The myth of the pimples-ridden malware author

Overheard in an Internet Cafe recently:

(guy storms in and purposefully walks towards the counter)

Distressed guy: “Hi, I have a virus on this USB stick and I can´t use it, can you clean it for me?”

Internet Cafe attendant: “…”

Distressed guy: “Look, I didn´t do anything funny, just because some little c*** has nothing better to do but write a virus I can´t access my files now!”

I take issue with this statement. It regurgitates the popular misconception that malware (also known as a virus, a worm, a trojan) is software written by someone who hates mankind. It is their effort to take blind revenge on the world, to mindlessly harm everyone for no real reason other than malice.

Er… no.

Malware takes effort to create. This means skill, patience, equipment and time. All this means money.

Slightly paraphrasing Mikko Hypponen, most malware is created for three reasons:

1. Money via criminal activities. See Peter Gutmann’s figures in his “The Commercial Malware Industry” from years ago to glimpse at just how much money is involved in this global underground market.
2. Idealism – which creates the composite term “hacktivism”. Groups like Anonymous fall in this category.
3. Control – this is state-level information warfare waged either against other nation-states or against the state’s citizens.

Some years ago, malware might have been an annoying prank of kids who had a gripe against the world.

This is no longer the case. Things are far more serious now.

Amazon Kindle 3 review

After a couple of months of having an Amazon Kindle 3 (purchased mid-2011) and travelling with it, here is my list of good and bad things about it:

PROS

1. Decent battery life if NOT using wireless. With intensive reading it lasts upto a week.
2. The display is much easier on the eyes than a traditional computer screen.
3. You can carry a lot of books and personal documents with you in a single small device
4. Friends and family can send you books to read in digital form
5. Project Gutenberg opens thousands of books for immediate download and reading for free
6. You can buy any book off Amazon and it will be in your hands in minutes
7. Registering two kindles under the same Amazon account lets you duplicate all your paid content on both devices.
8. For 10 quid you get the Independent delivered to your device automatically as long as you have GSM coverage every morning for a month… even if you are wild camping in a forest.
9. You can browse the Internet and do emails from wherever at no additional cost.
10. You get an English dictionary for free and it is easy to lookup any word in any document while reading in a non distracting way.

Cons

1. Using the 3G wireless drains the battery in less than 24 hours.
2. The battery takes approximately 3 hours to fully charge from empty when connected to a wall plug. Upto twice as much when charging from a USB port.
3. The display is much easier on the eyes than traditional LCDs… but you still get more eye strain than reading on paper.
4. You end up buying books only from Amazon, killing any competitors or smaller bookshops.
5. You don´t own the kindle books you buy. Amazon does. They control your device at all times. Amazon can and has deleted books remotely from Kindles, a-la 1984.
6. Organising your content is very limited and labour intensive.
7. There is no reasonable expectation of privacy. Amazon can see everything you do with your Kindle.
8. The pricetag for the 3G keyboard model is quite hefty at more that 150 quid.
9. A Kindle purchased and registered in the UK is not allowed to buy from amazon.com US site. You are forced to purchase books only from amazon.co.uk which is more expensive.
10. The keyboard is ergonomically cumbersome and not suited for extensive use.
11. The web browser is of limited functionality. It doesn´t handle popups gracefully and has problems displaying pages that try to open in a new window.
12. The display is black and white only.
13. The refresh rate of the display is very slow. Eg. it´s impossible t scroll through text without it all becoming a blur. Turning pages is slow. Eg. it takes a full minute to turn 30 pages.
14. You can not do anything with the books you have bought like give them to friends or family or sell them or save them in a less restrictive file format.
15. To create customer lock in and make a good profit Amazon use their own DRM which imposes a lot of unneccessary restrictions on the content you buy. They make it easy to convert anything you want to their DRM locked down format but very hard to do the reverse and convert Kindle content to less restrictive formats.
16. There is no international support. Only English. The Kindle can display international non english characters, but thats about it. Impossible to change the interface language, impossible to type in anything other than Latin characters.

Overall, the Kindle 3 + 3G is a good ebook reader with a great global Internet connectivity package, that is almost worth the hassle if you need to travel light and can afford to buy books that will remain locked in to Amazon for good. Perhaps an easy way to unlock Kindle books will become available in the future. Perhaps you won´t mind re-purchasing books that you might want to read on another, better device in a few years´ time.

The choice is yours.

A “perfect storm” of cyber attacks

What an utter load of baloney:

Not that I expect any self-respecting reader to pay heed to what such papers tout, but this fear mongering is still impressive.

Here’s what a more respectable organisation (BBC) has to say on the exact same issue:

Risks of cyber war ‘over-hyped’ says OECD study

And here is the OECD study itself (pdf)

Now, why is the Metro trying to mislead and scare the public like that?

September 11th security fee

I recently booked some tickets to fly to the USA and noticed this little gem:

But what is the “September 11th Security Fee“?

It would appear this is a tax on passengers imposed by the US government to finance our continued abuse by the TSA. There’s a certain irony in that… Thoreau might have had a snigger.

The name itself is pure propaganda, implying that paying this extra money keeps us safe against incidents like the Sept. 11th 2001 attacks in New York City.

Say NO to online censorship

One would hope that nowadays we know better than to put up with restrictions on our thoughts, talks and writings.

Click the button to learn more about the Electronic Frontier Foundation‘s efforts to safeguard your freedoms in a digital age:

A glimpse into reality – the world’s response to wikileaks

They say you can see the true nature of people in a time of crisis. All sorts of organisations, from media outlets to governments, consist of people. So, what has the publication of low-secrecy US diplomatic cables taught us?

An Australian citizen is denied bail in the UK, because of a misdemeanor charge in Sweden. The charge, if proven to stand, would amount to a crime on the same level with *graffiti*. (jurisdiction? innocent until proven guilty? Habeas corpus?

Parts of the US government are blocking access to newspaper websites. Others are ordering or threatening their own personnel and university students not to read the leaked diplomatic cables.

“News contributors” on (predictably) FOX news (and politicians) are going on the record on national television, stating that Julian Assange should be assassinated.

If this is what gets shamelessly thrown out in the open, can you imagine what’s going on behind closed doors?

For more on the above: DemocracyNow! December 15th broadcast

Access to Justice

Quoting the Guardian:

As part of a scheme called “access to justice”, prison authorities are arranging for Assange to be given a computer so he can work on his case. The computer will have limited internet access.

Assange asked for one of his legal team to be allowed to bring him a laptop, but was refused – prisoners are not commonly allowed their own computers.

Intriguing.

“Access to Justice” sounds like “we’ll be happy to know all your passwords & contacts” to me. I’m sure Mr. Assange is smart & informed enough to know this, but other prisoners might not.

Bringing your own laptop raises the bar just a notch, but doesn’t offer any protection against an organised adversary:

• All your network traffic will be observed (Man In The Middle attack)
• Anything you type on the keyboard will be known by the adversary, even if they’ve never touched your laptop.
• Anything on your screen can be “seen” by the adversary from the adjacent room.
• You better not leave the laptop from your sight, because if you do, you might as well assume it has a keyboard logger installed next time you touch it.

Bit of a pickle, really.

How to close your PayPal account

Predictably, PayPal make it hard to close your account with them. Friends have been asking me how to do that, in response to the Wikileaks affair, so here’s how:

1. Login to your PayPal account: https://www.paypal.com

2. Click on “My Account”

3. Click on “Profile”:

4. Click on “My Account Settings”

5. Click on “Close Account”

6. Click “Continue”:

7. If you feel like giving PayPal feedback as to why you’re closing your account, you can do so in this page. Scroll down to the bottom of the page to find the “Continue” button.

8. Click “Continue”:

9. Click “Close Account”

10. Finally, PayPal is kind enough to do what you asked it to do  7 clicks ago. Congratulations!

Note: If the above steps stop working (because PayPal reorganise their website or changes some buttons) you should be able to find instructions by clicking “Help” in the PayPal website and then searching for “close account”.

Wikileaks quote

Hilarious quote from https://twitter.com/wikileaks

Cablegate: Boy, the last time there was a leak like this, Noah built himself a boat.

’nuff said.