Monthly Archive for December, 2009

Trojans. Not Stupid.

I got held up recently by a particularly nasty Trojan infection that seemed to come from a flash vulnerability – or at least it installed itself in a Macromedia directory at a time when embedded flash would have been running on one of the web pages I had open.

TrojanNo ordinary decent virus this one though. It cleverly disabled my default browser – Chrome – coercing me into a specific set of steps that would ultimately place a rootkit on my OS. As my browser seemingly inexplicably was rendered useless, even after multiple uninstall/reinstalls, something else was up. Internet Explorer was attempting to connect to a “tolule.net” which on lookup resolved to a Chinese IP. So a quick entry into my Sygate advanced rules and I had a large swathe of Chinese IPs blocked. So I was safe for the time being giving me a chance to think about what was going on. (The Trojan was quite busy – attempting to connect every 10 mins or so and to multiple domains – initially always tolule.net but also gusmon.net and somemon.net – each time resolving to an address in China).
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Friday Linkdump

US Navy lags 18 months behind Wired who spat out a Piracy-awareness (well what else do you call it?) game in July. While the lag is shocking (won’t there be a new crisis by 2011?) each will be distributed to a different audience. The web may be open, but people still work with what they know – trenchline browsing.

green soothing light of slashdotThe Soothing Green Light

I initially thought this was going to be a ridiculous article. 5 paragraphs later I was proved wrong. Rings very true but does this mean we’re now going to be inundated with sites imploring us to level up?
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The StackOverflow Rant

I should probably open my commentary on the SO community with a more wide-ranging piece on the effectiveness of self-moderation and social badge collecting in rapidly scaling a web community but hopefully by dumping this the second opinion will be more insightful whenever that may be.

forum junkieOk so really I’m just a petty net troll who completely overreacts to criticism online. That aside, I still cannot understand how the answering army at stackoverflow come to the collective conclusion that every question on a close-to-the-bone programming issue requires some inane form of rephrasing or just outright blanking.

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