WeekEnd Feature:Extra! Extra! Read all about it!

by Ian Thompson, CCSP Staff Editor
Aug 7, 2004

The long, slow, lazy days of summer are upon us once again. Traditionally, this is a time that is slow for much in the IT industry – just too hot to be locked away in a room with warm electronics whirring away. Heck, even this week’s ‘Computing’ was thinner than a Beano comic. So I’m going to take a leaf from Macbiter (the only Mac hack who can go for months without writing about anything made by Apple) and not mention security much…

Who?

What? Macbiter?? Oh, well maybe you’d be more familiar with his real name – Tony Tyler – and his usual haunt of ‘Mac User’. I’ve known of him for far longer through ‘Computer Shopper’, where his witty prose and tales of Sixties prog rock (he plays keyboards in his spare time) are a welcome relief before soldiering on into the world of strange connections that is the final ‘Zygote’ article. I’ve emailed him a couple of times and we’d probably agree to agree about the generally ditsy way in which users hanker after the latest computer but probably use something slightly less so because, well, there’s normally cash involved somewhere along the way…

Any way, here’s an article that I strolled across today – regarding another person about whom you’ve probably not been too aware; one Sven Jaschan. Sven, it seems, is responsible for the vast majority of virus attacks this year – apparently over 70% of all incidences are down to his Netsky and Sasser progeny, including all their little offspring. Well done Sven! I mean, with a hit rate like that, there must be some ecommerce outfit just waiting to employ the same techniques to drop ads on PC desktops the world over. His future is secure, no doubt, and he’s only just out of school too.

Still, someone who you’ve never heard about is the guy who wrote the Bagle worm, with whom Sven was having a ‘running’ battle of words, buried deep within the code of each new variant that emerged. I have speculated before whether this led to the tip-off (and accompanying $250k reward from MS), but maybe there’s another possibility – and a numbered Swiss bank account in the name of one S. Jaschan that won’t be drawn upon for a few years…

What?

Brador (if you listen to Kaspersky) is a Trojan that attacks Windows PocketPC, apparently only if running on an ARM processor, which these days is most of them – there’d only be legacy PDAs running this OS on something slower. Palm PDAs are a different ball-game, since they don’t need anything like the oomph to do stuff. This attack follows closely on the ‘Duts’ tester, that apparently paved the way for something nastier.

Bardor (if you listen to Symantec) is also apparently for sale, presumably to further the number of attacks agains PDAs, or even just to worry users that more apparently ‘bad stuff’ is coming out of Russia. Don’t worry, though, because if your nice shiney iPAQ is infected, Symantec recommends “deleting the /Windows/StartUp/svchost.exe file in the Windows CE operating system and completely reinstalling the OS and applications.” There – a nice easy solution. You can bet that I’m running the iPAQ Backup program right now…

You know, most of us can’t have helped thinking that the AV companies might have a hand in all this somewhere. Viruses (biological) are a part of every day life, but are we more or less bothered about catching one when there’s a cure? Or does the fact that there is a cure make us more care-free in our attitude? Okay, the backup is now done – 3 minutes is a lot less time than a complete reinstall.

Why?

HP has this week announced at the LinuxWorld conference the first business laptop to ship with Linux installed. The unit is one of the Compaq nx5000 range (reasonable stuff) and it comes with SuSE Linux preinstalled, including Star OpenOffice. This is an unusual move – Linux really only accounts for a small percentage of the desktop market, as opposed to the huge take-up by the server end of things.

The only time I’ve seen Linux on a laptop was as a ‘proof-of-concept’ a few years back. I know another guy who used to write for ‘Computer Shopper’ who detailed the process back when SuSE was at version 7 and came to the conclusion that an older laptop would be preferably because of the state of Linux driver support. Laptops tend to use some pretty trick hardware that may not be widely supported away from the manufacturer, so as a result the hottest, quickest piece of kit would probably not be best provided in Linux.

However, look beyond this to the names involved. HP is a big company, with plenty of corporate clients. Some of these will operate in specialist markets where having a purely Linux-based laptop (not a dual-boot one) would be a boon. Think of distributed or grid-based systems, or even the vastly-parallel approach taken to build some supercomputers. Cast your mind back to when such items used Pentium Pro processors on dual-CPU boards, replicated about 400 times in a refrigerated room. Think of the Beowulf project and you might have an inkling of which market HP is targeting. Maybe it’s none of that, just a smallish number of punters waiting to hand over cash for the right product.

Now look at what has happened to SuSE in the past few months. No, go back further. The SuSE distribution is widely regarded as one of the better ones, up there with Mandrake, Debian and RedHat. It has contributed a lot to the open source community, including the neat YaST management and installation tool. Now fast-forward a bit – it was bought a short while back by Novell, a company that always saw itself as an alternative to MS in one form or another. Back when MS-DOS held up Windows, there was the alternative DR-DOS, which Novell bought then later span off to Caldera. Before that, most businesses ran Novell networks, and these can still be found. Novell may just want some of the glory back…

So HP and Novell, through their wholly owned subsidiaries Compaq and SuSE, might just be testing the water before trying something on a much larger scale – watch this space…

When?

So, in another non-event, it seems that XP SP2 is delayed – again. However, maybe you’ll have time to upgrade your Internet connection – the projected size of this download is between 70MB and 92MB, depending on the version of XP that you have installed at the moment. Microsoft will be busy the day that one is released, so don’t even think about trying to calculate how long it will take to arrive once you start downloading it. Maybe it would be a good time to stop the automatic collection and installation feature of XP? Just set it to notify when it’s available and pick a quiet time during the Redmond night, or whenever is cheap-rate for you (if you’re paying by the minute for collecting stuff).

However, AMD has released it’s new Sempron CPU range a few weeks early! This will replace the 32-bit socket-A Athlon/Duron ranges of desktop and mobile CPUs, and all below the 3100 will still used SoA. However, above that speed the systems will switch to 754-pin micro-PGA architecture, as used by the Athlon64 series.

Where?

In more sinister news, security forces suspect that the Mediterranean area will be hit at either end by unwanted activity. However, we must all show a brave face and remember that some news is not to be made light of.

Lastly, I leave you with more exciting X-Prize news – and Canada’s latest step in the space-race. All donated stuff, with an 8-track cassette deck and a Sixties Soviet cosmonaut helmet. It’s apparently going to use an airbag on landing, so let’s hope they choose David Bowie’s “Man who fell to Earth” as the theme tune.

“Ground Control to Major Tom! The airbag we borrowed from the Beagle 2 lander won’t inflate – break out the emergency foot-pump!” – Ouch! Good luck, guys!