Categories
Technology

Mac Users, Beware!

A new malware variant is doing the rounds. Calling itself “Apple Security Center”, it tells you your Mac is infected. It isn’t infected. But as a counter showing the number of viruses “found” rapidly rises, it will offer to clean your computer. Don’t agree to let it!

Oh, you did. Damn. Well now you are infected.

It’s like inviting a vampire in. Modern computers are designed so that software can’t just install itself, it needs interaction from the user. So malware (that is, evil software) can’t do any harm until you give it permission. Now Mac and Linux are more common, and Windows is a great deal tougher than it used to be, malware is increasingly forced to focus on the one major remaining weakness of all computer systems. This is what techies like to call the PBCAK – the Problem Between Chair And Keyboard. In other words, you. Sometimes called scareware, things like “Apple Security Center” attempt to mindgame you into infecting your own computer.

Stop and think. It’s a Mac, it is quite to very unlikely that it has a virus. And anyway, who the heck is in any position to know what’s on your computer? If you did not install an antivirus program – and even now you really don’t need to – then you will not get virus warnings. Not real ones anyway.

Categories
Technology

Mac Users, Beware!

A new malware variant is doing the rounds. Calling itself “Apple Security Center”, it tells you your Mac is infected. It isn’t infected. But as a counter showing the number of viruses “found” rapidly rises, it will offer to clean your computer. Don’t agree to let it!

Oh, you did. Damn. Well now you are infected.

It’s like inviting a vampire in. Modern computers are designed so that software can’t just install itself, it needs interaction from the user. So malware (that is, evil software) can’t do any harm until you give it permission. Now Mac and Linux are more common, and Windows is a great deal tougher than it used to be, malware is increasingly forced to focus on the one major remaining weakness of all computer systems. This is what techies like to call the PBCAK – the Problem Between Chair And Keyboard. In other words, you. Sometimes called scareware, things like “Apple Security Center” attempt to mindgame you into infecting your own computer.

Stop and think. It’s a Mac, it is quite to very unlikely that it has a virus. And anyway, who the heck is in any position to know what’s on your computer? If you did not install an antivirus program – and even now you really don’t need to – then you will not get virus warnings. Not real ones anyway.

Categories
Humour

Coke Ads, Life

The Two Infallible Powers - The Pope Bovril
God I love this mad old advert

Imagine that. The 125th anniversary of Coca Cola. We tend to think of that brand as symbolic of the modern world. It’s strange to remember that it’s a weird holdout from the Victorian era, like Bovril or Beecham‘s Powders. Perhaps this means it actually is an excellent product. We’ll never really know – how can you possibly separate the actual drink from its image and its history?

Hmm. Maybe there is a way. Apparently Osama bin Laden and his cohorts were fond of the stuff. If someone so vehemently opposed to everything the product is associated with still enjoys it, then surely the only explanation is that it is an objectively good beverage.

Well OK, it might also mean that Bin Laden was deeply conflicted and/or hypocritical. But still, you can’t help feeling that Coca Cola missed an opportunity for the most amazing celebrity endorsement ever.

Categories
Politics

Liberals Off The Agenda

Manchester Town Hall
London's Big Ben. Or Westminster Abbey maybe. Who the hell is on the picture desk?

It just shows how long the UK’s Liberals have been away from the cutting edge of politics. They asked for mold-breaking electoral reform but, too eager to get into government for the first time in almost a century, settled for a rederendum on change so half-assed that some reformers even campaigned against it. And somehow they end up with most of the blame for the cuts too. Their old rivals slit them up like a fish.

I guess that’s about it for one of the great historic political party. Twits.

Categories
Politics

Vote Yes You Idiots

OK United Kingdomites. You face a choice, and there is only one right answer. Your electoral system is a heap of horseshit. You can stick with being very poorly represented, or you can introduce a system which is better. Not a lot better, but better.

Look at what just happened to Canada. An unpopular Conservative government fell and the vote swung to the left – but the Conservatives got back in! The opposition was split between a centre and a left party, and though the left made huge gains, the centre one remained big enough to split the vote. That is your system, that’s what it does. It delivered a government that 3 in 5 Canadians despise.

Choose AV if you don’t want minority rule. Clear?

Categories
Politics

Now Everything Is Right Again

So you work until dawn, sleep halfway through the next day, wake up to find Osama Bin Laden has been killed. Not sure for a minute if I didn’t travel back in time in a dream. Really not too surprised that the eighth most common search mentioning his name was “Who is Bin Laden?” Ten years. You have to ask if George Bush was ever actually trying to find him at all.

And then you have to ask if that wasn’t such a bad idea.

Categories
Cosmography

Wisdom, Corrected

Give a man a fish, he’ll eat for a day.

Sell a man a fish, you’ll both eat.

Teach a man to fish, he’ll catch all the fish.

Categories
Technology

Good Morning, Afternoon

A nice spot to have breakfast. Admittedly it’s the time of day when most people are having Sunday dinner, but I was up until 8.00. Thwarted just when I thought I was finished by a hard disk error. I’ll spare you the gory details.

(Edited to add: That there by the way is Neachtains, my local pub, and a view down Quay Street. Just out of shot is the river and Galway Bay.)

Categories
Technology

Open Source, Closed Book

Visualization of the various routes through a ...
I Definitely Left That File Here Somewhere

Another really pleasant April day. The last one of course; by the time you read this it will be May, and instead of considering the good days a bonus we’ll see the bad ones as short-changing us. This is why April is the far superior month, it rewards optimists.

But I’m back in the windowless Windows cave, a net café with 17 PCs in various stages of broken. Late last night I defeated a secret second level boss defending them against their own administrators. Tonight I have two cleaned and ready to take the set of applications that the public will want.

If it were up to me of course, the public would get the apps I want. And they’d all walk out of the shop pleasantly astonished at how good open source software is now.

Yeah right. Customers faced with OpenOffice instead of the Microsoft equivalent are just going to react with panic and dismay. Though there isn’t really much to choose between the two, it’s a classic case of the market leader being the market leader because they’re the market leader; office applications are a natural monopoly. The only reason why OpenOffice still even exists is that it’s not for profit.

What I think stands a better chance at competing, in this market at least, is Google’s still-nascent attempt at doing the thin client all over again, Chrome OS, where the computer is running absolutely nothing but a browser, and all the applications and all the documents are out there in what marketeers now want us to call “the cloud”, or what we used to call cyberspace. In other words, a server farm in Indonesia.

Is it crazy? Doing your computing right there in front of you has simply got to be quicker than doing it over a network, however fast. But consider me. It’s six in the morning. I started at one in the afternoon. I am still tweaking the drivers and software and settings of these Windows machines so that I can start to make them ready to be made ready for the public tomorrow.

Just one installed program – and even that kept updated automatically over the Internet? For public situations like this, yes please. For the customer too, the convenience of always having their documents to hand no matter what computer they were made on would be wonderful. No more schlepping them around on flash drives. They’ll learn to love Google Docs.

If need be I’ll pay them to.

Categories
Technology

Little Boxen

A USB flash drive in the shape of a piece of i...
I'm Starting To Hallucinate

Sitting in a late pub, torn between throwing up my hands in despair at those damn computers, and going back and coddling them all like sick hens. They really are depressing. Aside from some of them being basically made of string and spit, they have been the unfortunate victims of good ideas.

Naturally in a net café you want to keep the computers safe from the customers and whatever crap they might download or bring in on their dirty little flash drives. Someone had a scheme here, to totally lock down these computers. Good? Unfortunately, they’re locked to Windows Updates, to new software, to antivirus that can still  get updates… You can’t change anything as a user and you can’t log on as an administrator, even in Safe Mode. These computers are frozen in the past.

There are supposed to be Norton Ghost images to restore them from, but so far every one I’ve tried has this anti-change software on it, so they’re just frozen further in the past. It’s like whoever did this job last decided to set a fiendish puzzle to those who came after. Normally I’d relish such a challenge, but this café does need to start making money some time.