Sunbeltblog has a story about the “VideoC” video player… apparently they discovered this when visiting a site. A video starts to play and then abruptly stops and claims that “VideoC” player needs to install to view the clip. VideoC is not REALLY a video player just a clever way to get loads of spyware on your system.
Month: November 2005
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Interesting problem
In doing a routine Google for my name… I ran across a website which has my email address and too many others to count in a plain text file. The site is configured to allow browsing of all files/folders and the text file claims to be 1 of 2, and has reference to the name 1 million (1 million addresses?) The file is 9.8MB large. I haven’t done a wc -l to see how many entries there really are in this one. But the question came to mind what the best way to deal with this is? I guess my first step is contacting the site owner to have this removed? Ok – just did a cat | wc -l and there are exactly 500,000 email address in this file, what’s more I’ve stumbled across a directory that seems to have more email address information. MASSIVE AMOUNTS more for bulk mailing purposes in zipped text files categorized by service provider. (A directory for Bigfoot, hotmail, etc. for example.)
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Microsoft November 2005 patch day
That most wonderful day of the month has come when we get an idea of what vulnerabilities we may see exploited…. Seriously, if you run Windows, go to windowsupdate.microsoft.com or ensure you have automatic updates if at all possible. This months most critical update relates to a vulnerability in the way windows renders (draws) images. It appears that an attacker could design a web page with images in such a way as to run arbitrary (anything they want) code (programs) on the victims computer, alter or view data, or simply control the machine (creating/removing user accounts, etc.)
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Google the most recent phishing target
This reminds me of the emails that used to circulate claiming that Microsoft and Disney were testing a way to trace email and to keep forwarding the message, when it got to 500 people they all supposedly would win a trip to DisneyWorld. I guess people are generally trusting and willing to believe they may already be a winner. This one is a bit more dangerous though…. It seems there’s a phishing scheme going around claiming to be from Google, claiming that you’ve won $400.
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XML RPC worm new variant
There seems to be a new variation on the xml rpc worm spreading about, so patch patch patch. If you have php and vulnerable software on a web facing server, patch.
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Software bugs – 10 worst
Software bugs are annoying, frustrating and sometimes expensive and deadly. Wired is running a story on the 10 worst software bugs of all time.
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Illegal to disable some spyware?
OK – for starters, the keylogger that sunbelt talks about here is a legitimate piece of software for sale. Like anything though it could have illegit uses. Apparently retrocoder is upset that Sunbelt’s software detects spymon and gives the option of disabling it. Spymon is a commercial keylogger. They’ve claimed that it’s against their EULA and copyright law to “reverse engineer” their product. More specifically they’ve complained as such….
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Automated phone support lines – find a human
One of many people’s pet peeves these days is the automated phone systems that have you go through several trees worth of options to find tech support. These are called Integrated Voice Response systems (IVR) and sometimes getting to a “real person” is next to impossible. (Let alone getting to a person with which there is no language barrier.) Someone has made a list of ways to get a REAL LIVE person through these call systems and it was something I thought I’d have to link to.
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Transgaming winex 5 cedaga cedega
I’m going to have get used to that new name. Frankly I liked winex – simple and to the point, it was like DirectX, only WineX…. then they went and changed the name to cedega and I can never remember how to spell it cedaga / cedega / cedege… anyway, Whatever it is, I’ve installed version 5.0 now. And here are my first impressions. For starters let me say that I usually don’t test based on the latest greatest games, but the older games I’ve installed and left in my point2play setup to see what improements are made.
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Transgaming Cedaga 5.0 (Winex) release
Well, it looks like Transgaming has released 5.0 of
CedagaCedega (Winex) on the schedule they announced. And to quote from the release notes here are some of the new features….