PC myths: the truth

Posted on 14 Jul 2008 at 15:02

 

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"Most products failing missed tiny numbers of samples of polymorphic items - various types of infected hosts and generations of infection from a source sample from the WildList people." Most big-name packages score over 99 per cent in detections, but there is still a chink for virus-writers to exploit.

These are just the viruses that have been reported and fingerprinted. The threat of zero-day attacks, where bugs get out before a patch has been developed, remains high. "There's a frightening amount of new stuff out there. As many as 10,000 new threats can be reported every day," says Hawes. "Security companies are getting better at predicting new threats through heuristic scanning, but they won't spot them all."

Saddam Hussein built PlayStation WMDs
Credibility rating 0/10
Origin US 'news' website

In his rush to build weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) using processors found in Sony's PlayStation, Saddam caused a shortage of consoles in the run-up to Christmas 2000.

WorldNetDaily revealed that Iraq was putting together a supercomputer to work on ballistics designs and planes for delivering chemical weapons. According to the report, at least two US security agencies were investigating shipments of 4,000 PS2 consoles to Baghdad in the build up to the Iraq War.

"One expert estimated that an integrated bundle of 12-15 PlayStations could provide enough computer power to control an Iraqi unmanned aerial vehicle," the news site quoted a source as saying. "Most Americans don't realise each PlayStation unit contains a 32-bit CPU, as powerful as the processor found in computers."

UK intelligence services reportedly pooh-poohed the claim as "cobblers". Apart from the fact that building a supercomputer from odds and sods would take years of development, PCs were widely available in Iraq, so why bother with the soldering iron?

Apparently, Saddam never did get round to that WMD thing, but he did get the top score on Tank Elite at the Republican Guard knees-up.

Unplugging a memory stick without stopping it can damage data
Credibility rating 4/10
Origin Early thumb drive policies

USB flash drives are brilliant removable storage devices, but there's uncertainty over whether simply to unplug rather than 'stop' the device when you have finished transferring files.

Turning off USB keys via the Safely Remove Hardware option grew from legacy Windows systems and older memory sticks. Information was cached and written to the drive, so stopping the transfer mid-flow could cause corrupt files and problems with the operating system.

Since Windows XP Beta 2, the default setting for transfers allows you to remove USB drives safely and conveniently. "Safe removal was for when information is being written," says Mark Bernier, research and development engineer for Kingston Technology. "For speed, PCs can write to cache and shoot it to the USB stick, but if you removed the stick while data was in the cache you could get data loss. Since Windows XP, Microsoft makes the default setting to optimise quick removal, so you can just pull it out."

You can still change the settings to optimise writing for speed by changing the policies on the drive, but, says Bernier, "if you change it so it writes faster, and pulled out a USB drive without stopping it, you could corrupt it and might have to reformat it". Anyone still using Windows 2000 or earlier should manually turn off the flash drive.