It’s not new but this chart from Sophos shows just how much of the bad stuff is coming from China. The chart shows the top ten countries hosting malware (viruses etc) in June. China is usually top, and is likely to remain so with nearly 60% of the world’s bad stuff sitting on its computers:
Most of these websites are legitimate sites — they’ve just been hacked by the bad guys. Someone one day is going to make a lot of money cleaning up those computers.
Is the problem with journalism that it always focuses on the increment?
Was reading Jeff Jarvis’ piece on the revolutionary impact of the iPhone — not, I hasten to add, about the iPhone as an item (the fetishism surrounding it may mark a lowpoint in our materialistic age) but about the citizen journalism coverage of the absurd lines forming outside shops by those eager to be an early buyer (yes, this, too, may mark a low-point in our cravenly submissive consumer culture, but let’s not go there. At least for now.)
No, Jarvis was more interested in this real-time coverage and what it represents. He rightly suggests this is real-time coverage on a par with the Virginia shootings — something that Duncan Riley, who writes good stuff at the usually puffy or snarky TechCrunch, has already called eventstreaming.
Jarvis is right: the subject matter aside (Virginia Tech shootings vs absurd consumer lines outside stores that don’t sell out) this is a good dry run for something more serious. But it’s Jarvis’ other point (if you’ve read this far, sorry for the wiggly lines getting here) that caught my attention: the tendency of media to pick holes in the potential of this:
Problems? Of course, there are. I never sit in a meeting with journalists without hearing them obsess about all the things that could go wrong; that is, sadly and inevitably, their starting point in any discussion about new opportunities. I blew my gasket Friday when I sat with a bunch of TV people doing just that.
Very true. Journalists do this all the time. That’s because we’re trained to. Not a bad thing, actually, being able to spot problems. But it has a downside. And quite a big one. It’s this:
Journalists are taught to identify “news”. In some situations, it’s obvious: A bomb goes off in Baghdad; two guys drive a flaming SUV into Glasgow Airport; Apple launches a cute phone. All news, and no one would disagree.
But it’s the rest of the stuff that gets problematic. Most journalists don’t have these kinds of stories to work with so they’re forced to look for them, and that mostly involves prying apart things, people, organizations, situations, points of view and seeing some incremental change or difference that merits a news story, such as U.S. family terrorized by possible phone hoax (Cellphones Terror Weapon Horror!)
So Wikipedia, for example, gets coverage not for the millions of great articles in there and the millions of people who go to it first for information, but the few articles that are wrong, badly written, libelous, mischievous or biased. That, for a journalist, is the news story. (Wikipedia Unreliable Shock!)
Some companies and PR folk know this tendency and exploit it: Several security companies base their business model on the idea that there are enough journalists out there to write scare stories about mobile phone viruses for an industry to emerge (I wrote what I thought was a piece somewhat mocking this scaremongery only to get another company in the same business email me thanking me for my article and suggesting that I write about their product, which rests on all the same scaremongery that I was trying to pooh-pooh.)
I am not saying journalists only write negative stories and not positive ones. I’m saying that we journalists tend to focus on kinks in the same picture, magnify them and then call it news. This is nothing new, but we should be smart enough to realize that if it’s not just us journalists making the news anymore, we have to be ready to accept the notion of “news” is changing.
Just as we can see lots of things going wrong with citizen journalism, and fixate on those to the exclusion of the bigger picture, we may well be missing the bigger picture that technology is giving us.
Phone spam feels like it’s getting worse.
I and my wife have been receiving numerous calls from the local arm of ANZ Bank — a bank I am happy to identify by name because I’ve sought comment from them without reply for nearly a week now. Our mobile phone numbers were probably sold by another bank or possibly by the cellphone company.
Nokia researcher Jan Chipchase starts picking up SMS and phone spam on Hutch in India within a day of activating his SIM card, and finds that the company is three times as slow at removing his number from their spam lists:
Locals in the know send a text message to opt out, a process that, according to Hutch’s automated response takes at least three days to activate: “We respect your privacy. Please give us 72 hours to include your number on our Do Not Disturb list. Thank you” and an unspecified amount of time this to filter through to the companies that already have you on their disturb list.
I’m quite aggressive at fighting SMS and phone spam, but not always successful. One nightclub spammed me regularly until I got upset. Now they don’t. (Embarrassingly, it turned out to be owned by a friend of mine.) Now a lot of people here don’t answer their phone unless they recognize the number on the display.
Still, there’s nothing is quite as bad as this case of cellphone stalking in the U.S., where one family claim to feel harassed to the point of paralysis through their cellphone. A good clear-eyed view of the mess here.
This week’s WSJ.com column (subscription only) is about mobile viruses — or the lack of them. First off I talked about CommWarrior, the virus any of you with a Symbian phone and Bluetooth switched no will have been pinged with anywhere in the world.
CommWarrior isn’t new: It has been around since March 2005. But this isn’t much comfort if you find yourself — as a lunch companion and I did — bombarded by a dozen attempts to infect our phones before the first course had arrived. So is CommWarrior just the thin end of a long wedge? Yes, if you listen to the Internet-security industry. “I can personally assure you that mobile threats are reality, and we have to start taking our mobile security seriously,” says Eric Everson, who admittedly has a stake in talking up the threat, given that he is founder of Atlanta-based MyMobiSafe, which offers cellphone antivirus protection at $4 a month.
But the security industry has been saying this for years about viruses — usually lumped together under the catchall “malware” — and, despite lots of scare stories, I couldn’t find any compelling evidence that they are actually causing us problems beyond those I experienced in the Italian restaurant.
For reasons of space quite a bit of material had to be dropped, so I’m adding it here for anyone who’s interested. Apologies to those sources who didn’t get their voices heard.
Symantec, F-Secure Security Labs and other antivirus companies call FlexiSPY a virus (though, strictly speaking, it’s a Trojan, meaning it must be installed by the user, who thinks the program does something harmless). “In terms of damaging the user, the most serious issue at the moment is commercial spyware applications such as FlexiSPY,” says Peter Harrison, of a new U.K.-based mobile-security company, UMU Ltd.
Not surprisingly, however, Mr. Raihan isn’t happy to have his product identified and removed by cellphone antivirus software, though he says his protests have fallen on deaf ears. “We are a godsend to them,” he says of the mobile antivirus companies. “They are fear-mongering as there is not a significant problem with viruses in the mobile space.”
I first wrote about Scoble, then the Microsoft Blogger Enfant Terrible back in 2004 or something. Maybe even earlier. But he was the breath of fresh air the company needed at the time. Now the ‘markets are naked conversations’ thing is the main meme, the conventional wisdom the smart people (smugly) get. Now Scoble’s on his own doing podcasts, still famous for being, well, Scoble, and just posted something that made me realize the game may already have changed:
Steve Jobs is MANUFACTURING great PR by keeping everyone’s mouth shut. Heck, I’ve met some people I KNEW had an iPhone and they were so scared of retribution or consequences that they wouldn’t answer a single question.
It’s an interesting possibility: That the real lesson from the iPhone episode is that companies will throw their levers into reverse and batten down the hatches (and mix a few metaphors on the way.) Corporate secrecy rules again. What is the point of opening all your windows at the behest of bloggers if great publicity is possible by controlling the flow of information so it is not a trickle?
Let’s face it: Jobs has perfected a form of self-censorship that is the antithesis of everything Web 2.0, social media, the blogging revolution and the instincts of every decent, right-thinking person. And it works. And we love him for it. Who isn’t going to draw a lesson from that?