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Report: Malicious PDF files comprised 80 percent of all exploits for 2009
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A newly released report shows that based on more than a trillion Web requests processed in 2009, the use of malicious PDF files exploiting flaws in Adobe Reader/Adobe Acrobat not only outpaced the use of Flash exploits, but also, grew to 80% of all exploits the company encountered throughout the year.
Wow. That is a lot. And here I thought I was paranoid banishing Acrobat Reader from all systems I control.
Georgia Schools Inquiry Finds Signs of Cheating
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Georgia education officials ordered investigations on Thursday at 191 schools across the state where they had found evidence of tampering on answer sheets for the state’s standardized achievement test.
The order came after an inquiry on cheating by the Governor’s Office of Student Achievement raised red flags regarding one in five of Georgia’s 1,857 public elementary and middle schools. A large proportion of the schools were in Atlanta.
The inquiry flagged any school that had an abnormal number of erasures on answer sheets where the answers were changed from wrong to right, suggesting deliberate interference by teachers, principals or other administrators.
Experts said it could become one of the largest cheating scandals in the era of widespread standardized testing.
Hate your teacher? All your classmates hate him too? Easy solution! Conspire to have as many students as possible erase fake answers on your tests.
Adolf Hitler makes a Hitler YouTube parody video
Cassini Spacecraft Crosses Saturn’s Ring Plane
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Credit:
Cassini Imaging Team, ISS, JPL, ESA, NASA
If this is Saturn, where are the rings? When Saturn’s “appendages” disappeared in 1612, Galileo did not understand why. Later that century, it became understood that Saturn‘s unusual protrusions were rings and that when the Earth crosses the ring plane, the edge-on rings will appear to disappear. This is because Saturn’s rings are confined to a plane many times thinner, in proportion, than a razor blade. In modern times, the robot Cassini spacecraft orbiting Saturn now also crosses Saturn’s ring plane. A series of plane crossing images from 2005 February was dug out of the vast online Cassini raw image archive by interested Spanish amateur Fernando Garcia Navarro. Pictured above, digitally cropped and set in representative colors, is the striking result. Saturn’s thin ring plane appears in blue, bands and clouds in Saturn’s upper atmosphere appear in gold. Since Saturn just passed its equinox, today the ring plane is pointed close to the Sun and the rings could not cast the high dark shadows seen across the top of this image, taken back in 2005. Moons appear as bumps in the rings.
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Cartoons
Reboot Scheduler
Whine about Apple about closed systems and lack of multitasking all you want, but at least there’s no need for an app like this.
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Adobe sabotaging the HTML5-spec via W3C politics?
No part of HTML5 is, or was ever, “blocked” in the W3C HTML Working Group — not HTML5, not Canvas 2D Graphics, not Microdata, not Video — not by me, not by Adobe.
Neither Adobe nor I oppose, are fighting, are trying to stop, slow down, hinder, oppose, or harm HTML5, Canvas 2D Graphics, Microdata, video in HTML, or any of the other significant features in HTML5.
Claims otherwise are false. Any other disclaimers needed?
So, let’s go and check the minutes:
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Here’s another one (from http://www.w3.org/2010/02/11-html-wg-minutes.html#item07 , the official minutes from the February 11th teleconference of the W3C HTML Working Group):
“”"
masinter: do I need to repeat objections?
paulc: the co-chairs are aware of the formal objection
rubys: it would be helpful to repeat the objection
paulc: it would be helpful to people who aren’t reading w3-archive emailplh: we won’t approve the FPWDs until the FO is resolved
masinter: sure, i’ll forward my comment on scope
paulc: plh and larry, can you post the FO on the public-html list and the affects on the plans?
(plh and larry each agree)
“”"For those of you playing along at home, “masinter” is Adobe’s official representative on the W3C HTML Working Group; “paulc” and “rubys” are the co-chairs of the W3C HTML Working Group; “plh” works for the W3C; “w3-archive” is a members-only mailing list in the W3C that is not only not viewable by the public, it is not viewable by the hundreds of non-W3C-members who have been invited to the W3C HTML Working Group.
Oh, and “Simon St. Laurent” is apparently some guy with a blog who enjoys cherry-picking quotes from a bunch of other blogs that fit his preconceptions. But don’t let that stop you from reading the primary sources for yourself, where you will clearly see that on February 11th, the co-chairs of the W3C HTML Working Group were trying to convince Adobe’s official representative to make public the Formal Objection that he had previously only made on a members-only mailing list, a Formal Objection which the W3C representative said would have to be resolved before the W3C would agree to publish the W3C HTML Working Group’s working drafts.
Looks like a block to me. But since Adobe claims “not so!”, Ian Hickson calls their bluff:
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Since I was mistaken about the formal objection, should I prepare the drafts for FPWD publication now? What date should I use?
Wi-Fi Turns Arizona Bus Ride Into a Rolling Study Hall
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Students endure hundreds of hours on yellow buses each year getting to and from school in this desert exurb of Tucson, and stir-crazy teenagers break the monotony by teasing, texting, flirting, shouting, climbing (over seats) and sometimes punching (seats or seatmates).
But on this chilly morning, as bus No. 92 rolls down a mountain highway just before dawn, high school students are quiet, typing on laptops.
Morning routines have been like this since the fall, when school officials mounted a mobile Internet router to bus No. 92’s sheet-metal frame, enabling students to surf the Web. The students call it the Internet Bus, and what began as a high-tech experiment has had an old-fashioned — and unexpected — result. Wi-Fi access has transformed what was often a boisterous bus ride into a rolling study hall, and behavioral problems have virtually disappeared.
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The 70′s were awesome!
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Hunh. I tend to balk at upgrading Acrobat Reader on my Windows box (for a variety of reasons and no perceived value gained) but I think I may just have been convinced to start keeping up with updates.
This seems to be one of the big gotchas of software design & customer service: upgrading software behind users’s backs is considered a no-no; nagging them a lot quickly becomes annoying (yay, ANOTHER iTunes update. go AWAY); doing nothing is rarely an option because most code eventually turns out to have security issues.
Here’s a good upgrade for Acrobat Reader: http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/reader/
Oh yeah, I used to use FoxIt and forgot about it. (Don’t spend much time on Windows anymore.) Thx.
on the mac it’s easier: just trash Acrobat and let Mac OS Preview handle it.
This must come as a huge relief to MS who has held the crown for how many years now? (sorry, couldn’t resist)
Ya know, Irene makes a good point. The paper that this is sourced from does not mention Internet Explorer at all. Vulnerabilities in Acrobat/Reader and Flash together make up 98% of the reported exploits. Really? There are effectively no active browser exploits anymore? Or are we looking at some odd subset here?
And another possibility…
http://www.docu-track.com/product/pdf-xchange-viewer