Nota Bene

There’s a Russian saying that translates roughly something like ‘live a century, you’ll be amazed for a century’. Meaning, I reckon, that when you think you’ve seen it all, you in fact won’t have. For me, this applied to the trip I made to the city of Magdeburg recently, for it did just that – amazed.

On the whole the place is a little dull and provincial (in my opinion, that is; but then again – I do live in Moscow most of the year :). There’s the river (the Elbe, but here it’s still quite meager), the impressive banks thereof, the equally impressive walls of the castle (restored) and the gothic cathedral. There’s not a great deal besides that. Apart from one feature that makes up for all that dullness…

In the center of the city there’s a totally incongruent large residential/commercial building known as the Green Citadel of Magdeburg. Just check out the colors, shapes and patterns! You seen anything quite like it?

The artist responsible for this architectural aberration is Friedensreich Hundertwasser, a Gaudi for the late 20^th century. This is just one of the many buildings he transformed into a masterpiece across central Europe – in his totally original and mind-blowing style.

This Austrian was a true maverick, so I’m a fan for sure. He believed that folks shouldn’t live in box-like houses that are all the same, and that inhabitants should be encouraged to paint or in some other way change the walls around them. And that meant interior walls too. He was also into converting disused factories into avant garde pieces of art.

Enough words. Now for some pix:

More: What were we doing here in the first place?

Ladies and gentlemen!

Today is a special jubilee of the greatest living person on earth. Today is the 90^th birthday of Lee Kuan Yew, the founder and indisputable leader of the city-state of Singapore, without whom Singapore today would be a very different place. This is the man who turned a backward non-entity of a place into a flourishing nation, a dream city – an example for all the other countries in the world.

So what was Singapore like before?

In 1965 Singapore didn’t just become independent as many nations do – it was forced to become independent after having been thrown away much like unwanted garbage. It was a tiny group of undeveloped islands with very little going for it, which no one in their right mind considered either credible or potentially viable. People in their right mind tended not to consider it at all in the first place.

What was it like?

• It was wretched territory – marshland and an overall mess of a territory on which pigs and cows grazed.
• No natural wealth, not even drinking water (and apparently still none).
• Unfriendly (to put it mildly) neighboring countries.
• A semiliterate population, and a strong communist influence (including outside support).
• Interethnic conflicts; a population made up of Chinese, Malay and Hindus – three very different religions.

Bonuses:

• Organized crime.
• No army; no loyal police force.
• Corruption with a very BIG capital letter.
• Besides the British military base and the sea ports there was practically no other business at all.

Enough?

Dirt, poverty and nothing to look forward to. That was in 1965.

After 25 years of reforms (yes, as early as in 1990) it was a completely different place…

More: rapidly growing economy, no corruption, rule of law, people dreaming living there. A paradise…

Hip, hip, hurray! Yee ha! Woo hoo! The latest incarnation of KIS has landed – everywhere (almost)!

As per our long held tradition of launching new kit during the summer months – we’ve now managed to get KIS 2014 officially released in all the main regions of the world and in all the most widely spoken languages. For those interested in KIS itself, go here to download the new version. Upgrade guidelines are here.

And as is also becoming a bit of a tradition early fall, the time has come for me to tell you all what’s in this here new version…

First thing I can say: new stuff – there’s plenty of it. So much so that there’ll be several posts covering the key new features separately, as the low-down on all of them won’t fit into one bite-sized blogpost that won’t send you to sleep…

So, here we go… with post No. 1:

Basically, KIS 2014 packs yet more punch than its already punchy predecessor – KIS 2013 – which even without all this year’s additions was unlucky for no one. The protection provided is harder, better, faster, stronger. KIS has gone under the knife for a nip and tuck complete face-lift of its interface, and the logic of its main operations has been overhauled too.

There are new features to ensure secure online money operations (we’ve beefed up Safe Money); there are new features in Parental Control; there’s integrated protection against malicious blockers; and there are various new performance accelerators and optimizers to make the protection even more invisible and unobtrusive.

But the best feature of all in this version is what we put most effort into: providing protection from future threats, having added to the product – much to the chagrin of cyberswine – several specialized avant-garde technologies (none of which appears to be included in competitors’ products). No, we haven’t used a time machine; nor did we track down cyberpigs and do a Jack Bauer interrogation on them to get to know about their planned mischief. We shamanized, looked into the future, came up with rough calculations of the logic of the development of cyber-maliciousness, and transferred that logic into practice in our new technologies of preventative protection.

Among the preventative measures against future threats I’d like to emphasize the souped-up Automatic Exploit Prevention – two special technologies from our corporate solutions that have been adapted for our home products – ZETA Shield and Trusted Applications mode, plus a built-in proactive anti-blocker.

So how do all these fancy sounding features actually help in daily computer hygiene? Let me start by telling you first about Trusted Applications mode – the world’s first for such technology being featured in a home product providing complex security.

More: Fighting the parcel in ‘pass the parcel’ syndrome…

Guten tag folks!

I’m currently on a trans-Europe express road trip. And along the way I keep coming across such unusual sights that I feel I’m simply duty-bound to share them with the world’s more progressive readers of blogs. Ok?

Oddity No. 1

What cars do you generally see on the German autobahn between Frankfurt and Hannover? A lot of fast modern ones, that’s for sure. And what cars do you tend not to see? Easy: older models. So you can perhaps understand my shock surprise at seeing vintage (and all tuned-up) Zaporozhetses – with Moscow plates! What the flip? I was expecting pigs to fly past next… There they were – several of them – going hell for leather at full throttle, chugging and rattling and attracting the attention of the modern-car drivers – so much so that the traffic was slowed down to a very un-autobahn-like speed. Good gracious me. The Ukrainian retro invasion!

CCCP’s answer to the VW Beetle

More: Berlin & Berliner Kunst…

Privyet everyone!

Yakutia (home to the Yakut people), or, officially, Sakha (home to the Sakha people) is very proud of its humungous dimensions, liking to compare itself with assorted European countries, a favorite for some reason being France: on Wikipedia (in Russian, at least) it says Yakutia is ‘five times as large as France’. (Why France? Why not Spain, Turkey or Ukraine?) There are plenty of other comparisons kicking about the Internet too, like the one approximately equating Yakutia with the Mediterranean and Black Seas together.

Anyway, whichever way you look at it – or measure it – there can be no doubt in anyone’s mind that what we’ve got here is one titanic territory. Indeed, turns out it’s the largest subnational entity in the world in terms of land area – stretching across three time zones!

But I think to do the place some justice it needs to be compared with other massive things, not much smaller ones. So, here we go…

With a territory of around three million square kilometers (but a population of just under a million; that is, three square kilometers per person), what other ginormous territory can it be compared with?

First off – Australia. Yakutia is only two and a half times smaller than the whole of Oz, while having 20 times less population. But that makes sense, for down under they don’t have to suffer the intense Yakutian winters. Then again, Australia is nothing but desert… that must be why the population there is only 20 times larger and not more (and lives all along the coast).

Next up: Canada. Yakutia is just three times smaller than this country together with all its islands. However, most of Canada is much further south – thus, 35 times as many folks live there.

Next: China. This country is also three times bigger than Yakutia, whereas the population… hmmm, best not get into that. China not the best example to take…

On per capita income – Yakutia is somewhere near Thailand, Cuba and Peru (individually), while it comes four times less than Australia and Canada, and a little more than China.

Yakutia can boast not only a massive territory; it also rocks in terms of diamonds, is real cool on the permafrost front, and is extreme to the extreme on wintery cold – particularly in Oymyakon. There’s also the Kolyma Highway (the one Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman rode along on their round-the-world motorcycle trip in 2004), the Lena River, and – last and most – the Lena Pillars – which were where we were headed. Here are the pics:

More: Pillars, permafrost and people who live there…

…at our disappointment about the weather in this corner of the atlas.

Howdy all!

Briefly, what’s coming up below: a quick Alaskan photo-fest + brief commentary, after a recent trip to the 49^th state. This place is the latest been-to of my upcoming Top-100 Must-See Places in the World.

So, herewith, I submit, your honor, both my witness testimony and photographic evidence…

Alaskan Duel

More: First thing to say: it’s royally rainy here…

It’s easy to brainstorm a long list of things you can associate instantly with the USA. Easy peasy…

Washington, D.C., the White House, NYC, the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building, the Wild West, the Great Depression, Lend-Lease, the first man on the moon, the Space Shuttle, Coke and Pepsi, McDonald’s, Hollywood and Disney, Microsoft, iPhone, Google, Facebook… I could go on for ages, as I’m sure you could….

But one thing I never associated with the U S of A is volcanoes. However, it turns out there are quite a few here – and rather impressive they are too. They’re on the West Coast – in Washington state, up next to Canada.

For those who might not yet know, I’m a big fan of volcanism (see my tales, pics and vids from Kamchatka, New Zealand, Santorini, Mount Etna, Pico de Orizaba and so on).

And I can now add a plus-2 to my collection of been-to volcanism – with these two gems:

1) Mount Rainier (Indian name – Tahoma);

2) Mount St. Helens (Indian name – Louwala-Clough).

More: Stateside volcanism…

Hi all!

Once upon a time long, long ago (in 1998 to be precise) some comrades and I, much in need of some rejuvenation on the basic ideas front, decided to take leave of the hustle and bustle of Moscow for a short while and get ourselves to a quiet place (so that nobody could disturb us) in a charming location. We needed to get away from it all, and to go back to basics – to discuss and hammer out blueprints for the future of our technologies, antivirus engines, how various antivirus subsystems effectively interact with one another, and other such fundamentally crucial topics.

So this is what we did…

First, we needed to get the venue right. What we were after was a place that was sufficiently comfortable (not some doss house with one bathroom per floor or something), but nothing more. We also needed a conference room that could seat six – that’s how many were heading out. Basically it needed to be reasonably economical, since back then we weren’t exactly flush with cash, to say the least. Thus: three-star it was to be.

We checked out various places in the Moscow region, but to no avail. So then we looked further afield. Eventually we decided that the most suitable place – out of those not too far from Moscow – was the Czech capital. So off we flew down there…

More: Prague brainstorm, 15 years later…

My power over you
grows stronger yet
(с) Andrew Lloyd Webber – Phantom Of The Opera

In the ongoing battle between malware and anti-malware technologies, there’s an interesting game that keeps getting played over and over – king of the castle.

The rules are simple: the winner is the one who loads itself into the computer memory first, seizes control of the ‘levers’, and protects itself from other applications. And from the top of the castle you can calmly survey all around and guard the order in the system (or, if you’re malicious, on the contrary – you can cause chaos, which goes both unnoticed and unpunished).

In short, the winner takes all, i.e., control over the computer.

And the list of applications wanting to do the boot process first begins with (as the name might suggest) the boot sector – a special section of the disk that stores all the instructions for what, when and where to load. And, terror of terrors, even the operating system sticks to this list! No wonder cybercriminals have long taken an unhealthy interest in this sector, since abusing it is the ideal way to get first out of the blocks while completely hiding the fact that the computer is infected. And the cybercriminals are helped in this by a particular class of malware – bootkits.

How your computer loads

To find out what bootkits are and how we protect you against them – read on…

More: the prosperity, the fall and the return of bootkits…

The coolest car in Moscow…

… was totally smashed at the weekend not far from the Kremlin after Kamui Kobayashi’s unfortunate spill at Moscow City Racing. Somebody has even coined a new term – “Kobaycrashy” :)

More: Moscow City Racing -The Aftermath…