I seem to be beating the same drum every month, but I think I have to do it. Most of you probably don't need to be reminded to be careful out there. The problem is that being careful is harder to do every month as the spam/scam artists grow more and more clever.
For example, there was an e-mail message offering information and pictures regarding casualties in Iraq ("Iraq Bombing—140 Marines Killed"). It gave the first paragraph of a story designed to panic anyone with relatives or friends over there, and induced you to download a link to get the rest of the story. The HTML received by downloading the link offers you more opportunities. Eventually if you cooperate with these bad guys your system will be a robot, and the bad guys can do anything they like with it. The exploit sounds more clever than it was, in that if you have your system updates in place you will certainly be warned against proceeding further before you drive over the cliff, but it didn't have to be: that is, it made use of a cross-domain scripting vulnerability that is pretty well known to the spyware and virus detection people. Suppose, though, that it had been an entirely new and as yet unknown exploit?
Another very clever scam purports to come from eBay. I was first warned of this by Peter Glaskowsky since my InBoxer and other filters seem to have spared me from ever seeing it. Peter says "These are fairly ordinary phishing messages with the usual bad grammar, but with one interesting exception. The link they want you to follow actually does go to eBay. Somehow the phisher figured out how to get eBay's server to direct a request to his own site."
These concerned me enough that I sent an e-mail warning to my subscriber list (subscribers to www.jerrypournelle.com, not www.byte.com; BYTE would never give me or anyone else the BYTE subscription list).
2008 International Mathematica Conference Dr. Dobb's interviews Wolfram Research's Theo Gray, co-founder and Director of User Interfaces, and Roger Germundsson, Director of Research and Development, about the upcoming 2008 International
Mathematica Conference.
How Do You Do Nightly Builds and Tests when there is No Overnight? Software Production in a Geographically Distributed Environment
Attend this Webcast and find out how to overcome common build-test-deploy challenges that affect all members of a distributed team, including:
<ul>
<li> Communication difficulties, because of time-zone and cultural differences</li>
<li> Workflow challenges, like lack of documented procedures and build and test handoff problems</li>
<li> Slow build and test cycles, broken builds, and other factors that hamper distributed team productivity</li>
</ul>
Thursday, September 25, 2005 " 11am PT / 2pm ET
</p>
In this volume of Best of BYTE, we explore the emergence of some heuristic algorithms. Although we have only scratched the surface of this intriguing subject, we hope we've suggested the potential of the synthesis of heuristics and algorithms.
Understand C/C++ code in less time. A new team member ? Inherited legacy code ? Get up to speed faster with Crystal Flow for C/C++. Code-formatting improves readability. Flowcharts are integrated with code browser. Export flowcharts to Visio.
