Zott - Slashdot User

Submission + - New York Times site pop-up says your computer is i (nytimes.com)

Submitted by

Zott

on Sunday September 13, 2009 @07:14PM

Zott writes: "Apparently, "some readers" of the New York Times site are getting a bit more with their news: an apparently syndicated adware popup with a faux virus scan of the user's computer indicating they are infected, and a link to go download a fix now. It's entertaining when a Mac user gets it, but clearly downloading an .exe file isn't a good way to keep your computer clean..."

The Twitter Book 88

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday July 01, 2009 @01:15PM from the read-all-about-it dept.

stoolpigeon writes "Microblogging service Twitter has undeniably been a hit, with growth rates that were at times in excess of 1400%. The growth was rapid enough that the site became well known for its periodic, and, at times, extensive downtime. Even with these issues, the service continued to grow rapidly, and with celebrities getting into the mix Twitter was quickly on the radar of mainstream media. The ubiquity of Twitter and ever-increasing coverage of 'tweets' has also brought the inevitable backlash. As with anything that gains high-profile popularity, there are plenty of Twitter haters out there, though the role Twitter has played in the recent Iranian elections seems to have brought more legitimacy to Twitter in the eyes of many. With popularity come books, and quite a few are already out there about and for Twitter, but my favorite so far is The Twitter Book by Tim O'Reilly and Sarah Milstein." Read below for the rest of JR's review.

Submission + - Macros in MS Word: Good thing for legal docs?

Submitted by

Zott

on Friday June 26, 2009 @11:11AM

Zott writes: "An interesting question came by my desk today, relating to a Microsoft Word 2007 document with a .docm extension. That's a "Macro-enabled" Word document.

What's interesting is that the context was a document that was going back and forth as a negotiation with a client. My first impulse is to suggest that sending what is effectively "code" (dynamically-modified content) is probably not a great idea if you're trying to come to an agreement with someone. There have been issues in general (likely not as serious these days with modern antivirus applications) with malware-in-a-Word-document, but more to the point does one really know what you're sending to someone if the document itself can change without user intervention?

It looks like there's a community that has generated macros to aid in formatting legal documents, which is all well and good. But I wonder whether this functionality extends to trusting one's partner not to modify the document (let's say, for the sake of argument, that this would be an inadvertent side-effect). After all, we've all been through negotiations with lots of marked-up and changed documents, and we're supposed to do a full proof-check before affixing our signature — but it does seem worrisome to me.

Or am I being impractically paranoid? Does anyone work with organizations that have guidelines in this area?"

New Denial-of-Service Attack Is a Killer 341

Posted by kdawson on Wednesday October 01, 2008 @08:08AM from the fighting-a-resource-war-with-an-unfair-advantage dept.

ancientribe writes "Hacker RSnake blogs about a newly discovered and deadly denial-of-service attack that could well be the next big threat to the Internet as a whole. It goes after a broadband Internet connection and KOs machines on the other end such that they stay offline even after the attack is over. It spans various systems, too: the pair of Swedish researchers who found it have already contacted firewall, operating system, and Web-enabled device vendors whose products are vulnerable to this attack." Listen to the interview (MP3) — English starts a few minutes in — and you might find yourself convinced that we have a problem. The researchers claim that they have been able to take down every system with a TCP/IP stack that they have attempted; and they know of no fix or workaround.

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