Grey Matters

Today’s Arizona Republic, on the front page, says: an, “estimated 12 million undocumented immigrants” are in the U.S. I’ve seen that number a lot and it doesn’t seem to have changed over the last few years. There’s no attribution; we don’t know the source of that number.

The Arizona Republic on Oct. 31 (p. A10) also said that the Border Patrol has caught more than one million illegals annually for at least seven years, and that for every one caught experts say, “two or three make it through.”

Do the math.

Using the lower estimate, if only two evaded capture for each one caught over the last seven years, that’s 14,000,000 right there. I’m pretty sure there were illegals here prior to seven years ago as well. Time to revise that “estimated 12 million” number.

“Everyone is entitled to his own opinion but not his own facts.” — Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, (D., NY)

You may have heard about ‘Net Neutrality’ or perhaps ‘Internet Neutrality’. You may have heard nice things about it. I’m telling you it’s a bad idea. The idea behind Net Neutrality sounds good, unless you understand how networks work.

The Competitive Enterprise Institute addresses ‘Neutrality. Their concern seems aimed at pricing flexibility — the lack thereof — under neutrality rules.

As someone in the Internet business, I can say with certainty that some services require priority and should be given special treatment to get them delivered promptly. You may not have used a VoIP (Voice over IP) phone yet, but I guarantee you that you will want VoIP packets (groups of message bytes) delivered promptly. Try to imagine a conversation on the phone with the other party cutting in and out because the message stream is interrupted periodically to handle other packets ‘equally’.

We’ve probably all experienced jerky video because something got held up.

ISPs and other network managers understand that some Internet services require that the network packets associated with that service be given priority. We give such packets priority. We restrict others as being of a lower priority and not time sensitive. Some things we block entirely so as to be able to deliver the things that matter.

Under innocuous-sounding “Net Neutrality” rules, I could not prevent some kid who’s downloading pirated movies from hogging so much bandwidth that other customers cannot collect their email.

Sent to my Family & Friends mailing list on 2006-02-04

Greetings from sunny Mexizona.

Though this site plugs a book, it makes a valid point. After watching the flash movie, ponder this: 2005 marked the second year running that Jose has been the most used name for newborns in the state of Arizona. And Jose has been the most used name for newborns in the state of Texas for the last 18 years in a row.

(This link no longer leads where it did.) <http://usawakeup.org/HowToDestroyAmerica.htm>

I’ve been saying for years that Mexico is taking back California and the southwest. I can see a time when California will be Mexican in nationality, not just in population.

There is no denying that the flood of Mexicans and Central/South Americans into the U.S. is changing the country. The only question is whether the changes are good/neutral/bad. The author of the book plugged by the flash movie believes it is bad for the U.S. and makes some valid points. That any of you disagree with him makes them no less valid.

America rose to greatness by accepting just about everyone that wanted to come here. The key was assimilation and shared values, seeking the American Dream. In America you could work hard and provide for your family — make something of yourself — free of political and religious persecution.

But the key was assimilation. The great melting pot. America attracted the best and brightest from all over the world. The lure was simply freedom, the freedom to succeed. This was good for America.

In the not-too-distant past, America’s immigration policy required that immigrants have a marketable skill or have a sponsor who would be responsible for the newcomer. This too was good for America. But immigration policy changed to favor ‘family reconciliation.’ If one member of a family gained entry, then members of his or her family would be given preference in immigration over those with merely marketable skills and no connections in the U.S. So, for some decades now, we have been admitting immigrants with no means of support. That, I think, is not good for America. We have enough home grown Americans unable to make ends meet; we don’t need to import any.

Despite a very liberal legal immigration policy, we still get lots of illegal immigrants. (Yes, I know it’s preferred in some circles to call these ‘undocumented aliens’. Euphemisms are often employed to hide the true nature of something.) What can you say about someone whose very first moments in this country demonstrate a willingness to violate U.S. law? Will they continue to break laws or will they become productive members of American society? Only time will tell, but they are off to a bad start.

This willingness to violate U.S. law has been rewarded several times by granting amnesty to all illegals. This just encourages more people to enter the U.S. illegally. We have enough home grown American lawbreakers; we don’t need to import any.

And what is the lure now, for immigrants both legal and illegal? For some, that lure is free stuff. Welfare, food stamps, free education for their children, free medical care. Some policy makers in the U.S. believe that America owes the world a living, that our wealth is the cause of other countries’ poverty. For many illegals, making it to America is like winning the lottery, hitting the jackpot. Do you think that your taxes should be spent supporting such people? Do you owe the world a living?

It’s one thing to come to America to succeed through one’s own efforts, to earn a living. Quite another to have it just handed to you. Government provides many incentives that attract freeloaders. That’s not good for America.

The problem with illegal Mexican immigrants is the government policy towards them. Government does not provide incentives for assimilation, it does just the opposite.

By accommodating language differences, you dissuade immigrants from assimilation. One need look no further than Canada to see people in opposing camps, divided by language. It’s not that hard to imagine a separatist, Spanish-speaking California seeking to break away from the U.S. and join with Mexico. When Californians identify better with Mexico than Kansas, what would you expect to happen?

By treating peoples of different ethnicity differently, government sets us against each other, competing for the attention and largesse of government. “Affirmative Action” — a euphemism for discrimination — creates many more victims than people it helps. Affirmative Action is predicated on the belief that the problems of non whites are caused by whites. Affirmative Action will gain you a preference for being black or having a Spanish surname, no matter that you just entered America yesterday. Affirmative Action is a very divisive policy. Affirmative Action is bad for America.

Government often does things that are bad for Americans, all with the best of intentions. Being well-intended, however, makes them no less bad for American society.

Some of you reading this may think me a hateful bigot for wanting everyone to be treated equally under the law. If you think that illegal Mexican immigrants are not having a deleterious effect on Americans, you are only fooling yourself. A number of hospitals in Arizona have simply gone out of business because they could no longer afford to treat (as required by federal law) the illegals that showed up in their emergency rooms.

I know people who live along the southern border and report illegals coming onto their property, breaking into buildings, helping themselves to anything they come across and setting up camp, even butchering the livestock they find and then leaving a mess when they move on.

These are not people I want as neighbors and, I suspect, neither do you, though the more politically correct among you would deny it, even as you locked your doors.

I have nothing against Mexicans, not even the illegal ones, providing they respect the rights of others and pay their own way. But if they want to live and work in the U.S., then they should at least learn English. Certainly I would endeavor to learn Spanish if I moved to Mexico, or French if I moved to France. I would attempt to assimilate. And I wouldn’t expect hand-outs.

Differences divide. To the extent that government encourages (even celebrates) differences, it is divisive and bad for America. Government should be neutral, play no favorites. Favoring Suni over Shiite, Hutu over Tutsi, Protestant over Catholic — or black over white — leads to trouble and bloodshed every time.

Until government policies are fixed, illegal immigrants will continue to be a problem for the U.S.

—
“The study of history is a powerful antidote to contemporary arrogance. It is humbling to discover how many of our glib assumptions, which seem to us novel and plausible, have been tested before, not once but many times and in innumerable guises; and discovered to be, at great human cost, wholly false.” — Paul Johnson

Written 2006-02-02

On a server administrator mailing list to which I subscribe, one discussion thread involved the TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) difference between Macs and Windows PCs. The talk had turned to how the inadequacies of Windows provided employment for so very many people. Several network administrators said that their support staff had doubled or even tripled after making the switch from Mac or Unix to Windows. (Entire companies, of course, exist solely to help people cope with the deficiencies of the various versions of Windows.)

Here are two quote from one poster, a Systems & Networks Architect.

Note: ‘colo’ means a co-location facility, a place you send your servers to be located near a major Internet connection.

“At a notable colo in NYC a notabl search engine company has racks and racks of WinBlows machines. They constantly need rebooting. So much so that they have three dedicate ppl at the colo at all times, on stool/chairs w wheels rolling up and down the aisles rebooting machines as they crash. This keeps quite a few people in a nice warm environment and off the street too.”

and

“Our USTS side of the business does support Windows systems, some at some very large nation-wide, distributed enterprises. They love us. Why? Because every day we save their company from disaster. It doesn’t matter that the systems we moved them from never had these issues and were stable and kept their business running reliably, to them we’re magic b/c we can save their ass every single day. And we do.“

Another poster wrote:

“This exact thing happened at a site I worked at a few years back.
Same deal, the shop was primarily unix based (engineering/manufacturing company) and was using a single unix mail server to support roughly 12000 users. New CIO [Chief Information Officer] gets hired and tells the IT [Information Technology] staff to move to Exchange [Windows Exchange mail server] so they did. It took 23 Exchange servers to do that same job and they had to hire a staff of like 8 people (2 per shift) to sit in the ops center 24/7 to reboot the proliants [Compaq ProLiant servers] that went down. Funny.”

When I hear of managers who make the switch from more reliable Mac or Unix systems to Windows, I have to believe that when they were growing up, their mothers never asked them, “If all your friends jumped off a cliff, would you jump off too?!?”

“A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing.” — Emos Philips

Written: January 17, 2006

I recently received email which said: “… you sent an email awhile back about how some people say that Macs do not have the viruses written for them because there are so few Mac users… I’m starting to hear that a lot at work lately… If you have it handy, can you re-send… I’ll be sending it around work to at least two guys I work with.” In response to this request, I’ve expanded on the email I sent previously to try and clear up some things and to specifically address the “Macs-have-no-viruses-because-of-low-market-share” issue.

_____

This guy offered a bounty for proof that a Mac OS X machine had
ever been infected by a virus. http://wilshipley.com/blog/2005/09/mac-os-x-viruses-put-up-or-shut-up.html

All of the viruses I find on my Macs are Microsoft viruses (peculiar to Windows OS, MS Word macro viruses, etc.)

I’m not saying that Mac OS X will never suffer a virus. Nothing is ‘impossible’ — there are just things we haven’t figured out how to do yet. And no one has thus far been able to figure out how to propagate a Mac OS X virus.

That’s not to say there’s no ‘malware’ — software that can do damage, if run. But as for real viruses propagated all by themselves from one Mac OS X machine to another? Hasn’t happened yet.

There was this thing called ‘Opener’ which is a root kit, not a virus. If someone were foolish enough to install it on their system (it cannot install itself, unlike viruses) then you’ve just given away control of your machine.

I operate my own Internet servers and I permit my ISP to use one of my DNS servers for his clients’ recursive lookups. Twice in the last year I have alerted him to spambots on his clients’ PeeCees — ‘zombied’ Windows machines that had unwittingly downloaded and, without knowledge or participation by the machine’s owner, installed a spam sending program so they could churn out hundreds of thousands of spam per day. I was alerted by the huge numbers of MX (Mail eXchanger) lookups done by these infected Windows machines.

As noted previously, software has to be installed by an admin user on a Mac. Software cannot install itself. I’ve never heard of a zombie Mac. (Go ahead and google ‘zombie PC’. Now compare that to ‘zombie Macintosh’)

I subscribe to a number of Mac mailing lists. The topic of anti-virus software often comes up. The discussion thread typically goes like this:

Q. What’s a good anti-virus program for Mac?

A. You don’t need one.

Q. But all my friends said I am crazy not to have anti-virus software.

A. All your friends probably use Microsoft Windows. There are lots of Microsoft viruses for Windows. There are no known viruses for Mac OS X.

Q. But there are Mac anti-virus programs on the Market. Why, if there are no Mac viruses? (Hah! Gotcha!!)

A. The best reason to run anti-virus software on a Mac is to prevent passing on Microsoft viruses to your Windows using friends. Though Macs are immune to Microsoft email viruses and such, you could inadvertently pass on a virus by forwarding an infected email or document.

There are a few viruses for the ‘classic’ (pre-OS X) Mac OS which Mac anti-virus software will catch as well, but if you run only OS X, this should not be an issue.

Another reason to run anti-virus on a Mac is to flag Microsoft macro viruses. But you can configure your Mac Microsoft Office applications to simply not allow execution of macros and be protected from these.

Mac “anti-virus” software also looks for Trojan Horses and other malware of the non-virus variety. For the most part, if you simply don’t install software from untrusted sources, you can remain malware free. 

Q. So I’d run anti-virus software on my Mac primarily to protect people using Windows?

A. Yup. The great vast majority of computer viruses are rightly called Microsoft viruses. If you do not use Microsoft products (operating system, email program, application programs) then you really don’t need anti-virus software on your Mac.

Q. Well, why aren’t there any Mac viruses?

A. Mac OS X is based on Unix. Unix got its start in 1969 and really took off in the ’70s. As a multi-user operating system, security has been an important factor for decades. Many versions of Unix, including the BSD Unix which is the basis on Mac OS X, are ‘open source’ software. That is, the source code is available for everyone to examine. This means that many, many people are able to check the code and look for vulnerabilities. Because of this openness, there are very few vulnerabilities and those which are found are quickly patched.

As a result, Unix-type operating systems tend to be quite secure. A virus simply cannot install itself and propagate to other Mac OS X systems. They lack the permission to do so. If a virus cannot spread, there can be no outbreak. Remember, to be a ‘virus’, the software must be self-propagating.

Q. But isn’t Apple’s low market share a factor? If Macs were more widely used, they’d be targeted more by virus writers, right?

 A. Targeted? Perhaps. But that’s not he same as being successfully infected. The whole point of creating a virus program is, after all, to succeed — to infect lots of computers. You can go on the Internet and download do-it-yourself virus writing kits which will help you create your own Microsoft virus. There are so many security vulnerabilities in the Windows operating systems that the process of writing a virus can be semi-automated. Pick which security hole you’d like to exploit and go from there.

As for targeting OS X, what would be the point of aiming for a target you cannot hit? When’s the last time someone “targeted” Fort Knox for a robbery? More often targeted are liquor/convenience stores which are ‘doable’.

The last viruses for Mac were in the pre- OS X days. Go ahead and google “Macintosh Virus” and you’ll find lots of hits from 1999-2000 and talk of Systems 6 and 7. There were a couple of pretty good outbreaks way back when, showing that Mac IS targeted when it’s doable. There have been no outbreaks on OS X because no one has figured out how. Contrast that to even the latest Windows XP OS.

Even if it were true that the only reason Macs have no viruses is the low market share, isn’t that enough of a reason to switch to Mac?!? Do you really care WHY Macs are virus free, as long as they are? If you were in an area where malaria was a common affliction, And your friend in Arizona said malaria wasn’t a problem there, would you respond: “Oh, the only reason malaria isn’t a problem in Arizona is that there are so few mosquitos there”?

Q. So if I’m using Mac OS X, I’m completely safe?

A. Not quite. There are ‘malware’ programs out there — programs that will do your OS X Mac harm if you install and run them. But that’s the key: install software only from trusted sources. There have been a few ‘proof-of-concept’ developments that showed that a Mac could be harmed in some way, but they all relied on being run by someone with permission to do so. I’m not aware of any malware that can install and run itself on OS X by simply visiting a web site, as can happen on Windows operating systems, for example.

As for true viruses for Mac OS X, there have been none. Software simply cannot install itself on your Mac OS X computer, run itself and spread to other Mac OS X computers the way it can on Microsoft OS computers.

In summary, Microsoft products are the ‘vector’ that allows computer viruses to spread. The more ‘Microsoft’ you have on your computer, the more you need anti-virus software.

This ends our Q & A.

I’ll end with some A-V related excerpts from a Mac mailing list.

At 6:11 AM -0700 10/6/05, Jim wrote:

http://securityresponse.symantec.com/avcenter/vinfodb.html is the searchable database. I just searched for the word Macintosh and got 2,869 documents found, top 500 by relevance.  I have obviously not read all of them to see how many reference actual threats to a Mac.

Here is what is in the defs for NAV 10 on my Mac, dated 10/5/2005 say:

33,658 Virus names found, 70,732 total virus definitions.
I can then sort by type.
Hypercard Virus — 12 (I doubt most Mac folks still use Hypercard)
Macintosh file infector–34
Macintosh Trojan Horse–19
Macintosh Worm–2
Macros–too many to count. These are cross-platform on Office documents.

PC Virus–too many to count. I don’t know how many of these might be a threat under Virtual PC because I don’t have it. Running a Windows AV program under VPC might be recommended for those who do but again I don’t have it.

There is no breakdown listed as to how many are OS X although I recognize a few related to concept viruses or worms that have not been seen in the wild but have been mentioned online.

 
At 8:29 PM -0800 11/27/05, Randy wrote:

There are *no* viruses for OS X specifically. There are literally thousands of Word and Excel macro viruses, but you can keep them from running by enabling “macro virus protection” in preferences in those programs. (Business users, who frequently receive legitimate Word and Excel documents with embedded macros, may prefer to have an anti-viral program that can actually detect and clean a malicious macro from a document, and preserve the document.)

There are two or three Trojans/worms for OS X (not just “concepts”), but they are incredibly rare, and they aren’t self-propagating, so you are unlikely to encounter them, and only then if you engage in downloading from peer to peer networks.  Trojans for OS X include Opener/Renepo, the WordInstaller Trojan, MacCowHand, and MP3/Concept. MP3/Concept does not exist in the wild as anything other than a proof-of-concept.

http://www.sophos.com/virusinfo/analyses/maccowhanda.html

http://www.macintouch.com/opener02.html

http://securityresponse.symantec.com/avcenter/venc/data/macos.mw2004.trojan.htm

http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/index.cfm?

NewsID=8406http://www.intego.com/news/pr41.asp

http://www.securityfocus.com/archive/1/395107/2005-04-03/2005-04-09/0

As for MP3/Concept, when someone posts a proof-of-concept on the Internet, my personal feeling is that it is sort of like providing a construction kit for psychopathic geeks to create malware. Thus, the mere existence of such a proof-of-concept on the Internet heralds the need for increased security.

There is no spyware for the Mac that can be disseminated via a Web site or e-mail, so it is highly unlikely that you might become infected with spyware.

There are classic viruses (for OS 8/9) that can infect Classic running under OS X, but they have become very rare because they were designed to propagate via floppy, and Macs haven’t used floppies in ages. (Folks don’t seem to share user-recorded CD’s like they did floppies.)

So, your chances of encountering any malware at all, if you are running OS X, is minuscule. Most Mac users feel that using anti-viral software is a waste of money. I have used anti-virus software religiously for at least the last couple of decades, and its been a long while since it flagged anything other than a Windows virus that has shown up as an e-mail attachment. (Windows viruses are completely harmless to Macs.)