Category: malware

40 months later

Apple history malware

In June of 04 I found and read Grubers “Broken Windows” post. Found it via blogsNow, and finding that post alone made writing the tool worthwhile. Gruber explains logically why Mac’s are without malware and PCs are not. Reading it today it still makes sense.

Back in the day the most prominent argument against this was market share: People claimed that there were simply not enough macs around to be attractive for viruses. Since Gruber’s post mac sales have almost trippled. And they have switched to the same CPUs that Windows runs on. Number of Mac viruses? Zero. Still. Not even a single one.

Back in the summer of 04 Apple shares did cost 15 US$, now they are 185 US$. Sure, there is the iPod and the iPhone. But even without that Apple would not look that shabby.

I actually makes me happy that the ‘broken windows’ post holds up. It’s hard to decide if it’s the pointless yet human pride to have been right. Or the happyness about forty month of right decissions based on the right theory. I am sure I save allot of time during those forty month in that I was not battling malware on my laptops.

permanently damaged software???

Apple malware


“Apple has discovered that many of the unauthorized iPhone unlocking programs available on the Internet cause irreparable damage to the iPhone’s software, which will likely result in the modified iPhone becoming permanently inoperable when a future Apple-supplied iPhone software update is installed,�

Now, how stupid Apple thinks people are?? Permanently damaged software? Excuse me? Yes you can paint yourself into a corner and a device might be unable start when you mess
with it’s boot software for instance. But you can not permanently damage software. That’s like suggesting the letter ‘e’ got damaged and can no longer be used. That’s just plain stupid. Or marketing via FUD. Only companies on the loosing slope resort to FUD. Nobody has ever recovered to prosperity via FUD. With AAPL trading at a stagering 150 US$ I wonder why Apple things they have to sling some bullshit like that. Probably since they always did so. Apple has always operated on ‘bended truths’. Anybody remember how the PowerPC is just so much faster than those Intel CPUs?

about those two years

Apple malware marketing

So, my iPhone fell down. And the ‘volume up’ button got stuck. Bad luck. Then Apple lowered the price and the 4GB Version gets sold for 299 right now. So I thought I get a new one. I asked in the Apple store if I would need to renew my contract to activate the new iPhone. They said this would not be necessary. They said that I just would need to replace the SIM card from the old to the new phone.

Of course that is not the case. Calling Apple got me the answer that AT&T would be responsible for this. Well, it’s not me that did choose AT&T. It was Apple that did that for me. Calling AT&T they told me that the only way to activate the new iPhone is to restart the two year commitment with them.

By now I really hate both companies for their blatant ways of trying to rip people off. Even though they seem to win this time, I will make god damn sure that they will not come out of this on the upperhand in the long term. They neither can run nor hide, and I will get both of them. With interest, and fun-bonus. They deserve it for been taking for a ride, as they try to do it with their customers.

iPhone data roam shock

Apple malware

The iPhone worked in Germany. Which is good. I was worried about roaming charges, so I left it off most of the time. But during four days I was out of reach of any wifi network, and Vodafone’s data network did work. It was painfully slow, hardly hardly usable. I checked my email during those four days. Maybe 8 times in total. Now I returned and got the bill: 358.18 US$ in data transfer charges. The roaming cost for data transfers comes down to almost twenty dollars per Megabyte! Imagine the connection would be faster. I certainly wanted always to pay a hundred dollars to watch a youTube movie. Can be done easily.

I am not very pleased how big corporation error on side of blatant rip off. Almost 400 US$ for checking my email a couple of times. Finding out what those roaming charges would be on the website of AT&T? Good luck. That’s impossible. I should have called them. Would only take ten to fifteen minutes of voice mail hell to find out I would guess.

So if you are abroad: DO NOT use the iPhones data mode. Twenty dollars a Megabyte is steep.

pirates

malware media technology

Sometimes there is a refreshing new view in acts of crime. Since the usual rules don’t apply, people get to be innovative. Or at least a bit out of the ordinary.

spam, human one

BlogsNow malware marketing

BlogsNow is back. The added spam detection seems to work. Since I never trust new code, especially not when I wrote it, I pay a bit more attention to which blogs get flaged as spam. Once they are flaged they are ignored. This shows the blogs that google had seen updates for in the last ten seconds. Good luck finding a legit one. There are in there. Somewhere.

Today I thought I had found another bug. Blogs like these: example example example example example example started showing up being spam. Although they are written by people. After looking into it I realized that these people participate in a ‘pay per post’ scheme: They get paid if they blog about something. Sandwich men. I decided to ban all those blogs. No matter if it’s a spam bot or a human being getting paid to write his/her own copy and flagging it all-so-PC with ‘paid post’: The effect is the same. Links from those sources can not be trusted. I am aware that I delete lots of mid range blogs with that. But then, I don’t care: There is no short supply in blogs. BlogsNow can afford to look for the pure ones. Interesting how spam-detection can be a good training ground for other, yet related, schemes.

new way to get rich

Apple economy malware media

Somebody managed to send an email out that the iPhone would be delayed. In the following hours that it took the official Apple PR machine to react and ‘catch the bad meme’ the Aaple did go down by a couple of dollars. Then it rebound. Somebody could have made 3% in a couple of hours.

update 5/17/07:

techcrunch says that the false engadget news wiped of four billion dollars in market cap in six minutes. New travels fast it seems.

mail fseek: Invalid argument panic: temporary file seek

internet linux malware

With a full mailbox mail might die with:

fseek: Invalid argument
panic: temporary file seek
Aborted

of course it’s all spam. That aside it seems that

mutt

can deal with these big mail boxes.

greyfication

history linux malware marketing media


So far botnets have predominantly infected Windows-based computers, although there have been scattered reports of botnet-related attacks on computers running the Linux and Macintosh operating systems.

That’s the NY Times being clueless about Botnets. Good that they write about it. As it is a problem.
Bad that they write so badly about it. The author seems to like ot cover his bases here. “Scattered reports”? God, there are scattered reports about Ant’s playing doom in mongolia. This is as covering. Not more. The reality is that 100% of all botnets are run on Windows machines. There are still no Viruses for OS X. There are MS Office infections that affect the OS X flavor of the product. But the Operating system has been save.

It’s as binary as that. Don’t get me wrong: Apple sucks in some areas. But their OS has had no real life virus infections. People seem to shy away from such binary truths. Easier to throw in a ‘scattered reports’ here and there. Pseudo Balance. It’s actually much more harmful than it seems: It leaves loopholes. It kills the truth: Somebody with an intention could quote now the New York Times that there have been Botnets on Linux and OS X. Which is a lie. Not true. The big question that needs a real answer is, if Vista can join the club of predomiantly safe operating systems or not. Unfortunately journalists will not help in finding this out.

The only real weapon against malware is the truth.
Too bad that the New York Times is too afraid to avoid it.

spamindustry

malware

the next weapon in the arsenal of the spammer of today: people. cheap ones