Dave's Tech Blog
A Third Eye on Technology

I came across an article in Network World magazine that goes over five common Internet scams and thought this needed to be shared with everybody.  Please click here to read the article.

I was just browsing Ubuntu Forums recently and someone wanted to get a second opinion to see if it were indeed true that Linux doesn’t need anti-virus software.  I humbly obliged them with my own answer on the matter:

You don’t need anti-virus for Linux. Others in here will do a better job at explaining why this is, but in short, the OS has a big advantage here due to it being open source. The operating system is a product of crowd-sourcing, much in the same way as Wikipedia has been since it first showed up several years ago. And much like the highly-moderated articles of Wikipedia that require membership and an approval process for changes made to locked articles, so to is a strict moderation that goes on with the source code for Linux before it’s allowed to become part of the official distribution. Everybody is out to identify possible flaws or weaknesses or bugs in the source code and it’s much easier for any single person to make a contribution because the OS and much of the software that runs on it is open-source.

In Windows, the users don’t have the luxury of being able to dig through the source code to look for flaws. All they can do is report symptoms of problems to Microsoft, and the limited number of paid programmers that do have access to the source code then have to decide what flaws are the most important and which ones don’t merit their attention. So with Windows, a bug that affects only 500 people won’t be as important as a bug that affects 500,000 and probably won’t be fixed at all. But if it were Linux and if just one or two of those 500 people were a programmer who had access to the source code and figured out how to fix the problem on their own, the other 498 would actually stand to benefit from a patch that ends up being released thanks to the work of that one developer who had some spare time on his hands and decided to do something about a bug simply because he could.

So throughout the long life of Linux there has been this much more diversified, seasoned, multi-cultured source for development feedback that has helped to make it a much stronger, more “mature” operating system, especially in terms of the way security was designed. If there was ever a person out there who found a way to circumvent that security, there is at least one other who knows exactly how to repair the flaw. The reason viruses are able to best Windows is because their developers can only patch so many holes, and the ones they don’t have time to get around to end up being exploited the most. Third-party software developers that make Anti-Virus software make a killing because Microsoft is unable to handle this responsibility all by themselves, and even still, the best anti-virus software isn’t perfect.

The reason anti-virus software isn’t necessary in Linux is simply because the OS and its updates that patch vulnerabilities do the exact job anti-virus software in Windows is meant for: Prevent unwanted, malicious software or network activity from compromising the system. If there were a flaw in Linux found that allowed something like that, it wouldn’t be the job of some third-party software to safeguard the user against but the job of the OS itself. The reason anti-virus software even exists is simply because Microsoft is unable to handle the immense work load of patching their own source code as well as a crowd of Linux geeks can.

Am I saying Linux is perfect and invincible to viruses? Might it become more susceptible to viruses in the future if it were to ever become as popular as Windows is today? I would think that with an increase in the number of users would also come a complimentary increase in the number of clever developers that would only help to increase the number of eyes available to find flaws and fix them. Saying that Linux would get a lot of viruses down the road because more people are going to use it is like saying Wikipedia will become rife with widespread, uncontrollable vandalism because more people visit it. It hasn’t happened yet, and very likely never will happen because of the way it is designed, moderated and improved upon by the hive mind.

EDIT to add: As mentioned in the first comments below, I failed to acknowledge that while Linux is more robust in the area of security, nothing can compensate for the weakest link in this arrangement:  The User.  A novice user could easily be enticed by a sinister website  that tells them to download a deb file which might contain malicious code and absentmindedly install it or execute a destructive command from the terminal window because they didn’t know any better (like rm -rf ~/*).  Fortunately for novice users there is little if any need to actually venture out into uncharted territory like a terminal window or strange websites to get software, thanks to the official repositories that contain a HUGE collection of software which continues to grow.  I’ve even heard you will soon be able to purchase proprietary Linux-based software through it.  Unfortunately, little can really be done to compensate for user negligence, and trying to compensate for all possibilities would likely result in too many annoying alerts and prompts for the average user (like when Windows Vista sprang the UAC on its users).

There are only a couple of circumstances that I believe anti-virus software on a Linux platform would might be worth having which involve helping to protect other Windows systems.  Say you got an email from someone that contained a virus but you never knew it was there and forwarded it onto someone else who uses Windows, resulting in their day being ruined and you being blamed.  So that’s one scenario.  You might also have a Linux server administrating a network of Windows based workstations which you have read/write access to and use the server to conduct scans of these machines over the network, but at the expense of finite network bandwidth and CPU cycles on the server.

All good things come to an end…  Fortunately, Virtual Dave isn’t one of them.  I’ve recently made the decision to drop my own remote assistance software in favor of using a new open-source VNC launcher called Gitso.  This launcher has a few benefits over the previous iterations of my older “Virtual Dave” software:

• Lightweight:  It’s written in Python and loads very fast.
• Simple:  Sometimes losing a couple “bells and whistles” is a good thing.
• Multiple platforms:  Gitso works on Windows, Ubuntu Linux and Mac OS X.
• Active Development Pipeline:  A feature request I submitted was approved for the next version less than a half hour after I submitted it.
• Open-Source:  Free as in freedom.

There are a lot of features in the coming versions of this software I have been looking for in a VNC tool for a long time.  And who knows, I might learn a thing or two about programming in Python with this little tool.

Several months ago I bought my girlfriend a laptop to use for school and replaced the Operating System that came with it with Ubuntu. She likes it but feels that it’s kind of an inconvenience to have to type in her account password to apply the latest software updates. Further, it’s also a hassle to even be made aware that there are updates available to be installed in the first place. When the Update Manager would pop up she’d exclaim, “Ugghh! I just did this yesterday.” So I decided to find a way for Ubuntu to apply ALL updates silently in the background without even making the user aware they were being applied.

Step one:

First you need to click System -> Administration -> Software Sources. On the updates tab make sure “Check for updates: ‘Daily’” is set and “Install security updates without confirmation” is set. Then close this window.

Step two:

Open a terminal window and paste in the following command:

gksudo gedit /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/50unattended-upgrades

This will open a file in your text editor. In that file is a section that looks like this (which will vary slightly, depending on the version of Ubuntu you are using):

Step three:

Remove the slashes “//” from the next to last line, like this:

That’s it!

Save and close the file and then restart your system. From now on all updates for Ubuntu will attempt to install in the background automatically without any intervention required by the user. You won’t even know they are being applied unless a system restart is required as it is after kernel updates.

However, if you feel it’s necessary, you can have the system automatically restart itself if one is required.  This is achieved by removing the slashes at the bottom of the same text file, in the portion which pertain to auto-restarting, and changing the value at the end of the line from “false” to “true” to enable it.  But I wouldn’t recommend it unless you know what you’re doing.

For several months I’ve had a server with a monitor, keyboard and mouse  plus a wireless router cluttering the back side of the livingroom in my home and decided to migrate this stuff into a room that’s at the far end of the house (“far” end meaning “further away from where my computer is, aka the cave).  So the only thing left in the living room was a cable modem which now connects to a 25 foot long Ethernet cable that leads to the router in the next room.

The drawback I knew I’d probably run into with this is the good chance that my wireless network connection would nearly be crippled.  I don’t have a big house, but I was going to be adding a couple more walls in between my computer and the router.

Now, I don’t go around talking too much about playing video games, but lately I’ve been on a streak of Left 4 Dead 2 because my best friend Jordan asked me to get it so we could play together online.  Games like that demand the best of connections that you can muster, and adding another gap of lag between myself and those game servers got me worried.  I haven’t yet tried to do multiplay since the move, but did notice that my wifi said that my signal was now “Very Low”.

So I pulled out my new Nexus One cell phone with Android Linux on it and fired on an app I got from the market for free called Wifi Analyser.  It kind of looks like this:

Above is just an example image I found with Google. What this program will show you is a line graph that displays the radio frequency usage of nearby wireless networks.  You see, wireless networks are kind of like walkie-talkies.  If some kid in your neighborhood is using the same radio frequency as you, your signals will obviously overlap and interfere with each other.  This app is made to quickly show you what frequency ranges are the most used in your immediate vicinity.  In my case I had quite a lot of overlap.  So I logged into my router, changed the wireless channel from 6 to 11 and that made a world of difference.  Windows says my signal is “Very good” now.

If you don’t know how to log into your router a good website to consult about this is portforward.com.  This site is intended to be used as an interactive guide that shows you how to login to your router and change your port forwarding configuration.  So the only part you need to pay attention to is the first half that shows you how to access your routers configuration settings.  The last half can be tossed aside.  Router configuration is a lot like browsing a website that has different check boxes, fly-outs and text fields for you to manage.  Just click around until you find something that says “wireless” and look for a setting that pertains to the radio channel it’s using.  The default for most routers these days is 6, or sometimes “auto”.  If it’s auto, you can at least experiment with it to see if based on your observations there is a frequency range that is more open and less cluttered than one it’s currently using.  And if it doesn’t seem to help your performance any, the change can be reversed.