Category: Technology

Lots of pundits point out that the antivirus/firewall/antispyware companies are making big profits from the fear instilled in computer users the world over. Whether every threat is real or not, who’s got the guts to go out into the cyber world unprotected these days, or even plugin in someone else’s USB key for all that.

Now, it seems a Trojan horse program has surfaced that looks rather suspiciously like a goody-two-shoes kind of application. Rather than handing over access to your hard drive to the nearest script kiddy, opening ports to every electronic eavesdropper, and emailing itself to all your business contacts complete with some salacious come on, this little critter simply deletes all the porn, p2p shared files, and eradicates warez from your computer. It’s almost as if, could it possibly be, a puritanical application created with the sole intent of cleaning up the net?

The clever guys at Sophos have dubbed this latest threat to geek sanity “trojerazera” (like Trokan melded to Kazaa I guess)

http://www.sophos.com/virusinfo/analyses/trojerazera.html

It also goes by the name of TROJ_P2PCOPY.A, Trojan.Win32.Eraser.a, Erazor, and Troj/Erazer-A.

If you’re desperate to retain your collection of electronic smut, don’t fancy losing all those painstakingly downloaded illegal copies of software package, and are hoping to hang on to your p2p-shared folders just long enough for the RIAA to find you, then download the latest update for your antivirus software and do a detailed trojerazera eraser job.

More than one in twenty executable files on your PC could be a spyware program, according to researchers at the University of Washington. Computer scientist Hank Levy and his colleagues analyzed over 20 million internet addresses, to track down programs that can get on to your computer without you knowing and perform tasks ranging from displaying annoying advertising banners and pop-ups to gathering personal information, redirecting you Web browser to a client’s site or even utilising your modem to call out to costly toll numbers abroad. These scams are the reason why People are looking for IT Services Ottawa, New York, Tokyo, etc.”

The researchers examined sites in the most popular Web categories, such as gaming, news, and “celebrity” sites. [Not sure whether that includes porn sites or not, Ed.]

They found that more than one in twenty executable files contained spyware piggybacking on the legitimate software users might want to install. On average, almost 2% of Internet domains performed drive-by download attacks to force spyware on users who simply visit a Web site. Game and celebrity Web sites were the worst offenders the researchers told the 13th Annual Network and Distributed System Security Symposium in San Diego, California, on Thursday. Perhaps obvious is the finding that sites offering pirated software topped the list for drive-by attacks.

“For unsuspecting users, spyware has become the most ‘popular’ download on the Internet,” explains Levy, “We wanted to look at it from an Internet-wide perspective – what proportion of Web sites out there are trying to infect people? If our numbers are even close to representative for Web areas frequented by users, then the spyware threat is extensive.”

If you’re worried about spyware, which can be anything from “annoying to catastrophic”, then you should read the major security sites for advice on general computer security, firewalls, antivirus software, and, of course, how to get rid of spyware and other computer pests.

You can read Levy’s paper in PDF format here.

There’s a heated debate underway on the NASW discussion groups about whether marijuana is addictive or not.

Deborah Frisch came up with a great comic dialogue between two dudes [has to be two if it’s dialogue, Ed.] discussing the issues and whether or not we should be talking gently about the anandamide receptor or boldly about the cannabinoid receptor in scientific circles. My cartooning colleague Peter Welleman did a great satirical cartoon to illustrate the dudish dialogue, which we reproduce with permission from Deborah and Peter on Sciencebase.

Heavy….maaaan!

I find it endlessly fascinating the things visitors to the site search for…hopefully, a few sciencebase readers are at leasst vaguely interested too, otherwise these posts are a total waste of time. Anyway, a selection from the almost virginal monthly log for May reveals some nice topics:

wiffle ball science, what is the origin of the asteroid belt, x chromosone recombination, physics problems in movies, x-ray vision fact or fiction (also), obliquity earth.

Maybe some day I’ll write some short items on each of those, but for now you’ll have to settle for the links I found.

One final search query has got me stumped – what in fact is its size in ratio compared to the earth – well, if anyone can tell me to what the “its” is referring I might be able to offer an answer

Altavista’s translation service Babelfish, named for the critter in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, does a superb job of providing very rough translations between dozens of different languages. But, have you ever tried translating an English web page into French, say and then back again?

Martin G at Really Magazine thought that might be fun and contacted Sciencebase with a sample of text from the site that he had two-wayed using a little form he’s created in his blog to demonstrate what a site might “look like” to a non-English speaker using autotranslation (http://www.reallymag.com/2Xlation.htm).

Needless to say the results are not at all pretty, this was from a current item:

“In the visitor the chance which puts out their opinion with voice in order period me is late in small quantity and recently the conference, in order to arrange a new poll that le or comfort in order to manufacture in SciScoop location the hazard was in the mongering disease which covers.”

Basically, Mr G picked up on my announcement of the SciScoop poll on disease mongering. But you cannot really get a sense of that from the 2x translation can you, which might suggest that a non-English speaker viewing the site with 1xtrans switched on really isn’t going to get the best out of SciScoop.

Martin had this to say about the process, “I thought it gave a nice real-world overview of how the engines are coping with (the admittedly very difficult job of) auto-translation.”

Give it a whirl with your favourite blog or site.

A letter in Physics Today this month discusses the archetypal renaissance man and his impact or otherwise on science, engineering and art…

Who is he?

According to the letter head, some fella by the name of Da Vinci. Perhaps he’s the same guy to whom Dan Brown is referring in his eponymous code book. I assume so. Either way, surely they don’t mean the Italian polymath born in Vinci in 1452 known to his mum as L’il Leonardo. I bet they do you know…