An Epilogue

Whooa. Tired now, and sleepy. Spent a significant part of tonight marking some more assignments, capped off with a satisfying hour of alien blasting in Futurama: the Game. Anyway, aside from the car (which also turned out alright) the rest of the day was very pleasant, indeed. As I was filtering out my inbox however, something from CNet's news bulletin caught my attention:

"...The worm--also known as W32/Lovsan.worm and W32.MSBlaster--is successful not because its creator was knowledgeable about programming, but because a great many people whose computers are connected to the Internet are still ignorant of security.."

How's that for a reality check? The full article can be gotten here. I guess in a sense, the statement IS true. Quite a few PCs belonging to colleagues in the faculty got hit, and luckily most of them had already been patched. But how about the other faculties, and other less savvy users? I used to find that most regular computer users will not update their antivirus solutions, partly due to ignorance, and also because they think they'll never get hit. Anyone remember the CIH fiasco? There was a lot of downtime, then..and some people I know ended up with barely usable hard disks. Ironic that in a lot of ways, computer viruses are like their biological counterparts. Take Dengue, Malaria or even AIDS, for instance. Replace the worm name with any other easily communicable disease of the past century and we find that the sentence still works. Sometimes, some of us feel we're invulnerable." It always happens to someone else..", we think.

The truth is, to other people, we're all "someone else". Hopefully, with computer literacy on the increase, we'll see more users being aware of new threats such as these, and how to avoid them. And I'm not talking about just electronic viruses, worms, trojan horses or what-have you. I'm also talking about not sharing needles, laying off dangerous drugs, practicing safe sex (or abstinence, whichever works for you), a clean living environment or in simpler terms: Plain Common Sense. Always take a few moments to think about it (and I'm speaking partly from experience). Sun Tzu once said "know your enemy."

I'd like to think we're on the way to doing just that. Well, Friday's peeking round the corner, and the Ox will be a busy bee. As said by my favourite writer:

"Preludes and Nocturnes, a little night music from me to you.
I hope you liked them. Good night.
Pleasant dreams."

Neil Gaiman, afterword to The Sandman : Preludes and Nocturnes, 1991.