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Security research company Intego on Monday issued a security alert about a new Trojan Horse called OSX.RSPlug.A that specifically targets Mac users. The Trojan is a form of DNSChanger that changes the Mac’s Domain Name Server (DNS) address.

According to Intego, the Trojan has been found on several pornographic Web sites. When trying to view a movie, the user is told that “Quicktime Player is unable to play movie file. Please click here to download new version of codec.”

When the user clicks the link a disk image (.dmg) is downloaded to the desktop. When the user installs the software, they are actually installing the Trojan, not a free video codec. The Trojan is installed with full root privileges, which means it has access to all files and commands on the system.

When the malicious DNS server is active, it hijacks some web requests, leading users to phishing web sites (for sites such as Ebay, PayPal and some banks) or to web pages displaying ads for other pornographic web sites, according to Intego.

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What is this lonely tire doing beside the road? Did someone just leave it there? Has it run away from his three best friends?

Read the rest of this entry »

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Older Americans around the country are getting duped by a seemingly innocuous tactic that can expose them to hard-sell pitches from the insurance industry.

The technique is centered on a marketing tool called the lead card, and it became popular after the federal government created its Do Not Call Registry in 2003 to shield consumers from unwanted solicitors. Sent through the mail, the lead card invites the recipient to mail off an enclosed reply for free information about, say, estate planning.

But the cards fail to warn that by sending off replies, recipients are giving up their right to avoid telephone solicitations from the sender — even if their phone numbers are on the Do Not Call list.

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State Rep. Richard Curtis, R-La Center is married and has children, according to his legislative Web site. Elected to the state House of Representatives in 2004, he has voted against gay rights legislation.

More here.

Ninja Parade Slips Through Town Unnoticed Once Again

The most interesting advances in Science don’t come when somebody shouts Eureka! They come when somebody wonders “now this is odd…”

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Goodwin leads me over to a red 2005 H3 Hummer that’s up on jacks, its mechanicals removed. He aims to use the turbine to turn the Hummer into a tricked-out electric hybrid. Like most hybrids, it’ll have two engines, including an electric motor. But in this case, the second will be the turbine, Goodwin’s secret ingredient. Whenever the truck’s juice runs low, the turbine will roar into action for a few seconds, powering a generator with such gusto that it’ll recharge a set of “supercapacitor” batteries in seconds. This means the H3′s electric motor will be able to perform awesome feats of acceleration and power over and over again, like a Prius on steroids. What’s more, the turbine will burn biodiesel, a renewable fuel with much lower emissions than normal diesel; a hydrogen-injection system will then cut those low emissions in half. And when it’s time to fill the tank, he’ll be able to just pull up to the back of a diner and dump in its excess french-fry grease–as he does with his many other Hummers. Oh, yeah, he adds, the horsepower will double–from 300 to 600.

“Conservatively,” Goodwin muses, scratching his chin, “it’ll get 60 miles to the gallon. With 2,000 foot-pounds of torque. You’ll be able to smoke the tires. And it’s going to be superefficient.”

He laughs. “Think about it: a 5,000-pound vehicle that gets 60 miles to the gallon and does zero to 60 in five seconds!”

[..]

Two years ago, Goodwin got a rare chance to show off his tricks to some of the car industry’s most prominent engineers. He tells me the story: He was driving a converted H2 to the SEMA show, the nation’s biggest annual specialty automotive confab, and stopped en route at a Denver hotel. When he woke up in the morning, there were 20 people standing around his Hummer. Did I run over somebody? he wondered. As it turned out, they were engineers for GM, the Hummer’s manufacturer. They noticed that Goodwin’s H2 looked modified. “Does it have a diesel engine in it?”

“Yeah,” he said.

“No way,” they replied.

He opened the hood, “and they’re just all in and out and around the valves and checking it out,” he says. They asked to hear it run, sending a stab of fear through Goodwin. He’d filled it up with grease from a Chinese restaurant the day before and was worried that the cold morning might have solidified the fuel. But it started up on the first try and ran so quietly that at first they didn’t believe it was really on. “When you start a diesel engine up on vegetable oil,” Goodwin says, “you turn the key, and you hear nothing. Because of the lubricating power of the oil, it’s just so smooth. Whisper quiet. And they’re like, ‘Is it running? Yeah, you can hear the fan going.’”

One engineer turned and said, “GM said this wouldn’t work.”

“Well,” Goodwin replied, “here it is.”

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Inwoners van Nederland en Renkum, Bennekom en Doorwerth in het bijzonder. Hou u kinderen thuis. Omdat ze bij het OM hebben lopen knoeien, rijdt er nu een gore viespeuk door uw straat. Waarschijnlijk in een lichtblauwe Fiat Multipla. Hoewel de zaak klip en klaar lijkt (“De man heeft de vergrijpen bekend. De slachtoffers waren kinderen in de leeftijd van 9 tot 11 jaar. Agenten betrapten de man op heterdaad.”) heeft de rechter-commisaris van Arnhem vandaag in alle wijsheid besloten deze sex offender de straat op te sturen. Uiteraard mag u als hardwerkende burger niet weten hoe deze meneer heet en hoe deze meneer er uitziet. De privacy van een pedo is in dit land meer waard dan een kind. Dit zaakje stinkt natuurlijk. Zo had de politie geen tijd om een aangifte in behandeling te nemen. En daarbij; ANP had aanvankelijk de naam van aanrandert op de nieuwsfeed staan, maar ANP heeft de naam verwijderd, ook uit de archieven. WAAROM??? Amerikaanse collega’s noemen gewoon man en paard. Engelse collega’s noemen gewoon man en paard. Spaanse collega’s noemen gewoon man en paard. Kijk, dat schept duidelijkheid. Nu worden alle lichtblauwe Multipla’s gedemoniseerd…

Tja. Het is maar waar je prioriteiten liggen…

Take the names of two U.S. States, mix them all together, then rearrange the letters to form the names of two other U.S. States. What states are these?

Although the answer is really, really easy if you think about it for a second or two^*, it can be used to demonstrate some interesting programming principles, and you can say something very interesting about algorithms and programming languages.

* answer:
North Carolina
South Dakota

South Carolina
North Dakota

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“…And the irony is, Rudy Giuliani, probably the most under qualified person since George Bush to seek the presidency, is here – talking about any of the people here. Rudy Giuliani. I mean think about it, Rudy Giuliani, there’s only three things he mentions in a sentence — a noun and a verb and 9/11 and I mean, there’s nothing else. There’s nothing else.”

– Senator Joe Biden

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The Supreme Court on Monday agreed to decide whether Exxon Mobil Corp. should pay $2.5 billion in punitive damages in connection with the huge Exxon Valdez oil spill that fouled more than 1,200 miles of Alaskan coastline in 1989.

[..]

The justices said they would consider whether the company should have to pay any punitive damages at all. If the court decides some money is due, Exxon is arguing that $2.5 billion is excessive under laws governing shipping and prior high court decisions limiting punitive damages.

The last time I bought anything from an Exxon company was sometime during the nineties when I took delivery of a new (company) car, and the fuel tank was just about empty and the only station I could reach was one of theirs.

Next time, I’ll walk instead.

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had it. I get more than 300 emails a day and my problem isn’t spam (Cloudmark Desktop solves that nicely), it’s PR people. Lazy flacks send press releases to the Editor in Chief of Wired because they can’t be bothered to find out who on my staff, if anyone, might actually be interested in what they’re pitching. Fact: I am an actual person, not a team assigned to read press releases and distribute them to the right editors and writers (that’s editor@wired.com).

So fair warning: I only want two kinds of email: those from people I know, and those from people who have taken the time to find out what I’m interested in and composed a note meant to appeal to that (I love those emails; indeed, that’s why my email address is public).

Everything else gets banned on first abuse. The following is just the last month’s list of people and companies who have been added to my Outlook blocked list. All of them have sent me something inappropriate at some point in the past 30 days. Many of them sent press releases; others just added me to a distribution list without asking. If their address gets harvested by spammers by being published here, so be it–turnabout is fair play.

There is no getting off this list. If you’re on it and have something appropriate to say to me, use a different email address.

Followed by a nice long list of addresses, and a lot of very interesting comments. As one of the commenters state: I

absolutely love the fact that the only people who have commented and are offended are PR spammers. I think that, more than the post, more than the list, more than anything else, speaks volumes.

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Andrew Keen recently wrote a book called “The Cult of the Amateur” in which he lambasts citizen media for degrading our culture. To him, Craigslist, YouTube, blogs, and the like are dangerous because “the distinction between trained expert and uninformed amateur becomes dangerously blurred.”

Despite the patent absurdity of the premise, I picked up the book anyway, thinking it may have some value.

What did Keen, an “expert” technologist and entrepreneur, have to add to the debate?

I started reading until I got to page 52, and unexpectedly came across this passage:

Unfortunately, the internet is bloated with the hot air of these amateur journalists. Despite the size of their readership, even the A-List bloggers have no formal journalistic training. And, in fact, much of the real news their blogs contain has been lifted from (or aggregated from) the very news organizations they aim to replace.

It is not surprising then that these prominent bloggers have no professional training in the collection of news. After all, who needs a degree in journalism to post a hyperlink on a Web site? Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, for example, the founder of Daily Kos, a left-leaning site, came to political blogging via the technology industry and the military.

First of all, I’m not sure what Keen is talking about when he says we aim to replace news organizations. He’s been reading too much Pajamas Media propaganda. But more importantly, it’s really too bad that this non-amateur, non-blogger, expert technologists doesn’t know how to use Google. Or a web browser.

Because right on my About page you’ll find this:

Moulitsas earned two bachelor degrees at Northern Illinois University (1992-96), with majors in Philosophy, Journalism, and Political Science and a minor in German.

Oops.

Or he might’ve found out that I spent a significant amount of time working for traditional media outlets:

After a hitch serving as an artillery fire director at the headquarters for a missile battery, he attended Northern Illinois University, winning dual degrees and majoring in philosophy, political science and journalism and minoring in German.

From there, it was on to Boston University, where he earned his law degree.

“I knew in law school that I never wanted to be a lawyer. It was a way to kill three years of my life,” he offered with a smile.

He could have become a reporter—there was a job offer from the Associated Press—and he did freelance for three years for the Chicago Tribune, “but I decided I didn’t want to live vicariously through other people’s lives.”

Oops again. That article, by the way, is from the Daily Berkeley Planet, so he didn’t even need to go online to read it. Keen lives in Berkeley.

Had he asked me about my experience, I would’ve added that during law school, I was a graduate assistant to communications “expert” T. Barton Carter (where I helped update his seminal law textbook on media law), and T.A.’d a class on media law at the Boston University College of Communications.

Yeah … oops.

But that’s not all! More recently, in 2005, I spent two weeks in the UK reporting on the elections for the Guardian. And yes, produced “journalism” like this and this.

Oops, oops, and oops.

Keen has just proven why us “amateurs” have little regards for the “experts”.