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I'd certainly be willing to offer classes, but this problem is not going to be solved -- ever -- until those people start seeing some consequences to their lack of security. In this case, grandma calls her ISP because she can't get online. Her ISP says "Oh, you can't get online because your machine's infected." She takes it to her local geek relative or computer shop to get it cleaned, so there is now one less bot in the world.

Yes. Now weight the pretty much non-existent benefits of that against the harm caused to grandma.

Maybe she keeps it clean. But maybe, a few weeks later, it happens again. Sooner or later, she's going to decide that enough is enough and decide to make a point of learning something about security.

Yeah. Namely, that it's impossible - even actual experts get hacked. Thus grandma either gives up computers completely, or continues to go through the cycle. And the same goes to everyone else too - yes, including you. One of these days a bot will contact your machine before it can apply an update, and then you're p0wned.

Even if you use Linux, your web browser is bound to have bugs, and those allow bots to your machine - or perhaps one manages to break into a package repository. And the kernel itself has had holes before, and likely still does.

Yeah, it does kind of suck for grandma, but what's your alternative, other than botnets forever?

All ecological niches get fulfilled, that's one of the basic laws of nature. The Internet is an ecosystem, botnets have a niche, they will continue to exist as long as computers can run code not approved by some authority and talk to each other. And so what? They're a nuisance, nothing more.

The existence of malware is the price for having open computation platforms, and the existence of botnets is the price for an open Internet.

I'm gonna' say: consume it quitely without much hoopla.
http://www.gulker.com/2006/04/09.html
Keep in mind how far away from the Sun the Earth is in that image.

It's been poking about a few times, and at least it appears to obey robots.txt and use anti-hammer tricks unlike another IP rights company (albeit tagged to another market altogether) cyveillance who use false user agents to hide their activity, don't look for robots.txt and can sometimes hammer your entire website off the web if you have a low cap (say daily rather than monthly). Kudos to people who build polite bots. Have they been crawling your site?

Sun, you can keep your Java Desktop. I want Looking Glass.

Cyveillance is also very sneaky, and they abuse the USER_AGENT string.
see this for more info.

Direct link to the Looking Glass post... and a hi-res version of the jpg (it's a time exposure made from my seat of the projection screen... mileage may vary etc.)... just for /. comments readers.

Direct link to the Looking Glass post... and a hi-res version of the jpg (it's a time exposure made from my seat of the projection screen... mileage may vary etc.)... just for /. comments readers.

There is a photo on http://www.gulker.com/ If you scroll halfway down.

click here

I just took apart my Mac LC & LCII. The both had AMD chips in them, not the processor, but some other chip was labeled with an AMD logo on it.

Also, for more WiFi info, these are some good links...

http://melbourne.wireless.org.au/wiki/?Apple

http://www.personaltelco.net/index.cgi/WirelessLin ks

http://www.gulker.com/2002/10/10.html

I believe that most wireless access points are just PCMCIA wireless cards with some extra software and hardware controlling it, that's why prices of these are coming down so much.