TheGreatDamorian

Right now everything on my site and blog is a mess. I know it’s been forever since I’ve updated anything, but I’ve been really busy over break. Expect lots of updates (and fixed links) soon.

Yeah... Ok... (Pic stolen from WIkipedia)

This is an essay I wrote for scholarships a while back and thought it was still relevant to this blog. It’s a pretty interesting read. I made a post over on Striggler.com, and I would kindly ask for those of you who have old essays sitting on your hard drive collecting dust to post them up there and help some students out. Here’s the essay:

The Internet: a Cesspool of Disease

So I went to check my email the other day, and to my surprise I had received some spam titled, “Hot Babes in Your Area Want Your Body NOW!!!” This was upsetting to me for two reasons. First, because “NOW!!!” is not a timeframe I would be able to deal with, and secondly, because I knew it was some fake ad to get me to download malware, spyware or some other form of nastywares. Like any intelligent person though, I deleted it and went on to read my other messages, but the fact is 50% of the population is below average, and countless people have opened up these types of messages, popups, or shady web pages to get infected. Later they probably end up being part of a botnet in a DoS attack or have their identity sold on the black market. My main concern isn’t for the people that get malicious code on their computer, it happens to everyone at some point or another. My concern is for the people that write the programs in the first place. That’s why I feel the internet is in dire need of some help to stop these sick, perverted individuals.

Little is being done to stop these people, which is probably the biggest problem. Antivirus companies have their products counter their malicious creations, but then they just go on to make another, smarter virus. Right now, this is our best, and only, defense. Little can be done legally since these people are generally from Eastern Europe, Brazil or China. Foreign governments aren’t stopping them since they either don’t care, can’t because often times viruses are written to not infect computers in their local countries (like the new Antivirus2009 fake program) so it isn’t illegal, or because it’s generating wealth for that country and it’s in their best economic interest to not stop them. As always though, looking to the government isn’t always the best solution. Sometimes we have to take matters into our own hands.

As a “computer nerd” I’m asked constantly to fix peoples’ computers, and I nearly always oblige. Lately, I’ve been seeing tons of computers with “Antivirus2009”, a fake antivirus app that installs itself along with some other trojans and such depending on the version and can’t be removed. Of course, this “program” also constantly asks that you pay for the “full protection” it offers. There have been instances where people have actually “bought” it and end up having all their money gone the next day. So anyway, after the first few times I saw this I was so frustrated that I was going to do something about it. I got all the IPs and domain names I could that were involved with the program and started running whois checks, just to see if I could find a phone number to scream at someone, but my search was in vain. I know I’m not the smartest person alive, but I’m sure there’s other people in the world that could succeed where I have failed.

Basically, the internet needs one thing to stop this: vigilante justice. I’m not saying we should hunt these people down and repeatedly punch them in the face (although I’m not entirely against that), but something needs to be done to teach them a lesson. I know an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind, but I think these hackers could learn a lesson by having someone steal their banking information and use every cent they own to deliver their least favorite kind of pizza to their house. Revenge isn’t the only solution though. Sometimes the nerds of the internet make “curing” viruses, or programs that spread like viruses and remove harmful infections. One example is the Cheese worm that would scan the internet for machines affected by Lion worm and use the same backdoor it was running rootkits on to clear Lion off. These are just a few examples of things that could be done to help with the ever-increasing internet security threat and I know that with the ingenuity of humans that we will be able to do something about it, hopefully soon.

My MP3 Player

With phones like Blackberrys, the Droid, and the iPhone, is there any room left for run-of-the-mill MP3 players?  Nearly everyone I know has one, including my parents, but I honestly can’t think of a reason why they should, since those features are prebuilt into most of today’s phones.  Really, all you need to do is throw in a microSD card (I got a 16GB one for $50, and that was three months ago) and get a pair of headphones with the proper adapter.  Don’t get me wrong, Zunes, Zens, and iPods are great devices, but why pay $200 for a device that does what you already can with your phone.  Just something that occurred to me while listening to my Env3 on the plane.

I keep seeing people make this mistake, and it’s slightly frustrating to continuously explain it. There’s 8 bits to a byte. Speeds are measured differently.

Generally, when you’re talking about networking upload or download bandwidth (like what your ISP tells you) it will be in b/s (bits per second) such as kb/s (kilobits per second) or mb/s (megabits per second). This is different when data is being transferred though, since it will be measuring it in B/s (bytes per second) such as KB/s (kilobytes per second) or MB/s (megabytes per second).

Here’s an example. Most modern NIC cards are gigabit cards, meaning their maximum throughput is 1 gb/s, but people expect to be able to transfer one gigabyte in a second. Since there’s 8 bits to a byte that 1 gb/s is only 125 MB/s. Meaning that with maximum throughput (which will never happen) you could only transfer 125 MB/s (again, 1/8 of a GB/s). I know that was very redundant, but for some reason I have the hardest time explaining that to people. Just be sure to note the difference between the capital B and the lower case b.

Also, it’s a good time to point out that there’s a difference between what operating systems consider a kilobyte and what disk manufacturers consider a kilobyte. OSes generally use 1024 bytes per KB (2^10, 2^20 for MB and so on…) and hardware makers use 1000 bytes per KB (the traditional definition of prefixes). Some people freak out when they look at their one terabyte hard drive and only see .9TB and they feel ripped off, but really it’s just because of different definitions of data amounts. Hope that helps.

So in conclusion:
1mb/s = .125MB/s or 125KB/s