Author: Dr. Bill

People are gloating that the Mac finally has a serious virus threat. Thing is, it is really a Java threat that effects the Mac in certain specific cases. So chill, you guys!

What you need to know about the Flashback trojan

“On April 4, Russian antivirus vendor Dr. Web published strong evidence that more than 500,000 Macs have been infected by the latest variant of the Flashback trojan. As Mikko Hypponen, Chief Researcher at F-Secure pointed out via Twitter, if there are roughly 45 million Macs out there, Flashback would now have infected more than 1 percent of them, making Flashback roughly as common for Mac as Conficker was for Windows. Flashback appears to be the most widespread Mac malware we’ve seen since the days when viruses were spread on infected floppy disks; it could be the single most significant malware infection to ever hit the Mac community.

Here’s what you need to know about Flashback, what you can do about it, and what it means for the future of Mac security.

Flashback is the name for a malicious software program discovered in September 2011 that tried to trick users into installing it by masquerading as an installer for Adobe Flash. (Antivirus vendor Intego believes Flashback was created by the same people behind the MacDefender attack that hit last year.) While the original version of Flashback and its initial variants relied on users to install them, this new form is what’s called in the security business a drive-by download: Rather than needing a user to install it, Flashback uses an unpatched Java vulnerability to install itself.”

And, you can read the whole artcle at the link above!

Somehow, I thought so!

Augmented reality! Digital lifestyle on steroids! Awesomeness! Don’t take my word for it, watch the video!

Will they actually be able to pull off this concept “in the real world?” (And, what IS the real world, anymore?) Zowie! I hope so!

I am just glad that 1/5 of all Americans have read ANY book! But, still, that is pretty impressive when you think about it! I read my Star Trek books on my Kindles all the time… so I probably “skew the curve,” but we are definitely reading more virtual books!

The rise of e-reading

Summary of findings

“One-fifth of American adults (21%) report that they have read an e-book in the past year, and this number increased following a gift-giving season that saw a spike in the ownership of both tablet computers and e-book reading devices such as the original Kindles and Nooks.1 In mid-December 2011, 17% of American adults had reported they read an e-book in the previous year; by February, 2012, the share increased to 21%.

The rise of e-books in American culture is part of a larger story about a shift from printed to digital material. Using a broader definition of e-content in a survey ending in December 2011, some 43% of Americans age 16 and older say they have either read an e-book in the past year or have read other long-form content such as magazines, journals, and news articles in digital format on an e-book reader, tablet computer, regular computer, or cell phone.

Those who have taken the plunge into reading e-books stand out in almost every way from other kinds of readers. Foremost, they are relatively avid readers of books in all formats: 88% of those who read e-books in the past 12 months also read printed books.2 Compared with other book readers, they read more books. They read more frequently for a host of reasons: for pleasure, for research, for current events, and for work or school. They are also more likely than others to have bought their most recent book, rather than borrowed it, and they are more likely than others to say they prefer to purchase books in general, often starting their search online.

The growing popularity of e-books and the adoption of specialized e-book reading devices are documented in a series of new nationally representative surveys by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project that look at the public’s general reading habits, their consumption of print books, e-books and audiobooks, and their attitudes about the changing ways that books are made available to the public.

Most of the findings in this report come from a survey of 2,986 Americans ages 16 and older, conducted on November 16-December 21, 2011, that extensively focused on the new terrain of e-reading and people’s habits and preferences. Other surveys were conducted between January 5-8 and January 12-15, 2012 to see the extent to which adoption of e-book reading devices (both tablets and e-readers) might have grown during the holiday gift-giving season and those growth figures are reported here. Finally, between January 20-Febuary 19, 2012, we re-asked the questions about the incidence of book reading in the previous 12 months in order to see if there had been changes because the number of device owners had risen so sharply. All data cited in this report are from the November/December survey unless we specifically cite the subsequent surveys. This work was underwritten by a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.”

We started out, many years ago as drbillbailey.net/blog, then, we were thecomputercurmudgeon.com, then we became drbill.cc (for Computer Curmudgeon), but as time went by, I added DrBill.TV as a separate web site for the video show… well, now, we have consolidated everything together under DrBill.TV. All the old site addresses still work, of course, but they all now point to DrBill.TV! So, make a note! Mark it down, you heard it here first! (Well, where else would you hear it!?!)

My favorite Virtual hypervisor for Linux clients has been upgraded!

VirtualBox Web Site

Oracle today (April 2, 2012) released VirtualBox 4.1.12, a maintenance release of VirtualBox 4.1 which improves stability and fixes regressions.

“VirtualBox is a powerful x86 and AMD64/Intel64 virtualization product for enterprise as well as home use. Not only is VirtualBox an extremely feature rich, high performance product for enterprise customers, it is also the only professional solution that is freely available as Open Source Software under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 2. See ‘About VirtualBox’ for an introduction.

Presently, VirtualBox runs on Windows, Linux, Macintosh, and Solaris hosts and supports a large number of guest operating systems including but not limited to Windows (NT 4.0, 2000, XP, Server 2003, Vista, Windows 7), DOS/Windows 3.x, Linux (2.4 and 2.6), Solaris and OpenSolaris, OS/2, and OpenBSD.

VirtualBox is being actively developed with frequent releases and has an ever growing list of features, supported guest operating systems and platforms it runs on. VirtualBox is a community effort backed by a dedicated company: everyone is encouraged to contribute while Oracle ensures the product always meets professional quality criteria.”

More on the Tricorder front… this time, an Open Source Tricorder!

Star Trek-like open-source tricorder sees magnetic fields and more

“Know the near-magical hand held analysis gadgets known as ‘tricorders’ that everyone carries in Star Trek? A cognitive science researcher has created a real-world version.

‘The open source science tricorders that I’ve developed are very much a way to help people explore and feed their curiosity for the world,’ Peter Jansen, who created and built the gadget, told me today in an email.

Jansen recently earned his Ph.D. in in cognitive science from McMaster University in Ontario, Canada where he taught computers to learn language like babies do. He is currently at the University of Arizona working on high-tech sensors.

A person with that level of smarts, apparently, has enough brain power leftover in his spare time to invent tricorders, not to mention the greedlessness to share the blueprint with DIYers who want their own. Instructions are available from his Tricorder Project website.

Like the Trek devices, Jansen’s gadgets will measure the environment, things such as ambient temperature, humidity and magnetic fields, as well as take spatial readings for distance, location and even motion. They won’t, however, identify aliens for you.

The idea is to ‘help kids learn science at a conceptual level and ground abstract concepts like magnetism or polarization by providing a way to intuitively visualize them long before kids learn their mathematical formalisms,’ he said. (That’s the uber-academic term referring to the logic and structure of math.)”