Don't be an OS Slave

Here in Korea - as I have mentioned so many times before - people are complete M$ droids. I have lost count of the number of jaw-dropping incidents, the sheer breathtaking stupidity of South Korean computer users who simply don't understand the basics of computer security.

What follows is an update of my experiences . . . please try not to laugh too much . . .

It's difficult to begin after such a long hiatus. I have not been making newer additions to my blog here because - as a working person - I have been both busy and severely stressed. But of the two, the stress has been most wearing.

I'll explain. As I put it on my Opera blog a while back (http://my.opera.com/fukudasan/blog/), troubles had been simmering here for some time, firstly with falsified documents used for getting teaching jobs and secondly the notion that some of the same people might also be paedophiles. The Korean Immigration Bureau responded by toughening up the regulations for neophyte foreign teachers in particular, requiring them to provide details such as a clean criminal record, freshly-sealed university transcripts, and we now have to have a medical each year, too. Completely new foreigners must also have an initial interview at the Korean embassy or consulate in their own countries for approval. I balked at the idea of having to apply for some printout of my criminal record (basically because I had to leave England in a hurry for my first teaching job in Taiwan, and had no idea whether there were still any "unresolved issues" back there, as I haven't been back home since late 2002), but finally applied (with great reluctance) and two months later, a clean CRC was returned. I contacted the British Embassy in Seoul and they kindly notarised it for me for a fee.

This was all very stressful. As I have grown older, I have come to have less and less faith in law generally, and I don't like it when something like this crops up and appears as a career-threatening . . . thing. It does seem to me that one cannot have faith in the legal process when the very people you elect seek election on the basis that this allows them free reign to enact the laws that they want, rather than laws which most people need. Most so-called "democracies" nowadays seem more like "plutocracies" once the divergence from the ideal sinks in.

I kept upgrading Mandriva on both of my machines (and I am still considering building a new one) and I have to say that despite any initial adjustments which have to be made or glitches which arise, each new version knocks the socks off Micro$oft. When my laptop arrived last year, I bought a wifi router and guess what? It took me a WHOLE MONTH to figure out how to get wifi on XP - unbelievable! Each time I wanted to go online, I had to connect the laptop physically with a cable.

Granted, at that point MDV 2007.0 also had the same trouble. But 2007.1 Spring was installed later and when it was, the wifi (RaLink chipset) worked out of the box, immediately. Joy? I was speechless. After all, wifi as a popular phenomenon arose under Windoze, so why should it be better under MDV than XP? But that's the way it was. So now I have wifi on both partitions . . . the difference being that it sometimes fails under XP, for no apparent reason.

Anyway, I decided that it was That Time again and got out my CC and paid for MDV 2008.1 Spring . . . and I'm still not disappointed. I pay for MDV but thereafter, I don't have a need for AV, anti-malware and other dubious "protective" software like I do under Windoze. On the laptop I now have wobbly windows and swivelling desktops (courtesy of Compiz Fusion). Why shouldn't computing be fun? I showed this to some of the kids here at the hagwon and they loved it. Try doing that under Windoze!

Ahh, work . . . let's get back on-topic. Several things made me want to add a new blog entry. One of these was the fact that we have a second long weekend in succession (courtesy of Buddha's official birthday); another was the fact that I need to finalise my latest Korean Konundrum over at Linuxquestions.org (a lengthy tract about security under Mandriva). But another thing is the pathetic way in which people who know little or nothing about computers stick doggedly to one platform and irrationally refuse to even look at another; and how these same people are completely in denial about the existence of malware.

Let's begin with something completely jaw-dropping. My Boss has a load of XP-Pro-based machines which are networked together and have access to the Internet through the same network (this may be jaw-dropping enough for many readers just as it is); the kids come to the school and have to do "nogeum", i.e. they have a Java-based app which allows them to make a voice recording and deposit it at a company server remote from the school itself. So these machines get hammered in the most royal terms; headphones with boom microphones get shredded and mice have all-too-frequent close encounters with the floor . . . ahh, but the biggest drag is that they are running Microsoft. Why? Well, listen to this . . .

I run Opera as my main browser under both L and M, and one setting under Opera is to flush the temporary files folder when the program shuts down. I normally install things like Ad-Aware and SpyBot Search Destroy on my Boss's machines, and not without good reason; I installed it on one machine a few weeks ago and a forty-minute-plus scan revealed no fewer than thirty Trojans on that one hard drive. Andrew's jaw hit the floor . . . but the following week I left it running on a machine on the floor below and came back later, thinking: "Hmm, surely there's a tick box under IE7 for flushing the temporary folder?"

So I asked one Korean coworker if she could tell me where this tick-box was.

"Ah!" she said, "Are you running anti-virus?"

"Of course." I said.

"Did you know that you do not have to do that?"

"Why?" I asked, thinking (in my innocence) that there must be some AV software on the system somewhere.

"It slows the system down. You should not run it."

"So how do you keep the viruses out?" I asked.

Response: silence. She was clueless. All she saw was the fact that scanning the system for crap slowed it down; and like so many of her compatriots, did not understand the reason why it was necessary. People here are completely in denial as much about computer viruses as they are about real ones in their bodies, and clearly do not understand their means of propagation.

To this we might add that AV software here - such as it is - often manifests as a piece of out-of-date crapware which cannot be updated because (a) it was installed from a old, standard installation disk without any real thought process being engaged and (b) the person upon whose HD it was installed (my Boss, in this case) is clearly unwilling to fork out for it, on all of his PCs, each year. The result is a mess. Every so often an "engineer" is called in because a BSV has locked the HD and prevented booting; it looks very much as if there is no effective third-party firewall in place, and no effective AV. The kids often make free use of the PCs to browse the Internet and play games, and you can bet your bottom dollar that the server they are browsing is passing around all sorts of stuff. Quite why it is that a place like my employer cannot have a network-wide policy and remote scanning of machines (as well as defragging, I swear, plus something like Smoothwall) is a mystery to me.

What all of this seems to indicate is that simply because a "certain" Redmond OS is preponderant globally, this does not equate to quality of service. On the contrary: it comes pre-installed on systems which are purchased by people who are completely clueless and even worse, may not actually be learning anything from their mistakes. It is easily hacked or infected and people are happy with their state of blissful ignorance - until the inevitable strikes.

Another story concerns another coworker - English, this time - who decided that it was A Very Good Idea to get a laptop of his own essentially for home use (as the Boss was happy to help him not only purchasing the thing, but also getting online). But, ah, it came with the Korean language pack installed, and as his Vista was a "Home Basic" version, he had to upgrade to a more expensive version if he wanted it all in English. Several times, I put it to him that he could partition his drive and dual-boot with Mandriva and avoid all of that (including scans which must surely be shortening the life of his HD), but he was insistent and in the end, actually ordered an English-language OEM disk all the way from England, and asked me to help him install it.

Of course, there was some wisdom inherent in all of this - after all, if he, as a non-Korean-speaking foreigner, could not understand which menu command he was clicking, how could he be certain of really important things like security? His response was to buy a complete new copy of the OS in his language; my response was to dual-boot with Mandriva. And I have heard NOTHING from him about which AV he is using. Nothing. Which response seems more sensible to you?

Of course, OSes are never perfect and Mandriva is no exception to this. But as I often say to people, the OS is just a tool: how well it performs depends upon how skilled you are, and you only acquire skills by learning and practice. But nowadays, people typically want everything on a plate, right away, with no thought involved. I have been amazed in the past by how many people cannot even make the simplest change in a Windoze GUI; I hated the babyish-looking default interface in XP and changed it immediately to look more like 98SE (which I miss very much, it was smaller, lighter, and faster). One small joy I have had with the aforementioned English coworker is that both he and the other (there are three of us here, you see) have been exposed to things like Opera (which he now enjoys immensely) and, more recently, AbiWord for Windows, which I often also install on the Boss's machines and have under both partitions on both of my own.

My encounter with Mandrake/Mandriva has been a learning experience which I shall never regret; I have learned so much about security and configuration and I am so pleased that it runs so well on the machine I am using now, a desktop originally slapped together in a hurry to accommodate XP Pro almost four years ago and still running better than intended - thanks to Mandriva. What saddens me is that it is so difficult to share what I have learned with others. How is it that you can have a full OS, downloadable and installable completely free, with free productivity software of all kinds, for goodness' sake, which has all of the features that the main competition lacks, and yet they still go for the competition? But then, we might say the same about Apple. I know of at least two Apple outlets here in this town, but I have never encountered anyone who admits to using it. And I would love an Apple, myself, despite what anyone says about it; it would go really well with my two existing machines.

In terms of productivity, Mandriva and Apple would keep me going all the time; but I go to a web site called http://www.osnews.com/ extremely regularly and much of what you see there is little more than a pointless flamewar between MS acolytes, Linux geeks and snooty Apple fanbois. This is wrong. It's just a machine: the real crime is that people become convinced so easily that one Swiss Army Knife is good for everyone and try constantly to convince others of this "fact". It makes no real difference if your Apple is more expensive than a bog-standard Dell if you get what you paid for; and whereas the former is not win32 and cannot therefore be infected by anything needing the win32 environment, the latter is and may be wide open. So you need a third-party firewall and about half a dozen other third-party scanners to keep the situation under control; these apps consume system resources and therefore slow it down. And if M$ decide that they don't want to make their Office suite available in the latest version for a Mac, for example, why not use OpenOffice or any other office suite?

I suppose we could end this diatribe by stating something which on the face of it is extremely obvious, but in practice is never stated explicitly: Even in a supposed democracy, we never seem to demand our money's worth but simply grumble all the time, so we can't be surprised that (for example) our democratically-elected politicians suddenly decide to increase taxes or pass other laws which we don't want - like, for example, anti-terrorist measures in the face of an apparently negligible "terrorist threat" - they take it as a given that being elected gives them an automatic mandate to do what they want. So it is also with computers - one platform has acquired dominance and if there are features we don't want, don't need or are in fact absent when they should be present by default, we should learn from the example of Napoleon's troops, and vote with our feet.

Especially when so many of the alternatives are actually free.

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