A Techie Tuesday

[Before I get to a few notes of techie interest, this word: Remember to call, fax AND email your senators to encourage them to put a stake through the heart of the vampire shamnesty bill and stuff its mouth with garlic, spray it with holy water and then burn it. Visit NumbersUSA for links to phone numbers, faxes you can send, etc.]

---

Here’re a few light tech notes, some of which may save your bacon, others just of passing interest.

Have a Nokia Series 60 or other Symbian mobile device? Sophos (along with Kaspersky and Symantec) has issued a warning that you may be (are) vulnerable to a Trojan that sends an SMS to a premium-rate number every 15 seconds. Imagine your delight in opening a bill that has days full of premium-rate phone calls you didn’t make… The upside of this is, as with almost ALL malware, it’s a darwinian kinda thing: the user has to infect themselves, so only really dumb users are likely to do so.

“iPhone Battery Conspiracy Theory” *heh* (Man, am I glad I can view such pages as the one linked to here in Opera: blocking the stupid flashing ads is a Very Good Thing.)

Standing up to the Me$$y$oft bullying tactics, Cannonical’s (Ubuntu) Mark Shuttleworth says, “We have declined to discuss any agreement with Microsoft under the threat of unspecified patent infringements… (Microsoft itself is regularly found to violate such patents and regularly settles such suits). People who pay protection money for that promise [not to sue for infringement] are likely living in a false sense of security.”

My goal is to carry free software forward as far as I can, and then to help others take the baton to carry it further. At Canonical, we believe that we can be successful and also make a huge contribution to that goal. In the Ubuntu community, we believe that the freedom in free software is what’s powerful, not the openness of the code. Our role is not to be the ideologues -in-chief of the movement, our role is to deliver the benefits of that freedom to the widest possible audience. We recognize the value in “good now to get perfect later” (today we require free apps, tomorrow free drivers too, and someday free firmware to be part of the default Ubuntu configuration) we always act in support of the goals of the free software community as we perceive them. All the deals announced so far strike me as “trinkets in exchange for air kisses”. Mua mua. No thanks.

Good on you, Mark.

The Italian Job, Parte Due: Just say, “Nessun ringraziamenti!” to surfing Italian websites, for now. *sigh* It’s just easier than pre-sifting them all for malware attacks. Late last week, ,

We verified a report of a large-scale web attack on going in Italy at the moment… The gang behind the attack had successfully compromised the homepages of hundreds of legitimate Italian websites. We checked many of them and we verified that they include now a malicious IFRAME (detected as Trojan.Mpkit!html) which redirects to the same bad IP address. The list of compromised sites is huge and from Mpack statistics this attack is working efficiently (the statistic page reports 65K unique visitors with almost 7K exploited browsers).

Infection spreading to other countries, naturally. Defense? Two layers, yeah and three: Up-to-date, ACTIVE anti-malware software (of course) on your own PCs, avoid Italian web pages, for now (*sigh*), and DO check your own ISP/hosting security levels to avert the spread of this thing (hosting services differ: consult your own hosting service’s documentation). Trendmicro notes that

Most of the legitimate Web sites that were compromised by the malware authors are related to tourism, automotive industry, movies and music, tax and employment services, some Italian city councils, and hotels sites. Apparently, most of these sites are hosted on one of the largest Web hoster/provider in Italy.

500-pound gorilla weighs in for Blu-Ray:

Blockbuster will rent high-definition DV-Ds only in the Blu-ray format in more than 1,400 stores when it expands its high-def offerings next month.

Well, that should be enough light techie stuff for one Tuesday.

---