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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).

It almost sounds like sacrilege to make this statement and most people today seem to accept anti-viral software as the first and only solution the the problem (I even see an increasing demand for AV sofware on Linux where almost no virusses exist).

Every bit that travels through the internet is scanned and scanned again. A mail is often scanned at the sending computer, then at the mailserver of the sender, again at the mailserver of the recipient and one last time at the receiving computer. Yet, despite this over-agressive approach, virusses continue to infect and damage computers worldwide.

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.

Both Sony and the mainstream media are doing their best to prove that they just don't get the problem.
When I first published my articles on the Rootkit that Sony CD's installed on consumer PC's, I hoped that the big media would pick up on the issue behind it.

Although Sony received a huge amount of bad press about this, very little of it cuts to the hart of the real issue.

As the story unfolds, it seems that the rootkit was initially discovered by a PC repair shop that reported it to F-Secure for analysis at the end of September 2005.

On October 31, it was revealed by researcher Mark Russinovich that Sony's audio CD's contained a form of spy/malware called a rootkit.

I wasn't going to write about this intially because most of it has been rehashed in the popular press already. But the events have taken such a turn for the worst after the response of Sony to the mess they created that I cannot be silent.
Sony admitted that most CD's it sold over the recent years contain software to prevent them from being copied on Windows-based PC's (reports from consumers list arround 40 infected titles).

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.

Yesterday, the capital of my country (Belgium) was shaken by the thread of terrorist activity near the buildings of the European commision in Brussels. I just visited this area a day before on business.

After the initial announcements in the press that something was happening, some government departments responded with fake explanations of what was happening, I can only imagine that they did this to avoid panic.
The Belgian authorities where warned by the Spanish Intelligence service that there was a thread of a car bomb near the European Commision yesterday.