that the laptop has been slaved to a domain, somehow. i cleared out the executable and a number of drivers with names that i didn't like, and i suspect in some subset and combination were being utilized by the executable. so, you could imagine that i thought that the registry was a likely cause. but, replacing the registry didn't recreate the bluescreen; it was only being recreated when i removed specific nt* files from the f-key in the catroot directory. 

so, i saved my registry, actually, and everything that was in it. that means this should hopefully be quicker to reconstruct. all the missing services are already gone, for instance. the firewall might even still be in place.

i'm also toying with a naturalistic explanation to that update process. the one thing that i do always run when i come up is the activation plugin, which insists on connecting to the internet via firefox, but it always errors out. if the activation process utilizes firefox as a download manager, and it is the default browser, then that could explain the traces of hex - and could explain why it's erroring out in the catroot, or what it's doing running an update at all. i was able to verify that the activation process does utilize files in the catroot folder.

that's not what these files in the catroot directory look like though, they look like server files. 

i'm going to try to put this back together as best as i can, then. hopefully, it's not too long.

should i even redeploy every morning, pre-emptively?

i do have to make this point clear though, don't i - what i'm saying must be worthwhile on some deeper level if they're going to such extremes to shut me down.

i've been fighting with this now for months.

and, i mean, it's not like it's hard to get back up.

it's just a constant annoyance.

what i should do for now is take a backup image of the drive before i go back online, and then have it ready for a quick deploy for the next time.

if i need to reinstall every other day until whoever's bothering me goes away, i can script the machine to make that easier.

it seems clear to me that i'm dealing with a cyberattack.

my best guess is that the cops think i'm some kind of spy, and i'm essentially being shut down by the military.

the fact of the matter is that i'm a disabled artist on welfare that's just trying to get some work done. and, this is your tax money at work, people - this is who they go after.

am i potentially being targeted by somebody else? again: i don't have anything to steal. and, if somebody is trying to knock me offline, all i can do is point out that it won't work.

but, i don't want to play this game. i want to get some work done. and, all i can do is make it clear - i'm not having fun, and i'm going to go out of my way to make this process unfun.

so, don't expect me to do anything. don't expect me to retaliate - i wouldn't know how to, even if i'd want to. expect me to take my time getting back online, and hope that the problem is fixed, this time.

or, i suppose, have to do it all over again.

and again.

and again...

*sigh*

so, i got up yesterday afternoon to roll a joint, with the intent to get to writing the reviews when i came in. but, the machine was stuck at a blue screen when i got back, one that i don't remember seeing before and didn't know how to fix.

as mentioned: i don't want to run generalized scans on my machine, i want to figure out what happened and undo it. so, the internet wanted to tell me to do things like run a sfc scan, which i'd throw the machine through a window before i actually did. i don't want to load the defaults and forget about it. thanks.

as i really hadn't the slightest idea what had happened when i was out, i decided that the only thing i could really do was to reinstall to the drive, then slowly copy over data from the broken partition until i found the culprit, which it turned out was in the catroot folder. 

and, i was able to figure out that there was indeed some kind of update process that happened when i was out smoking.

that took until early this morning, and i've been in a sort of a rage. see, what i'm stuck with now is the task of finding out how to undo this update that i went to such great lengths to stop from happening. why did it happen when i went for a walk?

i spent all night hoping i could salvage the install, but now that i'm sure that the blue screen was caused by something in the catroot folder, that is something update related, i feel like i have no choice but to start over again from where i was at last week, and try and do a little better with it this time.

so, i'm reformatting the drive and copying over the install from early november, again. i'll keep my tabs and a few other things in separate copy processes. then, i'll need to spend another day or two trying to lock the machine down better than i did before...

it seems to either be an error with windows update, or some kind of backdoor that wants me to think that's what it is. the installation files seem to have come in via firefox, and then evaporated. and, the error i'm getting is something along the lines of that the setup files are corrupted.

listen: windows update does not work on this machine. those kinds of errors are the inevitable outcome of trying to update this machine, and that's by design. it's broken on purpose. it's never going to work; stop pretending that it will.

if i can get the copy over by mid-morning, i could conceivably be back online tomorrow or the next day.

and, yes, i'm angry and frustrated but i have to just keep going.

what i will say is this, though.

i need to get the liner notes for the november sequence done, and i might decide that the answer to this problem is to keep the laptop offline until it's done. i need internet access on my main machine. but, if i'm going to be constantly targeted by the cops, or some idiot kids that act like cops, then i'm going to have to find a way to get out of the way.

again: i'm never leaving the internet. but, if i have to find some other way to post for a bit, so be it.