Well… the media has taken the drab name of w32sober.X@mm or w32sober.x or w32sober.y, W32/Sober.AD-mm or any of those other drab names that we’ve been looking at the last week and dubbed the latest big virus, the FBI/CIA virus…. and it’s gotten a lot of press the last few days. I suspect as people head back to work from Thanksgiving, we may see a slight bump in traffic. (Bringing infected laptops into the network maybe? or just home/office users getting back to work…)
Category: Computers
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Sneaky TorrentSpy bundling…
Sunbeltblog is talking about torrentspy, which has licensed their own version of Rufus, a bittorrent client. All well and good, but… they’ve decided to bundle WhenU SaveNow *(adware) with THEIR version of Rufus. This has ticked off the writers of Rufus among others.
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Another wolf in sheeps clothing
I did an article a while back on “wolves in sheeps clothing” software that poses as security software but will usually turn around and bite you. Sunbeltblog has a post on another fake security center site. Keep an eye peeled for these, information is power in protecting yourself against this kind of stuff. This site is at www.updateyoursystem.com
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XBox 360 launch and problems
I’ve not been big into console games. The last computer we had that directly connected to the TV all the time was an old Atari 400. (Which I occassionaly wax nostalgic for…) Anyway, the XBox 360 is the recently released big new upgrade to the XBox from Microsoft and there are a couple of interesting reports out about it today. For one, Business Week is reporting on the likely loss that Microsoft is taking on each unit (they seel for $399), they’ve looked and think that MS is losing a bit over $100 on each one. The goal of course, is to make money off the games. There is worse news though for some XBox 360 new owners.
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How effective is the MediaMax copy protection?
One of the sub-stories in all the Sony DRM mess of the last month with the XCP copy protection was that it was really an ineffective way of preventing copying of music anyway. In other words, you could press shift while inserting the cd to avoid the installer, then other programs could access the cd/allow copying without the software installed, other OS’s could access the disc and rip the tracks. In other words it wasn’t very useful toward it’s objective of preventing copying…
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New Beagle/Bagle variant?
So, I submitted the suspicious attachment I received to virustotal (scan@virustotal.com with SCAN in the subject and suspicious file as attachment.) What follows below is the report I received. It looks like some of the big names (Symantec, McAfee are not finding anything wrong with it at this point, with the hodge-podge of names it will take me a bit to investigate and see if the other vendors are tagging it as new.)
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Serving up web ads to users with javascript disabled
Well, with all the news on the Explorer bug, I started wondering what affect this would have on people browsing sites with adsense. I mean, adsense relies on javascript, so if it’s disabled, no adsense right? Right… Of course, adsense is not the only advertising program that uses javascript. (Of course, there are a number of other things, web counters like google analytics, etc….)
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Old Play by mail (email) games…
Ok – not work related, but… I was remembering with one of my brother’s a computer game we played maybe 10 years ago that was a strategy game and had a neat play by email feature. The game was turn based, we’d make a move and it had a handy link to email the game info to each other and I think we went back and forth with it for several weeks. It was really quite an entertaining way to deal with the game. Now, today, with realtime strategy games, online multiplayer communities, etc. play by email seems a bit dated, but for many turn based games this would be one feature I’d LOVE to see more of.
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Leading browser coders get together on internet security
This is one of those stories that you never thought you’d see (especially after the Microsoft-Netscape “wars”)… Developers from four of the most prominent web browsers, Internet Explorer, Mozilla/Firefox, Opera and Konqueror (much of the foundations for Safari are in the Konqueror codebase)… have got together and talked about different approaches and ideas on improving security while web-browsing…
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Today’s Sony DRM rootkit stories….
Amazingly I haven’t seen any big Sony news today, but there are a couple stories out that are worth noting… First up is freedom-to-tinker with their take on the lawsuits announced yesterday and the one thing that isn’t getting much press coverage, the MediaMax DRM software. XCP is the name of the rootkit that Sony had used for Digital Rights Management that’s caused all the fuss lately, through it’s way of hiding in the system, it’s security vulnerabilities, it’s difficulty to remove (damage to the system) and vulnerabilites in the uninstaller. Well…