Archive for March, 2009

Anyone who has followed technology news these past few weeks is aware that on April first computers infected with the Conficker worm will receive instructions, after which they will do something. What exactly they will do is a mystery at this point. Most speculation revolves around them doing something like harvesting bank account information or sending lots of spam. If I wake up on April Fools day and notice a few extra spam messages in my inbox, big whoop, I delete them and go about my day.

What if there is some signifigance to them choosing April fools day though? What kind of prank would someone with a few million zombies be capable of accomplishing?

Here’s five ideas:

5. Brute forcing the password on Steve Jobs email account, and using it to send spam to people about winning some sort of iLotto. To claim the the prize you need simply wire $9000 to Steve Jobs most trusted lawyer in Accra Ghanna.

4. Pull a denial of service atack on Google. Given how Google has massive data centers spread all over the world this seems unlikely, especially in light of the massive traffic Google already handles fairly well. Maybe if they flood Google with requests Google isn’t ready to parse, they might get somewhere. It would probably be easier to try to just deface the main page though.

3. Suprise infected users with a polite greeting and thorough guidance on practicing proper computer security.

2. Start running a social networking site that is a clone of what facebook was like four years ago. Some brave current facebook users try out the site and wonder what’s the point. Then the go outside and are impressed by sunlight and trees. They wonder why they wasted so much time on site that started off as a place to practice data entry and shameless self promotion.

1. Skynet. Arnold issues a warrant in the state of California for John Connor. Obama is revealed to be a terminator robot. World gracefully accepts computers as our masters. Republican strategists just mumble about how they just knew Obama was too good at the internet.

As a side note reading this CBS news story I found the comments to be dishearteningly naive. It seemed to have devolved into a Macs and Linux are immune to viruses versus no they aren’t debate of the sort that makes you want to hit your inbox up and just start reading spam. There are three leading causes of getting your stuff ruined on a computer.

1. Social engineering: You can give your banking details to a phisher on any computing platform connected to a network. Even OpenBSD and SELinux can’t prevent poor judgment.

2. Lazy: Not running updates and not running any security software leaves your system open to attacks. And yes, antiviruses for Mac OS and Linux exist. They exist because viruses exist for those platforms. Its not just the operating system you need to worry about either, just as a web browser can pick up some malicious code, so can your enterprise database software or content management system.

3. Expectation of invulnerability: Thinking something can’t happen to you is not a preventative measure against something happening to you. If Chris Hansen can reliably net truckloads of sickos who think they can’t be caught, people who want to separate you from your money can and will compromise your online security if you don’t work to stop them.

There are numerous health benefits associated with sleep, and on your day off here are some reasons that together can build a case for a few extra hours of shut eye instead of tackling that job around the yard you are just going to have to do again anyway.

7.  Sleep improves concentration:  If you have to turn that big pile of limbs in the yard into a neat stack of firewood, a little concentration go go a long way towards protecting your own limbs as you operate a chainsaw.

6.  Sleep isn’t mere rest:  When you sleep, your body is having a celebration not unlike an old fashioned barn raising where all these tasks it can’t accomplish while its busy being awake get done.

5.  Daytime television isn’t very good:  If you don’t have anything to do during the day, by being awake you put yourself at risk of encountering brain rotting attention span killing daytime TV.  Daytime TV can lead to thinking you can sue a rude cashier, because you saw something similar on Judge Fill-in-the-blank once.  Having watched so much daytime TV though, you forget that both sides lost.  Being on TV is no meaningful stamp of quality.

4.  Sleep reduces stress:  Stress is linked to ailments as varied as mild irritation, gnawing insecurity, homicidal rage, and all around grumpiness.  Acting on the impulses produced by any of these ailments in the wrong context could lead to wearing handcuff.  Especially in the case of general grumpiness anywhere around an airplane.  Grumpiness is taken very seriously by the TSA and DHS when national security is involved.

3.  Sleep helps to preserve memory:  Memory might not be a big deal for a lot of people.  The people who programmed computer models to predict financial market probably though so at least, and subsequently forgot to include parameters for executives involved in decision trees leading to their maximal personal as opposed to institutional benefit.  See Richard Fuld, Barbara J. Desoer, and Bernard Madoff.

2.  Naps consume time:  In order to nap during the day to catch up on sleep, one has to go through the initial wake up routine associated with their normal sleep.  Then they have to do some sort of nap preparation before the nap.  Once arising from the nap it becomes again necessary to do some sort of activity to clean up after the nap (straighten clothes, fix hair, etc).

1.  Dreams remind you that though experience is real, it is truth neutral:  Of course one can accept they really had a dream about panda’s losing the right to be called bears after a run in with some polar bears, and that it was epic.  As an experience the dream was real, even if it is lacking in a determination of truth.  Really out there dreams can make a decent reminder to keep our judgments in perspective.