Why Julie Amero Matters - Computers in Society

"Freedom begins when you tell Mrs Grundy to fly a kite" -- Robert Heinlein, The Notebooks of Lazarus Long

This is a follow-up to my previous post on the Julie Amero case.

A few months ago my son, an EO Smith student, was studying Arthur Miller's "The Crucible". He wandered around the house for weeks wrestling with the play. "What does burning witches have to do with today?" I'm sure he wasn't the only student who couldn't quite resolve the issue... yet.

The Julie Amero case is yet another Crucible being played out in small town America. It represents the eternal tension between those who live in a world they cannot understand and those whose very existence adds complexity, risk, and the temptations of the unknown chance.

Her case is a threat to computers in any classroom. Computer manufacturers such as Gateway, Dell, and others should look hard at what's going on here. You see, what teacher will ever turn on a computer in class if the risk is that they can be prosecuted and jailed for life because of malware? The answer is no one.

And her case is a threat because any international terrorist who is sophisticated enough to hijack an online PC (and they are) can blackmail, smear, or humiliate any priest, police officer, teacher, lawyer, whoever by letting the American public lynch them. Without firing a shot, innocent Americans on any stripe can be targeted and quite easily disengaged without a trace of manipulation being left behind to incriminate the real culprits.

Our obligation to the new generations of American children must be to teach them that objectionable stuff exists in cyberspace and they'll need to confront it. In Ashford, from an early age, our kids pass a poster that asserts "Character is what you do when no one is looking". At the high school level, one can only hope that message is reinforced by trusting students to exercise good internet habits.

But prosecutions such as Julie Amero's affect all private citizens who own computers. Who can explain all of the garbage that accumulates on their home computers? I'll venture to guess very few.

The key, of course, is that we engage them in the internet, and computers, and the risks that represents. We cannot, anywhere in America, assume guilt when a human is associated with automated behaviors on a computer or browser.

I hope Joe Courtney is made aware of this case and works for legislation that addresses the need for protections for Americans who are being prosecuted on morality charges as though the actions of an infected computer are willful actions of an individual who happens to be there at the time. We have long passed the threshold of being able to attribute - without a shadow of a doubt - whether a computer user is wholly aware of what may be happening under the covers of their own machine.

It is time, once again, to end the witch-hunts.

School Communications

In the past couple of years I have had the hair-pulling experience of having to deal with email attachments that come from schools. My wife is a teacher and my sons high school students but this phenomenon started when they were in elementary school.

Let me tell you why schools make parents (and fellow teachers and administrators) nuts.

For some reason, school secretaries have decided that Microsoft products are the best way to communicate. So they send the Word document based on the latest, greatest school version of Word, say, Word 2006. The trouble is that most parents and students haven't yet "upgraded" to that version so the student or parent can't read the file. That is, unless they know where to get a special reader or go out and spend hundreds of dollars on the upgrade.

But wait, even assuming you can read the file, Word email attachments are notorious for carrrying viruses and malicious stuff in them. And schools are great places to launch such things. So many saavy parents won't let such attachments be open out of fear that the computer itself is compromised.

The best way for schools to send attachments is by PDF file, a much safer alternative, for reading files.

Unfortunately, the State Department of Education often sends PDF files that have to be filled in with data. Without a PDF editor this is a nightmarish experience.

The recommendation I continue to make despite it falling on deaf ears is to send documents to be read only as PDF files. All others should be OpenOffice documents.

Why? Because OpenOffice is freely downloadable to the school, the parents, and the teachers. And, generally speaking, a less risky medium than Word.

Is anyone listening?

Free Computer Anti-Virus Software

In an article called "Two More Ways to Fight Viruses, for Free" in the Washington Post, Sunday, November 27, 2005; Page F07, Rob Pegoraro reviews two freeware anti-virus products.

You are welcome to use your own judgement about these things but I present the information to let everyone know that it's there. For anyone on a budget it probably makes sense to give it a try.

Selections from the article;

-snip-

For several years, two Czech software developers have offered free versions of their anti-virus programs to home users. These no-charge downloads don't offer every feature provided by McAfee Inc. and Symantec Corp., the two security developers whose programs come pre-installed on most Windows PCs. But when put to the same tests as software from the Big Two, they did the job almost as well and with less fuss.

Both of these freebies -- Avast 4 Home Edition, from Prague's Alwil Software, and AVG Free Edition, from Brno-based Grisoft Inc. -- can be installed only on home computers that aren't put to any business or commercial use. (Income from sales to businesses and organizations covers the cost of this exercise in Internet charity.)

These two programs share a few welcome traits. Both are relatively small downloads -- almost 10 megabytes for Avast, just under 15 for AVG -- that tout compatibility with systems as old as Windows 95. And both automatically download updates every day and allow quick manual updates.

-snip-
AVG's interface is in general far cleaner than Avast's, putting all the relevant controls and status indicators in one window.

Neither program's screening was quite as far-reaching as that offered by competitors -- for example, Avast and AVG allowed me to preview a .zip archive containing a virus using Windows XP's Compressed Files tool, while Symantec and McAfee's software denied all access to that .zip file.

Also, neither Avast nor AVG will stop spyware that you choose to download and install on your own -- each pronounced a freebie, spyware-riddled download as safe. So you'll still need a separate anti-spyware utility such as Microsoft's free Anti-Spyware for Windows 2000 and XP.

But if you define an anti-virus utility's job as ensuring that no virus sent your way can run on your computer (as opposed to also ensuring that no virus can even land on your computer), these two programs were just as capable as their pricier competitors. And while I've gotten more reader reports than I can count of PCs immobilized by malfunctioning Symantec and McAfee software, I've yet to hear of such trouble with Avast or AVG.

Whichever virus scanner you use, make sure you keep one other active -- the one that came pre-installed at birth: your brain.

Even the most rigorously updated security software can miss a just-created program that hasn't been entered into virus databases, but any reasonably aware human should still be able to spot a con job when it arrives.

Be as skeptical and smart about strange files as you would any other strange solicitation, and you won't have to rely on somebody else's software as your only line of defense.

The urls are AVG and Avast.