Oh the joy, the sheer unadulterated delight…

BayStar, the company that (together with the RBC bank) invested 50 million dollars in SCO in order for SCO to sue IBM and Novell over (alleged) inclusions to and copyright of Linux and UNIX, and any users of Linux like AutoZone and DaimlerCrysler, is having some trouble understanding why they somehow came out the other end with much less money then SCO led them to believe they would have, (and much less money then they put in.)

This new story comes to light as SCO just suffered it’s second big setback in their litigation, firstly the AutoZone case was stayed, and secondly the DaimlerCrysler case has been all but thrown out.

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A new “Windows only” Trojan horse is luring hapless victims to run it by promising “suicide photographs” of the suicide of Osama bin Laden.

The Usenet newsgroups postings contains a link to a website promising the photographs, and directs them to download a file that is instead the Hackarmy Trojan horse. The purpose of this program is to give control of your Windows PC’s to the crackers who can use it for any purpose they choose, including selling it to spammers to be used as a spam relay, or to attack any company they choose with all the other captured PC’s.

As a general rule, you should treat files you get from an unknown source online the same as you’d trust food given to you by shady sorts in a back alley. In other words not at all, always throw it away. As usual, this Trojan only affects Windows 95/98/ME/2000/XP/2003, Linux and Macintosh are totally unaffected.

For information and removal instructions, see Sophos Hackarmy.

While there are undoubtably millions of people out there that would be ecstatic if Osama offed himself. I can’t see it happening any time soon, and if it were to happen, it would most likely be by walking into a public place strapped to a bomb. I can’t see that being all that likely either as he seems to prefer to use his minions for all the “one way” missions.

regards

Franki

In the ongoing saga where SCO group sues the world because they “allege” that Linux infringes on their copyrights, (A claim that Novell contests strongly), the first of the cases has been decided. In a huge blow to SCO, the case was for the most part thrown out entirely.

For a breakdown of the saga, see my earlier posts on the subject, here and here.

The short of the story, is that the judge found that Daimlerchrysler correctly certified their UNIX usage (which was nothing as they had not used it in 7 years) and that the case was essentially dismissed. He did however say that SCO can still question why it took DC 110 days to comply instead of the 30 days that SCO stipulated. DC replied that the license which was put in place before SCO had anything to do with it, did not stipulate a time frame.

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Microsoft has revealed that it has no plans to port the security fixes contained in WinXP SP2 to older versions of windows like Win98/ME and 2000. I suspect that the reason for this, is that Microsoft is increasingly finding that one of its worst competitors is it’s own previous versions of Windows and Office. What better way to convince people to pay $$$ to upgrade, then to tell them they are insecure if they don’t. My suspicion is that this might also result in a few more people considering giving Linux a try.

What does that mean for 30 percent of our visitors that are still using one of those operating systems? Well not too much really, you can get many of the same benefits by using free software available on the net, my suggestions are as follows:

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My long-time opinion has been that kids should not have access to the Internet in places unmonitored by adults, and that parents should be taught what they should be looking out for. To aid in the effort, I created the website ChildSafetyOnline.net that was to be an (un-threatening newbie friendly) website designed to try and teach parents how to protect their offspring from some of the more common dangers. I have not yet had time to continue that task, but I’ll get back to it someday.

Anyway, the reason I am bring this up is this recent article on TheRegister. In short, the statistics reveal that 57% of kids have come in contact with porn while online and that only 16% of parents where aware of it. Also that a third of kids have had “unwanted sexual or nasty comments” thrust upon them, with only 1 in 20 parents being aware of the problem.

The statistics come from a report from the London School of Economics, and while this site is not UK based, you can be sure the same statistics would be applicable to pretty much all western nations.

So parents, if you have a net connected PC in your kids room, you might want to consider moving it to a position where you can see what they are doing, and where they go. Kids are too trusting, and it’s up to you to be their guide, even though they might be far more computer literate then you.

Regards

Franki

This part of the site was originally called “Random Thoughts” but Franki changed it to Random Tidbits. That is fine with me I guess, but I reserve the right to post random thoughts when I want to (of course he has an edit and a delete button — as do I — so I guess we cannot offend each other too bad *grin*) …. anyway on with the thought!

Franki and I often spend time in our chat exchanging links we are reading. Todays list thus far for example has included:
Gate’s Mugshot
Windows Updates Blog Articles
Nuclear Weapons Allegedly Found in Iraq
Franki’s latest on wonderful things … Firefox Extensions … if nothing else (like security gets you off of IE, this should)

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Wall Street Journal RSS Feed Information is available. RSS isn’t just for the little guys any more. First exploding (in my opinion) in blogs and smaller places, the big boys are now coming on board with RSS feeds, further validating the concept has long term viability. This page also is good because it explains in simple terms what to do with an RSS feed.