This morning, while I was out for a walk, my computer was sending spam to everybody I’ve ever corresponded with. I’m sorry if my computer spammed you. I thought Macs were above that sort of thing.
I’ve been sending email for 23 years now, and this is a first for me. I’ve always wondered why some people are so prone to spam and viruses, while other people (like me) aren’t.
Are the more prone people more naive and impulsive, clicking willy-nilly on anything and everything they see? Are they more adventurous, seeking out more questionable sites and downloading riskier material? Are they more optimistic, believing themselves to be virtually immortal, and therefore not using precautions?
I changed my email password and I’m scanning my computer right this minute to see if I’ve got a virus. So far it’s scanned over half a million objects and they’re all squeaky clean.
While my computer was spamming everyone I’ve ever corresponded with, I was out walking and listening to one of my half a million objects. It was Episode One of a podcast called The Partially Examined Life. It’s about philosophy, and it’s done by several guys who met in university while working on their PhDs. Their plan was to do philosophy for a living, but then they got disillusioned and changed their minds and quit school and turned to other things, like IT and communications. They’ve created this podcast for fun. As they put it, the podcasts are like the conversations that take place in the bar after the lectures.
Yesterday I listened to episodes 49 (Foucault) and 50 (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Persig). Today I started at the very beginning of the series, with Episode 1, which was an hour and a half of Plato.
You don’t really need to know anything about philosophy to get something out of this. My own background in philosophy, while not extensive, is unusual.
When I was 15 I was introduced to my foster father, Jean-Paul, who told me he was a philosophy professor.
“What’s philosophy?” I asked.
Well! He was so impressed with that question! He thought I was asking the BIG question, “What IS Philosophy?” but really I was just asking “what’s philosophy?” because I was only 15 and I hadn’t heard of it. (And even after our mutual friend gently cut him off after he’d waxed eloquent for 20 minutes about the nature of philosophy, I still didn’t know what it was.)
While I was living with him, his wife left us and he fell into a deep depression. In retrospect, I believe he had untreated bipolar disorder. He spent weeks at a time barely able to function. During one of these episodes, he was sobbing on the kitchen floor and he told me that he couldn’t bring himself to tackle the stacks of essays that needed to be marked, and he was afraid of getting fired.
So I offered to mark his essays, and he was so desperate he accepted my offer. I was maybe 16 years old by this time, and I still didn’t know what philosophy was. The bulk of what I now know about philosophy, which is not very much, comes from that stack of second year essays.
…it’d be a good idea to call your computer repair-person, if this virus / trojan got past your anti-virus software in the first place it’s unlikely your software will pick it up after it did its thing. I have friends who have been caught by the same type of virus who sent out two or three broadcasts after they were sure the virus had been dealt with.
1. keep your own email address in your ‘contact folder’, this way you’ll know when the spamming starts.
2. close your email account while it’s not in use. Don’t leave it open in a tab while you surf in other tabs.
3. keep your contact email addresses in a text file on your desktop. Most of these viruses use your contact folder to send out the spam, if you don’t have a contact folder there’s no spam.
Last week I was helping a neighbour buy a laptop and I got into a discussion with the salesperson about antivirus software. I asked her which program she used. She chuckled and said she didn’t need one, she had a Mac! I nodded in understanding… I guess we’ll all have to rethink that.
I’m glad you don’t really want me to buy medication on the internets!! Hahaha, thought that wasn’t like you!
I took philosophy in University for a couple of years and a 16 year old untrained perso could probably do pretty well marking the crap we spewed out in all our serious thinkingness.
That whole “Apple’s are virus free” thing has always been a myth. The only reason there are so many more attacks on PC’s than Apple’s is because Apple products, until recently, have made up such a tiny fraction of the marketplace. Apple computers make up roughly 10% of the consumer market, and less than 5% of the business market. If someone wants to spread a virus to the most computers possible, they design it for a PC.
The myth is so pervasive that most Apple users I know don’t even update their anti-virus software.
Unfortunately for Apple users, with Apple products getting more popular, there has been an increase over the past year in viruses designed specifically for Apple’s.
Daily Mail, 23rd May 2011:
Headline: The curse of being too popular: Apple Macs now seen as a ‘soft target’ for spreading viruses
…one new ‘scareware’ program is Mac Defender, which is also distributed under various similar names including Mac Protector.
It infiltrates a Mac computer via a fake Google Images result or an Internet pop-up that convinces victims their machine is infected by a virus and that they must download anti-virus software to delete it.
In some cases, the pop-up doesn’t even wait for the user to refuse its request, and simply downloads the virus directly onto the user’s computer.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1390014/Apple-Macs-seen-soft-target-spreading-viruses.html
Use a free software operating system (http://distrowatch.com). And use a free software email package like thunderbird, or use a command line email package like pine. That will give you the best odds of staying malware free.
I have been listening to philosophy podcasts here abc.net.au/radionational/programs/philosopherszone/
and here philosophybites.com/
There, they interview real philosophers and talk real philosophy. I think I may have actually listened to them ALL now!