BY DAN
KENNEDY
Serving the reality-based community since 2002.
Notes and observations on
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Wednesday, August 20, 2003
Under cyberattack. Between
yesterday at 3:52 a.m. and today at 8:49 a.m., I received 91 copies
of the SoBig virus. So incessant was the invasion that I had to delay
posting yesterday's Media Log for several hours.
Because of a peculiarity in the way
I choose to have my Phoenix e-mail delivered -- I actually
have it forwarded to a different account -- the viruses never get
intercepted by the paper's server-level virus-scanning software. So I
get every damn one of them.
Fortunately, I can't actually be
affected by SoBig: I use a Mac, and can't even open the infected
attachments, which carry names such as "application.pif" and
"thank_you.pif." But, as many of you already know, the SoBig attack
-- one of several virus invasions over the past week -- has slowed
down the entire Internet and crashed some sites.
Moreover, each copy of the virus
runs around 100 KB (I remember when floppy disks for the Apple II
held a maximum of 140 KB), which would make downloading my mail an
endless task if I were still on dial-up. That's 9.1 MB of crapola in
just a little more than 24 hours.
I also received several
computer-generated e-mails from other sites telling me that I had
attempted to send the virus to them. I opened them up, and sure
enough, the e-mails appeared to be from dkennedy[a]phx.com. But they
had been sent to addresses I'd never heard of, and that are
definitely not in the address book of my e-mail program, Microsoft
Entourage.
No surprise there. This is how
insidious SoBig and similar viruses have gotten. Once it infects a
computer, it burrows into the address book and sends out a copy of
the virus to every e-mail address that it finds. All I can be certain
of is that someone out there has an infected Windows-based computer
with dkennedy[a]phx.com in its address book.
Hiawatha
Bray has a good story on
the latest virus invasion in today's Globe. If you want to
know more, check out InformationWeek
and Wired.
The Wired piece, by Michelle Delio,appears to make a good case
that the endless proliferation of viruses is at least partly the
fault of Microsoft.
I'm not in a position to judge, but
a little Bill-whacking is always in order.
Horror and quagmire in Iraq.
Media Log has been Iraq-free for a bit -- not because I'm not
horrified by the way the US-led invasion has descended into
all-too-predictable chaos, but because I've been at a loss to find
anything that really puts it all in perspective.
But after yesterday's terrorist
attack on UN
headquarters in Baghdad,
it's clear that the quagmire is deepening. On today's New York
Times op-ed page, Harvard
terrorism expert Jessica Stern
offers a brilliant -- and disturbing -- analysis of the situation.
Her lead:
Yesterday's bombing of the
United Nations headquarters in Baghdad was the latest evidence
that America has taken a country that was not a terrorist threat
and turned it into one.
Of course, we should be glad
that the Iraq war was swifter than even its proponents had
expected, and that a vicious tyrant was removed from power. But
the aftermath has been another story. America has created -- not
through malevolence but through negligence -- precisely the
situation the Bush administration has described as a breeding
ground for terrorists: a state unable to control its borders or
provide for its citizens' rudimentary needs.
How do we get out of it? On the
same page, Tom
Friedman, as usual, offers
some ideas that are both idealistic and useful. But it would have
been a lot easier not to have created this disaster in the first
place.
posted at 9:15 AM |
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Dan Kennedy is senior writer and media critic for the Boston Phoenix.
