Did You Know?

Three words spoke to my heart this morning. May they continue to echo there:

Father, forgive them

No, you didn’t know that. But now you do. And that fits in with this:

Are you a twit if you don’t want to Twitter?

Last month, Alex Slater took it a step farther. He dumped his Twitter account and stripped the information on his Facebook page to a minimum. Though he has more than 600 “friends” on Facebook, he checks it much less often.

“Being exposed to details, from someone’s painful breakup to what they had for breakfast – and much more sordid details than that – feels like voyeurism,” says the 31-year-old public relations executive in Washington, D.C. “I’m less concerned with protecting my privacy, and more concerned at the ethics of a ‘human zoo’ where others’ lives, and often serious problems, are treated as entertainment.”

Yes, I have a Twitter account. No, I don’t have a raft-load of Facebook Friends. Yes, I think the above article is worth reading in full. No, I don’t plan to announce on Twitter that I had two cups of coffee and two Tylenol so far this morning.

Oh, and speaking of Facebook:

Fast-growing Facebook’s user base hits 200 million

Facebook also updated its display of site statistics.

According to these, more than half of its users log in to the site at least once a day, and the fastest-growing demographic is people over 35. About 70 percent of Facebook users are outside the United States (MySpace still claims to be the nation’s largest social network).

For those itching to know if they are popular enough: the average user has 120 “friends” on the site.

And speaking of friends, do friends let friends over-text?

Hammer time for cell phone used to run up $5K billA cell phone used by a Wyoming 13-year-old to run up a nearly $5,000 phone bill will text no more thanks to her angry father and his hammer. Dena Christoffersen of Cheyenne sent or received about 20,000 text messages over about a month, and her parents’ phone plan didn’t cover texting.

πŸ™„

Meanwhile, some other “friends” are waking up around the globe:

Huge worm stirring to life

The dreaded Conficker computer worm is stirring. Security experts say the worm’s authors appear to be trying to build a big moneymaker, but not a cyber weapon of mass destruction as many people feared.

As many as 12 million computers have been infected by Conficker. Security firm Trend Micro says some of the machines have been updated over the past few days with fake antivirus software – the first attempt by Conficker’s authors to profit from their massive “botnet.”

So, this post begins by featuring a Friend. (And what a Friend we have in Jesus!)

Now it ends featuring someone else’s friend:

Woman finds cashiers check and returns it

But just as she was about to do her part for a cleaner planet and deliver the paper from the parking lot to a trash can, she noticed it was a real cashier’s check with a real signature.

“I couldn’t believe it. I almost passed out,” Curtis, who works as a loan negotiator, told The Associated Press on Wednesday. “I have never seen a check that big. Not in my possession, anyway.”

She immediately set out to find its rightful recipient….

Good day?!

Coming on April Fool’s Day

Vexing computer worm to evolve on April Fool’s Day

A tenacious computer worm which has wriggled its way onto machines worldwide is set to evolve on April Fool’s Day, becoming harder to exterminate but not expected to wreak havoc.

[…]

“There is no evidence of it going into attack mode or dropping any particular payload on April 1st,” Ferguson said in an interview.

[…]

It can infect machines from the Internet or by hiding on USB memory sticks carrying data from one computer to another. Once in a computer it digs deep, setting up defenses that make it hard to extract.

[…]

A troubling aspect of Conficker is that it harnesses computing power of a botnet to crack passwords.

Microsoft has modified its free Malicious Software Removal Tool to detect and get rid of Conficker.

[…]

Computer users are advised to stay current on anti-virus tools and Windows updates, and to protect computers and files with strong passwords.

Conficker is programmed to reach out to 250 websites daily to download commands from its masters.

On Wednesday, the worm will begin connecting with 50,000 websites daily to better hide where orders originate….

[…]

Among the ways one can tell if their machine is infected is that the worm will block efforts to connect with websites of security firms such as Trend Micro or Symantec where there are online tools for removing the virus.

[…]

Hackers have taken advantage of Conficker hype by using promises of information or cures to lure Internet users to websites booby trapped with malicious software, according to security specialists.

Get a FREE malware scan now (from Trend Micro)

“Over the Top and Unworkable”

Well, that’s good news, isn’t it? πŸ™„

Facebook, Bebo and MySpace ‘to be monitored by security services’

The private correspondence of millions of people who use social networking sites could be tracked and saved on a β€œbig brother” database, under new plans being drawn up by the UK government.

Ministers revealed yesterday that they were considering policing messages sent via sites such as MySpace and Facebook, alongside plans to store information about every phone call, e-mail and internet visit made by everyone in the United Kingdom.

There was immediate uproar from opposition parties, privacy campaigners and security experts who said the plans were over-the-top and unworkable.

Yeah. Maybe so.

Transparency

Google software bug shared private online documents

Google has confirmed that a software bug exposed documents thought to be privately stored in the Internet giant’s online Docs application service.

The problem was fixed by the weekend and is believed to have affected only .05 percent of the digital documents at a Google Docs service that provides text-handling programs as services on the Internet.

But a bunch of you wouldn’t listen to my earlier warnings (here and here), would you?!

Oh well. πŸ™„

Ah, yes. Transparency and openness — they’re the new wave. Well, you can surf it all you want. πŸ˜†

Oh, sorry me — I forgot — you know it won’t happen to you. Great. I will grant you that the .05% cited above gives you good odds. Still, what about the security lapses they haven’t even discovered yet? πŸ˜€

And how much comfort do the owners of the .05% derive from those “long” odds? 😯

Anyway, I’ll continue to store my stuff on CDs and DVDs and secondary PCs and external (almost always disconnected) hard drives.

Possibly the Biggest Virus

Nasty worm wriggles…into your computer?

A nasty worm has wriggled into millions of computers and continues to spread, leaving security experts wondering whether the attack is a harbinger of evil deeds to come.

US software protection firm F-Secure says a computer worm known as “Conficker” or “Downadup” had infected more than nine million computers by Tuesday and was spreading at a rate of one million machines daily.

The malicious software had yet to do any noticeable damage, prompting debate as to whether it is impotent, waiting to detonate, or a test run by cybercriminals intent on profiting from the weakness in the future.

“This is enormous; possibly the biggest virus we have ever seen,” said software security specialist David Perry of Trend Micro.

[…]

Perry urges people to harden passwords by mixing in numbers, punctuation marks, and upper-case letters. Doing so makes it millions of times harder for passwords to be deduced, according to Perry.

OK, it’s time for me to start methodically (or is it methodicly?) changing and hardening more of my passwords…starting the with the one in my browser.

You should, too!

PC Privacy

Police look to hack citizens’ home PCs

Police and state intelligence agencies from several countries may soon be working together to secretly hack into private citizens’ personal computers without their knowledge and without a warrant.

According to a London Times report, the police hacking process, called “remote searching,” enables law enforcement to gather information from e-mails, instant messages and Web browsers, even while hundreds of miles away.

Furthermore, the Times reports, a new edict by the European Union’s council of ministers in Brussels has paved the way for international law enforcement agencies to begin remote searching and sharing the information with each other. According to the Times, the United Kingdom’s Home Office, the nation’s lead government department for immigration, drugs and counter-terrorism enforcement, has already quietly adopted a plan that would enable French, German and other European Union police forces to request remote searching be done on UK citizens’ computers.

I haven’t much to say here except this: If you have DSL or some other form of “always on” broadband, disconnect your computer when you’re not online.

Perilous IE Flaw

Yahoo! News reports:

Microsoft releasing emergency patch for perilous IE flaw

Microsoft will release an emergency patch on Wednesday to fix a perilous software flaw allowing hackers to hijack Internet Explorer browsers and take over computers.

The US software giant said on Tuesday that in response to “the threat to customers” it immediately mobilized security engineering teams worldwide to deliver a software cure “in the unprecedented time of eight days.”

Read it all

Private
Above all, love God!