Editorial

Wie is de eigenaar van je computer?  Het lijkt een simpele vraag maar denk er even over na voor je antwoord.

De meeste mensen antwoorden onmiddelijk "ik" en logisch gezien zou dat ook zo moeten zijn.  Maar de werkelijkheid is een stuk complexer.

Dit is een vertaling van mijn oorspronkelijk artikel uit 2007, het origineel (Engelstalig) vind je hier.

Het klinkt bijna als heiligschennis om dit te zeggen omdat de meeste mensen geloven dat anti-virussoftware de belangrijkste en zelfs enige oplossing voor het probleem is (ik zie zelfs steeds vaker de vraag naar AV software op Linux opduiken terwijl er bijna geen Linux virussen bestaan).

Who actually owns your computer? It sounds like an easy question, but think about it for a moment before you jump to the answer.

Most people will off course be inclined to answer "Me!" and logic would say they are right. But in reality, this is increasingly not the case.

There's a new war on terror about to hit off in my country.
This time, the terrorists are not armed with guns or bombs, they are armed with economic weapons of mass destruction.

It happened to me again. I fell fool of the poor service quality of an IT shop.
I could have known this by applying Nocturn's law to (IT) purchases.
I was recently looking for a place that sold Linksys routers in my area. Unfortunately, these are not very common in Belgian IT stores so I could only order it from a local store which I previously had some problems with. I did this because I needed the router very urgently (before friday that same week).

I was reading an online paper today (GVA, in Dutch). I immediately noticed an article titled "Windows Vista cannot be cracked" (translation of "Windows Vista niet te kraken").

I opened the article, and not only does it not cover the topic at hand (the security of the OS), but it fails several accuracy checks, giving the general public a false idea about what is going on.

The article deals with MS new plan to put piracy controls in Vista that will disable (or at least severly cripple) systems that are detected as illegal. It makes no mention off course about the security of the OS.

I made the mistake of buying an Asus motherboard (A7V133a) a couple of years ago. This is the story of what happened as it appeared on my original site unixmafia.port5.com.