Monthly Archives: January 2006

A grim anniversary

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Timely reminder from BBC Online.

The 20th anniversary of the first PC virus falls this month.

It was during the opening weeks of 1986 that the first PC virus, called Brain, was discovered in the wild.

Though it achieved fame because it was the first of its type, the virus was not widespread as it could only travel by hitching a ride on floppy disks swapped between users.

Now 20 years after they first appeared there are more than 150,000 malicious programs in existence.

That’s why my colleagues and I created our online course, Vandalism in Cyberspace: understanding and combatting malicious software.

Quote of the day

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“About two thousand kilometres.”

Lieut-General Dan Halutz, Israel’s Chief of Staff, on being asked how far Israel would go to stop Iran’s nuclear programme.

Source: Economist, 21 January, 2006, page 53.

Intel inside, but where next?

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This morning’s Observer column about the implications of Apple’s new processor. Excerpt:

More troubling for Apple is the prospect that its operating system and applications software can now run natively on (much cheaper) PC hardware. The company is set against this, but already programmers have hacked it and it is difficult to see how Apple could stop the practice. If it catches on, Apple might see sales of its computers decline as those who admire Apple software but dislike its hardware prices get the best of both worlds.

If Apple is ambivalent about the future, you should see Intel’s smouldering fury as the implications of the launch dawned on it. Not only did Jobs decline to go along with the ‘Intel inside’ mantra embossed on most Windows machines, he authorised a television ad that left the company’s executives speechless.

‘The Intel chip’, it burbles. ‘For years, it’s been trapped inside PCs, inside dull little boxes, dutifully performing dull little tasks, when it could have been doing so much more. Starting today, the Intel chip will be set free and get to live life inside a Mac. Imagine the possibilities.’

How do you spell ‘chutzpah’ again?

Fairtrade Gods

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The Guardian on Saturdays has a nice section (called “Ouch!”) which prints embarrassing misprints and typos. How about this?

The Parochial Church Councils of Risley and Stanton-by-Dale with Dale Abbey have both said that we are Fairtrade Churches. This means we do all in our power to use only fairly traded gods in our churches and activities.

Or this ‘For Sale’ notice?

UNISEX mounting bike universal black & yellow with helmet.

Blackmailers target $1m home page

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BBC News Online report…

The site of a UK student who had the idea of selling pixels as advertising space has been hit by a web attack.

Alex Tew, 21, hit the headlines at the start of the year when he revealed his Million Dollar Homepage had made him a million dollars in four months.

But the publicity brought the unwanted attention of extortionists who knocked the site over with a massive denial-of-service attack.

Following a week of downtime, the website is now back online.

The Jean-Paul Sartre Cookbook

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Alors! Ici!

Tuna Casserole

Ingredients: 1 large casserole dish

Place the casserole dish in a cold oven. Place a chair facing the oven and sit in it forever. Think about how hungry you are. When night falls, do not turn on the light.

While a void is expressed in this recipe, I am struck by its inapplicability to the bourgeois lifestyle. How can the eater recognize that the food denied him is a tuna casserole and not some other dish? I am becoming more and more frustated. [sic]

Google, the Bush regime and our privacy

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John Battelle quotes, in his Blog, a passage from his book, The Search — written some time ago but published recently.

As we move our data to the servers at Amazon.com, Hotmail.com, Yahoo.com, and Gmail.com, we are making an implicit bargain, one that the public at large is either entirely content with, or, more likely, one that most have not taken much to heart.

That bargain is this: we trust you to not do evil things with our information. We trust that you will keep it secure, free from unlawful government or private search and seizure, and under our control at all times. We understand that you might use our data in aggregate to provide us better and more useful services, but we trust that you will not identify individuals personally through our data, nor use our personal data in a manner that would violate our own sense of privacy and freedom.

That’s a pretty large helping of trust we’re asking companies to ladle onto their corporate plate. And I’m not sure either we or they are entirely sure what to do with the implications of such a transfer. Just thinking about these implications makes a reasonable person’s head hurt.

Google to contest Feds’ demand for search records

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It was bound to happen. And now, according to UserSecurity.org, it has:

The US Government is taking legal action to gain access to Google’s vast database of internet searches in an historic clash over privacy.

The Bush Administration has asked a federal judge to order the world’s most popular internet search engine to hand over the records of all Google searches for any one-week period, as well as other closely guarded data.

The California-based company is to fight the move.