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Fox News Ties 'Flame' Malware To Angry Birds
eldavojohn writes "The title of this hard-hitting piece of journalism reads 'Powerful 'Flame' cyberweapon tied to popular Angry Birds game,' and opens with, 'The most sophisticated and powerful cyberweapon uncovered to date was written in the LUA computer language, cyber security experts tell Fox News — the same one used to make the incredibly popular Angry Birds game.' The rest of the details that are actually pertinent to the story follow that important message. The graphic for this story? Perhaps a map of Iran, or the LUA logo, or maybe the stereotyped evil hacker in a ski mask? Nope, all Angry Birds. Describing LUA as 'Gamer Code,' Fox for some reason (popularity?) selects Angry Birds from an insanely long list in their article implying guilt-by-shared-development-language. I'm not sure if explaining machine language to them would alleviate the perceived problem or cause them to burn their desktops in the streets and launch a new crusade to protect the children."
It would make a crazy sort of sense, yes? If Angry Birds was actually malware...
Bits of code, random ramblings: jakimfett.com
Now we know why those birds are red.They are obviously commies.
Ninjas don't carry tic tacs
So.. Flame is about as related to Angry Birds as Fox News is related to facts then?
I've built up so much character I have an alter-ego
Americans will generally only read news articles that are of interest of something pertaining to them or their general situation. Iran issues, to Americans, probably don't mean much of anything. Angry birds on the other hand.... now THAT is the stuff that matters. Nothing more than a poor attempt of Fox to garner page views from readers.
Lua is not an acronym. It is a WORD. It even strains on the lua.org website, that Lua is a word meaning moon in Portuguese, not an acronym.
If it were an acronym it'd stand for "learn ur acronyms".
And fox news will soon fade away as the baby boomers fade away
Misleading Fox News Titles are Misleading.
Seriously, some people should be banned for life from writing tech stories. That's somewhat akin to saying the Queen of England is tied to a kidnapping because the ransom note was written in English.
There's a much more compact way to summarize this story:
"The submitter has a hard-on for Fox News"
Much clearer, compact, and concise, and contains just as much relevant information.
Even on Lua's site (which Fox links to), they have a section explaining how to spell and pronounce the name.
Please do not write it as "LUA", which is both ugly and confusing, because then it becomes an acronym with different meanings for different people. So, please, write "Lua" right!
You think they'd at least get that part right (when they link to the website).
Its not what it is, its something else.
This just in - Fox News is related to Terrorism in that both use the english language to communicate.
See what I did there Fox? Yeah. We saw what you did there too.
The Washington Post wrote a similar piece yesterday that I read. Headline was less direct but linked it in the first paragraph.
As did a number of other sources.
So, how does this apply only to Fox?
I guess were witnessing reality news for the masses. If there wasn't an audience for fox news,they'd been gone long ago. I know from standing in the grocery lines however that National Enquirer draws its own crowd of gullible lamers. Fox news has basically capitalized on that but in real-time.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
http://www.lua.org/about.html#name
I stopped reading before I even finished the title.
I'm assuming even the biggest idiots on this site (like myself) know better than to listen to anything that spews from that "news" site.
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
Angry Birds is obviously an evil socialist liberal attack on conservative American values! Look at it: Liberal bird brains get pissed when they lose their nest egg to wealthy conservatives, done up as pigs in an obvious ad hominem attack, when they slack off on the job. They then conspire to fly into the "pigs" buildings, bringing them crashing down on their poor heads. This is just more proof that liberals are really a bunch of terrorist sympathizers! /sarcasm
It's funny laugh! Please, laugh? Why are you all looking at me that way?!?
I have a few tech-saavy friends who are fox viewers that don't believe fox news has an insane conservative slant (being conservatives themselves, they just dont see it).
Big grin on my face as I forward this to them ... it's only a slim 0.1% chance that they'll "get it" but .. still .. a chance ..
So they "tied" it to something popular to get millions of peeps on ads.
What's the beef? A few years back CNN ran an article soon after the huge tsunami in Asia that sea rises due to global warming "would be like the tsunami zomg!!!" In the fine print a scientist said there could be a 30 foot sea rise, the same height as the tsunami wave, over the course of 100-300 years.
Ad people are jackasses.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
This just in, Fox News is produced using video cameras, the same technology used by terrorists to create beheading videos!
If there's anything more important than my ego around here, I want it caught and shot immediately.
Unlike the geeks and techno-junkies here...95% of the American viewing public has no clue what malware is. Fox did what all broadcast news does...they related a story to something the people could understand.
Slashdot opinions do the same thing with all the car analogies.
Maybe if the average American IQ was higher than a half-full glass of water the news (FOX, CNN, CBS etc) would be a bit more insightful.
It's a comedy site, mashing random shit together into implausible narratives is exactly what they're supposed to be doing. This is no different to what The Onion or Cracked do and I don't see the bile getting thrown at those corners of the intertubes. The only thing objectionable here is the quality. It's not hilarious but not terrible. Keep trying guys and girls!
"Welcome to our world. We are the wasted youth. And we are the future too." Yes, I know these are stupid lyrics.
I'm not sure if explaining machine language to them would alleviate the perceived problem or cause them to burn their desktops in the streets and launch a new crusade to protect the children.
When the propaganda ministry of the GOP tries to report an actual news story they kind of fumble around with the process. They should just stick with being a right wing tabloid, it's what they're good at.
Fox News delivering idiocy to your doorstep (couch) still surprises people? And here I thought amercans watch it instead of comedy central...
Apple has "Mac vs PC", Microsoft has "Laptop Hunters", Linux has recession
If sales in Angry Birds drops, then Rovio can sue Fox for libel, or harmed reputation, or whatever?
This has a very good chance of causing quantifiable, demonstrable harm. I hope it does, and I really hope Rovio slams Fox's collective rectal cavities against the wall for it.
It's far worse than you realize, Fox: LUA is also heavily used by World of Warcraft! So, the Flame virus that's taking over your computer has ties to demon-worshipping warlocks, pagan druids, and heretical shadow priests.
Some a them birds are yellow. They must be Jap'nese. Doesn't anyone remember Pearl Harbor anymore?
Others are black. You know about them.
Still others are blue. Must be from some a them blue states!
In fact, this whole multicolored thing reminds me of (shaking head) multiculturalism. Angry Birds is rooning Murka!!!
We all can watch Fox News. It's easy and there's nothing to stop us. But should we? Is there any redeeming value that accrues by watching it, or is it all pure commercial pro-establishment rubbish whose primary purposes are a) to make money from advertising, and b) promote a particular political ideology, not necessarily in that order?
There are many similar things that we can do: smoke, drink sugary beverages, eat meat every day, drink lots of booze, live a sedentary lifestyle, obsessively and bitterly wish we were millionaires, drive our cars always as fast as possible (because we're in a hurry and everyone else is a fucking loser), drive big expensive cars (or aspire to do so), drink sugary beverages in large quantities, obsessively and bitterly wish we were billionaires, zealously believe and promote a political party or candidate, covet the yuppie lifestyle, smoke lots of dope (insert favorite drug and drug pastime here), play video or computer games or consume electronic pop culture at every available moment (earbuds? always on), have all the latest gadgets (cell phones, laptops, consoles, tablets, Apple products, etc.), gain weight without any reasonable limit, and so on. The list is long. We can do it if we feel like it. Who are you to deny that right?
We can do those things, right? Nothing to stop us.
followed by "head in hands" pose.
It's like we're going back to the frickin dark ages.
Fox have discovered that Ghandi and Hitler were both humans, more on this shocking link later!
Fox News is commonly written in English, the same language used to write Twilight. This clearly ties them to sparkly vampires who are destroying our youth.
It would make a crazy sort of sense, yes? If Angry Birds was actually malware...
Actually the reference makes perfect sense. They quote merely offers an example of the LUA language's more typical type of usage. Angry Birds is a good reference since it is something that many non-geeks will be aware of.
If you look at the "insanely long list"(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Lua-scripted_video_games) on wikipedia, angry birds is the first well known computer game listed. I think this is half lack of any relevant knowledge, half laziness.
"Lua" (pronounced LOO-ah) means "Moon" in Portuguese. As such, it is neither an acronym nor an abbreviation, but a noun. More specifically, "Lua" is a name, the name of the Earth's moon and the name of the language. Like most names, it should be written in lower case with an initial capital, that is, "Lua". Please do not write it as "LUA", which is both ugly and confusing, because then it becomes an acronym with different meanings for different people. So, please, write "Lua" right!
... just like every single malware site on the Web. BEWARE!
Fuck. Seriously. What will it take to get that sorry excuse for a news organization removed from existence? This shit is just so fucking wrong.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
N/T
And before you post it:
http://www.snopes.com/cokelore/fanta.asp
You mean talk with a Lisp and program in ADA?
Pirate Bay tied to terrorism.
Terrorist have been using cyber-weapons on the internet, the same medium used by the Pirate Bay to distribute files.
"Science can amuse and fascinate us all, but it is engineering that changes the world. " - Asimov.
I recall MSNBC calling linux the prefered OS of terrorists some years back
Flame is 20Mb total, and a lot of that is almost certainly written in C/C++ (Lua VM, sqlite3, zlib, libbz2).
The article then says, "[Flame] was built with gamer code". Also incorrect. Lua is a general-purpose scripting language in no way specific to gaming. And I've heard nothing that says code directly related to any sort of game is part of it.
That's the last time the article mentions Lua or gaming, but no further mentions are necessary. A false connection has been made, and by hyping up the danger of Flame, e.g., the UN views it is a "significant threat", they're effectively blaming game developers through guilt by association.
The article also says, "Flame came to light when the U.N. International Telecommunications Union (which oversees cyberactivities for the body) received reports of unusual activity." The implication is Flame was responsible for the activity. Again according to Kaspersky, that's not the case. They were attempting to track down something called "Codename Wiper" that was responsible for actually deleting data when they stumbled across Flame by accident.
In contrast, the MSNBC article makes it quite clear that only part of Flame was written in Lua. It then engages in a fairly coherent discussion of why Lua might have been chosen to implement part of Flame, quoting various sources with various different takes on it. And the headline is rather obviously intended to be facetious.
So, on one hand we have a fairly coherent piece that actually tries to get into software design philosophy. And on the other, we have your typical pile of crap from Fox News.
I'm all for Fox bashing, but it looks like this story about "Gamer Code" came from a common source (Reuters?).
More "reputable" sources say they same thing:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/flame-cyberweapon-written-using-gamer-code-report-says/2012/05/31/gJQAkIB83U_story.html
Of course, Fox shamelessly went so far as to post a pic of AngryBirds encourage clicks, but that is just marketing.
Fox / Newscorp is about as much about journalism as a turnip is about active predation.
10 They will print whatever crap they think will sell papers / generate page hits / boost Nielsen ratings so they can make more money so they can then monopolize more media so then again
20 go to 10
The Source Engine supports scripts in LUA so maybe we should start blaming Valve for malware targeting Iran? Half-Life 2, Left 4 Dead, Team Fortress 2 are all VIRUSES! PANIC!
Huh, I had the opposite reaction: I think I'll go learn Lua this weekend. Maybe it'll make me look edgy when a non-geek asks about it. I think a lot of other young, wannabe hackers have the same weekend agenda now.
All publicity is good publicity!
Availability of another simple language that is easy on the eyes that has nearly self-explanatory procedural concurrency (via coroutines in Lua's case) might do the trick, but I don't see any real reason to hate on Lua.
Someone had to do it.
Journalist don't write their own headlines and whoever wrote this one should be punished, but the article doesn't make any connection between the cyber-weapon and Angry Birds, except what is notable and that is Flame is written in gamer's code, apparently something new in the cyber-war era.
The article's facts are correct and it is not wrong to mention that the code used is used to write the most popular game in history, given that's the only way most people could relate to a language called Lua.
The facts in the article come not from Fox News, but from sources who are named in the article.
I find that those who bad mouth Fox News the most never watch the network or, apparently, read the articles they trash, either.
They just read the headline written by a summer intern.
"Watch out! He's using 'Gamer Code'!"
Ok, this is a secret so don't go telling anyone.
Angry Birds is a Finnish conspiracy AND an attack plan for our inevitable assault on Iran. It also funds the Finnish military.
Did you think think that the name Rovio (=stake or huge-ass bonfire) is just a coincidence?
So in other words, par for the course, accuracy and relevance wise, when it comes to Fox News reporting.
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
In the next version of Angry Birds we will shoot birds against evil FOXES !
...our delicious, supple youth.
Ok, I agree that the headline is extremely misleading, and yet another disgusting move by Faux News, but I am not at all surprised that they picked Angry Birds if they were already going to spread FUD about games anyway.
I mean, why would they pick anything else when Angry Bird is probably the most well known game written using this language? Using some random title no one knows about wouldn't have nearly the same effect. But now the attention of the Faux News audience is captured using a game they are quite likely to be familiar with.
So while the sensationalist article is a bunch of crap, the choice of game is not exactly surprising.
Clever signature text goes here.
Fox does this with Muslims every day. Some crazy guy with a beard somewhere acts crazy, and so I get dirty looks here in the US of A. It probably doesn't help that I like Lua.
What? Fox "News" misleads its viewers with a story filled with misinformation and innuendo? I'm shocked! SHOCKED I tell you!
The latter of which are also used to staff Fox News.
This post does the same thing. "Fox News Ties 'Flame' Malware To Angry Birds" is a deliberately attention-getting title, and is not very accurate. A better title might be just "'Flame' And Angry Birds Written In Same Language"