(Image is used under the Pixabay license)

Even if a hacker put some code into a music file (for example), the music file player should just try to send the code to the speakers along with the rest of the data, not actually perform any commands (like taking over your computer). For this to be possible, the makers of the player software practically have to write custom code to look for and execute hacker code.

In other words, for a virus to be embedded in a video, music, or text file, there has to be deliberately placed code in the player that watches for commands and acts on them.

It's stupid to think you could ever get a virus from a text document, a music file or video file, but, thanks to sloppy programming practices like this, it happens. Remember not to get distracted by the spin doctors and "damage control" people. If there's a virus in video, music, or text, it's the fault of the player/reader, not because of clever hacking.

(Image is in the Public Domain)

How many years has it been since America's Funniest Home Videos came around? How many videos do you still see of some dad somewhere teaching his kid to swing a bat, but he stands behind him and gets nailed in the crotch? You think they'd learn.

Well the same can be true of these laptops. How many times does a company/government branch have to lose a laptop before they learn? The simplest solution is to stop putting people's data on laptops! Sheesh.

(Image used under: Creative Commons 3.0 [SRC])

The Consumerist reports that one of their readers asked for a non-RFID credit card from American Express. Granted, they only disabled contactless transactions in their database and did not issue him a spychip-free card, but one of the commenters said that they were able to do so with Washington Mutual.

It never hurts to ask, but it can certainly hurt to not.

Of course, you could just physically disable the RFID with a hammer, drill, or knife.

(Image is in the Public Domain)

This article is a treasure trove of historical information about the battle between consumers and copyright holders in P2P and DRM.

A bit about the attitude of the market:

Rhetoric about internet democracy aside, the point of interest was that such a huge number of people had no problem with copying and sharing movies, that they regarded it almost as a right.

A bit about the Media companies' "shame on you" campaign:

The strongest moral card they hold is that illegal downloaders are ripping off the artists. This, however, is the most shamefaced hypocrisy imaginable. Media companies have historically been the biggest sharks going, pressuring artists into exploitative contract deals that cut them out of most of the money and limit their creativity. Their argument seems to be, "Buy the disc or else your favourite singers and actors will be sleeping in the gutters."

A bit about DRM:

Trying to control the technology itself only breeds resentment and the kind of reaction seen on Digg as a hacker took the power into his own hands and shared it with the world.

A bit about reality:

Critics point out that illegal downloads hit smaller, independent companies the hardest as they depend on direct sales. This may be true but it only suggests another economic model. Maybe artists should be selling for themselves directly. And if an artist has a song that’s downloaded illegally by 5 million users, they now have 5 million fans. That translates into lots of concert tickets. Canadian artist Leslie Feist was shocked to hear American audiences singing along to her new songs – the album hadn’t yet been released in the US. When she asked her fans how they knew the words they yelled back: Illegal downloads!?

Nice.

DVD Encryption will never work. Ever.

(Image used under: Fair Use doctrine)

The companies are trying so hard to make it impossible for people to copy DVDs, but hackers continue to prove that they're wasting their time. Just one day after releasing new keys for their copy protection system, a hacker posted the key on his website.

The AACS LA is not happy about these Processing Keys being released. When previous keys were leaked, the organization vowed that it would remove the keys from the Internet with cease-and-desist orders. Predictably, this only encouraged people to post them more. The whole series of affairs evokes memories of when DVD decryption was all the rage, and the DeCSS code wound up being printed on t-shirts to express the futility of trying to sue anyone who used or even knew about it.

The key thing here is that hackers are working for free and there's a lot of them. I don't think this is a battle that copyright holders will ever win.

Phone Scams

(Image is used under the Pixabay license)

Be warned. No matter how nice, not matter how much they already know, no matter how much they try to upset you, don't give out information over the phone.

The scammer – who sounds young and American – calls a military spouse and identifies herself as a representative from the Red Cross. The caller says that the spouse's husband, who is not identified by name, was hurt while on duty in Iraq and was med-evacuated to a hospital in Germany.

(Image used under: Creative Commons 3.0 [SRC])

So there's a bunch of vulnerabilities in older versions of wordpress. There are other reasons to upgrade besides security.

For example, just going from 2.0 to 2.1, I could see a ton of usability features that made my site much easier to manage. And when I read about 2.2 and how a error in your code wouldn't break your site, I wished I had upgraded then. The very next day, I made a coding error in one of my plugins and my site was down the whole day until I could get back to my home machine.

Either way, besides feature upgrades, each version includes better security so it's best to keep current.

(Image is in the Public Domain)

This is pretty neat. This drywall contractor with no inventing experience made an effective telescoping stun stick / taser out of a simple lightsaber toy.

That's pretty slick.

(Image used under: Creative Commons 2.0 [SRC])

I haven't talked about this before, but it's a problem that's been around a while. A lot of spammers will send full images containing their message instead of HTML or text because a spam filter can't recognize what's in a picture. Now that spammers have been seeing the results of advanced spam filters, they are moving more and more to image spam.

From the article I linked to, this is the most important piece of advice:

Disable graphics in e-mails you receive. Most e-mail services such as Microsoft Outlook 2007 and Mozilla Thunderbird automatically prevent graphics from showing in e-mails you receive unless you click on them or enable the graphics yourself. While this can slow things down a bit, it also reduces the chances that you will be caught clicking on a piece of image spam. You can also configure your e-mail account to only receive plain text, blocking rich text and graphics altogether.

The key is that if the image loads at all, even if you don't click it, the spammer can know you opened their e-mail which will encourage more spam.

(Image used under: Creative Commons 2.0 [SRC])

Now that Apple is planning a DRM-free store, we can conclusively say that Steve Jobs wasn't just paying lip service. Right on.