Fighting viruses, defending the Net.

We’re using services, connectivity, entertainment, business, commerce of Internet during our lifetimes. One day we’ll be writing history books hundreds of years from now – this time our generation will be remembered as the generation that got online, the generation that built something really and truly global. But yes, it’s true that Internet has problem with security and privacy.

The first virus called Brain-A and it was recorded to the quarter-inch floppy disk. And specialists knows where Brain come from, ‘cause it says so inside the code. In fact, there is address, names and phone numbers: 1986, Basit and Amjad, Pakistan.

That was 25 years ago. The PC virus problem 25 years old now. Now the viruses we used to see in the 1980’s-1990’s are not a problem anymore. Now, there are no longer being written by hobbyists and teenagers. Today viruses are a global problem. Specialists in the lab found a new virus every 10 seconds.

So, where are all these coming from? Today, it’s the organized criminal gangs writing these viruses, because they make money with their viruses. Some of them buying infected computers and monetize it. There is multiple different ways, such as banking Trojans. Which will your money from your online banking accounts, or key loggers. Key loggers silently sit on your computer, hidden from view and record everything you type: google searchers, passwords, logins and sent to the criminals.

So, what happened when online criminals are caught? In most cases it never gets this far. Sometimes there is no ways to find out which continents the attacks are coming from. And even if the lab is able to find online criminals, quite often, there is no outcome. The local police don’t act, or there is not enough, or for some reasons. But things are also changing in a very rapid pace.

There is a beauty in the future of the Internet, but we might not see that. May be we are running into problems because of online crime. What we need is more global international law enforcement work to find online criminal gangs. That’s much more important than running anti-viruses or running firewalls. What actually matters is finding the people behind these attacks. We have to find people with skills who are about to become part of this online crimes and give them the opportunities to use their skills for good.

OOPS.

Of all areas of high technology ideas seem to arrive from nowhere and became established as a common knowledge almost immediately. Who had even heard of C five years ago, let alone use it? The idea attracting attention at the moment is that of object-oriented programming or oops. Oops is simply a programming language. Enthusiasts claim that new approach of oops makes software clearer, shorter and more reliable.

In the past more and more people became involved with structure programming. The principle was “top down” approach to program writing. You start by considering problem as a whole, with the claim of dividing it into separate parts. And you continue dividing it until you reach stage where each module performs a single discrete task. The total program is divided into a three structure with the initial problem at the top, and the fundamental modules at the bottom.

Languages like Pascal, C, Module-2 support a lots of control structures including repeat-until, do-while, for-next and so on. These structures determine the skeleton of algorithm.

Data is a different structure: it is purely passive as it gets between the active modules.

Oops starts from the “bottom-up” principle with emphasis of the data structure within the program. During the design process, the language is extended by defining new data types and new operations. Objects contain code as well as pure data within the same definition. There is no distinction between the data and the code which will manipulate that data.