Sunday 18 December 2005

Pic of the day: "I don't like it when others are so happy"... the original reason to write virus. These days however it is about getting your credit card information and other identity details and selling them to international criminal leagues for money.

Antivirus crash

My Norton (Symantec) blew up today. It had disabled itself, told me that its integrity was compromised or something, and bade me install it anew. Except it came with the PC so I don't have the install disks, and buying it again would cost $70. Since I got a free Norman antivirus from the DSL provider (LOS), I installed that instead. But its firewall is clearly not made for people who run a bittorrent server. It spammed me with literally hundreds of messages. Even after I had allowed all addresses to enter a certain port (such as 6881, the classic BitTorrent port) it kept asking again for each address. Nor was there a configuaration file I could edit manually. Shoddy, shoddy.

I disabled the firewall after 3 reboots of the machine plus the loss of my Azureus share list. Azureus is able to survey many dozen files and serve up those that are in the highest demand and least supply. It did so for me until Norman destroyed it. I have disabled the firewall and will rely on the fact that worms don't know how to use Opera, but look for Internet Explorer and Outlook. They won't find much fodder there!

Still, I liked the feature in Norton which caught worms even if I disabled the firewall. It would recognize certain signatures and stop them before they could burrow into my harddisk. With Norman, they probably will burrow, but my unusual software configuration will likely make them useless for whoever sent them. Also I perform my net banking from a different machine which is heavily firewalled.

After The Move, the plan is to convert the old WinME machine to Ubuntu Linux and run Azureus from that. Linux is virtually immune to viruses. Not because of its advanced security - the opposite is rather true - but because it is too marginal a product to bother writing virus for. Or rather, too marginal products: A virus for Redhat might not work for Debian, and so on. Linux is all about not standardizing anything else than the data that actually need to be exchanged. And even that can be hard to agree on sometimes. A myriad of different programs doing the same things dot the Linux world. It makes the OS a nightmare to learn for old folks with no interest in "data", but it also gives a natural immunity to viruses.

I guess this "target fragmentation" is similar to living organism, in which the invention of the male made it possible to remix the DNA in every generation, making us forever a moving target for any parasite. Admittedly the parasites have caught up to some extent, but then again they had a billion years. A billion year without antivirus should be enough for anyone. A billion years without Norman Personal Firewall sounds just right to me.