Friday, April 15, 2005

Arrested Development - Why aren't you watching?

The best comedy on television, the outstanding Arrested Development, is in danger of being cancelled, but FOX decides to pick up That 70's Show for another season? And as further proof FOX has no idea what it's doing, they recently resurrected the terrible Tru Calling. Read this article for more info, including deserved high praise for the show and it's terrific cast.

Fake blog sites infecting people's computers

Well, this is just a crappy thing to do - bogus web log (blog) sites being used as traps to infect visitor's computers. The firm Websense noted in a recent study that it has found hundreds of blogs created for this purpose, and warned that the viruses/malicious software found on some of them could get past traditional security measures such as anti-virus scanners and anti-spyware programs. The article notes that the perpetrators would creating a legitimate looking weblog, loading it with keylogging software or viral code, and then sending out the address of it through instant messenger or spam e-mail. So, as Websense's research Director Dan Hubbard is quoted as saying, "These aren't the kind of blog websites that someone would stumble upon and infect their machine accidentally - The success of these attacks relies upon a certain level of social engineering to persuade the individual to click on the link." There is some comfort in that, and in the fact that best estimate is currently 200 bogus blogs out of the estimated 8 million blog sites out there. As a blogger myself, I think it's a really horrible thing to do (of course) - but how do you stop it? Getting a blog started these days is incredibly easy, you get decent amounts of storage space to host whatever you will be putting on your blog through a good number of hosting companies, and you can remain anonymous very easily. So it would be really hard to police this the way things are currently. Could it lead to more stringent policies at the blog host - like collecting and verifying information from someone before they can start a blog on the service? Or does that start to hit up against First Amendment rights? Maybe it's just as simple as personal responsibility for now, since these sites are reached via spam email. So, in other words, if I'm savvy enough to not open unsolicited spam and click on a link in it, I'll be fine. Let's just hope the jerks behind this don't get smarter and find even craftier ways to do this.

Thursday, April 14, 2005

Firefox website visits on the rise

I thought this article had some interesting statistics about visits to the Firefox website. Site visits have increased in the 9 months that they've been tracked by Nielson/NetRatings, up 237% within that period. Male visitors accounted for 71% of the site visits, and women 29%. Good to see that more people are visiting the site and getting more info about Firefox, maybe this will lead to even more people dumping Internet Explorer!

Wednesday, April 13, 2005

Time to fire up Windows Update

All you Windows users out there - it's time to browse over to Windows Update once again. The latest batch of security patches are available, check this Microsoft Security Bulletin for more info.