Posts by happygeek

I'm sure everyone would like to join me in congratulating ~s.o.s~ on his promotion and welcome him as the newest member of the Admin team here at DaniWeb. Sanjay has been a moderator for more years than I care to remember, and for the last few has been the official moderator 'team leader' if you will.

Hehe, welcome to Da Management Darkside ardav and pyTony :)

An ongoing attack aimed at users of the Apple Mac platform is being reported by security researchers. AlienVault, which has discovered these weaponised attacks in the wild, warns that regular Mac users without IT security software installed could be at risk of infection and hijacking.

The researchers suspect that the attack stems from the same anti-Tibetan, pro-Chinese, hacking group that has been responsible for attacks targeting Tibetan activist organisations in recent weeks.

According to the lead researcher who made the discovery, Jaime Blasco, the group is "delivering two different Mac trojans" including a new and improved one called MacControl.

The weaponised files themselves are all MS-Office .doc files, and is quite rare in that malicious Office document files are hardly ever used in an attempt to deliver malware payloads to the Mac platform. AlienVault researchers have detailed how the files use a remote code execution vulnerability of MS-Word file handling of malformed records. Blasco warns that an attacker who successfully exploits this vulnerability can take control of the target Mac along with other networked computers.

I'm not sure just how much of a threat this latest in the wild attack actually is though, considering that for a start any Mac user operating without administrative rights is unlikely to be impacted. Nor, for that matter, are those users who have patched their copy of MS Office with the security updates that Microsoft made available way back in 2009. Yes, really, that long …

When you look at the iTunes download charts you will always find an Angry Bird perched towards the top. That's quite simply because this game app has been the undoubted number one commercial and cultural success story of the App Store. The app developers, Rovio, have been accused in the past of cashing in on this success by rehashing the same format with different backgrounds and a new bird or two under the guise of a 'new' game. A new game that will cost you if you want to play, of course. Personally I don't have a problem with this as both Angry Birds Rio and Angry Birds Seasons have been as addicted as ever, and Rovio regularly update them with freely downloadable new levels to play.

But when I heard that yet another new variation was about to be released I have to admit that I felt more than a little disheartened, wondering if Angry Birds Space was going to be an app too far for the franchise. Still, I downloaded the premium 'HD' version for my iPad 2 on the day of release and have been playing it every spare moment since.

Although you do pay a premium for the HD version, $2.99 compared to just $0.99 for the bog standard game, the far from bog standard graphics are worth the extra. It's not as if a couple of bucks more is going to break the bank, is it? But Angry Birds Space …

Yay. Although I did as I changed to the number of posts option instead of member rank as I fancied a change :)

see this piece of string? That's your answer...

So kit005, it seems you are not really a new member after all. Why did you drop the EMP01616 account after maming 10 posts and then start another? Just curious...

Hi Sylvester, welcome to DaniWeb. An all new look but exactly the same old sense of community and helpful members bursting with IT expertise :)

Welcome to DaniWeb

Contact your AV security vendor, and if you do not have one then contact Websense (use the link in the article itself as a starting point) and ask them for advice on removal. I'm sure they will point you in the right direction.

And, for the record, no donation is required. DaniWeb does, of course, welcome donations from members who have been helped and wish to express their thanks by providing financial support to the site but it is certainly not obligatory.

Sorry AD, but WTF? :-)

While the News International phone hacking scandal that saw the demise of the News of the World newspaper cannot have escaped your attention in the US or UK, news from India concerning the latest 'tumble and clone' developments could leave the mobile phone calls of more than just celebrities at risk of hacking.

If you thought it was bad enough that UK newspapers have apparently been hacking into the mobile telephone conversations of celebrities and others 'in the news' in order to gain a competitive advantage when breaking news stories, then wait until you hear the latest reports to come out of India concerning GSM hacking methodologies.

Researchers from an Indian security company called Matrix Shell have demonstrated how it is possible to hack into Indian GMS phones, tumble and clone them, and then make calls using the unique International Mobile Subscriber Identity (INSI) number so as they were charged to the unsuspecting victim's cell account. Furthermore, by using a combination of firmware and customised software, the researchers were able to intercept calls made by the compromised handsets

According to Akib Sayyed from Matrix Shell, many if not most of the Indian mobile network providers use a5/0 instead of a5/1 encryption on GSM which, Sayyed says "is practically no encryption at all." Indeed, such is the weakness of this method that his researchers were able to use open source software to sniff out the data from thin air and listen in …

My profile is currently showing that I last visited 2 days ago. That's just a wee bit wrong of course, as I'm here all the time. Maybe something to do with setting myself as invisible so as to remove my admin/modding activity trail from the members online timeline?

I moved the post to the GL, but it remains a pointless and crappy question wherever it is posted...

Layout oddity in user profile page: in the 'where does happygeek post?' section the word 'post?' has overflowed onto the list of forums displayed (stays there no matter how I enlarge/decrease etxt and across both IE9 and Chrome.

What he said :) All the admin tools I used to use seem to have vanished.

That said, I am getting to like the look and feel of the 'edit post to infract and delete' one-click (well not quite, but...) system for dealing with individual posts and can see that over time it will be an improvement - but only if it is combined with things such as the ability to infract member profile, IP display/search, display of banned status to name a few.

You cannot change your username to linda as we already have a member with that username in the database.

You will need to try something a little less obvious before I can do anything I am afraid...

Hi, Could i change my username from leenz to linda ?

Lidiate was truly phenomenal I thought, man of the tournament for me let alone match.

Wales played well enough, but France were asleep for 40 minutes which helped :)

Yep, I think England played out of their boots and the score was a realistic reflection of that. Ireland look tired and past their sell by date now.

Great to see Italy avoid the wooden spoon at last, something Scotland thoroughly deserved. Agree 101% that the manager has to go, he's shite on a stick...

Thanks. Really not looking forward to tomorrow, but at the same time want to know exactly what I'm facing be it good or bad. Much easier to deal with then.

What he said :)

Yes the article was a response to the Volkman release.

Yes I have used Windows 8 on a PC.

No I am not paid by the word.

I have made it clear in the copy now that it is the graphics processor which is upgraded, in case anyone else was confused by it. The quad-core processor still puts it ahead of most (all?) of the competing tablets though. The graphics processing being, after all, one of the more important aspects of such a graphically intensive UI as iOS on an iPad.

Microsoft failed to make tablets work with Windows for PEN Computing twenty years ago, so why are some people saying that it is set to dethrone the iPad later this year? Can Windows 8 really prove to be a commercial threat to iOS?

I still have my Compaq Concerto from 1992, which is generally accepted as the first ever mainstream Tablet PC. It ran Windows for PEN Computing Version 1, which was actually just Windows 3.1 with some rather rudimentary pen input add-ons included. Although I have sentimental reasons for hanging on to the world's first real commercial tablet, I will readily admit that it sucked elephants through a straw and the reason why was that damn-awful PEN Windows OS abomination.

So when a press release hit my desk this morning which loudly and proudly promised to explain why Windows 8 is going to be, and I quote "fierce competition" for the iPad, I was all eyes. Especially since I am more used to getting press releases which proclaim how the latest Android-powered device or Android OS iteration knocks the socks off of the Apple tablet.

Ever since the bad start with PEN Windows, Microsoft has never quite managed to cut the mustard as far as the tablet computing market is concerned. So why should Windows 8 be any different? Karl Volkman of SRV Network, Inc. (a Microsoft Gold Certified partner, it should come as no surprise) reckons that Windows …

Just as long as you read the rules and do not advertise your product in contravention of them you will be OK. Pay particular attention to "Do ensure that all posts contain relevant content and substance and are not simply vehicles for external links, including signature links".

Here's a question: why call it crookservers? Especially when one dictionary definition of crook is "a dishonest person, especially a sharper, swindler, or thief."

Wednesday 6th June 2012 is World IPv6 Launch Day (no, seriously, it is) and, we have been continually reminded in a Chicken Little fashion, the IPv4 address space sky is falling. The fact that the media obsession with Internet addresses running out has been on-going for at least a decade now, fuelled no doubt by slow news days and headline space to fill, has led to something of a blasé attitude towards making the move over to IPv6. Indeed, you might be forgiven for thinking that the whole IPv6 thing had fallen by the wayside and become another Betamax technology.

This could hardly be further from the truth, and the rollout of IPv6 adoption continues to pick up pace. But just how many internet services are geared for that adoption, and how many networks are already enabled now where you live? The latter is something that RIPE NCC, one of the five Regional Internet Registries, has quite naturally been taking an interest in. Such an interest that it has developed a rather clever interactive graph that enables anyone to quickly and easily see the level of IPv6 take up in their country. Not only that, but also compare the number of IPv6 enabled networks between any number of countries on the graph by way of drop down menu selection. The graph takes 2004 as the starting point, and allows the user to search by country or region. The data displayed relates …

The only way Wales will not win the GS is if the team has one too many shandies the night before and Andy Powell leads them in a golf cart parade on the M4 in the wrong direction and they miss the kick-off.

Congrats on the GS :)

What a cracking match. Brilliant stuff, shame the English hadn't played that well all tournament. Great spirit.

France were absolute cack though.

Blindly. 22-24 with three and a but mins to go. My finger nails are shot...

I became a grandad for the fourth time today. Gracie is beautiful.

Later thus week I will find out if I am going blind in one eye and how long that process will take, and importantly if it will spread to the other eye. Final tests on Friday, in the meantime my vision is really quite poor indeed. Haemorrhage behind my 'good' eye leaving me with a large distorted area and just my bad 'lazy' eye to rely upon.

Gracie makes up for everything though :)

Tom Croft. I love you!!! Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeees!

Edge of seat indeed. Great effort by England to keep it score-free for the sin bin ten, but ten to go and 15-17. Eeeeek!

What a shame England have the ref to play against as well. What a complete twat. Mind you, par for the course for the man with a very French sounding name... Yelliw card my arse :(

England played out of their boots for the first twenty, have fallen asleep since then though. Second half just started, should be an edge of the seat job methinks.

The Iranian Cyber Army may be the latest elite military hacking squad to hit the headlines, but Iran has a long way to go if it's to catch up with China in terms of international data disruption. According to one newly published report into the threat from Chinese state-sponsored espionage activity, the true scale and nature of these cyber-attacks is really quite interesting.

Context Information Security argues in the ' Hidden Tiger, Crouching Dragon, Stolen Data ' report that while cyber-attacks originating from China are nothing new, they have grown in both size and scope in recent years in order to support the drive for business intelligence and IP that the development and expansion of the new 'open' Chinese economy demands.

The bottom line being that both foreign governments and business alike have shown a reluctance to act upon this increasing threat fearful that political, or worse still economic, isolation may follow. Throw this reticence into the ring with an already under-invested information security infrastructure across many cash-strapped Western business landscapes and stir in more than a little lacking in the kind of user education needed to spot the early warning signs of these attacks, and you have a recipe for potential disaster.

You can be sure that the kind of attacks analysed in the report are neither random nor indiscriminate; they have real purpose, and that is to steal information that will, according to Context "steal information that will fulfil a clear set …

Your eldest daughter goes into labour with your FOURTH grandchild (and you are not even 50 yet but feel about 75) - woke me up by text message at 5.20am to let me know the contractions had started... <yawn>

Security researchers are warning that some 30,000 WordPress websites, 85% of them based in the US, have been compromised by a mass-injection hijack attack which sees visitors to any of more than 200,000 individual pages redirected to a Trojan infected rogue AV scam.

The senior security researcher with Websense Labs, Elad Sharf, admits that while rogue AV is old hat these days it's obviously still a money-making exercise and one that turns enough profit for the bad guys for them to keep plodding away at it. "With such a high number of compromised web pages and websites in this on-going campaign, it's evident these scams are still working. Websense Security Labs has been following this mass injection campaign for months and we've seen over 200k web pages and close to 30k unique websites compromised" Sharf says, adding "vulnerable websites are a rich source of opportunity for cybercriminals".

According to the researchers who have been working with data from the Websense Threatseeker Network, the vast majority of the targets of this latest mass-injection exploit are based in the US. In fact, some 85% of them it would seem, and most are also hosted by the WordPress content management system.

The actual code that is injected into these vulnerable sites is pretty short, as is the norm, and can be found nestling just before the closing 'body' tag at the bottom of an infected page. What it does is the same old same old, hijacking …

Welcome to DaniWeb Mr (or Ms) Error :)

Interesting two years ago, yes...

You may be rather disappointed then, considering that this is an IT discussion community and not an Indian travel and tourism one.

I suggest you pay close attention to the rules before posting, so as to ensure you understand where the boundaries are regarding self promotion/advertising etc.

All that said, welcome to DaniWeb :)

See the comment from Sanjay, directly above your posting, which reveals all.

And following those, now deleted, pointless bumps to try and keep this thread alive I am prompted into closing it...

done

Not seeing them here at all, but the screenshot suggests they are of the IntelliTxt type which I thought DaniWeb had dumped yonks ago now.

Do you have graphical ads disabled under your control panel AD?

Welcome to the DaniWeb experience :)

Yandex is one of the leading Internet portals in Russia, and yes they do still use that terminology instead of search engine. The name itself, apparently, stands for Yet Another Indexer which is kind of apt as the company has just published the results of Yet Another iPad Survey. However, this one is a little different to your run of the mill iPad research as it is both specific to user behaviour and more precisely specific to Russian user behaviour. As such it gives us an insight into how others around the world are using their tablet devices.

For a start, we learn that iPad use in Russia has rocketed more than six times over from 2011 to 2012 with more than 700,000 people now using the Apple tablet. To put that into some context it equates to just about 1% of all Russian Internet users, so not amazing but a decent enough slice of the Internet access pie none the less considering that the iPad only went on sale officially in Russia at the end of 2010. The growth rate of iPad ownership in Russia has far outpaced both mobiles which grew by 2.5 times and PC's which grew by 1.4 times in the same period.

The really surprising statistic to come out of this research, at least as far as iPad ownership is concerned, was that it revealed over half of iPad owners in Russia come from the Moscow region which …

This morning (it's 8am here and I've been up working for 2 hours) I am mostly drinking freshly made espresso coffee using the love of my life, my Nespresso espresso maker. I'm in a Lungo mood this morning, and have had three cups so far.

As for food, what's that again?

If you have a problem with a user because of a specific post or PM then you can use the flag bad post/PM facility to bring it to the attention of the admin and moderating teams. The flagging procedure allows you to compose a post explaining why you are reporting it.

If you want to report a user for some other reason, then you are welcome to PM me directly and I will look into your complaint personally...