Monthly Archives: November 2005

The cultural impact of rootkits

Turns out, the problems with Dad’s fastest computer is an evil rootkit in the Windows partition. He’s not sure if the rootkit came from one of Sony-BMG’s CDs, with their ill-conceived rootkit designed to stop people from copying the CDs. But wherever Dad’s rootkit came from, it made me want to learn more about rootkits and related malware so I can protect the computers I use — and if you don’t care about the gory details, you can skip to the cultural commentary in the last paragraph of this post.

First, Dad pointed out that if you run a recent version of Windows on your computer, you can protect yourself from rootkits fairly simply. Set up a domain user account, and do just about everything from that user account, because when you’re logged in as a user account Windows will prompt you for an administrator password most times when there is an attempt to modify operating system files. (Fortunately, the Windows machines at church are already set up that way.)

But even if you’ve set up your computer that way, you have no reason to be smug. As Larry Selzer points out in a column over at eWeek, any computer user can get prompted to enter their administrator password at the behest of malware because…

…normal users will probably see this situation as similar to all the other times they installed software. Every now and then they need to provide these credentials and they’ll just do it this time too….

…so we’ll just have to be even more suspicious, er, careful.

Second, what to do about my Mac? Mac users are not quite as safe from rootkit-type malware as we’d like to think, according to The Unofficial Apple Weblog. And Adam over at the blog “Emergent Chaos”, writes:

…while the default user is in the “admin” group, the admin group is not extremely powerful…. Often, to install software, you need to type your password. That’s because the admin group is not powerful enough for some important install types. Usually. For some install types. Not other times. And that ‘not other times’ will be the path that attackers use. It’s the path that you use dragging apps from a dmg (disk image) to /Applications.

So I’m making sure I use the Mac only from within a user account, unless absolutely necessary. And I’m trying to remember to never, never, never type in that administrator password unless I really know why I’m being prompted for it. And I’ll just have to be even more suspicious, er, careful.

For now, Dad is running his infected computer primarily using the Linux partition, since he has to meet a deadline using the software in that partition. Eventually he will have to completely erase the hard drive, and re-install operating systems in both partitions, along with all his applications and data files. We talked about safe computing, and Dad’s future strategy will be to use an older, slower computer (with no critical files on its hard drive) to access email and the Web; the fast computer will be reserved for his research and consulting work.

To my mind, this whole Sony rootkit debacle raises an interesting cultural point. I have had to learn way more about rootkits than I wanted to know. Computers are still not the mainstream, foolproof consumer goods the manufacturers would have us believe. You still have to be something of a geek to use them — and you have to be willing and able to hire a real geek on a regular basis to take care of the really bad problems. In short, in spite of the fact that something over half of U.S. households have a computer, computers are nowhere near as mainstream as telephones or TVs (I mean, have you ever heard of a telephone geek, or a TV geek?), and seem unlikely to become that mainstream for some time to come.

BND?

Friday is “Buy Nothing Day (BND),” according to Adbusters, an anti-consumerism organization based in British Columbia. Check out the BND Web site at www.adbusters.org/metas/eco/bnd/ and scroll down and click on the pink piggy for a sometimes-amusing ad spot promoting the day.

I find it easy to be cynical about BND. It’s easy to point out that even if consumers don’t buy anything on BND, they’ll just turn around and buy the same amount of stuff some other day. In which case, what’s the point of BND? Well, the point for me is personal sanity. Long before I ever heard of BND, I avoided stores the Friday after Thanksgiving, just because trying to go near any store on that busiest of all shopping days is simply crazy-making.

Besides, I can’t stand the Musak version of “The Little Drummer Boy” — “ba-rump-ba-bump-bump” does not sound better backed by an overly-sweet string section.

Where has your Muse gone?

I happened to be reading in Henry Thoreau’s Walden today, and this passage caught my eye:

When I first paddled a boat on Walden, it was completely surrounded by thick and lofty pine and oak woods, and in some of its coves grape-vines had run over the trees next the water and formed bowers under which a boat could pass. The hills which form its shores are so steep, and the woods on them were then so high, that, as you looked down from the west end, it had the appearance of an amphitheatre for some land of sylvan spectacle. I have spent many an hour, when I was younger, floating over its surface as the zephyr willed, having paddled my boat to the middle, and lying on my back across the seats, in a summer forenoon, dreaming awake, until I was aroused by the boat touching the sand, and I arose to see what shore my fates had impelled me to; days when idleness was the most attractive and productive industry. Many a forenoon have I stolen away, preferring to spend thus the most valued part of the day; for I was rich, if not in money, in sunny hours and summer days, and spent them lavishly; nor do I regret that I did not waste more of them in the workshop or the teacher’s desk. But since I left those shores the woodchoppers have still further laid them waste, and now for many a year there will be no more rambling through the aisles of the wood, with occasional vistas through which you see the water. My Muse may be excused if she is silent henceforth. How can you expect the birds to sing when their groves are cut down?

One moment

One meeting after another in the morning, enough time to run out and grab a quick sandwich, another meeting in the early afternoon, then on to the pile of paperwork on the desk and the backlog of email in the computer. At 4:30 I thought: this is necessary work but.

I grabbed a few minutes and climbed up into the attic space over to the left of the pulpit where there is a stash of old sermons. At random I pulled out “Jesus the Man” preached by Rev. Richard Huff in 1954. Back in the office I blew the dust off and started to read. But. Bible scholarship has made a lot of progress in the past fifty years. I didn’t agree with Richard Huff’s main line of argument. There was the inevitable disappointment of reading something meant to be listened to during a complete worship service. I grew annoyed. But. I couldn’t help thinking of the 150 people who probably heard it that long-ago Sunday morning before I was born. I couldn’t help getting a feel for the congregation that listened to that sermon. People grounded in good common sense. People willing to use reason in religion. People who were headed somewhere. Oh yeah I said that’s why we do this. To keep the doors open for people like that. To keep the doors open for us. So we can do religion together not agreeing completely and arguing and annoying each other maybe even loving each other under all the annoyance. As we head in the general direction of truth and goodness. There’s more to it than that but that was enough for this afternoon. A good thing this was enough because just then the phone rang.

New development

I claim that this blog is about “liberal religion, arts and culture, and sense of place.” But I realized that my definitions of these three things might not be your definitions. I’m also all too aware that I tend to write too much about certain personal passions (tpoics about which I am, as the Japanese say, a “maniakku”).

I’m working on adding pages that give my take on these four areas to orient new readers of the blog. But you regular readers should also note that you can leave comments on these pages, where you can argue with my definitions, which might prove to be a very interesting side conversation.

As with this whole blog, it’s all an experiment and it’s all evolving. (Actually, that’s true of the rest of life, too, isn’t it?)

November morning

You know when you’re driving into southeastern Massachusetts because the land flattens out as you move into the south coastal plain. The Wisconsinan glaciation ground off any protrusions from the underlying metamorphic bedrock, and when it retreated, the land it left behind always appears to me quite a bit flatter than the landscape further north and west.

You see a different mix of trees along the highway, too. This morning as I drove down to New Bedford from Watertown, once I got fairly into the coastal plain, I noticed many more red oaks along the side of the road. They stand out at this time of the year because they are still holding onto their leaves; and the red oak leaves are a particularly brilliant shade of red this year; in some of the trees I could see almost none of the usual brownish tinge to the leaves. The leaves glowed cranberry red in the early morning sun.

I saw just one or two trucks parked along the highway this morning, compared to the half a dozen two weeks ago. Maybe it was because I was driving down a little later in the morning, or maybe it’s because the most of the hunters have bagged their season limit of pheasant and quail and grouse.

You pass the sign that says, “Entering the Buzzard’s Bay watershed: Communities connected by water,” and it’s pretty much all downhill, literally, from there. The traffic is significantly lighter by that point. Even at eight in the morning, there’s plenty of traffic along interstate 93 heading south out of Boston. But by the time I got onto state route 24, around nine o’clock, there were times when I could only see one other car on the highway.

I pulled into downtown New Bedford at quarter past nine. Downtown is pretty empty on weekends at this time of year; the malls along route 6 in north Dartmouth have sucked most of the retail traffic away from here. I got a parking place right in front of the door to our apartment. Later, I walked up to the pharmacy two blocks up the hill. The trees along William Street are sheltered, and still have a few green leaves. I saw a few people. I passed one a man who looked somewhat the worse for wear; he was softly talking to himself, let out a loud belch, chuckled to himself in satisfaction. The other people I passed were just quietly going about their morning errands, headed to the newstand or the pharmacy or Cafe Arpeggio, hunched into their coats against the cold, the coldest morning yet this fall. I took care of my errand at the pharmacy, and headed back home to make a pot of hot tea.

$100 laptops

Laptops for only a hundred dollars — but they’re not for people here in the United States, they’re for children around the world. We’ve been hearing about Nicholas Negroponte’s vision of a laptop in the hands of every child around the world, and at last the prototype of the $100 laptop has been debuted:

A prototype of a cheap and robust laptop for pupils has been welcomed as an “expression of global solidarity” by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan.

The green machine was showcased for the first time by MIT’s Nicholas Negroponte at the UN net summit in Tunis.

He plans to have millions of $100 machines in production within a year.

The laptops are powered with a wind-up crank, have very low power consumption and will let children interact with each other while learning.

….

“We really believe we can really make literally hundreds of millions of these machines around the world,” Professor Negroponte said, as costs continued to drop.

He added that it was critical that children actually owned, instead of loaned, the machines.

….

“Every single problem you can think of, poverty, peace, the environment, is solved with education or including education,” said Professor Negroponte. –BBC News

Brazil and Thailand are reportedly seriously interested already, as are a number of other less-industrialized countries. (But I gotta tell you, we could use those laptops right here in the United States; right here in New Bedford.) Negroponte’s original plans were to make the laptops only available to governments. The BBC reports he is now thinking about making them available on the commercial market. Which gives me an idea. Once production starts and costs fall, why not sell this exact same laptop to the general public here in the States at market rates, and then donate the extra profit generated to the effort to get these machines in the hands of kids everywhere? Heck, I’d buy one. I do love that green case.

P.S. For more on the UN Net Summit, check out the blog iWitness: Journalists Shaping the Information Society.

Silly hats

About four years ago, Logan introduced me to Daniel Pinkwater’s books, and to their characters who spend time in funky older city neighborhoods where artists and other talkative eccentric folk live, and as much as I have liked the stories and the characters to my surprise I find myself living in a kind of slightly twisted version of just such a neighborhood, with monks who stand upon a rooftop to ring bells and a guy who makes wooden whales and chickens in his backyard and people who all have known each other for years and even the charming clusters of lawyers in charcoal-gray suits Monday through Friday (yes such places do exist outside fiction, just escape the suburbs to live in a place that might be a little less safe but far more real). Maybe you’ve read Daniel Pinkwater’s young adult novels and his Young Adult Novel, and if you have I think you’ll understand this question: What’s up with all his references to Chicago? True it is the great city in the United States, but. I mean. Chicago. You don’t get book contracts writing about Chicago or about any other midwestern city or indeed about any city that even vaguely resembles Chicago or the midwest, although heaven knows we already have far too many books set in Manhattan and L.A. and Boston and Dodge City and even Seattle. Of course if you live in the suburbs and haven’t read any of Daniel Pinkwater’s books, you can correct that situation. Or if you’re not a fundamentalist you really must read The Last Guru so you can find out about a fourteen year old guru who points out, “The Silly Hat Monks practice in a spiritual way by wearing the silliest hats possible. The more spiritually advanced a person is, the sillier the hat he wears. This prevents other people from getting the idea that he is anyone to take seriously.”

Just for fun

I’m a big fan of Free Range Studios. They’re the folks who created two of my favorite online videos, Meatrix and (Grocery) Store Wars. Now Emma M. sends me links to a two online animations created by Free Range Studios. Neither one of these is as well-conceived as the first two videos, but they’re still fun and worth a quick look….

Victoria’s Dirty Secret

Conan the Barbarian vs. Kindergarten Cop