Lest you think that the ANI thing was the only thing going on today, you’d miss the other part of today’s entertainment. There’s a new Trojan spam going around trying to entice you to download MSFT IE7.0 Beta 2 (never mind that it’s been released). This is, in fact, a new Trojan (Grum) and appears to be entirely unrelated to the ANI threat. The emails have a shiny “download IE7″ graphic in them:
Expand Post: IE7 Trojan on the loose
In what could be the most embarrassing exploit to impact Windows Vista since its commercial launch in January, security engineers at McAfee’s Avert Labs confirmed today – and posted the video to prove – that the operating system can be caused to enter an interminable crash-restart-crash loop, by means of a buffer overflow triggered by nothing more than a malformed animated cursor file.
It isn’t even a new exploit, as researchers with eEye discovered in January 2005. At that time, Microsoft acknowledged it affected versions of the operating system from the first edition of Windows 98 through to early releases of Windows XP, though it stated at the time XP SP1 was unaffected.
But apparently after researching field reports of limited attacks, Avert Labs discovered an apparently similar exploit using .ANI files impacts XP SP2 and Vista as well, as well as Windows 2000 SP4 and versions of Windows Server 2003 from the initial release through to SP1. Avert Labs stated XP SP1 and versions since were unaffected, though Microsoft warned the exploit does affect XP SP2.
If both firms’ accounts are correct, Microsoft may have fixed the problem with XP SP1 in 2005, and inadvertently un-fixed it sometime afterward.
Expand Post: Vista Can Be Taken Down by an Animated Cursor
After yet another contentious vote on the .xxx concept, ICANN has finally rejected the pornography TLD. The debate has gone on for quite some time, and the 9-5 decision was the third time a decision was reached on the subject. This is the second time the body has ruled against the idea, and is likely the last time we’ll see it come up for vote any time soon. One member abstained from voting. From the article: ‘Many of the board members said they were concerned about the possibility that ICANN could find itself in the content regulation business if the domain name was approved. Others criticized that, saying ICANN should not block new domains over fears like that, noting that local, state and national laws could be used to decide what is pornographic and what is not. Other board members said they believed that opposition to the domain by the adult industry, including Web masters, content providers and others, was proof that the issue was divisive and that .xxx was not a welcome domain.
Boot Camp, Apple’s solution for installing and dual booting Windows on a Mac, has just pushed out a new release with a few significant changes.
Most notably, Boot Camp now supports Windows Vista, but there’s a lot of other improvements in the release – like better drivers and Apple Remote support – that make it seem like a more attractive option every day. At Lifehacker HQ, we tend to stick to Parallels virtualization tool to run Windows in the Mac environment, but 1) it’s $80 vs. Boot Camp’s free, and 2) since it’s virtualization, it’s never going to be quite as good as the real thing. That’s where Boot Camp comes in. If you want to harness the full power of your Mac hardware in a Windows OS (now including Vista), Boot Camp is your ticket.
Boot Camp [Apple]
Hit game may be the most popular MMO you’ve never heard of
With more than 3 million units sold, legions of passionate fans and heaps of critical acclaim, “Guild Wars†is probably the most popular massively multiplayer online game you’ve never heard of.
It’s easy to see why. Blizzard Entertainment’s “World of Warcraft†is a seemingly unstoppable juggernaut, with 8.5 million worldwide subscribers. “Burning Crusade,†the expansion to the original game, sold an estimated 3.5 million copies in just one month.
“Because of those big numbers, and because ‘WoW’ is the first subscription-based MMO that’s broken out of hardcore market, [Blizzard] gets a lot of attention,†say Jeff Strain, co-founder of ArenaNet, the company that developed “Guild Wars.â€
But small, scrappy ArenaNet thinks it has plenty to brag about, too. In seven years, Strain and its co-founders, have taken a pretty radical idea about online gaming and built it into a successful company.
Expand Post: ‘Guild Wars’: An experiment that worked
We got the scoop on some very special Yahoo news! Yahoo Mail will be celebrating its 10 year anniversary shortly, and they REALLY want to celebrate. Everyone that has a Yahoo mail account will be offered unlimited email storage starting May 2007, rolling out to all users over a couple of months.
The current version of Yahoo Mail started out in 1997 when they acquired RocketMail and offered users a mere 4MB of email storage. Hmm, what could you fit in there now? Let’s just say not much by today’s standards. By 2005 the email capacity reached 100MB, then on to 1GB where it sits at today.
Will this groundbreaking new move from Yahoo make a few of the main free email providers like Google and Microsoft wonder how many users will switch over? Imagine never deleting emails again, storing countless mp3’s, and data backups all in your Yahoo email account.
PC World published an article on the analysis done by security firm Finjan that shows that 80% of all malicious code is served through online advertising. Now as with every statistic their selection might not have been representative, I have strong doubts that this number is accurate. But the trend is clear — there is much to be gained by infiltrating advertising networks, it allows hackers to inject their code into many sites including the ones where users don’t expect it. So the common advise to avoid visiting “shady†sites has once again lost some of its appeal, ads are displayed on “serious†sites as well. But I guess it will not stop most webmasters from trusting third-party content unconditionally by embedding scripts from third-party servers into their web pages. If these third-party servers get compromised their web site will be automatically affected as well, with identity stealing being the least serious consequence.
Guild Wars expansion , Guild Wars Eye of the North, is due to hit shelves Q3 2007. It will require one of the previous Guild War campaigns (Prophecies, Factions, or Nightfall) in order to play.
Guild Wars 2 will go into beta in the second half of 2008. The ArenaNet team has stated that Guild Wars 2 will still not have a subscription fee.
“We felt it was extremely important to reward those people who have been playing Guild Wars since the game first launched in 2005,†said Jeff Strain, co-founder of ArenaNet. “Those players have seen three very large campaigns created in a little under two years and so we think it’s time to begin filling in the details of the existing world and to provide more content for current characters. We are thrilled to focus our time on something that our players have been asking for.â€
Kids with cancer now have a new tool for understanding and fighting their disease. Re-Mission, a new video game created by HopeLab, is a "3-D shooter" that takes kids through the bodies of young patients with different forms of cancer, and it’s having an incredible effect on patients.
The idea is that it’s much easier to learn when you’re playing and having fun. Through playing the game, the kids learn information about the disease, quality of life, self-effacy (which the company defines as being able to take action in a challenging situation) and how to adhere to their medication.
By winning the game, the kids feel like they can win their medical battle.
According to an outcome study conducted by HopeLab, the overall self-effacy score of patients increased dramatically, and Re-Mission players maintained higher blood levels of chemotherapy and showed higher rates of antibiotic utilization — thus, the method was helpful in 80% of patients.
What an amazing idea!
[via Neatorama]
