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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
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".
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.
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 wish I could agree with that, but there are plenty of people in my age demographic (25-35) who get all of their talking-points from Fox News. I'm not sure why we eased up on the laws allowing Rupert Murdoch to own media in the U.S., but we pay for it every day in the form of continuing ignorance and whack-job propaganda/conspiracy theories.
"Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right" - Salvor Hardin
Because he paid a lot of money to a lot of people.
That would involve actually reading the website. Based on the tenuosity of the connection, I don't think they could handle that.
You think they'd at least get that part right (when they link to the website).
Linking to things and reading them are two entirely different things. Especially on Slashdot.
Bow before me, for I am root.
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!!!
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.
as long as there are 'young republicans' (and, sadly, there are) then there will be faux news, telling it how they want to hear it.
blame the churches and religion. they keep feeding the republicans more and more new blood.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
... 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.
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.
Nope, not generational. A majority of people are very easily swayed by persistent propaganda. They may figure out what their own interests are in their 30s, but under constant pressure they will eventually wear down and become scared and confused and angry at their lot in life. They will allow themselves to get roped into an "us versus them" mentality where the person with the largest bank-roll gets to decide who the "them" is (and there need not even be a real "them.") And research into human psychology advances and makes well financed advertising campaigns even more effective as time goes on.
By the time the recently resurrected racist element loses its steam, there will be a new bogeyman. The fools of the future will probably not look anything like the current republican base (for one, they won't be white), but what they believe won't matter so much as their maleability as political puppets.
(Oh yeah, and to rub salt in the wound, everyone who had the mental capacity to worry about man's effect on the planet and abstain from reproduction will have completely failed to produce any offspring with similar abilities, we'll have only a small gaggle of adoptees to carry that load.)
Someone had to do it.
Yes, and the Unabomber's manifesto was written in English, the same language used by Shakespeare. Now the bard is also a terrorist. I'm surprised they didn't call Flame a Brazilian plot. They're behind this whole LUA thing.