Day: April 20, 2011

Spammers are evil. And now they are trying to lure people into clicking on stupid links because of cute bunnies!

Spamvertised Easter Greetings lead to malware

“Security researchers from McAfee Labs are reporting on a currently ongoing event-based social engineering attack, aiming to trick users into clicking on a link found in a malicious email.

The spamvertised emails come using ‘Easter Greeting from Alex’ subjects, and are using an animated image including a ‘Download Animated Greeting Here’ body. Upon clicking on the link, the user is exposed to a password-stealing malware variant of PWS-ZBot.

With Easter only a few days away, cybercriminals are quickly adapting to the event-based social engineering potential presented by the holiday.

Users are advised to avoid interacting with suspicious links and email attachments found in email messages.”

Your iPhone knows where you are, and, it’s tellin’!

iPhone Software Tracks Location Of Users

“Apple’s iPhone software is storing a record of the travels of iPhone owners on their phones and on the computers used for iPhone synchronization, a practice that has renewed privacy concerns about mobile location tracking.

The data, consisting of latitude and longitude coordinates and corresponding timestamps, is stored unencrypted and, apparently, without permission or conspicuous notification. Apple did not respond to a request to explain whether any of its user agreements covers this practice.

The existence of the iPhone tracking database was disclosed on Wednesday at the Where 2.0 conference by Alasdair Allan, an iPhone programmer and a senior research fellow in Astronomy at the University of Exeter, and Pete Warden, founder of OpenHeatMap.com and a former Apple software engineer.

French blogger Paul Coubis appears to have been the first to report this issue last year, though his findings didn’t attract much attention.”

Now, this is interesting! According to the YouTube blog, YouTube is now transcoding all new uploads to WebM, whereas previously the focus was on 720p and 1080p video.

Google’s James Zern writes, “Transcoding all new video uploads into WebM is an important first step, and we’re also working to transcode our entire video catalog to WebM. Given the massive size of our catalog — nearly 6 years of video is uploaded to YouTube every day — this is quite the undertaking. So far we’ve already transcoded videos that make up 99% of views on the site or nearly 30% of all videos into WebM. We’re focusing first on the most viewed videos on the site, and we’ve made great progress here through our cloud-based video processing infrastructure that maximizes the efficiency of processing and transcoding without stopping. It works like this: at busy upload times, our processing power is dedicated to new uploads, and at less busy times, our cloud will automatically switch some of our processing to encode older videos into WebM. As we continue to transcode the remaining inventory, we’ll keep you posted on our progress.”