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Business as usual – nothing works

Okay, I've waited as long as I can. Being a stellar practitioner of the fine art of procrastination, I recognize my old friend The Last Minute when I bump up against it. Ouch, that hurt.
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Okay, I've waited as long as I can. Being a stellar practitioner of the fine art of procrastination, I recognize my old friend The Last Minute when I bump up against it. Ouch, that hurt.

All night long, as March bled into April and all of us fools slept, I was both haunted and intrigued by Borglike dreams of the brave new world I'd awaken to. "Eight million, three hundred sixty-five thousand, one hundred eighty-seven of twelve million reporting, Sir." Or would it be "Madam?" What would my niche in the botworld of Conficker be? Would I be just another drone workerbot in an anonymous army of conscripted cyber-enablers, doing my infinitesimal part to bring down the Pentagon's global defense systems? Another bit of undigested spam clogging the in-boxes of millions waking to discover they can't find the one worthwhile e-mail among the millions of come-ons for larger penises, no-default credit cards and personal credit scores?

I'm both happy and disappointed to report... business as usual. My computer fired up, said, "Good morning, Dave," a holdout from the old days, delivered the mandatory offers to enlarge my... you know, and opened my window to the wider world I used to rely on the morning newspaper to lay before me.

Sitting here in predawn, watching snow fall down, up, and all around in the swirling winds, I can allow myself the salving fantasy that Pique's computers might be banded together in a botarmy about to smite the Philistines or, more likely, commit mass suicide and make these efforts even more futile than they usually are. But I'm guessing life will be business as usual, at least for now.

The "experts" - not necessarily the same experts that warned us about the certain Armageddon we'd wake up to on January 1, 2000, but certainly their cousins - are still stoking the fires of hope. While my lifeboat may be temporarily watertight, that's no reason to get all smug and assume I'll manage to float to safeharbour. It could take a couple of days to ferret out the havoc Conficker intends to wreck. Assuming, of course, it wasn't an elaborate practical joke to begin with.

"Consensus among security specialists on Tuesday was that it was likely to take several days before the program's intent could be determined," reported a story in today's New York Times . How very War of the Worlds. For now, we just cower in the corner of the basement waiting to see whether cyberspace's atmosphere is manna or poison for this latest Borg while the G-Men try to sweat out a confession from the infected computers they've already arrested.

Meanwhile, Microsoft - the company you love to hate - has offered a $250,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of the malware's creators. As usual, Conficker only targets computers running Windows, much to the smug glee of the Enlightened Ones who use Macs and look on Windows users with the kind of bemused discomfort generally seen in very patient parents who've just found their child making mud pies out of poopie instead of flushing it down the toilet like they've practiced for the past eight months. Worms, viruses, Trojan horses and other malware always give Mac users smug glee. To a man and woman they believe it's the heightened awareness and superior operating systems of their computers, not their globally insignificant numbers, that grant them immunity. I believe it was a fishing guide who said it best; "Why catch minnows when there be real fish in the lake?"

I stopped worrying about Conficker when I read that Microsoft was offering a cool quarter mil as a reward. I figured any threat that was worth so little was no threat at all. I mean, Bill Gates loses $250,000 in the sofa cushions at home every time he stretches out to take a nap. There have been $250,000 rounding errors in each and every drawdown of each and every bailout fund announced by governments around the world. Dinner for the G20 delegation currently meeting in London cost more than that... without whine.

Then it struck me. Conficker is just a perfect little microcosm, a societal mirror for malaise gripping the "advanced" nations of the world. We've gotten to the point where we can't even create a good computer virus anymore. How in the world are we ever going to pull the global economy out of the flat spin it's in when even malware fails to execute properly?

I've been obsessed with our propensity to make and buy junk since, well, forever. But particularly in the last 48 hours when my oven stopped working just as three loaves of bread were ready to be baked. In terms of labour-saving appliances, modern conveniences if you will, ovens are, or were, pretty primitive technology. Apply alternating current to heating element, get heat. The only thing more rudimentary than an oven is a fire, something I kept thinking about while I tried everything I could think of - not much - to make the damn oven work. There's an old saying that if you can't fix something with the hammer you have, get a bigger hammer. If that doesn't work, you have an electrical problem. Lacking anything larger than a 16-pound sledgehammer, I reckoned I had an electrical problem.

But how could that be? We're talking about an appliance that, while granting it was undoubtedly the cheapest range the developer who chose it for my home sweet WHA home could find, is nonetheless a mere toddler. Only two years old and in a home I don't spend the entire year in! What in the world could break in that short amount of time on an appliance that, if past experience is any indication - hell, this isn't the performance of a mutual fund we're talking about after all - ought to outlast me?

The answer, naturally, lies in the beast's electronic brain, a word I use in its most tortured meaning. What was once a simple wire-through-fuse-through-controller affair is now a wire through electronic, printed circuit board black box hellhole arrangement. Unfortunately, being the flimsiest model in a suspect line of appliances made by a company since bought and sold like a slave with emphysema, its circuit board - fabricated no doubt in the same Chinese factory that mistook melamine for powdered milk - tends to malfunction in the presence of water vapour. Steam.

Now how in the world would an electronic control device on a kitchen range come into contact with steam?

If we are what we eat is it much of a stretch to wonder whether we are also what we make? Looking around at my stove, many of the dubious cars GM and Chrysler are trying to flog, the world's financial systems, and even Conficker, I hope not. On the other hand, maybe Conficker was meant to hijack all the electronic controls of all our stuff. How diabolically clever.