Slashdot Mirror

Even used MSDN-AA? It and many other services want an email address to sign up, and then will start with the box "Send me a buncha stuff in email" checked, which is pretty abhorrent.

Google is perfect, because the addresses are "plussed", so you can add a special code ("pig.hogger+bullshit@gmail.com") to tag where you give your e-mail to, and if you see different junk coming in, you know very well who's the sleazy fucker who sold your e-mail. At that time, you can filter out the "+bullshit" emails...

The encrypt-files-and-demand-ransom-trick has been tried before by criminals in 1989. A company sent out disks with software containing a trojan that encrypted the harddisk and then demanded money to decrypt it.

http://www.claws-and-paws.com/virus/papers/history -of-computer-viruses.html#C05

The dumbass assumed that spammers would pay for something they could obtain for free illegally.

Spammers stealing software? Why, that's never happened before!

When I go to the local airport and see a kiosk displaying a Windoze 2000 screen saver instead of information, something is wrong with the software running the kiosk.

I totally agree with your post, and hate to sound like I'm nitpicking, but I'd just like to point out that this happens with Mac OS X, too. The screen on the far right in that picture has the OS X desktop. Here is a closeup of that screen. Both pictures were taken in Terminal A at Philadelphia International Airport on August 25th, 2004.

In this case, either the software had an issue, or the user was incredibly stupid and did something they shouldn't have. Software can only protect against so much user-level stupidity. If the user does something like, drags the program to the wrong location instead of double-clicking on it, there's absolutely nothing the program can do about it.

P.S. I also am the happy owner of a Powerbook. :-) This post isn't intended as a slam against OS X.

When I go to the local airport and see a kiosk displaying a Windoze 2000 screen saver instead of information, something is wrong with the software running the kiosk.

I totally agree with your post, and hate to sound like I'm nitpicking, but I'd just like to point out that this happens with Mac OS X, too. The screen on the far right in that picture has the OS X desktop. Here is a closeup of that screen. Both pictures were taken in Terminal A at Philadelphia International Airport on August 25th, 2004.

In this case, either the software had an issue, or the user was incredibly stupid and did something they shouldn't have. Software can only protect against so much user-level stupidity. If the user does something like, drags the program to the wrong location instead of double-clicking on it, there's absolutely nothing the program can do about it.

P.S. I also am the happy owner of a Powerbook. :-) This post isn't intended as a slam against OS X.

I've explained at great length that this is immoral, probably illegal, and a really stupid idea all around. He agrees, but his boss really wants that check from the client and I don't know the boss well enough to confront him directly.

Any suggestions on what I can do to put an early end to my friend's career as a spammer? I love the guy like a brother and don't want to see him rendered unemployable and hated by his family and friends, but I also don't want him to lose his job.

Do you know what ISP the company uses? Here's one idea: Call them up, say "I'm an anonymous friend of a friend of a friend ... who works at such-and-such company, a customer of yours, which is thinking of advertising their business with spam. Would you call this company and perhaps discuss the possible actions that could result from them spamming? Thanks." I can see where this might have questionable consequences, the boss might say "okay, how the hell did our ISP hear that we were thinking of spamming?" but this should get the message across.

A really good place to ask this and get many other good (probably better) ideas is the SPAM-L mailing list:
http://www.claws-and-paws.com/spam-l/

Agreed. Here, ignorant modders. Click on the sixth .mp3 file and prepare to be delighted.

For the 5 people in existence who haven't heard them, they're here

Have fun

Virus history is a bit different if you follow the definition of viruses parasitically infecting files, whereas worms are self-contained and actively spread via network. Here's a paper that covers the early history of both to some degree.

There is also a digest mode of SPAM-L available.

BTW, I'm the guy who maintains the SPAM-L FAQ, hi. :-)

Because the concept of the game is sound, it's just the music which is crap. Any hints of something like this in the works somewhere?
How can you say that about DDR music? It rocks to all hell. But then, there are those (strange) people who don't like Eurodance, so...

Anyway, go check out StepMania or Dance With Intensity. SM is open-source, but I prefer DWI because of the arcade similarity.

You can find various DWI files scattered through the 'net; some places to look are ddrei.com and ddruk.com ...

I dunno, maybe I was old enough when I first ran across this sort of stuff that it couldn't shock me so hard. But I don't see what a big deal it is.

If you were hit that badly by seeing fan-art, I wonder how you'd react to hearing actual audio outtakes from the Thundercats show. The fact is, while the cartoon itself may be pure, the people behind it are only human.

Maybe the fact that I grew up watching Warner Bros cartoons, which threw in all sorts of hidden adult humor, helped cushion me from this sort of shock. I dunno.

Back in the day we used to talk about Sanford Wallace, his wife, and if they would ever have kids.

We concluded that he would most like "use someone else's open port" to make this happen.

We (Cryptic Allusion) are also developing a Dreamcast game with the freely available homebrew tools to go beyond the basic get-as-many-steps-right-as-you-can of DDR to something much closer to Puyo Puyo or Puzzle Fighter. Here's the link:

Feet of Fury

There's also Dance With Intensity that someone developed to play DDR songs on your PC, assuming you can track down the step files and MP3s/OGGs.

http://www.claws-and-paws.com/spam-l/

Search and archives are at:

http://peach.ease.lsoft.com/archives/spam-l.html

But you have to be a subscriber to use the above.

Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)

(Ripped from my Transformers webpage...)

TV Guide: Cybertron Edition

7:00 AM - Amazing Inventions!
Infommercial. Host: Swindle. This week includes a home fusion cannon kit, a plant that grows After Dark screen saver modules, and a one-way dimensional portal. All for only 12 trilitres of energon resin.
Operators are standing by.

8:00 AM - Cooking with Slag.
Yet more barbecue recipes. Today, Slag shows us why flamethrowers and cooking assistants don't mix.

8:30 AM - Transmaniacs.
Cartoon. Yakko decides to play with Shockwave and learns the meaning of "radiation sickness". Broadside sings the "International Friendship Song"

8:00 AM - Time Machine.
Science Programming. Eight o'clock??? erceptor, will you turn that #@^^%#! thing off?!

10:00 AM - Decepticon Workout.
Trypticon demonstrates how to tear apart vicious and deadly Autobot enemies.
Today's victim: Bumblebee.

10:30 AM - Rush Limbaugh.
Rush gripes about the growing controversy sweeping the nation: Rumble and Frenzy -- which is which? Also, a commentary on Megatron's and Optimus's new looks, and why Transformers would want to put their own names across their bodies..

11:00 AM - Special: Funeral.
Rumble and Frenzy locate the station Rush broadcasts from. Special appearance by Scavenger.

11:30 AM - Star Trek: The Next Generation.
Science Fiction. [Yes, even Cybertron gets this show] Riker tries to make the moves on Elita-One, only to get stomped on when he asks to see her hard drive interface card. Also: Data learns to transform into a warp nacelle.

12:30 PM - Movie Matinee: "Terminator 3."
In a misguided attempt to get a date for the Skynet dance, the T-1000 pursues Linda Hamilton across Cybertron. Guest stars (in order of appearance) Prowl, Optimus Prime, Groove, Blades, and Octane.

3:30 PM - Cybertronian Gladiators.
Game Show In the season premiere, the Gladiators replace the rubber balls in the cannon with Prowl's acid pellets. Will the competitors notice?

4:30 PM - Baywatch: The Director's Cut.
Don't even ask.

5:30 PM - The Simpsons.
Mr. Burns buys the smelting pits and gets Homer thrown in. Bart accidentally says "Eat me!" to Weirdwolf.

6:00 PM - Kung Fu: The Legend Lives On.
Ultra Magnus, a very, very distant relative of Kwai-Chang Cain, conveniently loses all his weapons and has to face Devastator in one-on-one personal combat for the fate of the planet. Again.

7:00 PM - Tales of Earth.
Documentary (part 6 of 12). The Cybertronians first encounter the Swarm, Megatron takes Optimus apart, and Omega Supreme invents the galaxy's largest Oreo cookie. Narrated by William Shatner.

8:00 PM - Vilnacron 90210.
Drama. Orion Pax runs against Decatron for class rep, and Groove tries Enerweed in the little robots' room. Arcee meets her evil twin sister and gets her boyfriend stolen. As always, Hot Rod just stands around looking cool, doing nothing, and occassionally giving out sagely advice.

9:00 PM - Combiner Variety Hour.
Variety. Bruticus does a puppet show, and Superion tries to reassemble himself while running on stale Pepsi instead of energon. Predaking shows off his latest magic act: walking through the Great Wall of China *without*
alerting local authorities.

10:00 PM - Brady Bunch: The Next Generation.
Comedy. The Dinobots kill several dozen innocent humans and are sent to bed without supper. Arcee asks Davy Jonesicon out on a date.

10:30 PM - The Gunman.
Galvatron meets a diabolical new villain with the power to destroy the planet -- and promptly blows his head off. Flashbacks provide blatant filler for the rest of the episode.

11:30 PM - Saturday Night Live.
Host: Soundwave. Musical guest: Ratbat. Sketches consist of recycled old skits, except that they occasionally change some of the names in them. Concludes with scenes from the time Sludge hosted the show and was startled by a loud noise.

1:00 AM - Late Night Theater. Tonight: "Godzilla vs. Wheelie." A highly emotional story about a lone Autobot who gets really drunk one night and calls someone "a stupid overweight squishy." For mature (over 5 million vorn) audiences only.

3:00 AM - Closing Commentary.
Grimlock points out several flaws in the philosophy of Socrates and meditates for continued peace in the universe. Guests include Ratchet, Wheeljack, and Wrapper, a new Autobot who transforms into a straitjacket.

Sorry, but nVir and other application based viri pre-dated MerryXmas by a good 4 - 5 years. HyperCard viri didn't hit till at least about the time of System 7 and I was dealing with boxen infected by stuff like nVir back in '88.

You got your dates wrong. MerryXmas did appear before nVir, whereas MeryXMas (also known as the Peace virus) was spreading early 1988 and triggered on march 2nd 1988.

See the Mac virus faq.

Some things not quite mentioned on the FAQ, but quite well known here in Montreal is that author of this virus was Richar Brandow, the then president of Club Mac Montreal.

Karma karma karma karma karmeleon: it comes and goes, it comes and goes.

Other than that, as someone else said here, cut down the amount of graphics you are using, that will really help on bandwidth consumption. One thing that I tried on the pictures section of my site was to not have any thumbnails on the pages, but instead fo use Javascript popup windows for the pictures. This has two benefits:

1. No thumbnails loading reduces bandwidth consumption.

2. A popup prevents someone from loading a picture into their current browser window, pressing back to return to the list of puctures, and possibly reloading that same page because their browser is retarded/configured badly.

--

We got our Internet access through Infoasis, which told us on the 22nd about Northpoint. Yet, all we had was a week's notice, not nearly enough time to get another DSL line (from say, Pacbell) or a T1. Giving a week's notice was nothing short of irresponsible on the part of Northpoint.

Thanks Northpoint, thanks for not show any compassion for your customers and making us now have to scramble for alternate connections.

--

1. Forcing users from around the company to switch from products that they know and are comfortable with to a product that they don't know and might not be comfortable with is only going to frustrate them and alienate them from management and especially the IT deparment, whose "fault" they'll percieve this as.

2. Outlook is chock full of security holes. Thanks to those holes, it makes worms like Kak possible, whereas it wouldn't be a problem with any other e-mail client.

"We are very up-front about what we do and how we do it," said Cajunnet general manager Eugene Wanless. "I think a lot of people consider it spam. We'll send out between 5 (million) and 20 million emails at a time and take a lot of heat from people whining and complaining. Eventually our ISPs wind up turning us off.

OBInfo: I maintain a FAQ for figuring out the origin of forged spams and how to complain about them here. I hope folks find it helpful.

I happen to maintain the FAQ for that list, it's over here if anyone would like to find out more about it.

A few weeks ago, we were having severe (>9000 ms delay) latency problems, and upon our first call to them, they told us things like "clear your cache". Morons. After about 2 days, and them finally sending someone over to the place where the DSL line is installed, we finally determined that the problem was on our LAN. Had Pac Bell bothered to do something so trivial such as to ping the DSL modem from their location, and see that ping times were normal, they could have avoided having to come out in the first place. (Yes, I should have pinged the modem myself, but I missed that step in my troubleshooting..)

The full story about our experience with Pac Bell can be found here.

Does this mean they'll have to resort to prostitution to support themselves? Remember, kids: respect your elders.

Viruses infect other executables, such that the original functionality is still there, but the viral code is executed when the program is first run, which gives it a chance to spread to other executables and/or become resident in memory.

Worms, on the other paw, are self-contained programs which contain nothing but the worm itself.

The definitions of these things are hardly new, they have been around for YEARS. I suggest reading section B2 of the comp.virus FAQ for more information.

Case in point, back in 1997, Dyson, who has NO experience in the anti-spam community, shot her mouth off about the spam problem and proposed a "solution" to it. Had she actually spent more than two seconds thinking about her "solution", or actually posting it to one or more anti-spam forums and asking for comments, she would have found that it's something that most anti-spammers don't see as being viable. But nooo, she didn't do that, she evidentally thought she knew more than everyone else, including those of us who have been dealing with spam for years, and the media blindly quoted her as though she were some anti-spam guru, which she's not.

I apologize for sounding bitter and turning this post into a rant, but dammit, it annoys me to no end when people don't think, and their short-sighted actions set back the efforts of an entire community. Dyson is in serious need of a clue.

<gets off his soapbox>

Yeah right, so first it says that high level scripts may be a source of viruses, but then when you have source code (in e.g. Makefiles, highlevel), viruses are all of a sudden less likely. I am still afraid that I come into a Makefile someday that holds the line:

install: rm -rf /

Is this not a virus? If not, why is it a virus if a similar line is contained in some malicious Word macro?

Please take the time to learn the terminology before posting things like that. If it's of any help, I have a collection of many anti-virus FAQs here.

http://www.claws-and-paws.com/virus/articles/linux _viruses.shtml

Share and enjoy. Comments are welcome.

As an anti-spammer, this bill is my worst nightmare come true. The opt-out clause is especially nasty, since now it means that we can get hit by each spammer once under the law, and we will have NO recourse whatsoever, thus, this bill isn't going to have any effect on the current spam situation. A much better law, IMHO, would be something like the current junk fax law, which states that if you get an unsolicited advertisement, you can sue the person for $500 per offence, or for $1,500 if the offence was "willful".

Okay, that's enough bitching from me, since there are already a few good laws on the books that are just waiting to be used against spammers in court. There's more information to be found on these laws at suespammers.org.

That being said, I also used to hang out on Fido Net's virus echos in 1994 and 1995 where some of the true anti-virus experts hung out too. And yes, I consider Eugine Kaspersky of AVP (the guy who was quoted in the article) to be one of them. Back when the first Word Macro virus (Winword.Concept), he was the one who I saw first post about it to Fido's VIRUS echo, and he was also the first one to release a fix for it (another word macro which caught and disinfected Winword.Concept).

Unfortunately, I fear this is another case of False Authority Syndrome in that while Eugene may know viruses very well, I question his credentials in the UNIX/Linux area. For one thing, for a virus to replicate to a considerable degree on a system, you'll need to be running as root -- if you're logged in as a regular user, any program you run isn't going to be able to infect /bin/ls, no matter how hard you try. :-)

I think Kaspersky also misunderstands the nature of UNIX/Linux, in that a lot of applications (the stuff *I* use, anyway, like Apache, PHP, MySQL, etc.), when downloaded from the net, are usually done so in source form, and the end user compiles the code and runs it. It would be foolish if someone tried to put replicating code in their source, as it would be spotted very quickly and the author would have some serious explaining to do.

Finally, just to play the Devil's Advocate, I think problems could arise if say, a binary in a distrubtion is infected, and then is sold to thousands of unsuspecting end users. All it would then take is to run that binary as root, and you suddenly have an infection on your hands. However, I don't see this as a very likely scenario, since I can count the number of Linux-based viruses which I have heard of on one hand. For the reasons I outlined above, Linux just isn't a very attractive platform to virus writers, who want to see their creations spread.

Yeah, that's the ticket, let's all wear tails and collars around cities! Furries unite! :-)

Really, it's not that hard once you get the hang of it...

I think the main reason is because you don't have the fear of being laughed at or made fun of if you say or do something stupid. I myself am very open when I'm online (if anyone doubts this, just look at my website ;-), and have made friends from around the world, some of whom I've even been able to meet in person.

Sure, people get raped and such meeting someone whom they've met on the Internet, but it certainly happens in real life too, and I'll even go out on a limb and hypothosize that it happens more in RL than on the Internet since on the Internet, if someone has a hostile personality, you'll be able to see it right away and not even consider wanting to meet them.

In a nutshell, I think the advantages of meeting people on the net far outweigh the disadvantages.