The paradox of computer security is that we must consider the human element, which is that although security is a big concern, its something people expect to just work. We dont expect our cars to blow up because we put a lot of effort into engineering them. Similarly, we expect security to just work with little investment by us.

However, it does require careful designing to make this happen. One part of careful design is accepting reality as it is. In the case of security, this is that users are forced to know at least a dozen passwords to do the minimum required for having an online presence. Its no surprise that, after wasting a few hours finding lost passwords with the kind of barely functional features available on most websites, they start using the same password everywhere. I bet the numbers higher than 61%.

Elephants in the computer security room

You may know that Owen Plant is featured in this site which, despite massively low readership, attempts to give those of you that do read the skinny on whats interesting or at least fun. Owen qualifies in both categories. Hes a reggae singer who writes folk songs with the sporadic vocal style of Cat Stevens, and something all his own in how he slices together a melody, picks out a harmony line and fits it all to a hard to pin down beat. Now with two free as in beer DRM-free open source reggae/folk songs available on the website.

Owen Plant

Allison Tartalia is an old friend now making it in the world as a singer-songwriter in New York City. Her music can best be described as throaty folk with jazz rhythms and ecclectic influences. Putting her background in drama to good use, she has taken this form of music and given it a storytellers quirky, vibrant gaze. She has three DRM-free tracks for download on her web site.

Allison Tartalia

What Yahoo! really lacks is an integration strategy as fundamental and simple and flawed as Googles. Googles idea was that measuring the popularity of a link should determine its fitness as a search result, or at least get close enough. On top of this Google built the idea that search results for a keyword mean advertising dollars for that keyword, and built the first distributed advertising technology cutting out all those media buyers and agencies.

Interestingly, although both of these companies have changed the way the world works, traditional media, mainly magazines and television, continues to influence the net more than any other factor. If its on TV, or in specialized magazines like People, National Geographic, Harpers, Forbes and so on, it will be big on the net, and whoever is mentioned in those articles will inevitably get many people linking to them because they read about it or saw it on big media.

I think Yahoo! should return to its original model of doing things, in which it created a directory where real humans picked sites on the basis of expertise. This was from the Yahoo!-era of the net, before Google, when things were more idealistic and simpler.

Yahoo! Circling the bowl?

However, this shows us a dark side of open source software, which is that most of it clones existing software. OpenOffice is a Microsoft Office clone, InfraRecorder clones Nero, Linux clones UNIX, certain text editors that wont be named clone their commercial variants. The problem I have with this is that doing for software what Nero did to CD-burning should reward those who do it, or were going to see fewer people wanting to do it.

There were CD burners before Nero, but they were disorganized. Their interfaces were awkward, arbitrary or primitive. They didnt offer sensible features like asking the user certain questions, assuming some things by default and making others that were rarer into menu options. Nero put it all together into one package. Seven years later, InfraRecorder clones that package, adding a few touches of its own, some of which are improvements, some of which are dumb, and some of which are the software interface equivalent of using synonyms to avoid plagiarism.

InfraRecorder and the Dark Side of Open Source

I fought blogging for years. I thought and still think it trivializes journalism into clever sayings and trendwatching. But, it's also the easiest way to get any content on a web site, and that's why the web has embraced it. As a result, for all things Christopher Blanc related, I've created the Christopher Blanc Blog, called Bolg after an anglicized word from a favorite work of literature. So, if you're bored... please come visit.

I can only promise thoughts that I believed were interesting at the time of writing, on topics as diverse as information technology, culture, interaction design, fiction/literature, technical writing and technical communications, web development and web design, and of course the ego and his friends.

To find out if things are good, bad or ugly, you have to try them. Now some things I'm not going to try, like hard drugs and using IE to surf for serial numbers, but others I'm game for the first time. One of these is about to be launched. The Christopher Blanc blog is one of these experiments. It will probably fail but I want to see how it shakes out, and what all this fuss is over this newfangled "blogging" craze.

We all got the message over the last two years: stop using Internet Explorer, because its ActiveX control friendliness is prone to security errors.

Most people then switched to Mozilla Firefox.

What's amusing is that these browsers both descend from early-1990s engines. IE is a grandchild of Spyglass, and Firefox is the great-grandchild of NCSA Mosaic and the grandchild of Netscape Navigator.

There is one browser authored anew, with new standards, and the explicit goal of being small and fast and solid.

http://cybernetnews.com/2007/09/03/cybernotes-exclusive-opera-95-features-video/

Check out the new Opera 9.5. I've been using Opera since 8-series and have been impressed to the point where it is my preferred browser. Its userbase also does not have the fanatical, ugly, supercillious chip on its shoulder that Firefox users often do.

Impressive features:
- Search every site youve visited
- Faster page rendering than any other browser
- Full standards support
- Restore closed windows
- Synchronize bookmarks remotely

Quite impressive! You can download it here:
http://snapshot.opera.com/

The browser wars that raged first in the 1990s, until Internet Explorer won, and were revived when its security problems drove people to Mozilla (in the same way Microsofts continued inability to secure older installations of Windows XP, and the slow process of perfecting Windows Vista) are now in turn revived, because Opera has upped the ante. For the first time since 1997, the browser is substantially changing in function and becoming closer to the general information peruser and manager many of us have always thought it would be.

Originally from The browser wars end or begin again

As someone who writes computer security related fiction, I have a vested interest in seeing what others do in my quest, which is somewhere between "desired profession", hobby and religious fanaticism. What I've found divides nicely between the technically accurate but boring, the technical abstract but exciting, and the complete fantasy that makes no sense.

Dan Brown's "Digital Fortress" was the first book that really shocked me. It fits into the latter category, for combining research gleaned from Scientific American and Slashdot with a whopping dose of unrealistic fantasy. It left me with the same feeling I had after watching the movie "Hackers." Wow, this one has a PCI bus, and my eyes wandered after that.

I'm accustomed to some of the better writing from the second category, like the William Gibson and John Brunner cyberspace fantasies, and have only encountered the first type on the net as unpublished work of interest to a small community. I think the divide comes about because of a need for stories to romanticize reality, and technical accuracy pulls in a different direction.

For example, if I want to write a post-modern style story, I need to find a meta-metaphor to give people that sense of profound, life-changing theory about the story. This means I'm going to have to contort my writing around the idea of an XOR, or character escapes, or the idea of layers in packeted networking. It's not a terrible gig, but it's by nature very cerebral.

It's too much easier to create The Matrix instead, where we get the hacking out of the way early on so the kung fu and cryptic concept salad dialogue can take over. But not all of us have given up, and there are some out here who believe that good science "equals" good fiction, in the way the older science fiction authors like Heinlein, Wells, Dick and Bradbury did.

Christopher Blanc writes computer security related fiction and "post-postmodern" fiction by night, and works in the IT industry by day.

Although people know me as a writer of fiction in my personal life, my day job is fixing computers, so when someone I know needs work done, I often get the call. Recently someone I used to work with as a computer consultant called me up to help install a home PC for a sibling in town. Because I'm nice and/or stupid, I did it.

The experience was not bad at all, since the user was kind and understanding. What stuck in my head however is how not ready for use the average Windows installation is. They try to get the user going with some kind of video-based training, but that isn't going to work for most people who find it horribly tedious and would rather play. My approach is different: I clear out the unnecessary, organize the computer appropriately, and then let 'em rip so they can learn by playing.

Here's a list of important steps:

1. Disable all crapware, even if it seems useful. Rip the installed programs list down to the bare minimum.
2. Update all drivers. I've rarely had to roll back.
3. Set the system swap file to be twice the size of the memory installed in the machine.
4. Add a firewall, install FireFox or Safari or Opera to replace Internet Explorer, and remove virus scanners.
5. Add Pegasus Mail, Thunderbird or Opera mail to replace outlook, and disable HTML mail and .exe, .vbs and .js attachments.
6. Clear all extra icons off the desktop. They need My Computer, My Documents and the Trash and that's it.
7. Uncheck all protocols except TCP/IP in the network configuration.
8. Set up a user account with Administrator rights, but keep the Administrator account in case they need bailing out.
9. Set up a guest account for drunken friends, idiots and clueless family members to use. You can set the password to TOIDI or NOROM to really fool 'em.
10. Run HijackThis and remove all unnecessary start up actions.
11. Go through your task manager, using this guide or one like it, and remove unnecessary programs.

This will take you the better part of three hours, but if you do this and then backup the system, you will have set your friends on the path toward sanity instead of confusion. They'll thank you someday.