The Bis Key Chronicles

Q: If I leave a computer running, but doing nothing but setting there, is there any danger of getting spam, virus or other infection? In other words, doesn’t the user have to be actively surfing on the web to get unwanted stuff?

A: Technically you are never “safe”, but in general there is less risk if you aren’t actively opening naked pictures of Britney Spears or surfing porn sites.

There are a number of ways a computer can be attacked and not all require “active” participation.  Of course, the most common these days is “social engineering” attacks where the evil-doers get you to open a file or enter personal information by offering you something really interesting (naked pictures) or pretending to be someone else (phishing).  

However, if you are bored sometime look at the logs from the firewall closest to the Internet (in my case my wireless router).  Every few seconds some bot is doing penetration tests on my system, looking for obvious holes.  It blew me away the first time I saw it because it is constant.  Assuming you have a good firewall you should be fairly safe.  

There are certain services that run constantly on your system.  If these interact with the internet (e.g., update service) and have vulnerabilities (e.g., buffer overflows) your system can be attacked without you actively participating.  

In reality, these attacks are rare and there is a cottage industry of security “experts” trying to build their reputations (and thereby their businesses) by finding them before the low-life punk in Moscow does.  

There is a lot of good information at http://www.microsoft.com/protect/default.mspx.  There are other sites devoted to computer security issues that go into the gory details.  I would recommend reading up on rootkits as they are currently the scariest thing out there (other than the NSA) that I’m aware of.  

I have been playing with the new search engine called Tafiti and luv the functionality! Tafiti, which means “do research” in Swahili, demonstrates the types of Web applications that can be brought to life with the new Silverlight technology.  I found very quickly some people who had been blogging about my blogs which I had somehow missed before! And I like being able to move searches to a shelf system to the right side of the screen.  :o)

The site helps people use the Web for research that spans multiple queries and sessions by helping them visualize, store and share the result.  Search is becoming increasingly specialized, across different user scenarios, vertical subject areas and entry points.  What works well for simple destination searches doesn’t necessarily work as well for more sophisticated research projects.  Tafiti uses Silverlight for richer visualizations in conjunction with Microsoft’s Live Search engine.

The site is live as of this morning; you can try Tafiti following these steps:

• Go to http://www.tafiti.com
• Enter a search query
• Drag interesting results to the shelf on the right.  Each box on the shelf can be used to save a related set of results.  Shelf contents can be saved and shared. 
• Use the carousel at the bottom left to do different types of searches (image, blog, etc.)
• Visualize your results using the Tafiti Tree View.

There is a podcast about Tafiti on Channel 9 and a video on on10.net that might be interesting too.