Conficker, it’s open war between the industry and malware writers
Conficker (also known as Downup, Downadup or Kido) is the worm that first, after the Sasser outbreak in 2004, was able to exploit a flaw in a Windows remote service, and due to this unusual ability the malware became in turn the target of a large part of the IT industry that, leaded by Microsoft, is trying in these days to defuse the time bomb of an enormous botnet yet with unknown practical outcomes.
File viruses, the outbreak goes on
As previously highlighted, traditional viruses, the ones that nowadays are generally defined as “file viruses” and target executable programs parasitizing and exploiting them as a medium for their propagation, even though reduced to a marginal component of the crowded zoo of beasties making up modern malware aren’t vanished at all. A confirmation of this is the fact that, after the Sality case, new parasitic viruses families have in the past days caught the attention of experts and security firms.
Epitaph on the automobile’s grave
One of the most interesting aspects highlighted by the worldwide recession is the fact that the economic standards of the past aren’t valid anymore, and in a not so distant future what many today describe as the slavery of a secure job will be remembered instead as a golden period, a privileged phase and life style that will never return.
New opening sequence for The Simpsons in high-definition
Well, actually if you leave out the evidently superior sharpness of the drawings (”as meant to be by the authors”, one says in these occasions) there isn’t much of new after all. Whatever it is, the most yellow America’s family updated its transmissions to the oddities of technology evolution, and on the past Sunday Fox aired the first high-definition episode (in 720p) provided with a complete rewrite of the notorious opening sequence of the show.
Requiem for the champion of abandonware
Home of the Underdogs is dead, long live to vintage videogaming. It’s unlikely that memorial words will be wasted in the IT industry for the occasion, nevertheless the event is worth highlighting: founded by the Thai woman Sarinee Achavanuntakul in September 1998, HotU eventually became the largest historic videogames archive (mostly) for DOS and Windows platforms, representing one of the major landfall points of the phenomenon at the boundary between illegality and collective cognizance better known as abandonware.
CPS Changer, the first and last Capcom console
Capcom makes videogames all along, and there are no doubts about the fact that the company is particularly good at it. But there was a time, around the half of the Nineties, when the award-winning Japanese producer tried to enter the hardware market too, during the fourth generation of consoles when Sega Mega Drive and Super Nintendo shared the domestic market while the others were watching.
Zoundry Raven has gone open source
It was mentioned earlier and now, one of the best WYSIWYG editors for off-line blogging has finally landed the FOSS and community-driven development world. In the past days Zoundry Raven has officially become an open source software, ready to accept contributions from coders willing to improve a product that already offers remarkable qualities as to code stability, ease of use and compatibility with various publishing platforms and CMS.
Rule number one: never trust the cloud computing
It was August 27 of 2007 (my birthday) when columnist John C. Dvorak warned against the dangers of things such as “cloud computing”, “software as service”, “Web 3.0″ and the many abbreviations that in these years are trying to catch the attention of the public and sell as new what is the most old fashioned computing architecture ever existed.
Empire of the Sun - Walking on a Dream
As a long time fan of Kraftwerk band I always feel a particular fondness for electronic music, whether it melt with the gloomy and metropolitan rock of Subsonica or follow the northern though charming pathways of Royksopp. Unfortunately there’s a bit of electronic in any damn pop tune released nowadays, and the value of experimentation with sounds has ended up in the back burner in respect of the overexposure of mean starlets used to feed, unconsciously, a grim showbiz that first swallows and then excretes them when they are digested.
Links & Suggestions # 7: videogame birthdays, pirates, industry assholes, nanometers and super-consoles
If technology is inclined to constantly project itself onward leaving very few room for remembering products that were so popular just some time before, Jake Gyllenhaal acting as the Prince of Persia is convincing as a cactus in a melodrama. If Doom is an historic videogame that deserves to be remembered for its birthday, pirates once again prove to be the only ones capable of saving the media world from the current DRM madness. And if the reading of this paragraph has a meaning for you then I would suggest to make an appointment with a psychiatrist, but a good one. Or the reading of a good grammar book. I am dispensed from the second, at least 
Model 2 Emulator 0.9, Sega 3D classics once again on these screens
There’s no doubt about the fact that ElSemi take his time when it’s about updating his Sega Model 2 arcade board emulator, but it’s similarly true that any new Model 2 Emulator update offers such an amount of improvements to give meaning to the time gone-by between a release and another. Seven months after the last revisions, therefore, the talented Spanish coder has in the past days delivered the 0.9 version of his thoroughbred arcade emulator.
Sality virus, the species evolution
The numbers clearly demonstrate it, nowadays the main threats to computer security are those coming from worms, trojans, backdoors, malicious code categories that have nothing to do with the historical “viruses”. But those digital parasites which travelled from file to file (and from floppy to floppy), hunting for new habitats and new victims to infect still survive today when malware is a business and the worm-based botnets have a scary amount of zombie-PC to use against institutions, firms or the network infrastructures of entire nations.
The 90 years of the Ruler
There is probably no other case in the world like the one of Giulio Andreotti, the politician survived to himself, the seven-times Prime Minister who sits in the Italian parliament since the times of of the Constituent Assembly and has contributed to establish the Christian Democracy party alongside the statesman Alcide De Gasperi. A Great Old of the republican history, Andreotti is among the other things also a well-known mafioso and mafiosos friend, a thing that sometimes it’s good to recall for truth’s sake, outside of the propaganda and the lies sold by the television regime that currently controls the minds of the majority of Italian people.
I have seen the corpse of the Italian press. Who knows how, it was still moving
To say that in Italy there is no more press but only an endless series of courtesans of the strongest is a pretty trivial thing, that a sober person could consider like qualunquismo if only it wasn’t a pure and simple matter of fact. In Italy the media are dead, they have become zombies artificially kept alive by state robberies and embarrassing money transfers. Just look at what is happening in these days after the demonstration in Piazza Farnese, Rome.
Videogames highlights - January 2009
2009 will be a year of deep economic crisis, but if the videogame industry hasn’t proved to be exempt as expected and the news about layoffs among developers are increasingly alarming, the true thing is that the enthusiasts will unlikely stop being in front of the screen only because they have less money in their pockets. Also because of the Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show happening, therefore, January too hasn’t lacked the usual flow of multimedia stuff on the hits as like as on the flops of videogaming to come.
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