The Life of Lou Ruppert

Sharing the wealth

The presentation on Mac Trojans went OK today. Most of the audience had read my previous stuff on the topic, so I only needed to review the material. The great thing was that a lot of people had really good questions. I’m used to speaking in front of a non-technical audience, so it was refreshing to hear well-thought-out questions. Nice work guys (and gals).

The new bits boil down to timing issues. The trojan, as currently implemented, is a bit sloppy. Where Windows trojan horses are nearly invisible and integrate seamlessly into the operating system, the Mac trojan is still rather amateur. So, as it’s updating the /etc/resolv.conf file once a minute, the normal process that produces that file will step in from time to time and produce a thin veneer of normalcy. Depending on when you look, you’ll get two different results. To break past that façade, you need to be familiar with the crontab command. Running sudo crontab -l will let you know if the administrator has evil scheduled to run once a minute or not.

Hoarding the wealth

I mailed the RAM off to 18004memory today and was abruptly reminded of why I hate the US Postal Service. I shouldn’t hate the postal service, because my father was a postman before I was born, but I’ve grown to hate them nonetheless. It started with them leaving expensive books out in the snow in my front yard, years ago. And now they’re all stingy with the packing materials. It used to be that if you needed an inch or two of tape to seal up your package, they’d provide it. Now they steadfastly refuse to help, because they are in the business of selling packing materials. Postmaster doesn’t like your packing job, or wants to inspect the package? Too bad. Either you go back home to reseal the envelope, or you pay them a few bucks for a fresh roll of tape. Come on, people! You have a monopoly on first class mail. Can you really not spare five cents worth of tape once a year for some of your customers?

It’s a prime example of how Americans have forgotten how to do business. Yes, granted, you’ll save five cents on having to help your customers do business with you today, but the bad taste the customer has gotten in his mouth from your ridiculousness means that he won’t likely use your services tomorrow. Look at all of the delivery companies that have sprung up in the last decade or so. Why are they here? People are less interested in preserving the customer relationship and making money in the long term, and more interested in the monkey-level instant figures. The USPS of ten years ago would have said “Hey, grab a piece of tape. We’ve got your back. See you tomorrow.” The USPS of today simply sneers and says “We don’t care who or what you are. We just care about your money. As long as the quarterly figures line up, we don’t care if you get hit by a bus on your way out.”

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