Outside our house, today.
The new malware
The Storm Worm has since continued unabated, most recently in the form of Web-based attacks. E-mails, socially engineered to look like electronic greeting cards and linked to a Web site containing malware, completely avoided traditional e-mail antivirus gateways. The Storm Worm’s course change to the Web reflects a growing trend of malware Web-based attacks launched through e-mail.
The simple logic behind these e-mail-based blended threats is astoundingly effective: no attachment means no antivirus block. And when combined with a user-friendly invitation, it creates the opportunity for a high infection rate.
Blended threats easily lead people to Web sites where malware gets downloaded–often without user interaction or knowledge. The industry is just now realizing the severity of the problem,
Researchers at Google recently published a paper concluding that approximately 10 percent of reviewed URLs contained “drive-by downloads” of malware binaries (PDF) and many more that were flagged as suspicious.
[Source]
Text for today
My first — and best — Editor, Robin Kyd, at his retirement party.
Cooped up
Snatched with a Leica M6. I didn’t see the kid in the car until I saw the print. Also the fact that the lamp-post slopes at the same angle as the door pillar!
VoIP: Very over-Inflated Price
This morning’s Observer column…
First of all, an apology. In previous editions, this column may have suggested that VoIP (internet telephony) stood for ‘Voice over Internet Protocol’. Now it turns out that it is, in fact, an acronym for ‘Very over-Inflated Price’. The proprietors deeply regret this error and hope that it has not caused any reader to make foolish investment decisions.
This matter was drawn to our attention by an announcement made last week by eBay. The company reported that in the quarter just ended, it will take £700m in write-offs and charges related to Skype – for which two short years ago it paid £1.3bn in cash and stock, plus what was enigmatically described as ‘a potential performance-based consideration’ estimated by industry sources at £750m. That’s £2.75bn in total…
I also wrote a short piece on the Wikipedia-obituary kerfuffle.
Berkeley puts courses videos on YouTube
Yep — according to TechCrunch…
The University of California Berkeley has started uploading video recordings of course lectures on to YouTube.
The initial round of lectures covers 300 hours of video on subjects including Chemistry, Physics and Non-Violence, with more content to come. The move by Berkeley is claimed to be a first by some, however some of the videos have been previously available elsewhere, including iTunes and Google Video; perhaps it’s a first for YouTube…
Here’s Sergey Brin’s lecture on search engines.
Later: Tony Hirst’s built a neat little search engine for the Berkeley shows.
The future of recorded music: an asymptotic decline to marginal cost
Interesting, if slightly utopian, column by Michael Arrington…
The economics of recorded music are fairly simple. Marginal production costs are zero: Like software, it doesn’t cost anything to produce another digital copy that is just as good as the original as soon as the first copy exists, and anyone can create those copies. Unless effective legal (copyright), technical (DRM) or other artificial impediments to production can be created, simple economic theory dictates that the price of music, like its marginal cost, must also fall to zero. The evidence is unmistakable already. In April 2007 the benchmark price for a DRM-free song was $1.29. Today it is $0.89, a drop of 31% in just six months.
P2P networks just exacerbate the problem (or opportunity) further, giving people a way to speed up the process of creating free copies almost to the point of being ridiculous. Today, a billion or so songs are downloaded monthly via BitTorrent, mostly illegally.
Eventually, unless governments are willing to take drastic measures to protect the industry (such as a mandatory music tax), economic theory will win out and the price of music will fall towards zero.
When the industry finally capitulates and realizes that they can no longer charge a meaningful amount of money for digital recorded music, a lot of good things can happen.
Hmmm…. I wonder.
Dream Realisation, release 1.0
When we embarked on the Ndiyo Project we always knew that the realisation of the vision depended on shrinking the thin client down to a chip. Well, our colleagues at DisplayLink have done it! This is the USB version of the Nivo, and it’s now in the back of monitors from two of the world’s leading manufacturers of displays — Samsung and LG. It’s an amazing achievement. And there’s more to come. Stay tuned.
Blackwaters run deep
Maureen Dowd in the NYT has been mulling over the Blackwater affair…
Americans have been antimercenary since the British sent 30,000 German Hessians after George Washington in the Revolutionary War.
But W. outsourced his presidency to Cheney and Rummy, and Cheney and Rummy went to war on the cheap and outsourced large chunks of the Iraq occupation to Halliburton and Blackwater. The American taxpayer got gouged, and so did the American reputation.
The mercenaries inflame Iraqis even as Gen. David Petraeus tries to win their trust.
Henry Waxman, the chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, summoned the 38-year-old crew-cut chairman of Blackwater, Erik Prince, to defend his private security company yesterday.
Once there was the military-industrial complex. Now we have the mercenary-evangelical complex.
Mr. Prince, a former intern to the first President Bush and a former Navy Seal, is from a well-to-do and well-connected Republican family from Michigan.
He and his father both have close ties to conservative Christian groups. His sister was a Pioneer for W., raising $100,000 in 2004, and Erik Prince has given more than $225,000 to Republicans…
Dowd says that Blackwater has been “the beneficiary of $1 billion in federal contracts, including a no-bid contract with the State Department worth hundreds of millions.”
Google search for ‘iPod killer’ still yields no results
Billg spoke thus:
“For something we pulled together in six months, we are very pleased with the satisfaction we got,” Bill Gates, Microsoft’s chairman, said in an interview Tuesday. “The satisfaction for the device was superhigh. The satisfaction on the software actually is where we’d expect to see a huge uptick this year. It was just so-so on the software side.”
Fact: Thus far, the Zune has sold 1.2 million units worldwide. I expect this gives Steve Jobs a huge uptick. Er, what exactly is an ‘uptick’? I’ve led such a sheltered life, you see.