Byte Into It - 15 Apr 09

Twitter Worm Attack Continues: Here's How to Keep Safe - Network World

The malicious worm affecting Twitter over the weekend has now mutated and continues to invade the popular micro-blogging network. Although Twitter is taking action against the problem, security analysts fear that further mutations of the worm will continue to wreak havoc on the network over the week.The worm, appearing as "" or "StalkDaily", was created by the 17-year-old Mike Mooney "out of boredom" and is now generating thousands of spam messages containing the word "Mikeyy". This is the fourth attack by the worm in the last four days, which sends Twitter messages from infected accounts, without the owners' knowledge.

First of all, experts advise Twitter users not to click on any links from messages containing the words "Mikeyy" or "Stalkdaily". It is recommended you use third-party Twitter desktop clients like Twhirl or TweetDeck (both PC and Mac) and that you do not use the web-based version of Twitter, especially for viewing user profiles (as this is where the attack seems to originate).

As an additional security measure, you can disable JavaScript in your browser. Firefox users can use the no-script add-on, which stops any unwanted scripts from running.

How to remove Mikeyy

If you've noticed any suspicious activity from your profile that includes the words above, then most certainly you're infected. It is very important for users not to retweet (RT) any of the fake messages.

Clear your browser cache and turn off JavaScript. Log into Twitter and delete any messages your profile automatically posted that contain the word "Mikeyy". You can turn JavaScript back on so you change your bio, URL and reset your color scheme from your profile. Additionally, changing your password could be a safe measure.

After all the steps above were completed, log out of your account and you can continue using Twitter via a desktop client.

How will Telstra respond to Rudd's fibre optic level playing field? - Silicon Lust - Blogs - PC Authority
Paul Montgomery, former Internet industry journalist and founder of Australian fantasy football site FanFooty, summed up Telstra's strengths nicely in a recent conversation;

"The problem is that Telstra is still an all-powerful monopoly with much better weapons that everybody else put together, so it is in a great position to out-compete the NBN on deployment and price. Telstra Wholesale is the biggest in the business with the shiniest toys and the most soldiers. You just know Telstra is going to beat the NBN to every market, delaying launch until just before the NBN on an exchange-by-exchange basis, just like it did with ADSL. And they'll be particularly evil in marginal seats just to hurt the Government," he said.

Of course you can add to this an army of dodgy door to door salesman, which previously marched one suburb ahead of competing ADSL rollouts to lock suckers into two year Telstra contracts just before true competition reached their exchange. Telstra now has almost a decade to reinforce its battlements before the NBN arrives on the scene. The government is going to need a thick skin, a massive marketing campaign and a gaggle of lawyers if it wants to ensure it doesn't waste more than $20 billion taxpayer dollars on a white elephant.

The gloves will be off and Telstra will come out swinging, perhaps as a more effective opposition than the Liberals leading up to the next election. Lets hope KRudd's Fibre to the Home survives the onslaught.

Wikileaks.de taken offline by German registry - Ars Technica

Update: Despite the statement posted on wikileaks.org, the disappearance of wikileaks.de appears to be the result of nothing more than a terminated contract. The contract to host wikileaks.de ended at the end of 2008 (heise.de, via Slashdot), and the site was taken offline after a three-month window during which the registrant could have moved it elsewhere.

Original story:

Germany and Wikileaks may be going at it again. The latest kerfuffle comes courtesy of German registration authority, DENIC, which has removed the domain registration for wikileaks.de. The domain, which is still unavailable as of publication, is held by Theodor Reppe of Dresden, Germany, whose home was raided last month by German police.

The raid came shortly after Wikileaks published a blacklist reportedly used by the Australian government to block banned websites. The list is closely guarded by the Australian Media and Communications Authority, and is reportedly distributed to ISPs and makers of filtering software as part of Australia's ambitious (and unrealistic) content filtering initiative.

BBC NEWS | Business | EBay plans Skype public listing

Online auction site eBay is planning to spin off internet call service provider Skype and list shares in the firm in the first half of 2010.

EBay said Skype was a "great stand-alone" firm but had "limited synergies" with the online auction firm.

When eBay bought Skype for $2.6bn (£1.7bn) in October 2005, many analysts thought the price was too high.

BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Tate art made available on iTunes

The Tate galleries have made hundreds of video and audio downloads available for free on iTunes.

More than 400 files are now on iTunes U - a section of the online store which features educational content.

Projects include a series of films that use social networking site Twitter to bring the audience's questions directly to artists like David Hockney.

There are also recent interviews with contemporary artists including Jeff Koons and Louise Bourgeois.

Clips of Turner Prize-winning artist Martin Creed and his band performing at the Tate Modern are featured alongside debates about his work.

Audio recordings of leading academics, teaching resources and multimedia guides for the latest Tate exhibitions will also be made available.

BBC NEWS | Programmes | Click | Hunting Easter eggs in software

Easter eggs have been around since the dawn of personal computing and often take the form of a hidden credits list to programming teams.

"Historically Easter eggs are just a chance for software programmers to really show off what they can do," said Tom Royal from Computer Active magazine.

"Quite often they are working on quite dull office products and it's their way of getting their names in the finished product," he added.

Microsoft's Excel 97 contained a weird psychedelic flight simulator which led the user to a black monolith down which scrolled the names of the programming team.

Excel 2000 went a step further by hiding an arcade style driving game in the code of its spreadsheets.

Plus, typing "Google Easter eggs" into the search engine of the same name and hitting the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button takes uses to an Easter themed game.

Call of Duty 5: World at War contains an entirely new game - just complete the single player campaign mode to unlock a creepy zombie shooter.

The film world has embraced the notion of the Easter egg too - some secret and special bonus material can often be found in DVDs hidden in among the production notes and photo galleries.

But accessing Easter eggs on DVDs can be a real test of the film lover's patience because these may require pressing the right sequence of keys on menu screens or hitting the play button at a certain time.

However, persevering through trial and error could reveal bonus material such as outtake reels, more behind-the-scenes features, or even entire re-edits of films.

Occasionally the odd hidden feature exists in hardware too - Nokia's N95 mobile phone has a little-known accelerometer that can enable motion controlled applications.

It can be activated by downloading a plug-in from the Nokia research website. This means the handset can used for motion sensitive applications, for example as a pedometer.

Lifehacker - New Tab King Adds Recently Used Items to the New Tab Page - Firefox

Firefox on Windows only: Firefox extension New Tab King adds a useful dashboard with recently used bookmarks and links to the Firefox blank tab page, so you can quickly access frequently used web sites.

Using the extension is simple enough—just use the Ctrl+T shortcut key, and the new tab page will show up with shortcuts to launch applications, the most used web sites and recently closed tabs—very similar to Google Chrome's new tab page, but in a list instead of a grid. Although you can customize the background image, there aren't a lot of other options to choose from—but it's an interesting extension that will hopefully get better over time.

New Tab King is a free download, works in Firefox for Windows only. If you'd rather have the Google Chrome new tab page in Firefox, you can do so by grabbing the latest version of the Google Toolbar for Firefox.

Lifehacker - Jump Quickly to Text Fields in Firefox - Firefox

Some websites automatically place the cursor in important text boxes for you. Others are not so courteous. A quick Firefox tweak makes it easy to jump right to the text boxes.

At the technology blog gHacks, they've shared a simple about:config tweak to make text box navigation easier. Unfortunately there is no hack for making the first text box on a page automatically in focus. You can however make jumping to the first text box really keyboard friendly.

Type about:config in the address bar within Firefox. Use the filter function to search for accessibility.tabfocus. The default value is 7 which means when you hit the tab key the focus jumps to any form or link element on the page. That isn't particularly efficient when you're trying to keep the focus on the text fields. Changing the value to 1 makes it so the tab key will only jump the focus to text fields. With that simple tweak a tab stroke or two will jump you right to the text field, no wasted key strokes or mousing required.

Lifehacker - Top 10 Must-Have Firefox Extensions, 2009 Edition - Firefox Extensions

Our new list keeps some, tosses others, and remains our go-to, Grandmaster list of the best Firefox add-ons. Includes:

10. AutoCopy

We like it because we're bloggers, having to quote and copy links and code every day, but anyone who does a fair amount of copying to and from the web will dig AutoCopy. The basic use: It copies anyt text you select on the web as soon as you select it—no Ctrl+C necessary. For pasting into text forms, you simply hit the middle mouse button rather than Control+V. If that's all it did, hey, we'd recommend it to anyone who writes, copies, or pastes a lot, but we also have to point out that it fixes really long, wrap-broken URLs automatically. Three cheers for fewer pinky-finger stretches!

Telstra open to break-up - The Australian

AmazonFAIL: How Twitter can trash a brand's reputation in hours - mUmBRELLA

Fairfax is keeping its readers locked in the cellar - mUmBRELLA

Open source news:

Going to work on the hill - Pia Waugh

OSIA to host talk on Open Source PR tomorrow night.

Dreamwidth

Dreamwidth - a new open source project forked from the LiveJournal project

Writing talking applications for Android - Google Open Source blog


Drupal used for some cool UN websites:

World Food Programme

Human Rights Watch


Identi.ca

Sociable plugin for WordPress

The latest version of the sociable plugin for wordpress includes a post-to-identica button. (via @jdub)

Mashing Twitter and Identi.ca: Following the Conversation - Silicon Florist