Amusing Spam

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Spam purveyors are apparently having a very tough time getting past Bayesian filters. Check out this one:

Subject: If you had a gold fish, you would ask for a bigger instrument.

Would you like to have as many women so you could forget their names? All that would be possible if you added some extra inches to your beef stick. Just ask us how and we will help.

Site for everybody

(The “site for everybody” text was a link to a Yahoo Groups group with a randomly generated name, which had already been pulled by the time I saw the message this morning, a few hours after receiving it.)

“Gold fish”? After much thought, I vaguely recalled a childhood tale of a fisherman catching a golden fish that traded some wishes for its freedom, but it was quite a stretch to link it to that subject line. And while “bigger instrument” is an oft-used term in such messages, unless you’re a musician or you work at a science lab, it’s unlikely to be a common and innocuous phrase in your e-mail messages. “Beef stick” is amusing though, I haven’t seen it in such messages before.

Nice try guys, but it was rated as 98%-probable spam here. “Keep practicing!” 🙂

The Good Old Days

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I had an interesting e-mail discussion with Ploni Almoni the other day, about how I should set up my new MacBook‘s security. He suggested installing a separate firewall program, despite the fact that OS X already includes a built-in “application firewall.”

After some web research, I told him that it looked like the built-in firewall was sufficient, and even an improvement over the traditional port-based firewalls, because there’s no need to know what ports it’s listening on. You just approve or disapprove it by program.

He came back with the perfectly logical argument that when a virus infects a previously-approved application, your system is completely compromised. Not the case, because Apple already thought of that; the OS cryptographically signs executables when you permit them through the firewall, so that if they’re changed, you have to manually re-approve them before they can open a listening port again.

But that got me thinking… there really aren’t many old-school viruses anymore. A virus, by the traditional definition, is something that reproduces itself by “infecting” executable files, modifying them to carry the virus’s code and execute it any time that file is run. They require a much higher level of knowledge and programming skill than most of today’s malware authors have, and they aren’t as useful these days either (because people rarely swap raw executables anymore, they generally download the latest version from the Internet, or install from an archive — zip, tgz, package file, etc — that can’t be secretly auto-infected by traditional viruses).

Practically all malware nowadays seems to be Trojans, which are stand-alone executables themselves. Like the storied Trojan Horse that they’re named after, they do their work by tricking you into allowing them in, rather than by sneaking in as part of another program. Much easier to write, because you don’t have to know the details of how a system’s executable files are put together, or of the defenses that the user or the OS might have against stealthy changes to them. They’re lumped under the umbrella of “virus” because that’s the term that people understand, but it’s technically incorrect.

On the plus side, it’s a lot easier for a savvy computer user to avoid infection by Trojans than by viruses. But — and I never thought I’d hear myself say this — I miss the old-school virus. At least when you discovered that your system was infected by one of those, you could console yourself with the honest assessment that your security had been bested by a skilled programmer. These days, programmers with that kind of skill have moved on to more challenging work; if you discover a Trojan on your system, you’ve probably been “pwned” by a script-kiddie, who thinks that a “pointer” is just something used when giving a presentation.

How humiliating.

The Joys (?) of a New Computer

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I have a love/hate relationship with upgrades. On the one hand, it’s exciting to have something new, especially since that something is almost always a major improvement over its predecessor. But on the other, it’s always a major pain to transfer all your data, reinstall all your software, and get used to the new quirks that any upgrade introduces. My unintended new computer is no exception.

As I said in my earlier post, this is the first Apple computer that I’ve ever owned, and I’m very favorably impressed. The hardware is completely awesome… the machine runs absolutely silently, other than the optical drive, so much so that the spinning of a CD or DVD is startlingly loud by comparison. Even in a completely silent room, I can’t hear any noise from the fan(s) that I know are in it, or the hard drive.

It’s also very cool, in both senses of the word. Even with both CPU cores running at full load, the case never gets uncomfortably warm (unlike every other laptop I’ve ever used). And the case itself is the best design I’ve ever seen, and I’ve looked at just about all of them. Everything seems to have been thought out with extreme care, from the placement of the power button and built-in microphone to the lack of any visible cooling vents — they seem to be in the join between the screen and the main body, an obvious improvement in retrospect but something that I’ve never seen done before. The slot-loading optical drive means that there’s no fragile (and, let’s face it, ugly) CD/DVD “drawer” to damage. The magnetically-attached power cord… the back-lit keyboard for use in the dark… the ambient light sensor (so that the screen stays at the proper lighting level for the conditions)… it’s just a truly well-thought-out machine.

(As an added bonus, our cat Oliver is baffled by the upper corners of the screen. They simply aren’t chewable. Unlike the Dell, which had very chewable corners — so much so that he chewed the plastic right off of one when I wasn’t looking.)

And that care extends to the operation as well. When you plug in an external monitor, the system automatically detects it and reconfigures itself to use it — a feature that neither Windows nor Linux has. Disconnect it, and the system reconfigures itself again. Very nice.

And then there are the aesthetics.

I’ve never really understood the argument for aesthetics. To me, computers have always been functional tools, not fashion accessories. You don’t hear about carpenters worrying about the most pleasant-looking saws and drills, and a computer is no different. Or so I thought.

Logos. On your average Windows machine, you’ve got logos everywhere. The optical drive has at least three different logos for supported formats. There are stickers bearing the logos of the CPU manufacturer, the video card manufacturer, and the operating system maker, and often one or two touting the features of that particular model as well. The underside resembles the business end of an industrial tool, with even more stickers, logos, and written information, this time nestled between access panels, ventilation openings, and angular bits of casing. When you first turn it on, you’re confronted with at least half a dozen desktop icons for different pieces of crapware that the manufacturer has “helpfully” been paid to include.

This MacBook, on the other hand, is startlingly bare. There is one logo on it — the lit-up Apple logo on the back of the screen. There is one bit of obvious writing on it — it says “MacBook Pro” on the bottom of the screen itself. The palm rests are devoid of any adornment. The left side, with the ports, has only one discreet icon to identify each of them. And the underside is a vast expanse of bare brushed aluminum, with two lines of tiny writing and one line of icons, all legally mandated, along the back edge. When you turn it on, it has one icon on the desktop, for your hard drive.

And the indicator lights! I never thought about it, but my Dell had no less than eight obvious indicator lights: power, disk access, battery-charging status, wi-fi, Bluetooth, caps lock, scroll lock, and num lock. Some of them were multi-purpose: the power light, in addition to being on or off, would slowly pulse when the system was in sleep mode. The battery light showed green when the battery was charging, slowly-blinking green when it was almost full, amber when it was low, and blinking red when it was almost depleted. The wi-fi light, in addition to showing whether it was on or not, would flash whenever data flowed through the wireless card. And the battery had five LEDs on it too, on the underside, to tell you how much juice was left in it.

The MacBook has one obvious indicator light, on the caps lock key itself — it’s only on when the caps lock is, but you can see it when the keyboard backlight is on too. There are a few other ones that I’ve seen, discreet to the point of invisibility when not in use: one to indicate that the camera is on; one at the front that pulses on and off slowly when the system is in sleep mode; and a set of eight tiny ones on the left side that will tell you the amount of charge in the battery when the button next to them is pressed. The battery charging/charged indicator has been banished to the power adapter’s connector, which is on the side where it can easily be seen when connected, and can’t be seen at all when it’s not. There’s no number lock or scroll lock, no separate power light, no wi-fi or Bluetooth lights, no disk-access light. They simply aren’t necessary, and the only one I miss even slightly is the disk-access light (just because I like to know when the system is doing something in the background).

I finally appreciate aesthetics in a computer.

Then there are the things that I’d expect from an upgrade. A noticeably faster processor. A completely ludicrous amount of battery life, without the special extended battery that I had to buy to get even large fraction of it with the Dell (that’s the feature that finally convinced me to go with this machine). The technology improvements that have been made since I bought my last machine: a 64-bit, dual-core CPU (when I bought the Dell, you could choose 64-bit or dual-core, but not both). Gigabit ethernet. 802.11n. SDHC compatibility. The latest Firewire spec.

Then there are the bad parts.

The operating system is unfamiliar: the menus for a program are along the top of the screen, not on the program’s window itself. The hot-key combinations that are trained into my muscle-memory don’t work under Mac OS X. The program-switching behavior is slightly different. On the plus side, it’s all well thought-out and consistent, and quite pretty — I never noticed before, but Linux and Windows apps very clunky-looking by comparison. And virtualization (running my comfortably familiar Linux apps via VMware Fusion) helps smooth things over quite a bit.

The keyboard layout is just unfamiliar enough that I’m constantly tripping over it. The option (“alt”) and command (“Windows”) keys are reversed. There’s no separate home, end, insert, delete, or page-up/page-down keys, though I can emulate all of them with combinations. Fortunately, I only have to deal with that issue when I take the computer out and about; in the office, my comfortable Logitech Bluetooth keyboard works perfectly with it.

The trackpad is extremely large, compared to the ones that I’m used to, and my old habits (like resting my thumb on the lower edge to press the now-nonexistent buttons while my fingers move over it) cause some trouble. Again though, my comfortable old wireless mouse works perfectly with it, and shields me from that most of the time.

Other than some minor teething pains (mostly related to VMware Fusion), those are really the only problems I’ve had with the transition so far. My Linux data transferred to my Linux virtual machine with no trouble, and installing my Linux programs was pretty much a no-brainer — much easier than with Windows, despite the fact that I’ve switched to the 64-bit version of Ubuntu in the process. (The only two programs that I expect to give me trouble are Skype and the Flash player, neither of which provide a 64-bit version. There are work-arounds for that though.)

All in all, it’s a change for the better.