Today is Chris Pirillo’s birthday. If you’re new to the internet or have just emerged from a cave, here’s a brief introduction;

Chris Pirillo (born July 26, 1973(1973-07-26) in Des Moines, Iowa) is the founder and maintainer of Lockergnome. He spent two years hosting the TechTV television program Call for Help before parting ways with the company. He also hosted the first annual Call-for-Help-a-Thon on TechTV. He now hosts videos on several internet sites, including CNN.com, YouTube and his own website.  (Wikipedia)

Chris was born the year after I graduated from high school.  That means today he is 35 and I’m as old as dirt.

By virtue of my advanced age I was a geek while Chris was still learning to go potty by himself.  In 1976 I was working with a Cray supercomputer and various in-house built systems at the National Security Agency as a member of the Army Security Agency.

In the 80s and early 90s I was living in Idaho, far from any connection to the world of computing and computers.

Chris, though, was busy learning all about technology, gaining the knowledge he would later employ to help others find their way on the newly created information superhighway.

Chris had already made a place for himself on the internet by the time I got involved in personal computers.  He had a successful email newsletter, had written a book and started an online community forum for those who needed answers to their cyber-questions.  The forum was where I first encountered this whirling dervish of all things tech.

Since joining the forum I’ve unashamedly followed Chris around the web, getting involved with nearly every activity he’s started.  I do so because I admire Chris on both a professional level and a personal level.

Not only is he a walking knowledge base of Windows (and now Macintosh) systems and online communication, he uses every venue imaginable to share that knowledge with everyone.

In the personal, non-tech world he’s a wonderfully compassionate person.  When I couldn’t find a way to attend my dad’s funeral a couple of years ago, Chris made it possible.  He’s been a true friend on so many levels that if he were to retire from the internet tomorrow I would still count him as one of my few close friends.

And yet I still have never met him in person.

Chris is a class act.

The internet is a complex world.  Chris has dedicated himself and his vast Lockergnome enterprise to making that world more comprehensible to the rest of us.

Head on over to his web page and wish him a Happy Birthday.

The biggest story to break this week will likely receive little mainstream attention. It may not even interest a great number of people. I mean, it’s all so geeky and weird, what do all those strange terms mean?

Even Lou Luddite would agree that like it or not, computers, networks and the internet form a real infrastructure within our society from top to bottom. From bank to boardroom, we depend on the internet and our local networks in the same way we depend on our other utilities; it’s just supposed to work. We don’t have to reboot the refrigerator (yet), when we turn the tap we expect water. When we open our browser we expect to find the internet, just the way we left it.

Recently our relationship to the internet was threatened not by thieves but by a flaw. An error (found and corrected) could have allowed hackers to cause massive mayhem on anyone using the internet.

Many people were involved in this effort, and I applaud them all.

Internet flaw could let hackers take over the Web

Computer industry heavyweights are hustling to fix a flaw in the foundation of the Internet that would let hackers control traffic on the World Wide Web.

Major software and hardware makers worked in secret for months to create a software “patch” released on Tuesday to repair the problem, which is in the way computers are routed to web page addresses.

“It’s a very fundamental issue with how the entire addressing scheme of the Internet works,” Securosis analyst Rich Mogul said in a media conference call.

“You’d have the Internet, but it wouldn’t be the Internet you expect. (Hackers) would control everything.”

The flaw would be a boon for “phishing” cons that involve leading people to imitation web pages of businesses such as bank or credit card companies to trick them into disclosing account numbers, passwords and other information.

Attackers could use the vulnerability to route Internet users wherever they wanted no matter what website address is typed into a web browser.

“People should be concerned but they should not be panicking,” Kaminsky said. “We have bought you as much time as possible to test and apply the patch. Something of this scale has not happened before.”

Kaminsky built a web page, DoxPara Research, where people can find out whether their computers have the DNS vulnerability.  (Source)

It appears that one of the cults within the church of technology is known as the early adopters. They’re like the scouts in the Wild West. “OK, pull the wagons around. We’re making camp here tonight.”  And another portion of untouched wilderness gets slashdotted.  But those in the lead are also those who find game first, get to eat first, survive.  They also get status and respect.  They probably got laid a lot.  OK, there are some differences between early adopters and scouts.

There’s another, practical reason to be an early adopter.  If you’ve put any effort into establishing your identity online, one sure way to “reserve” it is to register for any site that sounds even halfway interesting with your preferred username.  By joining a number of alpha sites and those new to the web, you sort of become an early adopter by default.  Of course, if you want to become an influential early adopter,  you’ll have to stick around the site after you’ve joined and provide feedback, commentary, invite others.  Those people seem to form an A-List; often it’s the same people at several sites.

I confess, I’m an early name reserver on a few sites.  In a textual environment, my name and pen name are a commodity, one that I want to be constant across the sites I enjoy visiting.

You know what it is?  It’s a flashback of my days with AOL.  One name, many sites.

Oh dear, now I feel so unclean.

The sophisticated mass infection that’s injecting attack code into hundreds of thousands of reputable web pages is growing and even infiltrated the website of the Department of Homeland Security.

While so-called SQL injections are nothing new, this latest attack, which we we reported earlier, is notable for its ability to infect huge numbers of pages using only a single string of text. At time of writing, Google searches here, here and here showed almost 520,000 pages containing the infection string, though the exact number changes almost constantly.

Other hacked sites include those belonging to the United Nations and the UK Civil Service.

The attack causes infected sites to redirect visitors to destinations that attempt to install malware on vulnerable machines. At time of writing, the malicious payloads attacked vulnerabilities that already have been patched. And in any case all three of the redirection sites were down, possibly because they were unable to handle the demand. But should the attackers get their hands on a newer exploit - say, one targeting a zero-day vulnerability in QuickTime - it would be relatively easy for them to swap out the payload.

One reason the infection has spread so widely is the attackers have managed to find a single attack string that seems to work on tens of thousands of different sites. Most web applications are custom -built for a particular site, so attackers likewise have to custom design attack parameters to exploit weakness. Not so here.

“These guys look like they’ve found a methodology to get a successful SQL injection generically across [many] websites,” said Jeremiah Grossman, CTO of WhiteHat Security, which helps companies secure web applications. “That right there is like a skeleton key.”

While the number of pages that have been infected is high, not all are able to launch an attack once a user visits them, according to Roger Thompson, chief research officer of anti-virus provider AVG.

“Very often they’re on a page but the stuff doesn’t actually fire when you get there,” he said. “This is not a cunning, premeditated task; it’s just a blast. They’re just planting the stuff where they can and the result is a lot of pages [that] don’t do anything.”

But webmasters should not be complacent about removing the injected code from their sites and fixing buggy web apps to make sure more don’t spring up.

“It’s the cleanup effort that’s just going to be monstrous,” said Grossman, who said affected companies will have to either remove each overwritten table record one at a time, or revert to a recent backup. “Either way, it’s going to take forever.”  (Source)

As our dependency on networked computers grows, our need to provide robust safeguards increases as well.  To be less than completely vigilant is to invite disaster.

Humans started to form societies as soon as we learned to communicate. Small groups of hunter-gatherers formed larger groups to ensure their survival. In order to coordinate their hunting parties, they had to develop a means of communication. Communication became the means of cooperation.

Look at the terminology I just used; communicate, coordinate, cooperate. The prefix co means together; joint; jointly; mutually. Co is the prefix that defines human society. As individuals, early man was nearly helpless. He had no fur, not very good teeth, relatively poor eyesight. He was near the bottom of the food chain. Yet collectively, humans survived, even prevailed against adversity.

Communication, the ability to share ideas, is what has enabled us to reach the 21st century without becoming extinct. Our means of communication have evolved from the written word to the printed page, from smoke signals to the telephone, from street singers to MP3s. And now we have the internet.

Even though it’s only a few decades old, the internet has begun to evolve, too. At first it was a simple repository of electronic pages; you had to know where to look to find what you needed. Hyperlinking gave this electronic library continuity, a means to get from one document to another. Soon this medium earned its title as the world wide web. Anyone anywhere with internet access could communicate with others from across the globe. The internet reduced the time it took to send a message from one pole to the other to a matter of seconds.

Just as early man had the entire world to himself, early users of the web felt like citizens of the planet. Eventually, though, just as mankind settled into towns and cities and states, electronic communication is becoming more localized. Ebay is a world market, Craigslist is a local one. Local communities are finding new ways to use the internet to stay in touch, to be politically active, to recruit volunteers. Just like society, the internet is becoming more and more community oriented. Just as you can be a member of the human race while at the same time be a member of your neighborhood, the internet will always be a global means of communication, but the true value of the medium is shifting toward those around you. Social networking is starting to focus more on the small scale, the local group. It’s not unprecedented; it’s exactly the way human society itself evolved.