The Dark End of the Street

"I'm not dead yet!"

Yes, despite the fact that I haven't written anything in this blog for a couple of months, I'd not dead yet. I feel happy! I feel like - dancing!

Besides, I haven't been silent. Stage Left, the blog from the other half of my brain, has been pretty lively lately because of all the shows I reviewed in June. And I'm working on a new op-ed piece for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. It'll be published on July 8th and I'll have a link to it here by the 9tth or thereabouts. My May musings for that publication can be found here. There's a March column as well, but it has been moved to their paid archives. Killjoys.

Still, the main reason there's been nothing here for a while is that there's been so much technology news lately that it's hard to keep up: Apple's iPhone and new MacBook Pros, Microsoft's coffee table computer (which looks suspiciously like the open-source ReacTable, not that I'm suggesting anything) and, of course, the daily flood of malware news.

I'll leave comments on the latest Bright Spaklies for another column. This time I want to expand on some advice from my ten-point Internet safety check. At the time, I advised you to "think before you click" on a link in an e-mail or at a web site. The idea was to avoid sites that were clearly dangerous or which might mimic legitimate sites.

Now, it seems, things have got even more complicated. According to a June 18th article in Computerworld a "phenomenal" number of web sites - mostly in Italy, so far - have been compromised by a gang using a Russian-made exploit kit called MPack. The hacked sites are used to download malware - mostly keyloggers, designed to grab user names and passwords - to unprotected computers that visit these otherwise legitimate web sites.

This is bad news, to say the least. It means that even if you're careful to avoid the dark end of the virtual street, you can still get mugged. Trend Micro network architect Paul Ferguson, quoted in the Computerworld article, puts it this way: "The usual advice we give, 'Avoid the bad neighborhoods of the Web,' just doesn't hold water anymore. Everywhere could be a bad neighborhood now."

Oh, joy.

Could be worse, of course. If you followed my advice back in February and installed multiple anti-virus and anti-spyware products, you're still likely to be protected from hacked sites. But this does ratchet up the paranoia level and raises an unpleasant question: just how risky does doing business on the Internet have to become before large numbers of computer owners decide it's not worth the trouble? And what will the economic impact be if that happens?

Chinese Rock

When it comes to technology issues, does this country's right hand know what the left hand is doing? Reading the on-line IT trade journals, the only possible answer I can come up with is a resounding “no”.

The latest example: a U.S. House of Representatives probe into hack attacks on government servers that appear to have originated in China.

To anyone following computer security issues, this is about as surprising as the discovery that the sun appeared to rise in the East this morning.

In America's corporate board rooms, however, the sun must be rising somewhere else, because, by an amazing coincidence, the hot new place to which corporate America is shipping IT jobs and company data as fast as it can is - China.

Maybe I'm just old-fashioned, but it strikes me as just a wee bit suicidal to be cheerfully sending confidential data to a country which:

• Is run by an autocracy that hasn't changed its hostility toward human rights since the Tiananmen Square massacre
• Has an attitude towards intellectual property protection that is (to say the least) indifferent, and
• Now appears to be hosting criminal attacks against our infrastructure.

But, hey: why let a little thing like homeland security stand in the way of a quick boost in corporate profits and the resulting hike in executive bonuses? We need to keep our priorities straight, after all!

Of course, the fact that attacks have originated from servers that appear to be in China doesn't necessarily mean that those attacks are orchestrated or condoned by the Chinese government. Indeed, why bother to attack American assets at all when American corporations are giving them away in return for cheap, obedient labor and a political system that makes independent trade unions impossible?