The blog

Why we patch, reason #145

Techdirt provides A Look Into How Spammers Spam:

some anti-spammers have managed to get themselves into the various “spam clubs” where top spammers trade tips with each other. From that they’ve learned, as we all pretty much knew already, that the state of the art in spamming is using compromised machines that have had a trojan installed on them. Lists of such controllable machines are offered to other spammers, both for additional spamming capabilities and for denial of service attacks. Basically, the spammers have built up quite a distributed super computer – and those contributing cycles and bandwidth don’t even know about it.”

The mysterious ~ on the desktop

I’ve been meaning to write about this for a while. Several times over the past year, I’ve worked on computers belonging to friends who are concerned that a file whose name is ~ (that’s a plain ol’ tilde) appears on the desktop. Is it a virus? Is it spyware? Nope. It’s an Outlook Express bug.

KB article 830921 explains the symptoms: “When you edit a contact in the Outlook Express Windows Address Book (WAB), a file named ‘~’ may appear on the desktop or at another location on the hard disk such as C:\Program Files\Outlook Express.” The solution? Move the file to another location. (Don’t just delete it.)

According to the KB article, this bug is due to be fixed in an upcoming service pack.

If you use Outlook, you need Lookout

For the past few months, I’ve been using a beta version of an amazing Outlook add-in called Lookout.

Today, the folks at Lookout Software released the preview version of Lookout 1.0. If you use Microsoft Outlook 2000 or later (not Outlook Express, which is a completely different product), you need this add-in. It’s as simple as that. The fact that it’s free makes it even more enticing, but I’d say the same thing if the price was $29.95, as it will be when the preview period is over.

Officially, the folks at Lookout describe their product as “a Microsoft Outlook plug-in that provides advanced, lightning-fast search capabilities to your mailbox.” Unofficially, I can tell you it’s just magic. Installation takes a minute or two. (If you have the .NET Framework installed. If not, then you’ll need to budget for the time it takes to download and install that code.) When it’s done, Lookout adds a toolbar to your main Outlook window. Behind the scenes, it builds an index of your PST file, which it updates every hour. The indexing activities have no noticeable effect on performance, as far as I can tell.

To search for something in your Outlook store – an e-mail message, a contact, a meeting on your calendar, a file attachment – you type a word or phrase into the box in the Lookout toolbar and press Enter. The search results come back at Google speed. (Lookout doesn’t index the contents of file attachments, only their names.) If you want to fine-tune the process – say, looking for a message that contains a specific word that was received in the month of February – you can open the Advanced search box and build your query.

Lookout passes the “it just works” test with flying colors. It doesn’t mess with your data files, and it doesn’t play any games with your privacy. The people who build the software are responsive, too. During the beta testing process, I reported several bugs and made a few suggestions. I got quick responses from the developers, Mike Belshe and Eric Hahn.

The more you use Outlook, the more you’ll like Lookout.

Thanks to Marc Orchant for letting me know about Lookout in the first place.

Why you should use NTFS

In the past two weeks, I’ve received panicked phone calls from two friends whose computers suddenly stopped booting. In both cases, the most likely culprit was a hardware failure, but it’s also possible that the damage was caused by a virus or by corrupted data on the hard disk.

One friend had a current backup, and the other didn’t. One is taking this opportunity to junk his old PC and restore his backed-up data onto a shiny new one. The other is about to spend hours or days trying to rebuild her system and recover data from an old, crashed hard drive – no fun.

The one obvious lesson in all this, of course, is back up your data. But a second lesson almost got lost in the noise. Both of these crashes were at least partially caused by disks formatted with the FAT32 file system. Converting their boot disk to NTFS might have prevented one or both of these crashes. NTFS uses a journaling system to keep track of all disk activity and automatically recover from errors. It is far more robust than FAT32, which runs ScanDisk if you so much as look at it sideways. It’s also more secure, but that’s a secondary benefit for most people running Windows XP at home.

At any rate, I bring this up because I can’t imagine why any sane person would continue to use FAT32 with Windows XP these days. (If you dual-boot, you’ll need to use FAT32 for Windows 9X, but not for XP.) So here’s a little information for you.
Continue reading “Why you should use NTFS” →

A phony test of spam filters

Aaron Pratt has published am open invitation for friends and complete strangers to spam his Gmail account.

How long does it take to fill up 1 Gig of storage with spam? How well do Gmail’s junk filters work? Let’s find out! Spam my shiny new G-mail account at prattboy@gmail.com Give my address to spammers, newsletters, annoying people, whatever, and let’s see how long it takes!

It’s an amusing conceit, but it reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of how spam filters work. Newsletters and annoying people are not, by definition, spam (which is unsolicited commercial email). In fact, if someone gives Aaron’s email address to a marketer (let’s not call them a spammer yet), don’t they have a right to at least send an email to Aaron asking him to complete the opt-in process? If they use a single opt-in, of course, he’s in at that point.

And from Aaron’s comments, it appears that some people are forwarding their spam to him, which in the process removes a lot of the spam’s spamminess. If I receive a piece of spam and forward it to you, it will come from me, through my email servers, with a legitimate set of mail headers. By contrast, the original spam was probably (almost certainly) sent with forged headers, through a server that was either an open relay or a hijacked zombie PC, and in either case it was probably on someone’s black-hole list.

If Google filters spam exclusively on the basis of content, they’re about five years behind the times. And I think we can be pretty sure that that’s not the case. So if a lot of spam seems to be sneaking into Aaron’s Gmail inbox, well, it may not be all Google’s fault.

Fun read. But not even close to a legitimate evaluation.

You got hacked. Now what?

Jesper M. Jahansson, Security Program Manager at Microsoft, has a new column: Help: I Got Hacked. Now What Do I Do?

Let’s just say you did not install the patches like we discussed last month. Now you got hacked. What to do?

I’ll skip to the end for you:

The only way to clean a compromised system is to flatten and rebuild. That’s right. If you have a system that has been completely compromised, the only thing you can do is to flatten the system (reformat the system disk) and rebuild it from scratch (reinstall Windows and your applications).

Are your security patches up to date?

Where do you want to go in 2006-2009?

According to News.com, Microsoft has announced a roadmap for its next generation of servers and confirmed some dates for the next version of Windows for the desktop as well. The successor to Windows Server 2003, Longhorn Server, won’t be out until 2007 or later, says Microsoft:

“The software maker said last week that the client and server versions of Longhorn are being developed in parallel, but added later that the additional testing needed for server software would cause that version to lag behind its desktop counterpart. Microsoft has a goal of shipping Longhorn desktop by mid-2006.

Expect the usual ration of snarky commentary from the Anyone But Microsoft crowd in response to the other announcement in this story: the first Longhorn service pack (2008) and update release (2009) are already on the schedule.

Ah, what the hell, I’ll start: There’s no word on when the first Longhorn virus will be shipped.

The Tablet PC dilemma

Peter Rysavy at Tabula PC has posted a long essay called Tablet troubles and stumbles – discussed and rebuked. As the title suggests, it synthesizes several recent blog entries by Mary Jo Foley and Robert Scoble that do the point/counterpoint dance about the viability of the Tablet PC.

Peter says: “Mary Jo Foley penned a great article about the troubles of the tablet. It’s a really good read, and it covers all those obvious problems that are apparent these days. Like Lonestar being delayed due to SP2 being pushed back, the confusion and disappointments stemming from the many no-shows in the retail and campus demo tours, the very poor retail marketing, and the recent renaming of the updated OS, which really nobody seems to understand. You know, all those things that the common person sees and hears out there in the real world. The ones that make him or her not get a tablet.”

I share Peter’s frustration to a degree, but I think the problem has a different cause than just poor marketing on Microsoft’s part. The Tablet PC is one of those products that you can describe until you’re blue in the face, but people don’t get it until they try it. And the average student or business person simply doesn’t get to try a Tablet PC. The floor models at your local Best Buy, if they even have one, are bolted to the shelf. Even if you can get your hands on one for a few minutes, you can’t really appreciate its utility until you start using it day in and day out. And the only people who get to do that are those who have the money and the daring to take a flyer on a new technology. In other words, the bleeding edge.

I think the build-up of momentum for the Tablet PC is going to take another couple years. I certainly don’t see it going away. Lonestar (Service Pack 2) will help a lot, because it really does improve the tablet experience dramatically. But prices have to come down enough for more people to take a gamble on this technology and allow their friends and associates to see it in everyday use. When the students on either side of you are using a tablet every day for a whole semester, it makes it easier to see why it works.

I believe Microsoft is in this for the long haul. The adoption curve will not be steep but gradual. For Peter and the others who are using the technology now, enjoy the feeling of being out in front.