Comment Re:Packer (Score 2, Informative) 224
those cases based on what you linked
-> those cases based on what the summary linked.
Slight target issue, appologies.
Comment Packer (Score 5, Informative) 224
It's not a virus, it's just a exe packer they used.
Virus scanners have been labeling PE Packers as viruses for ages now, simply because a virus could be packed with them, and it's easier to pick out a packer header than a virus contained in it.
A lot of false positives are caused by this, and this looks like one of those cases based on what you linked. "Generic" "NSPack" "PossibleThreat" in the VirSCAN links give that away.
EXE/PE Packers simply compress a binary and decompress it on the fly, simply to save space or "load faster". Likely Walmart's programmers used one to keep the app's size small on a small device like that.
I've dealt with this situation in size-coding competitions before, and it's not fun. A lot of false positives are caused simply because a packer was used.
Fortunately, some of the better virus scaners actually unpack the software before checking it, or look for valid virus signatures instead of a simple Packer.
This basically is just a case of virus scan companies being lazy.
Submission + - IE 8 Passes Acid2 Test
notamicrosoftlover writes: From Channel9: '...on Wednesday, December 12, Internet Explorer correctly rendered the Acid2 page in IE8 standards mode. While supporting the features tested in Acid2 is important for many reasons, it is just one of several milestones for the interoperability, standards compliance, and backwards compatibility that we're committed to for this release...'
You can read the whole blog entry here. There's also a video interview regarding IE8 development on Channel9.
Submission + - P2P Source Arrested, OiNK.cd Raided, Shut Down (torrentfreak.com)
eldavojohn writes: "A British man was arrested who was allegedly the source of a distribution supply chain for leaking albums & movies to file sharers. He operated OiNK which was by invite only and would post files to be distributed which would then show up hours later further down the supply chain on other file sharing sites. This scheme stretched across many nations and is the result of a two year investigation by the IFPI. They hope that by infiltrating these layers of abstraction to the source, they can stop the early leaking of media."
Submission + - Copyright advocacy group violates copyright (scienceblogs.com)
word munger writes: "Commercial scholarly publishers are beginning to get afraid of the open access movement. They've hired a high-priced consultant to help them sway public opinion in favor of copyright restrictions on taxpayer-funded research. Funny thing is, their own website contains several copyright violations. It seems they pulled their images directly from the Getty Images website — watermark and all — without paying for their use!
Clearly their agenda is simply to make using copyrighted materials inconvenient and expensive for everyone but THEMSELVES."
Submission + - Rural broadband crisis hurts residents & compa (computerworld.com) 1
Ian Lamont writes: "Thanks to profit-oriented telco industry in the U.S., rural residents don't have as much access to broadband services as those who live in urban or suburban areas. According to the federal government, just 17% of rural U.S. households subscribe to broadband service. But the problem is more than a conflict between Wall Street and small-town residents wanting to surf the 'Net or play Warcraft — the lack of broadband access prevents many businesses from growing and diversifying rural economies, as it's expensive or impossible to get broadband:
The author also notes that larger businesses are being crimped, from a national call center to a national retailer which claims 17% of its store locations can't get broadband."Soon after moving to Gilsum, N.H. (population 811), [Kim] Rossey learned that he couldn't get broadband to support his Web programming business, TooCoolWebs. DSL wasn't available, and the local cable service provider wasn't interested in extending the cabling for its broadband service the three-tenths of a mile required to reach Rossey's house — even if he paid the full $7,000 cost. Rossey ended up signing a two-year, $450-per-month contract for a T1 line that delivers 1.44Mbit/sec. of bandwidth. He pays 10 times more than the cable provider would have charged and receives one quarter of the bandwidth.
Submission + - New Milestone Demoscene Releases. (pouet.net) 4
An anonymous reader writes: With over 3000 visitors one of the biggest computer festivals, the Assembly 2007, just closed doors. The event saw the release of some of the best demoscene productions of this year. Among them the first good demos for the XBOX 360, but also for platforms as obscure as the Atari VCS2600 from 1976. The main demo competition was won by Lifeforce, one of the most acclaimed demoscene demos ever. Other releases can be found here.
Submission + - First Third-party Native iPhone Application (gizmodo.com)
An anonymous reader writes: The first third-party native application ever for the iPhone is now available: a real full-fledged iPhone application with a graphic user interface and its own icon in the iPhone home screen. It is not a Web 2.0 app but the real thing, What is it? Ironically enough, MobileTerminal, 'a terminal emulator application for the iPhone. MobileTerminal.app is NOT an SSH client, nor Telnet for that matter. It can however be used to execute a console ssh-client application.' The iPhone dev revolution has just started.
Submission + - Linux for Dreamcast NOT Dead! (wordpress.com)
beforum writes: "The group involved with LinuxDC have recently updated their site and have some great news. wOOt!
- Christian Berger forgot to sleep and wrote a driver for the VMU LCD display.
- Some Gentoo enthusiasts, including Karl Trygve Kalleberg, is again sniffing at making a Gentoo port to the Dreamcast.
- Karl Trygve Kalleberg noticed that our old domain (linuxdc.org) was not only expired but also snatched by an evil domain shark, so he had to register linuxdc.net instead.
- Christian Berger wrote a SEGA Dreamcast SLIP/Linux HOWTO and a tutorial on using the DC as a VPN firewall and router.
- Christian Berger wrote a driver for the SEGA LAN Adapter (HIT-0300), available as a patch against 2.4.19
- M.R. Brown left the project, being too busy with other console work. He is already missed.
- Adrian McMenamin has got his VMU filesystem driver to the point where it can list files off of the VMU. He's also working on using apache to serve pages from the VMU, once he implements read support.
Submission + - The Prostitution of Talent
theodp writes: "The Republic of East Vancouver ('Your completely biased news source since 2000') tackles ethical questions The Economist raised in last year's The Battle for Brainpower. Its conclusion? Corporations will always behave like corporations, no matter how ethical or creative their staffs become."
Submission + - Windows Home Server released (apcmag.com)
Thomas Nybergh writes: "Windows Home Server, based on Windows Server 2003 Small Business Edition "minus the Exchange mail server", has been released. Will the new category of Home Server hardware, combined with presumably easy to understand support for multi-disk redundancy be the ultimate backup solution Normal People and Very Small Business have needed for a very long time? And/Or will this end up being yet another, even worse supply of always available Windows machines for botnet owners to zombify? Should the industry focus more on the already existing kind of scaled down, energy saving NAS boxes rather than more or less full scale PCs running Windows Server with a silly limit on the amount of users?
On a sidenote, I've used normal pc hardware running Debian's rolling testing release as a multi purpose home server for everything from GNU Screen powered IRC, downloading ahem.. Linux install disc ISOs, NFS and Samba sharing and web serving for some time, and it simplifies a lot of things. But what amazing new uses for this new kind of for server use dedicated consumer products (perhaps running a more suitable OS), can Slashdot users think of? Especially a few product generations from now, when commodity home server hardware might support hotswappable devices and perhaps even different interfaces for interacting with your physical home, there must be something cool one could do with a server, right?"
On a sidenote, I've used normal pc hardware running Debian's rolling testing release as a multi purpose home server for everything from GNU Screen powered IRC, downloading ahem.. Linux install disc ISOs, NFS and Samba sharing and web serving for some time, and it simplifies a lot of things. But what amazing new uses for this new kind of for server use dedicated consumer products (perhaps running a more suitable OS), can Slashdot users think of? Especially a few product generations from now, when commodity home server hardware might support hotswappable devices and perhaps even different interfaces for interacting with your physical home, there must be something cool one could do with a server, right?"
Submission + - Northrop Grumman to own Scaled Composites
Dolphinzilla writes: According to Space.com and many other web sources, Northrop Grumman Corporation agreed on July 5 to increase its stake in Burt Rutan's Scaled Composites — designers of Space Ship One, Proteus, and whole lot of other unusal aircraft — from 40 percent to 100 percent
Submission + - Nearly 900K US Troops health care records exposed
blueser writes: Military Times reports that "personal health care records of nearly 900,000 troops, family members and other government employees stored on a private defense contractor's nonsecure computer server were exposed to compromise". Exposed information includes social security numbers, names, addresses and coded health data.
The contractor has been aware of the data breach since May 29, when USAFE notified them about an insecure data transmission. The Petangon and FBI have already been involved, and the contractor is already notifying those that have been affected.
Submission + - White House Says Hill Can't Pursue Contempt Cases (washingtonpost.com)
rook2pawn writes: Bush administration officials unveiled a bold new assertion of executive authority yesterday in the dispute over the firing of nine U.S. attorneys, saying that the Justice Department will never be allowed to pursue contempt charges initiated by Congress against White House officials once the president has invoked executive privilege.
The Moderate Voice asks "what is Congress remedy? Increasingly, Bush administration actions appear to be actually provocative aimed at throwing the matter into court. Could it be because George Bush now has more friends on the Supreme Court who believe in a stronger executive and will back him in the end? If they back him, the United States traditional definition of checks and balances may have to be heavily revised."
Submission + - Nigerian kids use OLPC laptops to find porn!
voss writes: Apparently MSNBC is reporting that reporters from Nigeria had spotted school children
using their laptops which had been donated by the One Laptop Per Child program to
surf for porn. Yes and these laptops do run linux!
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19871792/
