All you need to do to be infected by this virus is visit the homepage of Web hosting provider FortuneCity.com. CNET reports that a malicious program, dubbed QHosts, infects PCs using a recent flaw in Microsoft's Internet Explorer to take control of how computers look up Internet addresses. The program takes advantage of a critical flaw in Internet Explorer , which Microsoft has made an integral part of its Windows operating system. The Trojan horse used a banner ad that the attacker somehow placed there to install the Trojan horse on the user's PC.
I haven't tried this but it sounds a great idea: The Easy Bee is software that automates Web navigation tasks and builds aggregated pages with always up-to-date Web extracts. The Easy Bee lets you create Web agents?Honeybees?that will periodically navigate, extract and aggregate for you any web content, even web pages that require form filling and button clicking. What you end up with is a page of all the bits and pieces from the web that you need, be they newsfeeds, stock quotes or whatever.
More on disguised branding, this time with newspaper-related sites. Steve Outing points out on Poynter that newspapers are putting up bloglike sites to appeal to the younger crowd, while playing down the site's connections to the owner. Steve cites the Arizona Daily Star's AZNightBuzz, where "there's no indication on the home page that the site is connected to the newspaper, even on the About Us page".
The free, open source Office suite, OpenOffice, is now officially into version 1.1, including enhancements such as "revolutionary" XML file format, one-click PDF (Adobe Acrobat) export and Macromedia Flash export for presentations and drawings, according to The Register. 
On the heels of its launch of fresh handhelds, Palm has launched some new accessories, including a wireless keyboard, multifunction stylus, six cases, a camera card, handheld device protection units and complete accessory kits.
It's about to get tougher for hackers and virus writers, or at least for those who get caught. TechNews.com reports that those convicted will soon will face significantly harsher penalties under new guidelines which focus on the harm caused. Hackers, for example, will face up to a 25 percent increase in their sentences if they hijack e-mail accounts or steal personal data -- including financial and medical records and digital photographs. Convicted virus and worm authors face a 50 percent increase.
Clearly there is no ?marketing gimmick? or concealed identity and by no means do we want there to be. Further to my posting about AkibaLive, and my comments that it was a marketing tool masquerading as a blog, here's the owner's reply (I won't post his earlier message, since as he says, it was "fired it off in a state of unexpected agitation"):
A Singapore company has just launched what they say is a technology that will change the way which we compress, store and distribute digital content. MatrixView says that, compared to existing compression solutions such as JPEG and MPEG that are based on complex and predictive techniques to eliminate redundant data (JPEG is a widely used format for storing pictures, MPEG for video), its Adaptive Binary Optimisation (ABO) does not eliminate data. "On the contrary, it achieves significantly higher compression ratios by value-adding to data in such a way as to permit superior speed and security without data degradation." 
The email contains a graphic which is designed to look like "text" with a hyperlink - but is actually a mime part that has a gif. Clicking on the graphic causes you to jump to a web page purportedly from ebay. It disguises the fake web page using hex encoding of parts of the URL so that when the user opens the web page with a web browser, it apppears to be from scgi.ebay.com, but they don't observe that the real site is at 211.217.224.10 on port 4901. If you click on the email, it sends you to: <scgi.ebay.comindexupdateyourinformationsecure@211.217.224.102:4901/check1/index.htm> What's unbelievable is that it the scammers attempt to get: - Your ebay userid and password This is clearly a very well orchestrated attempt to fraudulently obtain banking information as well as ebay account info. You should alert people to it ASAP. Thanks, Syd. Definitely these scams are getting better. My advice: never trust any email that asks you to do anything, unless it's to call your mother more often. Sydney Low from anti-spam service AlienCamel warns of a new take on the email scam which tries to get you to hand over all your personal details. This one, which has been reported in a couple of places elsewhere, is worth repeating here to show how realistic these things are.
- Your name
- Your date of birth
- Your US Social Security number
- Your Credit card number
- Your Expiration date
- Your credit card's verification code
- Your ATM PIN number
From the About Time Dept comes news that Microsoft realises the whole 'issue a patch to cover a hole, knowing only a few people actually download it' approach may be, er, flawed. CNET reports that Microsoft plans next week to outline a new security effort focused on what the company calls "securing the perimeter". Details are thin, but appear to involve a deeper relationship with firewall providers.
Online porn is big. Really big. According to figures collected by CyberAtlas:
It's now pretty clear where this Instant Messaging thing is going, and why Yahoo and Microsoft have suddenly started blocking third parties from piggybacking their services. Microsoft have announced a hook-up with news agency and financial data transporter Reuters allowing users of the Messenger network to chat with the 50,000 members of Reuters own internal network (used mainly by traders).
From the guys who make the excellent Diskeeper ("set and forget") defragmenter software comes an interesting utility that "allows a user to retrieve and recover those files that belong to him without special configuration by the System Administrator". There's a home version too. I haven't tried it but if Diskeeper is anything to go by, it's worth a try.
Virus writers are getting smarter. It's official. The latest bi-annual Internet Security Threat Report from Symantec found that 64 per cent of all new attacks targeted vulnerabilities less than one year old. The Blaster worm, for example, appeared only 26 days after the vulnerability it exploited was announced, according to The Register.
As threatened, Palm have released new models: the Tungsten T3 handheld, "for the most demanding professionals who need a best-in-class colour and wireless handheld", the Palm Tungsten E handheld, for "cost-conscious professionals who need premium power and performance". 
Further to my earlier posting about marketing masquerading as blogs, here's some mail from Brooklyn reader Sam Bailey:
At first glance AkibaLive looks like a cool new blog on Japanese gadgets. But it's not. It's a marketing gimmick by Dynamism.com, "the leading U.S. retailer of next-generation electronics from Japan and around the globe". The press release says it all: "Retailers have yet to leverage the targeted, personal impact blogging has on consumers," it quotes Douglas Krone, founder and CEO of Dynamism.com, as saying. "The collaborative nature of this technology makes blogs ideal for customer relations, and promotional and advertising initiatives. It's a smart way to attract and provide value for the technophiles that make up our business."
A positive early review of Musicmatch's new online music store, from Paul Thurrott of WinInfo Update. "Musicmatch Downloads also has some unique advantages over competing services, such as higher-quality downloadable songs," he says. Musicmatch Downloads currently offers more than 200,000 songs for download, and the company says that more than 500,000 songs will be available by the end of the year. Like the competition, the Musicmatch service doesn't require a subscription fee.
A few folk have written in to my column asking how they can fight back at spammers. Here's one tale that offers hope. Wired reports the saga of graphic artist Andy Markley who found himself the victim of a major spammer who sent thousands of spam messages carefully crafted to appear as if they had originated from Markley's domain. His ISPs didn't help, so he took matters into his own hands, tracking down the spammer and getting him booted off his ISP.
More on the health effects of handphones, this time for 3G: Reuters quotes a Dutch government study that found users exposed to base station signals "felt tingling sensations, got headaches and felt nauseous". There was no negative impact from signals for current -- i.e. GSM -- mobile networks.
Pointed out by my old friend Robin Lubbock, here's an excellent essay by Dan Gillmor on the self-righting Internet community, where one bad turn is usually overwritten by several good ones. He makes some sharp comments on the VeriSign 'domain-stealing' controversy, which I haven't touched on in this blog. The bottom line: there are some pretty awful people out there, but they usually get drowned out by the decent folk. Long may it last.
Riding on the success of Apple's iTunes, Musicmatch has announced its own digital song-selling business, according to CNET. The service has access to songs from five major labels and more than 30 independents, with pricing set at 99 cents per song and $9.99 for most albums. 
A wonderful innovation with Opera's browser was the mouse gesture, where you could, for example, return to a previous page by holding down the mouse button and moving the mouse a little to the left. Intuitive and seriously time-saving. Now Internet Explorers have the same feature, courtesy of a bit of freeware (software you don't have to pay for) from UnH Solutions. 
Spammers may be using viruses to attack their enemies. Further to my column on how virus writers and spammers may be in cahoots to deliver spam, The Register reports that anti-spam activists have produced fresh evidence that recent assaults -- called Distributed Denial of Service attacks, or DDoS, -- on their websites have been enabled by the infamous Sobig worm.
