Tuesday 19 August 2003

Pic of the day: Misunderstandings come so easily. In this case, the text says "Rather, confessing and reproducing have completely different meanings!" This is because her friend has discovered that her hamster got pregnant after being locked in with another hamster, and ... well, you had to be there really. Enough about that, though!

Virus day

They crawled out of the woodwork
And they whispered into your brain
They set you on the treadmill
And they made you change your name

Candle in the Wind. Lyrics by Bernie Taupin. From Elton John's album Goodby Yellow Brick Road.

For some reason Norway became the prime target for the "sobig.F" virus. OK, so it did not make me change my name, or my e-mail address even, but I can see more clearly now why some people refuse to put up their real address. Wading through ca 200 messages, none of which were for me, had a distinctly treadmill-like quality!

***

I don't use MS Outlook at home, I use Opera which is harder to exploit. That and I update my anti-virus software regularly. So I did not catch the virus. But try to tell that to the dozens of people who got virus that listed me as a sender. "Sobig.F" will pick e-mail addresses not just from your e-mail address list but also from your temporary Internet files, where my journal lies in hundreds of computers all over the world - not that more than a couple of them write me - and then the virus uses these addresses both as recipients (which is why I get dozens of them) and senders (which is why dozens probably have got mail "from" me).

Even though the virus struck first in Norway, it came here from the USA. This is no big surprise, Norway is tightly connected to the USA. It could just as easily have exploded onto Washington or Atlanta ... Norway has less than 5 million people, but a lot of us are connected to the Internet.

More and more of us are connected all the time, and I am one of them. This could have made me a primary target for the recent Blaster worm, but there was not a trace of it. Of course, once again I guess it helps that I keep my software updated. Perhaps the NAT also helps ... Network Address Translation, which gives me another Internet address officially than I actually have. Plus I have severed some unnecessary and dangerous connections as described by Steve Gibson of GRC in his technical but useful articles on network bondage. And of course, I may be lucky too. Not all good things that happen need necessarily be my own work ... ^_^*

***

I have had problems getting my mail across to a friend for several days now, but I don't think that has anything to do with neither my computer nor viruses. It is probably a more local problem at her place. Perhaps they have blocked all access to Norway because we did not join the Iraqi Crusade or something. I mean, I was thrown out of an American mailing list after September 11, one where I was one of the main characters so to speak, and none of my Norwegian accounts ever came back in ... it is hard to guess with people who don't have much geography at school. Norway comes right after Oman on the alphabetical listings, so it is easy to make a mistake ...