eDave.org

Subway quietly does away with the “low carb” wrap

Dave — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 20:58:23 +0000

I was in my local Subway today and asked about the tortilla they use for the wraps. It turns out that they are now using plain flour tortillas and they have quietly removed the wrap selection from their menu altogether.

Upon returning to the office, I decided to do a little research on the new calorie information surrounding this. I pulled out my Calorie King guide and looked up Subway. The old-style, low-carb wrap was 120

calories with 4.5g fat and 13g carb. This was a significant difference to those of us attempting to lose weight be eating healthier, especially when comparing it to the most healthy bread choice (wheat), which weighs in at 200 (actually 202.5) calories including 2.5g fat and a whopping 37g carb (less 3g dietary fiber) with 8g protein.

The nutritional guide in the store and on the web site (www.subway.com) now list the wrap as having 190 calories from 4.5g fat, 32g carbs (less 1g dietary fiber) and 6g protein. This all means that there is virtually no difference between the wrap (which is much less convenient and much less yummy) and bread and, arguably, the bread is going to be better for you since it contains less fat and more protein (getting closer to that magic 40-40-20 ratio).

I have seen no information on this from Subway or anywhere else for that matter and I think that people who are watching what they eat may be surprised to find that their suffering with the wrap is now in vein. I know I’m pretty upset about the change myself. I would be considerably less upset if I had been warned ahead of time that I was eating more calories and getting a less healthy meal than I thought. I have no idea when this change occurred, so I have no way of knowing how long I have been unaware exactly what I was putting into my body. The only information I could get out of the people behind the counter was that the change was Subway-wide and caused by the fact that too many people complained that they didn’t like the taste of the low-carb wrap.

I’d love to hear your comments on this. I think it’s big news and hope word spreads quickly. I’d love to hear from someone at Subway as to why they are positioning themselves as the healthy alternative and behaving otherwise.

Tutorial: Rainbow Tables and RainbowCrack

Dave — Fri, 10 Nov 2006 18:25:25 +0000

The Ethical Hacker Network has a wonderful, lengthy and detailed look at Rainbow tables and how they work.Â Check it out:
http://www.ethicalhacker.net/content/view/94/24/

ICMP Tunneling

Dave — Sat, 01 Jul 2006 21:25:01 +0000

Blog20-20nulldigital.net

This is an EXCELLENT tutorial on how to use ICMP tunneling to get to the Internet no matter where you are!

Wither Openpodcast.org?

Dave — Tue, 06 Jun 2006 22:51:15 +0000

Openpodcast.org has been MIA for some time now.Â I quick Google search does not reveal any news about this strange occurrance.Â As it turns out, the creator’s web site (btucker.org) is gone as well.
Could the venerable podcast dispersal site have left us and no one noticed?Â I mean, I know that it had largely become irrelevant and used mostly for promos and vanity grabs, but…

Please leave a comment if you have any information.

AppZapper v1.3 released today

Dave — Mon, 03 Apr 2006 19:39:22 +0000

And it could be free by the time you click on this link.Â They’re asking for bloggers to post about the release and the more that do, the more the price goes down!

In case you don’t know, AppZapper is a great uninstaller utility for Mac OSX

macZOT!

ISC Brings InfoCon to Yellow

Dave — Fri, 24 Mar 2006 01:05:19 +0000

There is now exploit code in the wild to take advantage of the recent vulnerability to IE.Â Â Apparently, the exploit only causes the calculator to pop up on your screen, but it would be trivial to modify the code to do something much more dastardly.

Microsoft is prommising to release a patch in the cycle next month, but until then, they suggest shutting off active scripting in IE.Â As an alternative, you can download IE7 beta 2, which is supposed to be non-vulnerable to this exploit.

Good luck and browse safely:Â Get Firefox!

10 Best Security Live CD Distros (Pen-Test, Forensics & Recovery)

Dave — Tue, 14 Mar 2006 22:03:03 +0000

10 Best Security Live CD Distros (Pen-Test, Forensics & Recovery)

Darknet.org has the awards for the top 10 security live distros. Check it out if you’re doing any pen-testing or forensics work.

There’s some great stuff here.

Your message - What will it be?

Dave — Tue, 07 Mar 2006 18:22:06 +0000

Your message

The link above will take you to the web site of the “Keo Project” where you can leave a message for man-kind’s decendants 50,000 years down the road (if there are any). Keo is a sattelite to be launched into orbit sometime in 2007 or 2008 and it will orbit the earth for 50,000 years before its orbit decays and it plumets to earth in a fiery ball of goo.

They allow you to type in up to 6,000 characters for inclusion in this little orbiting goody that will hopefully be read by our distant descendants.

I’m sitting here trying to think of something profound to write out, but everything that seems important today most certainly will not be in 50,000 years. It really makes you think about what’s important in this world.

Express yourself to the future by clicking on the link above. As for me…I’m still thinking.

Stopping Spyware Spoilation

Dave — Fri, 17 Feb 2006 17:43:15 +0000

(Isn’t the thesaurus a wonderful tool?)

Last night I was at a friends house to pick something up. He had been complaining for a while about his machine warning him that he was infected with spyware and that he could go to winfixer.com and purchase the solution to all his problems. I had tried to give him some advice ove rthe phone before, but the symptomps made things look like this spyware was disabling his A/V and anti-spyware software so I told him he was probably going to have to slash-and-burn and start from scratch.

I was really just going to give him some tips on how to back up his data when I decided just to take a look for myself to see what I could find. The first thing I noticed was that upon login, IE was silently launched and attempted to open winfixer.com. I ran taskmanager and scanned the running processes for anything suspicious, but I didn’t really see anything noteworthy.

Next, I opened up MSConfig and started browsing the startup tab to see what was slated to run at startup. The only thing that hit me right off was an entry for “MyWebSearch” toolbar or something like that. I posited that this might be the culprit, so I went into the registry to remove this start up item and rebooted.

Once I logged back into the system, there was the familiar IE window trying to open winfixer.com again. This time, I took a closer look at the startup items in the registry, both in the LOCALMACHINE and the CURRENTUSER hives. What caught my eye this time through was an entry for “AOLHOST.EXE.” The first time through, this didn’t seem suspicious as my friend has a teenage son and this sort of thing would be normal in my house. I took a closer look at the taskbar and realized that not only does my friend not use AOL as an ISP, but he also was not running AIM. Here was my opening: the winfixer spyware had cleverly disguised itself with the name of a legitimate program that is likely running on hundreds of thousands of machines out there.

I removed the entry from the registry and rebooted. Bingo: problem solved. I immidiately made sure the A/V was up to date and installed all the latest Windows patches.

How did my friend contract such a dastardly defilement? The answer to that question is unclear, but I suspect that he was a victim of the WMF vulnerability from January. I did have his system configured to automatically download critical updates, but I’m not so sure how well that actually works. I noticed, upon going to Windows Update, that his machine still did not have the February patches two days after they were released and it seemed that none of the non-critical patches had been installed at all.

Microsoft needs to change either their criteria for indentifying the criticality of vulnerabilities or start allowing the automatic update to get “important” updates as well as the critical ones. I still can’t figure out why they would classify the WMF vulnerability as only “important” and not “critical.”

PaulTech - Mac Trojan/Virus

Dave — Thu, 16 Feb 2006 18:22:02 +0000

PaulTech - Mac Trojan/Virus

Paul does a really good write-up of this strange phenomenon that’s making the rounds of the news sites today, so I’ll spare youthe gory technical details…

What I can’t figure out is why this is news? I’m a Mac newb and don’t really know what I’m doing, but I can tell you that if I was trying to look at a JPEG and was asked to enter my admin credentials, I would be very suspicious.

Is anyone going to fall for this trojan horse trick?

You may argue that if you’re running as admin on your machine you might never know that it happened. I’ll argue back that the only way you should be running as admin on a Mac is if you already know what you’re doing, in which case you’re not going to fall for this trick. Being a Mac newb, I signed into my machine for the first time and set up my user account that does NOT have admin priviledges and this is how it was out of the box, so there should be no way you’re running with admin priviledges by accident.

I really don’t see this as a big threat and I’m sure the “news” will fade in a day or so, but it is doing something goog for the computing community and that is to make people aware. Yes, folks knowledge is your greatest protector against this sort of problem. Just understand what is going on with your machine and don’t enter your admin password unless you’re specifically doing something that would require you to do so!