[Quote]:

n April 4, Russian antivirus vendor Dr. Web published strong evidence that more than 500,000 Macs have been infected by the latest variant of the Flashback trojan. As Mikko Hypponen, Chief Researcher at F-Secure pointed out via Twitter, if there are roughly 45 million Macs out there, Flashback would now have infected more than 1 percent of them, making Flashback roughly as common for Mac as Conficker was for Windows. Flashback appears to be the most widespread Mac malware we’ve seen since the days when viruses were spread on infected floppy disks; it could be the single most significant malware infection to ever hit the Mac community.Here’s what you need to know about Flashback, what you can do about it, and what it means for the future of Mac security.

[Quote]:

The Irish Minister for Education, Ruari Quinn, says that religious orders in the country found culpable in the sexual abuse of children are not able to pay their share of the compensation owed to victims.

However, he also went on to say that he is still going to pursue every means possible to get the compensation from them.

[..]

Quinn is trying to get the orders to hand over deeds of schools and other property assets to redress the cash shortfall, but many of the properties are now owned by trusts and not directly by the orders.

The church hides its assets in trusts and forces the bill upon the Irish tax payer. Lovely.

[Quote]:

Homophobia is more pronounced in individuals with an unacknowledged attraction to the same sex and who grew up with authoritarian parents who forbade such desires, a series of psychology studies demonstrates.

[Quote]:

Pope Benedict XVI is set to lead Easter Sunday Mass in Rome’s St Peter’s Square and deliver his traditional Easter message from the basilica’s balcony.

At a vigil Mass on Saturday evening, he voiced fears that mankind is “groping in the darkness, unable to distinguish good from evil”.

Hmm… let’s see. “Groping in darkness”… said by a Catholic priest. I’m sure there’s a joke in there somewhere…

Quote (via Weighty Matters)

I am convinced that Ingrid Newkirk, the founder of PETA (“People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals”) was once a good person. What happened?

… In 1972, when she was a young stockbroker in Maryland, Newkirk rescued a group of abandoned kittens and brought them to an animal shelter. The shelter workers told her plainly that the kittens would be “put down,” but she had been born in England and raised mostly in India, so she misunderstood the expression…”She thought that the cats would be put up for adoption; when she asked some minutes later to see them, presumably settled in their cages, she was shocked to hear they had all been immediately euthanized.”

…PETA, for reasons near impossible to comprehend, decided to devote itself to precisely the treachery that inspired Newkirk’s mission in the first place. Her organization now routinely takes in animals, with the gentle lie that it intends to re-home them. It then exterminates them. Generally within twenty-four hours. All of them.

…PETA’s stated goal, in the elimination of animal cruelty, is a“No-Birth” nation. Of all PETA’s euphemisms, this is perhaps the most disturbing.

A No-Birth nation means a zero birth rate. Contrary to popular belief, “zero birth rate” does not imply population stasis, where the number of births is equal to the number of deaths. That would be “zero RNI” (Rate of Natural Increase).

A zero birth rate means extinction.

Long, but interesting insight into what I’d assumed were just a bunch of whacky pussy lovers.

Quote

Five people in southern China have been charged with intentional injury in the case of a Chinese teenager who sold a kidney so he could buy an iPhone and an iPad, the government-run Xinhua News Agency has said.

OK, I’m shocked!