Silence, Stupidity, Security and bonus Staph Infection
Publishing NewsConspiracy / security10 Comments
First, this fascinating article:
Real Life Cone of Silence?
Your next tinfoil hat will won’t be made of tinfoil. A small company called Conductive Composites out of Utah has developed a flexible material — thin and tough enough for wallpaper or woven fabric — that can keep electronic emissions in and electromagnetic pulses out.
It’s not exactly new. There’s been paint that does this. But I say have some fun with it in the comments. What Romance Novel plot to you see coming from this?
Stupidest Security Related Comment Ever?
From this scary article:
The bug takes advantage of the way that Mac OS X 10.10 (Yosemite) decides which programs can make changes to your computer without your password. Yosemite lists those programs in a hidden file called Sudoers. But the bug allows malware to be listed in the Sudoers file as well.
OMG!! Why did no one think to set the malware flag to 0? FFS. Someone wasn’t thinking very hard about that. But seriously, the whole point is that the malware gets slipped in there in non-obvious ways (assuming reasonably competent developers) It’s really not like you can say, oh, hey, don’t forget to set that up so no malware gets in there. I admit, however, that the sudoers file should require the developers who are better than reasonably competent.
Bitcoins or your Family Photos are Toast?
This Wired article about Ransomware got me to thinking.
That’s when your computer gets encrypted without your knowledge and then you have to pay money to get unencrypted. This has been on my mind lately because Radiolab, one of my favorite podcast channels, recently had a show about a woman who fell victim to this malware. Here’s the link to the show.
After some thought, I think I know what I’d do, which is say eff you. But them my mother always said that I’d cut my nose off to spite my face. I know it would be horrible, but I do believe my most critical files could be recovered from non-computer or attached drive sources. What would you do?
Geek Power
Also on Radiolab is this amazing story they titled Staph Retreat.
What happens when you combine an axe-wielding microbiologist and a disease-obsessed historian? A strange brew that’s hard to resist, even for a modern day microbe.
In the war on devilish microbes, our weapons are starting to fail us. The antibiotics we once wielded like miraculous flaming swords seem more like lukewarm butter knives.
But today we follow an odd couple to a storied land of elves and dragons. There, they uncover a 1000-year-old secret that makes us reconsider our most basic assumptions about human progress and wonder: What if the only way forward is backward?
This is my favorite kind of story because it’s about history, science, and Old English. Give it a listen.
Use it as an excuse to buy a better tablet or computer. Might get stuck using the failing netbook for awhile but *shrug*.
Okay, it might be a tougher call if there was really anything on this thing.
I’m with you Lostsahdows. I know I have stuff that’s important on the computer. But I still think I’d be a go eff yourself.
The bitcoin thing happened to an elderly friend of mine. We used to work together and she always had the IT guy at her desk fixing virus issues because she clicked on something she shouldn’t have. She retired recently and was surfing the web one night and clicked on something, she’s not sure what, and her computer froze. She said a little box popped up telling her they noticed she was having computer issues and they could “fix” it for her for $250. She gave them her credit card number and she was up and running a few minutes later. They also offered to bill her $75 a month to “monitor” her computer so it didn’t happen again. Several days later she called me and asked if she should have done it. My answer was an emphatic NO! She canceled her credit card, her credit card company stopped the charge, and she now has virus protection. I know something like this will happen to her again, she just doesn’t get the whole virus, identity protection, bad click thing.
Everything important on my computer is backed up to at least two different places and in some cases, three. Redundant? You bet! But between the problems I’ve had with backup companies where I couldn’t restore my stuff, and all of the near invisible code suddenly inserted behind links at a company level, I can smile and say eff off and never worry about it. A new SSD is relatively cheap these days, I can replace it myself and not worry about it. Beside, the companies I back up to now have my files available for viewing or download from anywhere so no more, OOps…we deleted your stuff because we didn’t read your emails…
And I do NOT understand bitcoin.
I had a ransomware lock up my laptop last year (no idea where I got it since I’m usually pretty careful what I click on), and my reaction was to tell them to suck it since I’d only lose about 2 days’ max worth of files. Since I wouldn’t give money to extortionists in general, why should I give it to online muggers?
So after finding that I could somehow copy many of the recently used files to an old USB key I could dispose of if it was infected, I decided to try and clear it out myself with a system restore and major malware and virus clean-up – and was successful, yay. Then I had it double-checked by a network engineer friend… and set my backups to go twice daily. As I’m not really a computer genius, I’m kind of lucky I didn’t kill it in the process, but since I’d already mentally reclassified it as a doorstop, it wasn’t as if I could do much more damage.
Some days, I feel like wrapping myself and everything/everyone in that foil, but at least there’s backup. Redundancy may be our best weapon since so much else is out of our control.
My Asus tablet wouldn’t turn on or charge, so my husband attempted to plug the unit into a usb port on his desktop and promptly blew out his power supply. Fortunately, the backup desktop was sitting in the closet and we swapped out his hard drive (could not get the power supply out of either computer). Fortunately, there are multiple backups of data, but still, there is unexpected peril at every turn, from out there and inside.
I’ve used Apple’s Time Machine as a backup for my Mac Os machines since it was introduced and it has saved me several times, most recently a couple of years ago when my Macbook Air’s motherboard decided to stop working. Then my husband’s Surface Pro 3 shut down and wouldn’t restart, but he had been backing up fairly regularly and was able to recover almost all his files on the new computer (supplied by MS because the original was still under warranty).
For the past two years I’ve spent a lot of my computer time on a Chromebook, and because I’ve put so much of what I produce in the cloud I’m not as dependent on what I’ve stored locally. It definitely makes life easier to be able to access my files from a variety of computers and operating systems.
I have a home cloud (2T WD MyDrive cloud that works like Carbonite) and a sync tool, daily auto backups of my most time-sensitive file with MS’s SyncToy, and a 1T external hard drive and do daily incremental backups with Macrium Reflect.
After Dropbox proved too fragile to trust (when sharing files because sharers don’t know what’s what and go on deleting sprees) (*koffhusbandkoff*), Mozy got too expensive, and Carbonite screwed me over twice, I bit the bullet and built my own cloud.
@Moriah Jovan: Carbonite screwed me over once. I didn’t give them a second chance. And they’re still highly rated which is so hard to believe because I’ve read tons of horror stories about that.
@theo:
At the time, they were cheap and I was in panic mode (the aforementioned Dropbox Incident To Which We Do Not Refer In This House) or I wouldn’t have.
I didn’t know other people had the same problems, though. Should’ve, but I wasn’t thinking.