greenpoint design

Night of the Living CPUs

I guess you can file this one under misuse of tools: the growth of zombified computers. Evan Ratliff’s excellent piece in the New Yorker October 10 delves into this net phenomena and the steps being taken to counteract it.

Zombies, in case you don’t know, are computers hijacked by hackers to do their bidding. In a new wrinkle, the hijackers are organizing slaved CPUs into massive denial of service attacks on specific businesses. The unlucky business owner then gets an email request for $5,000, $10,000 or $20,000 to make the attacks stop. Many of them pay the extortionists because the cost of fending off the attacks is so high.

Any computer with an always-on connection is at risk. Signs that your CPU has been enslaved include a general sluggishness of operation, especially while online, operation at odd hours and high bandwidth usage.

If you haven’t done so already, you can take the following steps to protect your computer:

• Firewall your router and PC. Free firewalls can be found at www.free-firewall.org
• Make sure your antivirus software is up to date and running
• Backup everything
• Sweep your computer with antispyware.

In this category, Lavasoft’s Ad-aware does a good job of eliminating superflous programs and bots. Spybot is another tool to fight the good fight. For Windows users, Ashampoo’s WinOptimizer cleans megabytes of junk out of your hard drive with one click.

It’s too bad that this sort of scamming is clogging up the net. Cynics would say it’s human nature. I think it’s more like the tragedy of the commons with a few individuals abusing the shared resource of the web. The thing to remember with common resources is that it’s ours. Do your part to protect it.

What is IdBlog?

What’s an IdBlog? Mostly a place to talk about tools in this modern networked world. Old world tools have evolved over centuries. Our current digital implements seem to be in a constant state of flux.

Consider the standard hammer, for example. Most models you find today are made out of one solid piece of steel with a rubber handle and a curved nail-pulling claw at the back. But if you’ve ever dug around in your grandparents toolshed, you’ve seen the old wooden handled variety with all kinds of strange heads. Certainly those tools had their uses, but they’ve been pushed aside by the greater utility of the standard model.

The digital tools we use today have only had about 60 years or so — if you take the Enigma machine as a starting point — to evolve. And in the last 10 years the pace of innovation and evolution has accelerated.

In the hyperlinked workshop of the internet implements are conceived, used and discarded in a matter of months. Remember Fortran? How about HyperCard? In this frenetic environment it’s hard to know where to invest your time. Why bother learning a new code if it’s going to be a trivia question in 10 months?

Here are some questions that I’d like to try and answer in this space:

• What makes a good tool, is it utility or ubiquity?
• How do standards change a tool’s value?
• When should you discard an implement and move on to the next better solution?
• And how do tools use us?

More Incessant Barking

This should be a mandatory disclaimer for all bloggers:

I’ll try to keep the pointless barking to a minimum.

The IdBlog Version0.01

Wordpress is a remarkable tool. I downloaded the first version in February and set it up on this site. It worked fine in the default mode, but I had some trouble configuring the theme I had chosen. Other projects came up, so I put the whole thing aside for awhile.

Fast forward eight months, and the worldwide collective that is Wordpress has cycled through a few more versions, added a ton of new plugins and themes and further refined the product. So I grabbed version 1.5.2 and got to work.

I won’t say it was easy to configure — any content management system has its own idiosyncrasies that must be negotiated — but Wordpress was always logical and well structured.

So thanks to Ryan Boren and Matthew Mullenweg, the coders who got this project rolling, for a really excellent new tool.