Computer virus history

There isn’t anyone who hasn’t heard of computer viruses. Except maybe people who doesn’t know a computer, but this is a minority. Well, maybe the people who use Linux ( :p ), and you can’t blame them ;-). I have noticed people don’t know anything about the history of viruses, and computers in general. This is actually really interesting, it is even not more than 50 years ago.

Maybe some of that later, but let’s go on now to the first computer virus. There might be some discussion about it, that’s completely normal, it depends where you see the boundary line for a virus program. If I’m completely wrong, you may tell me; actually, you have to tell me.

For me, the first real virus was ‘Elk Cloner’ written by Rich Skrenta in 1982. Rich was 15 years old, a high school student. It was the first virus that has spread ‘in the wild’, and it infected the Apple operating system. The virus infected a floppy disk, and this is also the way it was spread. The good news is it didn’t harm your computer.

The people then hasn’t heard about computer viruses, so they weren’t aware about it. Just like there weren’t any virus scanners and/or firewalls.

An interesting fact is that the virus is made due to annoyance. Rich wrote little games, which stopped after you played it like 50 times. He gave this to his friends. It’s really frustrating, when you begin to like the game, you can even say they already where addicted, the game stopped. So his friends learned not to trust Rich his programs. This is why he wrote his virus, now he could annoy his friends without their knowing.

Oh yeah, it even had a little poem on every 50^th booting:

Elk Cloner: The program with a personality

It will get on all your disks
It will infiltrate your chips
Yes it’s Cloner!

It will stick to you like glue
It will modify RAM too
Send in the Cloner!

 

So far the first computer virus …

World Sailing League

Since 2OO4 there were rumours about a new sailing circuit. On the 8^th February Coutts, Cayard & Lagos announced the creation of the World Sailing League. There had been some stops & start, but this announcement confirms it will take place.

 

They intend to bring sailing to the public by racing near the coast. There will be very short races, targeting 30 – 40 minutes. Due to this is tacking and jibing very important, and it will make the race very exciting, and that will be great. The sailing races are really spectacular, but the thing is the big races, like the Volvo Ocean Race, Americas cup and so on, are all offshore. That’s why you can’t enjoy of it like tennis or soccer, but that’ll be changed due to this. Outside the fleet racing, there will probably also be time trials and slalom racing, but this isn’t officially confirmed yet. I don’t know what the slalom will look like, probably something like the surfing or so. The time trials are pretty awkward, because the wind can blow much harder for the first boat than for the second. So everyone wants to go on a particular moment, because the boat with the biggest squall will definitely win. I guess this all will be tested when the prototype is ready, and then we’ll have more information.

 

Coutts & Cayard love exciting and fun sailing, and that’s precisely what you get on a Catamaran. It is light, powerful, really fast, and it can sail near the coast. So they have decided to use 70-foot catamarans. They think you will need an eight men crew. I think they probably won’t need to put up or drop a sail, because the races are short, and they’ll have a special spinnaker (something like a code-0).

 

These catamarans are very expensive. Lagos has committed 60 million dollars for the design and building of the 70-foot catamarans, and the rest will probably be used to help get the circuit rolling. The teams need a budget of about five to six million, what isn’t that much, because this is the same for the volvo ocean race in a year, and they only get like eight boats at the start.

 

A team, including Marc Van Peteghem and Lauriot Prévost have designed the boats. By summer 2007 the design should be ready, and the first boat should be in the water at the end of the year. They hope to have fourteen catamarans by 2009, when the first race starts, each represented by a country. The races will take places in several top locations, and the winner gets 2 million dollars. There is also a huge container ship to transport the boats.

 

If everything goes like they planned, it will definitely be a nice experience, and a nice race. No wonder, with Russel Coutss (44), listing an Olympic gold medal and three Americas cup victories as a skipper. Paul Cayard, the first winner of the Volvo Ocean Race, has won seven world championships. Together with João Lagos, a Portuguese sport promoter, they are a perfect team. They even intend to join the race themselves, each with his own team. The battle will be great.

 

I’m looking forward to it!

X doesn’t like me

I guess X hates me. Yesterday I started my computer, and my resolution was changed. I tried to fix it, but I did not work, somebody in the IRC channel advised to reconfigure my xorg, and so it happened. Hopla, there was the X message. Exactly the same as the day before (see ‘In the middle of the night’). ProfoX told me what he did then, so I did the same, and it still didn’t worked. Even stranger. We’ve been working on it for a couple of hours, and eventually profoX fixed it, again. Thanks a lot mate, what would I do without you :P. My xorg really insures problems, I guess I’ll have to report it as a bug. But I first need to figure out where.

70% Sites hackable

Acunetix says so. Since the beginning of 2006 they have scanned over 10 000 programs and 3200 sites for vulnerabilities. They say that 70% of the sites can be manipulated & sensitive information can be stolen by hackers.

Well, I hope it’s a hacker who discovers the bug in your site, because they will gently report it to you, if you’re lucky they’ll even give you a fix. The crackers however, that would be dangerous. I do believe many sites can be hacked, 70% however, is a little exaggerated. Maybe if they have checked only little sites they would have reached this amount, although Acunetix says that they’ve checked lots of business sites, and other big sites.

Beside this, it’s also nice to know what kind of hack is possible. We now that 50% of the hacks can be made by SQL injection, and 42% by cross scripting. But can you hack a simple webmaster-forum, so you have 2000 user names and passwords? Well, they may have it, just reset the forum, and register again. If they can hack sites of banks, that’s another thing.

I’m not the only one who thinks 70% is exaggerated. Joel Snyder, a security expert, says this is just sensation-loving nonces. He is sure they can’t realize what they say, and this is how he mentioned it:

Let’s get their list of 3,200 sites, pick 10 at random, and see if they can ’steal sensitive data’ from those sites. They say they’ll be able to hack into seven of them. I’ll bet $1,000 they can’t steal personal data from three of them.

Pretty nice challenge, and Acunetix has accept it. They actually had to, who wouldn’t accept it with that much money. But also because their statement would be very unbelievable if they hadn’t accept it. Acunetix hasn’t done anything yet. Does it just take a while, or are we right when we say they overestimated it? I’ll let you know.

Edit css

As it stood on my to do-list, I begun an hour ago with changing the css. A little thing, called Web developer (I’ll write a review later), helped me a lot. Now, when I’m finished and satisfied, I’ve just seen you need to buy some credits to use it. I don’t want to pay for it. I guess the layout will stay standard, or i should find someone who is friendly enough to loan me a bit of his/her web space, so I can put WordPress on it, and configure it myself. I kinda could expect it, after all is nothing free in the world. We are really lucky with the open-source software and all the volunteers, thank you all for your efforts, we all appreciate it. Would this be the beginning of a new friendly world…

Using Linux for the first time

You should have figured it out by now, I use Linux. I have been using Ubuntu for 5 days, though my first touch was 10 days ago.

 

I decided to make the step. You may be wondering why. First, Windows was driving me nuts, I get errors I couldn’t figure out, programs that weren’t working, MS did things I didn’t want to. I wanted more power, more control over my computer. I’m also very interested in computers, and not just what you see, but what’s behind the GUI. Linux is a great way to experience it. It’s far more powerful than windows, and it is virus free.

 

Another great thing in Linux is the community around it. In the IRC channels you have like 1000 people, who can help you, or with who you can relax. The huge wiki-database is also a big help, just like the forums. Being helped on Linux has his advantages and disadvantages. They can give you the commands, you just have to re-type them in your computer. It is not like in Windows you have to say something like ‘Do you see the button in the right corner? No, the other one. Disappeared ? Sorry, can’t help you. ‘ Yet there are some disadvantages about asking help, you need to have patient. Just like you should have in real live. People don’t know everything, and are mostly very busy. After all, they are just volunteers, and you get the software for free. It’s not like you can demand technical help, like you could do when you paid for the software.

 

There is another thing that can go wrong, it is not their fault, nor yours. Most of the time, you have multiple solutions for one problem. If person A tells you to do A, what is perfectly correct, it can occur that it doesn’t work perfectly. Now, if person B helps you some moments later with method B, and person C with his own C-method, it can become a bit messy. But hey, eventually, there will be someone who can help you.

 

So, that’s basically why i switched, and there are probably even more things I haven’t even found out yet. I have had some problems with installing myself. A week ago were the things I find now ‘oh that simple to solve’ really annoying. I have ubuntu installed twice from the live CD, then downloaded & burned the alternate CD, and after that I had some GRUB problems. If you look it the bright way, that is how you learn it, with trial and error.

 

After the weekend, when I was finally on Ubuntu, my wireless Internet didn’t work. Yet, I was a victim to the ‘multiple-solutions-mess’. Someone let me use ndiswrapper, another one let me use a driver, but it had to be another driver. Had some difficulties with setting it up, although it really isn’t that hard, but now my Internet always works fine, what can’t be said about the other windows-machines here.

 

I haven’t even used Ubuntu for a week by now, and I don’t want anything else anymore.

Linux and Viruses don’t match

Viruses need to spread themselves in order to survive. There certainly are Linux-viruses, but they are very uncommon, and it has been a while since there was a worm plague.

It is just much harder for a virus to spread itself in Linux. Simply because every Linux system is different. You can change every file like you want to, it is not like in Windows you just have to put the virus in that file, in that folder.

It is open-source. There are far more chances a virus would be detected, cause everyone is looking into the code. And that isn’t the only good thing about open-source. People can rely on each others work, why reinventing the wheel, right ? Besides it takes much time, there are other disadvantages about it, but that is for later.

Now, before a virus can do his ‘job’, it has to run, it has to be executed. This goes really simple in Windows, you run as an administrator. Due to this, the virus can even infect system files, or load itself by a simple click of the user (mostly with a phishing-trick). I heard they have changed it in vista, and now you always have to check the ‘I am really sure’ box, kinda annoying I believe. Vista users out there, let me know ;). Now, in Linux, if you want to execute something you would have to give it permission, and then run the executable itself. Far more uncommen ;)

In the middle of the night

It is in the middle of the night. It all started around like 6 o’clock pm, when Math^ told me something about beryl. I looked it up, and it really is cool. Math^ suggested to install it, he’d help me out (I’m a huge beginner, more about it in a later post).

So we started, we installed the driver pretty fast. After this, the error came. We searched at google, tried a lot of things, but we couldn’t find it. But i didn’t give up. Couple hours later, profox decided to help me. Glx worked, but i still got the error. He wrote something i had to copy to xorg.conf, and restart.

Then it came, the screen with the strange symbols (&#&) all over the place, claiming X probably wasn’t configured right. Yeah, great. Stupid F#!@: error. Profox tried to fix beryl, in the meantime i was on another computer, re-typing all the commands. After a while, we kinda gave up, and I’d just have to reconfigure the xserver-xorg, and we would fix beryl tomorrow.

Well, yeah, in a perfect world it probably would, but now, it didn’t worked. I tried it over and over, profox and other people in IRC claiming it couldn’t be, but yet, it was. Followed several howto’s, it just didn’t worked. It was so strange.

Then profox came up with a good idea, he set up an FTP, so i could give him some files. He found it, at last. He shouted something about how stupid it was, and that the software should be improved, well, it will be improved, in like 6 months or so. I didn’t and still don’t know about what he was talking about, but i’m glad i’m back on my Ubuntu, with GNOME.

Hello world!

It happened. The blog is made. Just like that, suddenly, at once, by that one click. The beginning of something big.. Well, we’ll see how it will develop.

I surf a lot on the Internet. It is always pleasant when I come across a blogpost. Now, lately I had been thinking, I also have lots of opinions (well, who doesn’t, right?) and I like to argue, so maybe the whole blogging thing is something for me too! So, after some (euh..) weeks, it has finally been made.

Shaffox’s Blog. I’ll post now and then some articles/opinions or whatever, just to enjoy myself, and of course, you guys, the readers. Last but not least; I have chosen to do my blog in English. It isn’t my first language, so don’t bite me if I make a mistake, just report it would be great.