retro virus

Today's xkcd is apropos. My Windows box recently got fuxxored by malwarez ("Total PC Defender"). Twice. Scrubbed all traces of it, but the system still wasn't happy - random reboots while sitting idle, non-functional browsers. ClamWin antivirus didn't find anything. Finally ran three different malware scanners on the system - each found a different set of things (which doesn't really inspire me with confidence), but everything seems to be happy now. Fingers crossed.

I'm running Linux more for day-to-day stuff, but I still need Windows for things like Photoshop and InDesign; and OpenOffice frankly doesn't do a great job rendering Word documents.

If I were a conspiracy theorist, I'd be wondering how much Microsoft has invested in the "security" industry.

more tech thoughts

As previously noted, I released new software on Monday last week. The press release that was supposed to go out at the same time...still hasn't.

I gave a tech talk Thursday last week. The video that was supposed to be available by Friday...still isn't.

I have to admit I'm a bit conflicted about the technology. If the ISPs had been doing their job, they would have turned on IPv6 years ago, and we'd already be living in a dual-stack world. But there are costs associated with doing that (upgrading routers, upgrading home gateways, upgrading debugging and network management skills), and up til now, there's been no cost associated with not doing it. So it was pretty inevitable that we'd come to the run-in-circles-scream-and-shout stage before anything got done.

In my ideal world (which might still come to pass), we wouldn't need any kind of address-sharing technology (beyond the NAT we've already got. The network core (carrier networks, backbones, etc) could all go to IPv6 immediately. Servers should already be dual stack capable, if their providers would only provision them with v6. Many many end user devices could go dual stack or v6-only without users noticing. OTOH, my printer will never be v6-capable, but I'm not putting it on the global internet.

If it comes to the point where the carriers have to implement IPv4 address sharing, it will make everyone's life that much more complicated - users and providers both. We'll be ready for that eventuality, but it feels like we're doing the wrong thing for all the right reasons.