Your average Filipino here in the Philippines doesn't make a lot of money. The majority earn less than the equivalent of $200 in US dollars per month. Owning a computer is rare and having a home Internet connection is even rarer. The computers here cost as much as they do in the US. Needless to say, it would take years for the average Filipino to buy one.

One of my neighbors came over this morning to ask for help removing viruses from his computer. His name is Johnny but his nickname is "Jojo". Well, Jojo only uses the prepaid Internet cards like I used to buy before getting DSL. The only reason he has a computer at all is because he works for FedEx on SBMA and they had a program that furnished employees with computers. He informed me that he didn't have any kind of antivirus on his computer. He had both Norton and McAfee at one time, but they expired and he removed them.

It wasn't an easy task. He had to borrow a USB flash drive from one of his relatives, bring it over here, and then I had to download AVG Free along with the definition updates onto that drive. Then I had to hike up a trail to his house. I was lucky that he was running Windows XP and not some older version. I installed AVG onto his computer and had it install the updates from the flash drive. Then I scanned his computer. After scanning for an hour, it found three trojans and one worm. The worm had replicated itself to 136 files on his two internal drives. I cleaned it off and it ran smooth again afterwards.

While it was scanning, we had a chance to talk about how he got the viruses in the first place. Apparently, his son likes to borrow video games from other kids and install them on his father's computer. One or more of the CDs may have had a virus on it. I also found out that Jojo's girlfriend had been downloading MP3s from some nefarious sites. Some of those MP3s were found to be infected during the scan. They displayed as corrupted in Windows Media Player this morning and that's what prompted him to come down and get me in the first place. I was going to explain how to use torrent sites until I realized she was downloading Tagalog music which you won't find much of at those sites.

Jojo asked me if the RIAA could cause him any trouble. At first I thought he was joking, but he wasn't. He didn't realize the American court system doesn't have jurisdiction here and that the RIAA's DMCA subpoenas would never be sent to an agency outside the US. I explained that even if the RIAA wanted to do something, they wouldn't because his girlfriend wasn't uploading anything. Chasing those who download only, even in the US, is futile.

Without a resident antivirus program on his computer, Jojo was asking for trouble. I gave him instructions on how to keep his AVG up-to-date, including paying me a visit at least once a month to download updated definitions for him. When all was said and done, Jojo was a happy camper. As long as he was happy, I was happy to help.

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