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Fox News Ties 'Flame' Malware To Angry Birds

Posted by Soulskill on from the there's-bad-men-in-our-internets dept.

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."

8 of 188 comments (clear)

  1. SO related by Tsu-na-mi · · Score: 5, Funny

    So.. Flame is about as related to Angry Birds as Fox News is related to facts then?

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    1. Re:SO related by Hatta · · Score: 5, Funny

      Fox News is written in the same language as the Unabomber Manifesto. Coincidence?

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    2. Re:SO related by jd · · Score: 5, Funny

      Maybe not - the language WAS invented by psychotic warrior tribes (the Angles and Saxons) and then added to by other psychotic warrior tribes (the Norse, the Danes and the Normans).

      Huh. Just thought. Maybe the Normans were psychotic out of confusion - none of them were actually CALLED Norman, they all had French names.

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  2. ffs by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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".

    1. Re:ffs by jd · · Score: 5, Funny

      Not only is it used by gamers and LaTeX (obviously a secret fetishist group), it's got a Foreign Name! That must surely be all the evidence Fox needs!

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      It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
  3. News Corp making a play for Rovio? by rk · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

  4. Re:Red birds by mwvdlee · · Score: 5, Funny

    If they're cybercommies, they're probably from cyberia.

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  5. Re:Next up... by pushing-robot · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Oh, sure, if they just wanted to drop the name somewhere in the article as an example of how many popular games and applications use LUA, that would be one thing.

    But this is not that thing.

    The very title of the Fox article is the ever-so-fair-and-balanced:

    Powerful ‘Flame’ cyberweapon tied to popular Angry Birds game

    ...So I'm going to have to go with "Fox News is Stupid" on this one.

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