Recently, Sophos analysts have discovered a piece of malware masquerading itself as a flash player plugin for the Firefox browser (detected by Sophos as Troj/FFSpy-A).
When the file runs, it pretends to install the adobe flash player for your browser.

However, instead of giving you a Flash Player, you get a piece of malware that spies on your Google searches, sends that data to a remote server and then displays ads into what you are viewing based on the keywords you entered.
According to the post on Sophos’ website, this malware seems to be spreading via Internet forums.  You probably won’t have to worry about things like this if you download any plugins directly from Mozilla’s website (but you should still be cautious).
On Sophos’ website, there are some screenshots that illustrate the difficulty you would have trying to determine whether or not you were installing a legit plugin versus one containing some type of malware.
If you want to test your installed version of Flash, you can visit the test page setup on Adobe’s website and you can download the current version of Flash from Adobe’s website as well.

Opera Version 10 has been in Beta since June and now it is ready for prime time Internet Browsing. It boasts new technology called Opera Turbo and it is designed to speed up browsing experience for slower connections, up to 8 times faster according to Opera.

I like Opera, but must admit that it is not as easy for me to customize as Firefox, which is what I use 99% of the time. Opera is very popular in Europe and they also have a great mobile browser, Opera Mini. You can download Opera here and can download Opera Mini here. I really like Opera Mini.

Make a little room between Google Chrome and Opera and you can shoehorn RockMelt into the mix. Yes, another way for people to view web pages and possibly another set of standards for which web designers have to prepare.

Rockmelt does have some pretty good backing, however. Do you remember the Netscape browser from the 1990s? The founder of that company, Marc Anderson, is a backer of Rockmelt.

Not much is known about Rockmelt at the moment and their website only has a spot where you can provide your email address to be sent more information. So we will have to wait and see.

At any rate, it faces a pretty packed market that already includes the likes of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari and Flock and a few others.

During this blogging sabbatical, we noticed some interesting patterns relating to comment spam, visits from other countries as well as visits from the United States and we plan on using this traffic data to make our sites even better going forward.

Internet Technology and Web Design has taken some interesting turns over the past few months. It was nice to take a step back and just watch the metamorphosis unfold – seeing the bigger picture. Over the next few weeks, we will be posting about a few of the more interesting things we discovered, so stay tuned.

Really appealing directly to the consumer is the main concern for Microsoft here, in recent market changes they lost a full percentage of the market two months in a row while Apple grew to have 10% of personal computer sales. This is not the first attempt by Microsoft to open a retail store in 1999 they had a store in downtown San Francisco however it closed not long after due to the blue screen on death, er, I mean to say due to other shops in the area closing down as well (area desirability?.)

Personally I am excited to see what the stores will look like, Apple has unveiled some pretty cool stores and now it is Microsoft’s turn. I expect to see Xbox 360’s blaring and Zune advertisements everywhere and hopefully on the desktops of the latest of what Microsoft has to offer in the handheld/personal computer category. Microsoft has already hired a retail lead to head the project, David Porter, who is a dreamworks exec with 25 years under his belt as a Wal-mart’s VP and general merchandise manager of entertainment. All I can say is lets hope the service received at the Microsoft store chains is better than finding out what all these error codes mean in Vista.

p.s.  I am new to the staff here you can check out my personal blog the details (wip) for the latest in the blogging community, or my bloggersbase for more posts by me.

First, my wife and I were searching for Petsmart and my wife noticed this warning:

I thought that was odd, but large sites have been hacked before.  So maybe they were having some problems.  However, as we searched for other things, we saw that same warning below every listing in Google, no matter what the search phrase was.  We even searched for “google maps” through Google’s search and here is what we got:

If we attempted to click on any of the returned search results, including the one that would take us to google.com, we got this warning:

In the process of doing more troubleshooting, it seems that the glitch worked itself out.  I wonder if anyone else noticed these issues.  Shout back if you have a second.

I am guessing that the errors we saw were a result of one of these situations:

1 – Google Malware Reporting was experiencing some type of glitch and was erroneously flagging every site as potentially dangerous.

2 – I have gotten some type of virus that is somehow playing around with something hidden in someplace I have yet to discover.

3 – Every site on the Internet (including google.com) was briefly infected with some type of malware and Google was dutifully warning everyone.

Hmm.  Thinking.  Thinking.

I am hoping it was #1

We are really looking forward to seeing the finished structure and thank them for the opportunity to help out!

Well, the Governor of New York is proposing one measure that is sure to get music lovers up in arms: impose a state tax on iTunes and “digitally delivered entertainment services.” Awesome!

Governor Peterson’s proposal still needs the approval of New York State Legislators, but I am sure there are 49 other states paying close attention to the outcome of the iTunes tax bill (or iPod tax, as they are calling it).

So, your $0.99 music download might be going up to $1.06 .  If bills like that are passed, I bet there will be a marked increase in music and movie file sharing.

There have been reports of those wacky Nigerians hacking into Facebook accounts and impersonating the user to try to scam money from their friends and reports of a Facebook javascript bug.

Now, there are reports of a virus called Koobface in circulation on Facebook.  Here is how it works:

• A hacker infects a Facebook user’s PC
• The hacker then sends messages to the user’s Facebook friends.  The messages say something like “You look just awesome in this new movie” or something seemingly innocent like that.
• A link contained in the message sends the recipient to a website where they are prompted to download a supposed update of Adobe’s Flash Player, so they can “view the video”.
• If the recipient clicks the link, their PC is infected and the cycle continues.

The hackers are taking advantage of the climate of trust the exists on Facebook.  Friends feel that any message they receive from one of their friends on Facebook should be trusted because of the privacy features in place.  We tend to let our guard down and not think that our friend’s account could have been hacked or that a message we receive could contain a malicous virus like Koobface.

According to a report from Wilmington NC television station WECT, some residents are saying that hunters are shooting Swans in Hewlett’s Creek.  These Swans are the kind that children feed with bread crumbs, in some cases they will eat right out of your hand.  Shooting an animal like that is wrong on so many levels:

1. The animal does not fear humans and so cannot distinguish the threat.  So they are not really “hunting”, are they?
2. It is illegal to shoot animals in Wilmington City Limits.
3. It’s a Swan – it is not like they are killing a wild boar or a bear.  I suppose these guys need something that presents a little less of a challenge.

The residents that say they have witnessed Swans being shot also say that the hunters are covering up their boat numbers so that they cannot be identified.  Evidently, they know that what they are doing is wrong and would probably be embarrassed to get caught.

Hopefully, the residents will get some evidence on camera.

If you are one of the “hunters” who shoot animals as they innocently swim close to you, please leave a comment because there are lots of people who would love to see if you can create a complete sentence with your words .