Goodbye, ZoneAlarm

There's something I thought I would never say because ZoneAlarm from Zone Labs (now a CheckPoint company) has been the only firewall I would use or recommend since sometime in the mid 1990s. A series of ongoing frustrations with the program caused in part by the company's expansion into providing other services finally led me to remove Zone Alarm and replace it with the free Comodo firewall that's been on my notebook computer.

You may be wondering what ZoneAlarm did. It's been a series of small frustrations, really. As the company added extra products to the mix (antivirus, anti-spyware, and such) the core product became less and less reliable. The final straw was an imbecilic error message that I could not convince to go away.

	It's clear that I have provided a level of total trust for the AVG Antivirus e-mail scanner component. I have told ZoneAlarm that I trust it for local and Internet access as both a client and a server and that I trust it to send e-mail (outbound e-mail passes through it.) • CLICK THE IMAGES FOR A LARGER VIEW.
	Even so, several times each week I see this warning. For the first few weeks, I selected Remember this setting and then clicked Allow each time the warning popped up. That had no effect. Later, I opened the program control shown above and specifically told ZoneAlarm to allow this application to do what it needs to do. And still the warnings pop up.
	This may be something that Zone Labs can resolve, but the company is no longer interested in helping clients unless those clients are willing to pay. The choices for assistance are to use a credit card for "premium" telephone support or to post a plea for support in the User Forum ("a place to share ideas and support each other.")

As it turns out, there is a third option: http://www.comodogroup.com/. I mentioned in November 2006 that I had installed the Comodo firewall on my notebook computer. It's still there. But now it's also on my desktop computer.

Just count the votes

I'm sometimes accused of being a whiny liberal pinko when I suggest that it's a good idea for boards of elections to accurately count all the votes cast in an election. I don't understand that. Why should this be a partisan issue? Shouldn't Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives, voters and politicians ALL want votes to be counted completely and accurately? Voting machines may be counting votes accurately, but we don't know for sure. That's not just a guess. It's a fact. The United States National Institute of Standards and Technology (these are the people we trust to run the atomic clock) says that there is no way to ensure accuracy with the current crop of paperless electronic voting machines. Shouldn't we insist that boards of election adopt only those systems that are reliable and auditable? Shouldn't everyone be in favor of this? If not, please explain why not.

One person, one vote (we think): If one set out to design a voting system that prevents checks and balances, it would be hard to outdo the touch-screen voting machines being used these days by local governments across the country. That's the gist of a a new report on paperless electronic voting machines prepared by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which found software-dependent voting machines to be inherently insecure and recommended they be upgraded so that the election results they produce could be independently verified.

To read the document, click here. (PDF)

"Security analyses have proposed that a useful measure of the security of a voting system is the size of the conspiracy required to 'rig' a large election, i.e., the larger the conspiracy required, the more secure the system," the paper explains. "A software-dependent approach such as the [current blackbox system] provides no independent capability to detect whether fraud has not caused errors in the records. In principle, a single clever, dishonest programmer in a voting machine company could rig an entire statewide election if the state uses mainly one kind of system."

This is a sweeping and troubling condemnation. Certainly it's unsettling to hear from an agency with the stature of the NIST that it's impossible to determine whether paperless machines are secure or not. "A lot of us have been saying it, but to have a body like NIST, that is so well respected and nonpartisan and neutral, say it gives credibility to the argument," said computer science professor Avi Rubin, technical director of the Information Security Institute at Johns Hopkins University. "I think we will now have a lot of play with legislators who are looking at these things."

One would have thought so. But apparently the thought of replacing millions of dollars' worth of paperless machines is more terrifying to elections officials than that of a malicious and undetectable change in an election's outcome. A federal advisory panel drafting voting guidelines for the U.S. Election Assistance Commission rejected the NIST proposal on Monday. Said commission member Brit Williams, "You are talking about basically a reinstallation of the entire voting system hardware." Nice to hear that the integrity of our elections reflect the integrity of our government only when there are no costs involved.

Will Ipods be with us for long?

The Wall Street Journal recently carried an article about dying (or murdered) Ipods. Battery problems, cracked screens, and crashed hard drives are among the problems users report. Most Ipods have hard drives that are used to store music (pictures and video) and hard drives don't like to be moved when they're running. I exercise most days at the Worthington Community Center and I see a lot of Ipods. When I'm there, I usually have my XM radio which is tuned to the Bob Edwards show delayed from 8am that morning. My XM stores programs on solid-state media, so there's no fear of motion. But anything with a hard drive will eventually fail.

My younger daughter drowned her Ipod (version 3) and had to buy her own replacement. She took it, in her purse, to a concert. Torrential rain caught everyone by surprise and when she pulled her Ipod out of her purse, she noticed water inside the screen. She tried to turn it on, which is probably what sealed the Ipod's fate. Later, I was able to disassemble the device and let the water evaporate, but it never played again.

When I bought Kaydee's Ipod, I bought a second copy for me. I didn't drown mine, but the battery no longer provided more than a few minutes of play time. When I bought a replacement battery, I knew how to take an Ipod apart and put it back together, thanks to Kaydee's sacrificial device. So after several years, my Ipod is still running – with a new battery – in part because I use it in a stationery position most of the time.

But people do want to use the device while they're walking, running, or otherwise exercising. I see them regularly when I work out.

Apple has done a good job of designing the devices. Only about 5% of Ipods suffer catastrophic failures. That's not bad, really, unless yours is one of the 5%. The Wall Street Journal article quoted Steve Dowling, an Apple spokesman, as saying the failure rate is "extremely low" when compared with other electronics devices.

Complaints about the battery are probably the most common issues. Apple settled a class-action suit based on battery problems by giving owners of some Ipods credit certificates. Initially, Apple offered a $200+ battery replacement program that later dropped to $100 and finally to a more reasonable $70. The case has no screws and must be carefully pried apart with special tools. Users can buy $35 replacement batteries, but they'll need to carefully follow directions – and if you break it, well, tough.

As cool as the Ipod is, and I love mine, it's still an extremely fragile device. Eventually solid-state memory devices will replace the Ipod because solid-state devices require much less power and they are not susceptible to damage caused by being carried around. Or dropped.

The Wall Street Journal article says "As pricey as many models of the iPods are, some users seem to accept the idea that their iPods are more or less disposable." Oy! If I spend more than $200 for something, it is NOT "more or less disposable." Sheesh.

Nerdly News

Iphone: Not so fast, Apple!

"This device has not been authorized as required by the rules of the Federal Communications Commission. This device is not, and may not be, offered for sale or lease, or sold or leased, until authorization is obtained." That's the tiny text at the bottom of Apple's website. The FCC hasn't yet approved it (but undoubtedly will) and Cisco Systems has filed a lawsuit against Apple over the use of the Iphone name.

Auspicious start! According to Cisco's General Counsel Mark Chandler, "Cisco entered into negotiations with Apple in good faith after Apple repeatedly asked permission to use Cisco's iPhone name. There is no doubt that Apple's new phone is very exciting, but they should not be using our trademark without our permission.” Oops.

Cisco acquired Infogear in 2000 and the Iphone name came along for the ride. Cisco also owns Linksys and that division began selling "Iphone" devices in December 2006.

That's Apple's device on the left and Cisco's device on the right.

This could get sticky for Apple. Cisco could file a suit that might delay Apple's ability to bring the phone to market quickly. Or at all. Chances are that somebody will blink, but the question is how soon.

New spam tricks

"House passes stem-cell bill," "U.S.: Iranians held in Iraq," "Suzanne Sommers Loses Malibu Home To Fire." What do all these headlines have in common? They're all current as of January 11, 2007, and they're all being used as subject lines on spams that claim to come from news sources. They don't come from news sources, of course.

Instead – if you're gullible enough to open one of these messages – you'll find an ordinary pump-and-dump stock tip such as this:

An interesting otc stock for your consideration.
Symbol: FCCN
On: PinkSheets
5-Days Target: $2.70
Long Term Target: $9.00
Exposure of there technology to the market has generated a great deal of interest and word on the street is that they are preparing a announcment concerning several large contracts with major providers, giving them a huge competative jump in the market. (Yes, the spammers did misspell 2 words in this sentence.)

Spam and fraud are increasingly big business on the Internet. For these things to work, gullible and greedy people are required. But there seems to be no shortage of those folks – the people who think they can get something for nothing but usually get nothing for something.

That this is a business is supported by the observation that volume now drops sharply on weekends. It used to be that spam increased significantly on the weekend. Small-time crooks who did other things during the week spewed their trash on Saturdays and Sundays. Starting in 2006, I started noting a trend the other way. Weekdays, my spam catcher routinely fries 200+ spams; weekends I may see only a dozen per day.

Spam recently dropped substantially – 30% by some accounts. Security firm SoftScan says the temporary relief appears to be the result of a "broken" botnet. Botnets are groups of compromised computers, machines that have been taken over the crooks.

Some observers think that new computers people received at Christmas replaced compromised machines and haven't yet been taken over by the fraudsters. Another possible cause could be the recent earthquake in Asia that disrupted communications circuits.

Prior to the drop-off, SoftScan reported that 89% of e-mail messages were spam. About one half of one percent of the spams carries worms.

This is the only ad you'll ever see on this site. It's for my website host, BlueHost in Orem, Utah. Over the past several years, they have proven to be honest, reliable, and progressive. If you need to host a website, please click the banner below to see what BlueHost has to offer.

TechByter Worldwide receives a small advertising payment for each new client that signs up with BlueHost but I would make the same recommendation even if the affiliate program didn't exist. (If you don't see a banner ad above and you would like to know more, this link takes you to BlueHost.)