| The most obvious day-to-day email hazard is time-wasting. Spam is a growing irritation that wastes bandwidth on corporate networks, and angers people on dialup modems who have to wait for the junk to download so they can get their real email, but spam rarely wrecks anything. Viruses, on the other hand, can do serious damage either to an individual computer or an entire network. There are thousands of viruses "in the wild," with new ones constantly getting written. Internet Chat as an Internal Communication Tool As I write this, I am logged into four different IRC (Internet Relay Chat) channels, all for work. One is used by Linux.com and NewsForge.com editors to discuss story ideas and edits, one is for technical matters pertaining to those sites, one is for Slashdot.org editors and programmers to use for both editorial and programming discussions, and one is for loose social chat. It is called "slashdot-cooler" because that IRC channel is our online equivalent of a casual "water cooler" conversation. Of course, the people who work on Linux.com, NewsForge.com, and Slashdot.org are not all in the same office. Today I've seen users log in from seven U.S. states, Canada, Australia, England, Israel, and Germany. Some of them are full-time staff employees, and some are freelancers. Some are writers, some are programmers, some are sysadmins. IRC (see Figure 6-3) is our meeting ground, the glue that holds our distributed work force together. Figure 6-3. Programmers use IRC to discuss changes to the software that runs Slashdot.org.
We prefer IRC, which is generally considered pretty geeky, because we're geeky people who run Web sites for geeks and because it's free. We have set up private channels (password required to join) on an existing, volunteer-run IRC network with which we have some casual connections. We talked about setting up our own in-house IRC server at one point, but decided it was easier to use existing, outside infrastructure instead. We have only about 30 people who work directly on our Web sites (writers, editors, programmers, sysadmins) and communicate rapidly and constantly with each other, and even a minimal IRC server running Linux can handle several thousand users. Companies or work groups that aren't full of technical people may prefer other instant messaging services to IRC; there are certainly plenty of them around. ICQ (www.icq.com), AOL Instant Messenger (www.aim.com) and Yahoo! Chat (chat.yahoo.com) tend to have the best cross-platform capabilities among the well-known ad-supported commercial services; that is, you can use them in Linux, Mac, and Windows, while others may cater only to users of one or two major operating systems and leave some of your people out of the conversation. Large public chat or instant messaging services, including IRC networks, are too insecure to use for exchanging critical information. A company called Jabber (www.jabber.com) sells private corporate chat and instant messaging services that are far more secure than the public ones, and an additional advantage of going the Jabber route is that your instant messaging will be totally under your control rather than being subject to the whims of another company. There is also Open Source Jabber (www.jabber.org) available at no cost for those who have the technical skills (and time) to run their own servers, and would rather do it themselves than hire an outside company to handle it. It's probably best to ease gradually into live chat or instant messaging as an internal communications method instead of issuing an edict one day that says, "This is how we are going to talk to each other from now on." OSDN never formally decided to use IRC chat. It was, and still is, a grassroots thing, first adopted by one small group of workers, then by others who saw how well it worked for the first group and decided to jump onto IRC themselves. The one big problem with live chat is that it can be addictive. Highly addictive. In our corporate case, where we all work online for long hours anyway, this is not a problem; we keep our chat programs going in corners of our screens, and need only to take a fast scan of the channels we're on every hour or so, because most of us have set our chat programs to beep at us whenever we get an individually-addressed message. For workers who aren't online all day as part of their jobs, or those who aren't "chatted out" most of the time because chat is an all-day, every-day work thing for them, the temptations of social chat can be big barriers to productivity, even if that socializing is only within the company. Social email can be a time-waster, but live chat's instant feedback (assuming the person on the other end responds instantly most of the time) can lead to conversations that occupy hours even though the people holding them might feel like they've spent only a few minutes typing or reading in those little chat program boxes in the corners of their computer monitors. |
Almost all email-borne or Internet-spread viruses technically most of them are "worms" but we'll use the vernacular here affect only computers running Windows, and the Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express email programs are famously susceptible to them, so the simplest and most obvious way to protect against viruses is to connect to the Internet only with computers that run Linux, Mac, or Unix, not with computers running Windows. Linux, especially, is nearly virus-proof because its Open Source code makes viruses easy to spot and stop, if not for everyday users, at least for the millions of programmers who prefer this operating system and keep a close eye out for any problems with it and usually distribute cures for potential security flaws which they find in Linux before those flaws can be exploited by the nasty people who write viruses. The underlying code for Mac OS X is also Open Source, so it, too, is unlikely to be as virus-victimized as purely proprietary operating systems. Those who prefer proprietary "closed source" operating systems must constantly be on guard against email viruses. They must use virus scanning software, and that software must be kept up-to-date, not just bought and ignored after the purchase, because there are always new viruses. Several other safeguards: Never open email attachments from anyone you don't know, and be suspicious of attachments from people you do know unless the body of the email describes each attachment precisely, by name and content. The reason you must be watchful of even your best friends, assuming they use Windows, is because a bad habit of many highly effective email viruses is to email themselves to everyone in an infected computer's email address book, and you are more likely to be in friends' address books than in strangers'. If you or your company own your own email server, even if it runs Linux or Unix and therefore cannot get infected with Windows viruses itself, you should still have virus detection and rejection software installed, because if any of your co-workers are running Windows on their desktop computers, and those computers get infected and start emailing large files automatically, the additional traffic volume can slow your network to a crawl or even make it stop from the overload. Outlook Express, Outlook, and Microsoft Internet Explorer users must disable ActiveX, because it is the "key" many viruses use to gain control of their computers. There are control panel settings in each of these programs where they can do this. These three precautions will take care of most email virus problems. The same "never open unknown attachments" rule also applies to instant messaging services that allow file transfers. These, too, can be virus carriers. |
