the BSD box

I think we can start this article off with a link to one of more pointless paranoia defences -> TFH 

Obviously being quite a few miles away from friends and family over here in Germany, I appreciate any quick and easy method of communication with them. I’m usually on the Internet in many forms through the majority of the day (msn/irc/twitter/facebook/email etc..) however I’ve started to notice that people are dissapearing.

There is the ’sheep’ effect to take into account, basically people will only use the latest and greatest social tool that all their friends are using. This obviously makes sense in that, that’s where everyone has gone and is now using to communicate. However people are starting to develop what can only be described as a paranoia complex regarding the internet. It’s common knowledge that viruses/spyware and worms have been around long before 99.9% of the people on the internet had even heard of them. However the problem here really is down to crafy social engineering from the virus creators and ridiculous lapses in judgment by the end user. It has gotten to the point where this paranoia means that everyday it delays me in everytask I do.

The most common application used is no doubt going to be Ms Office, used the world over for things such as document creation to managing the finances. However due to incompetancies from end users again, using any of these documents on any machine requires 15,000,000 ‘Are you sure?’ message boxes. This is then followed by a  several minute delay whilst the badly written virus engines pull these files apart whilst trying to occupy as much system memory as humanly possible. Why not a simple checksum to see if the document has been altered?

As social networking took off, from a rather pokey AIM and then through to MSN, the amount of people using computers boomed (especially young kids, with a rather naive view). Around this time people were usually using file transfer to send one another silly junk such as daft animated gifs and nude pics of whatever. When flash games became all the rage, and it was possible using Macromedia (now Adobe) Flash to package these up as small executables and run them stand alone. All of a sudden executables are flying back and forth at a ridiculous rate and in steps a huge problem. As most of the previous junk was a data file it was never executed and thus a virus would be pointless being attached to it. Once executables are flying around viruses attached to these are flying around with them. Suddenly MSN comes with stern warnings regarding sending and receiveing executables over the internet. The viruses creators went one step further and started writing code that made the virus act like the user, sending fake links through msn to the contact list and attempting to send itself etc..  So MSN suddenly isn’t safe anymore.

As the technology increased people went from having their own webspace on places like tripod/geocities to having a pre-created area for them to upload pictures and submit updates. Websites like faceparty and bebo appeared then followed by myspace which really was the big global phenomenon. Soon everyone would be ‘myspacing’ one another and added god awful mp3′s to their profile pages. Paranoia swept in withing 0.5seconds of it taking off, and newspapers pointed out that it was ‘probably’ full of paedophiles. However once the viruses writers found simple ways of infected peoples profile pages that was pretty much the end of myspace. This brings us onto where we are now, which is the current social networking site everyone is using.

Facebook

Luckily facebook has managed to stay clear of a route of virus transmission so far. There has been the odd security breach and compromised account and the administrators managed to curb the tide of ridiculous facebook applications swamping peoples profiles. Facebook has been affected by a new paranoia, which is perception. Suddenly having a profile that you’ve put all your deepest darkest secrets is a new threat, why you put them there in the first place is beyond me. There has been many news stories regarding how your facebook page can affect you in life. People have been divorced, arrested and lost their jobs over facebook.

Which brings me onto the latest paranoia craze that people seem to use as an excuse to steer clear of social networking. Friends have started leaving facebook due to a ‘rumour’ that the CIA are using it to spy on people. That’s right, wrap your computer in tin foil quick ! As crazy as my friends are, AND in the unlikely event that the CIA are using facebook to monitor people, what do my friends think they are doing that is so exciting that teh CIA will care? Furthermore, there is no proof anywhere that there is any fact to this rumour.

sigh..  (p.s. don’t wrap your computer in tin foil)