They (FBI, and their equivalents in the dozen other countries widely affected) know exactly where it's coming from, it's just not in their jurisdiction.

Code from within the 2009 version:
"00420214 - Don`t install on Rus:; 00420234 - Russian or Ukrainian Windows detected. Exiting ..." - http://sunbeltblog.blogspot.com/2009/01/russian-don-infect-themselves.html

"In the early and mid-1990s, criminal groups provided protection to businesses and enforced contracts when the state was too weak and corrupt to do so. In the process, they actually helped sustain private enterprise, albeit at a high cost to business. The emergence of an economic market for private protectionâ"in which criminal groups compete among themselves as well as with other newly formed private security agentsâ"has stabilized the business-criminal relationship. Recently, criminal networks have taken a more businesslike approach to maximizing profit" - http://www.worldpolicy.org/journal/articles/wpj04-1/sokolov.htm

The following article is the best writeup I've seen thus far on this threat, and provides some insight on the financials:

"If these stats are to be believed, one affiliate was able to install 154,825 copies of AV XP 08 in ten days' time, and 2,772 of those copies were actually purchased by the victims. This only represents a one to two percent conversion rate, but with the generous commission structure, was enough to earn the affiliate $146,525.25 for that time period. At that rate, the affiliate could be expected to earn over 5 million U.S. dollars a year, simply by maintaining a large botnet and forcing AV XP 08 installs on 10,000 to 20,000 computers a day." - http://www.secureworks.com/research/threats/rogue-antivirus-part-2/

Kinda makes a guy reconsider his chosen career... Until you consider the mortality rate of Mafiya members, and the hordes of angry noobs wherever you go ;)

"It's like something else is heating the atmosphere besides the sun."

The orbiting teapot must have boiled! ;)

So Russian phishers actually care about uptime? Who woulda thunk it! :p

In other news, when millions upon millions of computers are in botnets, some of them are probably going to be non-windows systems. Shock, horror. Related reading.

No no no, he's talking about the Lizardmen Evil Overlords, don't let them in! :(

Mirrored the PDF Here for anyone interested (though as I mentioned, the HTML page has the useful info). :)

One top quality vid (well, content-wise if not visually) gives an entertaining, in-depth breakdown of the reasons why not, Here.

Eeewwwwwwwww... :/

In other news, This! :)

Yeah, you just need to do it with a bit of a snarl, and have your parrot chime in with loud, often profane witticisms at opportune moments. :D

To be more exact, they tend to half-kill things and then eat them.

I'm a bit of a noob when it comes to comprehending licensing and related issues, but as far as I can tell Microsoft's biggest contribution to the Open Source / Free Software Movement has been the continued tendency to obscenely restrict and retard peoples' ability to use their computers and software as they see fit (I'm thinking primarily of 'premium content protection' in Vista onward), thus waking more and more people up to the alternatives (by motivating them to look elsewhere).

Here's a link to an audio podcast of the article (actually starts at 5:52): Cost Analysis of Vista Content Protection by Peter Gutmann.
And the source site (please don't try to download the PDFs, the useful info all appears to be on the HTML page and the site seems to be speed throttled): HERE.

On a side note (sorry for offtopic), I wonder how many people will be blocked from going to that page since it says "make bombs"? :P

ALLAAAAH

*cough*

Try 18 hundred years... While stories of Archimedes' Mirror may have been greatly exaggerated (Mythbusters and a couple of independent projects have recreated the effect but with an infeasible time-frame for warfare), the concept and 'technology' of parabolic mirrors or arrays to concentrate solar heat are pretty ancient. Also, Death Ray FTW. :D

And this is why advancing the technology in a mass market to the point where we all have waterproof, solar-powered e-readers (AND no connection requirement for Digital Rorts Management) is a worthy goal. This will only happen following the first few generations of widely affordable, less-featured (but still adequately functional) models being adopted by the public.

Whose corrections?

Fixed? :)

You are completely correct about lowering the cost of entry to education, this is a magnificent goal and one that should always be pursued (without affecting the quality of said education of course).

You mean like the Playstations and other consoles that do the same job as PCs, playing interactive video games? There are many reasons these products work, but the main ones would probably be specialisation and marketing. Specialisation (ideally) results in greater ease-of-use and reliability, and in some cases lowers the bar for entry - making it cheaper, and requiring less prior knowledge for pick-up-and-play than the all-in-one alternative, in this case the PC. I'm not saying this is necessarily a GOOD thing, but it makes business sense and is sustainable.

Marketing, well... I would predict that there are demographics which would be averse to computers for whatever reason, but would adopt an electronic reader with less persuasion required.

P.S: Yes, I know that strikeout didn't render - I can't seem to find /.'s allowed entities list and s/strike didn't work so meh :P

So in other words the price is shit? :P