One Shot Design

Crackers have recently started taking advantage of the success of social networking sites to lure unsuspecting users towards phising or malware-loaded pages. Simple advice: be weary of files or page links sent to you through Facebook, MySpace, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Read the article from The Wall Street Journal.

Here is a remarkably well done video explaining the origins of the Internet all the way back to 1957:

According to The Wall Street Journal, sales of the recently launched BlackBerry Storm amounted to 0.5 million units eleven weeks after being put on the market. In comparison, Apple sold 1.0 million iPhones G3 in the first 3 days, totalling 6.89 million in the 4^th quarter of 2008 and beating RIM record sales of 5.6 million Blackberry units in a full quarter.

RIM considers the Storm a success and is reported to have 0.25 million units manufactured per week. That is roughly 1/3 of the 0.8 million units Apple is rumored to have assembled each week.

Scott McNealy, co-founder and chairman of Sun Microsystems has been asked by U.S. President Obama to produce a white paper on the benefits of open source for the government. The United States National Security Agency has already capitalized on the benefits of open source and contributed with a set of modifications and cryptographic functions, so it would make sense to extend open source to the rest of the government.

Matt Asay , writing for Cnet.com, is very sceptical about legislating open source and argues that open source is already gaining momentum by itself.

I disagree. The predominance of proprietary software on personal computers has made most people oblivious to the idea of proprietary software. There is the example of a civil servant reprimating a student for demonstrating Linux to his classmates and accusing Ken Starks of the HeliOS project of “spreading misconception”. By officially adopting and enforcing open source, a government would educate its people on the issues and hopefully brush aside ignorance.

Computer infection by viruses either happens because of bad luck (visiting a page concealing malware), poor computer literacy (opening an attached file) or plain negligence (logging with administrator rights to perform mundane tasks). Similarly, identity theft can be encouraged by negligence, especially when one forgets to log out after having used a public or shared computer.

Having found himself sitting in fron of computers with the previous private account sessions still open, Jeff Rosenberg decided to“teach a lesson to negligent students” in a manner of a highly questionable nature and legality:

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gone to the library or a computer lab and found someone still logged into their user account. It used to make me angry. It used to make me wonder what was wrong with people. I don’t know if they just forget or just don’t care, but either way they deserve to be messed with for their stupidity. It took almost a year of my life to find these and to some degree I feel bad, but I’m pretty sure these people won’t ever forget to log out again.

In the USA, the Identity Theft and Assumption Deterrence Act makes the possession of “any means of identification [...] used without lawful authority” a federal crime. There is probably very little ground for accusing Rosenberg of identity theft since he never came in possession of the students login informations. But there is certainly something against vandalism.

Anyway, take heed and read the entry explaining Why You Should Always Log Out.