Now this is interesting: the Amus worm will verbally taunt the user using Windows XP’s speech-generating features. F-Secure has posted a .wav, and McAfee’s writeup has an MP3.
Oddly, Symantec’s entry says nothing about the speech. Maybe they don’t have speakers on their test boxes.
Oh, this is good!
You may have heard a few days ago that the latest MyDoom variant includes a request for work in the antivirus industry.
Well, the comic strip User Friendly has come up with the perfect solution!
Not five minutes ago I received my first 419 scam in a language other than English.
What’s strange is that even though it uses normal case and I can’t read more than a few words of French, it’s still obvious what it is. It has the same general structure with the opening, the “Excuse me for contacting you even though you don’t know me” line (I think), talks about a sub-Saharan African nation (Côte d’Ivoire), and of course, “($8,500,000) Huit Millions Cinq Cent Mille Dollars Américains.”
Microsoft responds to Apple’s contention that portable video isn’t a big market:
“Ask kids in the back of a car on a two-hour trip, ‘Hey, would you like to have your videos there?’ My kids would,” Gates said. “I guess Steve’s kids just listen to Bach and Mozart. But mine, they want to watch ‘Finding Nemo.’ I don’t know who made that, but it’s really a neat movie.”
Yeah, who was that?
Via Weblog about Markup & Style:
Dive Into Mark provides an excellent example of why a browser shouldn’t second-guess file types.
It’s a screenshot of Safari looking at a text document… but the first line mentions XHTML, so it’s decided that’s what it must be. I’ve had lots of trouble with Internet Explorer doing the same thing, and Safari’s been aiming at bug-for-bug compatibility in order to “break” as few sites as possible.
[Edit: After the source blog was taken down, I grabbed the screenshot from archive.org and uploaded it here.)
Via The War on Spam and The Spam Weblog:
Hackers hijack federal computers. Apparently the DOJ discovered, during their crackdown on cybercrime, that hundreds of Department of Defense and Senate computers had been turned into zombies.
Nice.
Can we really be sure they were only used to send spam? After all, zombies are generally the result of viruses, worms or trojans that install backdoors, so that the attacker can run anything on the system. Setting up a distributed and disguised spam-sending network just happens to be the most profitable application right now, but you can bet there are a lot of people out there who would love to take over — or just look through — US military computers.
I don’t know about you, but I find this really disturbing.
I accidentally hit ctrl-H in our computer system today…..and it acted like backspace. I have never before run into a modern, GUI-based program where that would happen. Then again, I don’t recall ever trying it, either.
