Mac Trojan – RAT ‘BlackHole’ Now in Beta

In a sign that hackers, like everyone else, are taking an interest in everything Apple, researchers at Sophos say they’ve spotted a new Trojan horse program written for the Mac.

It’s called the BlackHole RAT (the RAT part is for “remote access Trojan”) and it’s pretty easy to find online in hacking forums, according to Chet Wisniewski a researcher with antivirus vendor Sophos. There’s even a YouTube video demonstration of the program that shows you what it can do.

Sophos hasn’t seen the Trojan used in any online attacks — it’s more a bare-bones, proof-of-concept beta program right now — but the software is pretty easy to use, and if a criminal could find a way to get a Mac user to install it, or write attack code that would silently install it on the Mac, it would give him remote control of the hacked machine.

BlackHole is a variant of a Windows Trojan called darkComet, but it appears to have been written by a different developer. The darkComet source code is freely available, so it looks like BlackHole’s author simply took that code and tweaked it so it would run on the Mac, Wisniewski said.

Mac OS X has been gaining market share on Windows lately, and that’s starting to make it a more interesting platform for criminals. Wisniewski said that while Mac malware is still very rare, he has seen another Trojan, called HellRTS, circulating on file-sharing sites for pirated Mac software.

The version suggest that ‘BlackHole’ is currently in its early stage. However, the author seems to start showcasing the following functionalities:

• Remote execution of shell commands.
• Opens webpage using user’s default browser.
• Sends a message which is displayed on the victims screen.
• Creates a text file.
• It is capable to perform shutdown, restart and sleep operation.
• It is capable to request for admin privileges.

Breakup Notifier – Get Dumped The Techi Way!

Thanks to developer Dan Loewenherz, Facebook just got a little bit creepier—or more loving, depending on your point of view. That’s all thanks to the new application Loewenherz recently released: Breakup Notifier.

So what, exactly, does Breakup Notifier do?

“You like someone. They’re in a relationship. Be the first to know when they’re out of it,” reads the description posted to Breakup Notifier’s main page.

As described, the exact particulars of how the service works are fairly simple. You just have to log into Breakup Notifier using your Facebook account, and then select the various people on your friends list whose relationships are of critical interest to your daily life. Should said relationships change—for better or for worse—you’ll get an email referencing the friend and the specific change made.

“A few days ago, my fiancee and her mom were talking about setting up a nice guy with my fiancee’s sister. Unfortunately, said guy is in a relationship. My mother-in-law to be suggested it would be nice to know when the relationship was over (jokingly),” said Loewenherz in a post to Hacker News.

“I blurted out that I could make something that could do that in a couple of hours. By then, I knew I had to do it.”

According to Loewenherz, his application polls Facebook every 24 hours to detect relationship changes. Google’s app engine powers the mailing portion of the application, while the rest of his relationship scanner is built using Django and the Facebook Graph API.

“Seriously, this is mostly a joke,” writes Lowenherz. “But enjoy, if you do choose to use it for real.”

It’s been a relationship-filled week for Facebook itself, as the company announced last week that it had finished adding in the option for civil unions and domestic partnerships to its standard, “single,” “married,” and “it’s complicated” relationship options, to name a few of the choices one can select for one’s profile.

Also see Crush Notifier

 

One Rotten Apple !

For years now, the slick design and intuitive interface of Apple’s popular products have endeared the company to gadget geeks the world over. But increasingly, customers are becoming guilt-ridden, as allegations of human rights abuses at Apple’s Chinese suppliers continue to surface. Should Apple fans be concerned? That’s what Wired magazine aimed to find out in its March cover story “Gadget Guilt.” The issue, which is arriving on subscribers’ doorsteps this week, comes as The New York Times brings its own skeptical take on Apple’s labour policies in China. Both articles give a fairly even-handed assessment of Apple’s behavior. Here’s a breakdown of the bad stuff and the defensible stuff:

The Bad Stuff
Apple’s largest Chinese supplier, Foxconn Technologies, has had 17 suicides in the last five years.

• The company has even installed nets to prevent workers from jumping off the building

• Human rights groups have complained of “sweatshop conditions” and “forced overtime” at Foxconn. One Hong Kong-based group accused Foxconn’s Shenzhen plant of making workers toil for 13 days straight for 12 hours a day to work on the first generation iPad.

• “When one jumper left a note explaining that he committed suicide to provide for his family, the program of remuneration for the families of jumpers was cancelled.”

• At Wintek, a Taiwanese-owned company in China, workers have complained of “sore limbs,” “extreme weakness,” dizzy spells, headaches and being unable to button their own shirts. Doctors later discovered that the workers were exposed to n-hexane, a toxic agent used to clean the glass on Apple’s iPhones. Some workers were hospitalized and diagnosed with nerve damage.

The Mitigating Information

• 17 suicides isn’t actually that bad for 1 million workers. By comparison, the suicide rate for American college students is four times that. Looking at it another way, Foxconn’s suicide rate is also below China’s national average.

• Foxconn has onsite counseling facilities with psychologists and counselors. It also has a care center that provides music therapy and private counseling.

• Foxconn employees work for 10 hours a day, with two 10-minute breaks and an hour for lunch

• After visiting Foxconn, Wired’s Joe Johnson says it’s more like a college campus than communist slave mill. He describes dorms and cafeterias and says it’s not much worse than other types of manufacturing work. “It seems incredibly boring–like factory work anywhere in the developed world.”

• As for the toxic agent, n-hexane, Apple says it’s no longer being used at Wintek and the company has repaired its ventilation system.

Notepad++ Banned? Which Countries, and Why There’s a Controversy

Here is a superb article written by Dylan Brier of Opensourceware.org

This cross platform source code and text editor has been downloaded over twenty million times. It has incredible features for those who need to utilize code editing tools for their daily grind, or even just for their own small business, personal website, or applications.However, it has been at the center of plenty of controversy, and has even been banned in several countries.

What is NotePad++?

NotePad++ is a text editor with many in-depth capabilities, including:

• Drag & Drop Capabilities
• Split Screen Editing
• File Comparison
• Synchronized Scrolling
• Find & Replace on Multiple Documents
• Zooming
• Tabbed Doc Interface
• Compatibility with Many Syntaxes

The following are capabilities it can be enhanced to have with additional plugins:

• Multi Clipboard
• Spell checking

Notepad++ also has a few phenomenal features for editing source code, such as:

• Bookmarking
• FTP Browsing
• File Status Auto Detection
• Speech Synthesis
• Brace & Indent Highlighting
• Auto Completion
• Macro Recording & Execution

Additionally, the developers of Notepad++ have very strong feelings about certain things, like human rights issues, and are not afraid to show it.Which is where the controversy begins.

To read more go to Opensourceware.org

Wondering Why You Should Buy An E-book Reader?

If you don’t own one of the popular e-book readers like the Kindle or the Sony Reader, you may not realize all the benefits that are built into these devices. Even if you do own one, you may not have discovered all the features available to you. Here are some of the lesser known advantages included with the most popular e-book readers.

 

1. Easy on the eyes. The low glare screen is much easier on your eyes than a computer screen. In addition, the font size can be adjusted. No more need for buying large print books.
2. Highlighting. Many readers of non-fiction books like to be able to underline or highlight key statements in their books. The creators of the e-book readers took this into account and built in that capability as well. Besides allowing you to mark these statements (or even full paragraphs) the e-book reader will collect all your highlights in one area attached to the book. Scroll through all your highlights at once and with one click you can read it in full context as well.
3. Notes. Some people prefer to go beyond highlighting to actually writing notes in the margins of their books. The e-book reader improves this reader preference as well. You can add a note anywhere in your book. No need to fit it in a margin. The notes are saved together with your book, just like your highlights. In addition, they are typed, which should provide better legibility than small handwritten notations.
4. Built-in dictionary. This is a really great feature. You can access the dictionary with a single click from any book or magazine you are reading. Click on the word that you are unsure of and the definition pops up for you.
5. Saves your page. You will never lose your page or forget where you left off in a book when you use an e-book reader. You can come back to a book weeks or months later and it will automatically take you to the page you were reading the last time you had that book open.
6. Online backup. You will never lose an e-book that you have purchased through Amazon or Barnes and Noble. Even if you should lose or change e-readers, every e-book you purchase remains backed up and available for you to access at no additional charge.
7. Magazines. In addition to downloading books, you can also have most magazine subscriptions sent to your e-reader as well. This has many benefits. No magazines stacking up in your house. No concerns about magazines being forwarded if you have more than one residence, travel or are moving.
8. Read it anywhere. If you’ve ever tried to use a laptop computer in bright sunlight, you know that it is almost impossible to see the screen. Since e-readers don’t have backlit screens, they are as easy to read in bright sunlight as a book. In the dark you do need a book light to read these types of screens, but they are inexpensive and available as accessories. E-book applications are also available for iphones, ipads and computers. As stated before, you have access to your library online and this is true no matter which device you use. You also can also read your books with ‘no hands’. Set it down and read while your hands are busy crocheting or knitting. It just takes a quick finger click to turn the page.
9. Book sharing. This option was not always available but both the Nook and the Kindle now have book loaning options. You can now borrow e-books to or from your friends with similar e-book readers for a limited amount of time.
10. Audio. Some of the e-book readers have a variety of audio options included as well. You can have the device read to you in the car. You can add music files to your device and play background music while you read. These are options you just can’t get with a paper book.

There are other features as well like web browsing, car chargers, instant downloads, free previews of books and hundreds of free books available for download. Many skeptics have been quickly converted to e-book fans once they discover the benefits of this new technology

Piracy: Everybody Does It; Everything Should Be Free

 

Pirates are in it for the free stuff, and there are plenty of them: That’s the gist of a new PricewaterhouseCoopers study of consumer attitudes toward piracy. The study asked some 202 self-described pirates about their behavior and the reasons for it. At the top of the list was the fact that pirated content doesn’t actually cost anything.

Respondents signaled some willingness to pay, but not much — and the vast majority said that they’re going to continue to hunt for free loot. However, people don’t seem to mind ads, so the Hulu model might actually working to curb piracy.

Streaming clearly dominates video piracy, with 82 percent of respondents saying that they get their TV fare as streams, and 69 percent streaming pirated movies online, while 62 percent admitted to downloading TV show episodes, and 52 percent do so with movie titles.

To Read More

10 favourite Programming Quotes

For this post , i decided to collect some of my favourite quotes related to the programming .

These programming quotes  were made by some of the famous personalities in the IT industry .

So , without wasting any time , here are my 10 favourite programming quotes .

1. If debugging is the process of removing software bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in. -  Edsger Dijkstra
2. The first 90% of the code accounts for the first 90% of the development time. The remaining 10% of the code accounts for the other 90% of the development time.  – Tom Cargill
3. “There are two ways of constructing a software design. One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies. And the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies.”-  C.A.R. Hoare
4. Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight. – Bill Gates
5. “Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live.” – Martin Golding
6. “The trouble with programmers is that you can never tell what a programmer is doing until it’s too late.” – Seymour Cray
7. Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning. – Rick Cook
8. “Most of you are familiar with the virtues of a programmer. There are three, of course: laziness, impatience, and hubris.” – Larry Wall
9. “Sometimes it pays to stay in bed on Monday, rather than spending the rest of the week debugging Monday’s code.” – Christopher Thompson
10. Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen. – Edward V Berard

What is your favourite or interesting programming quote ?

For all you programmers out there have a look at http://www.ginktage.com

 

Make Money as an Affiliate

 

Affiliate marketing is a marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate’s own marketing efforts.

Here are five ways to make money as an affiliate marketer:

1. Affiliate Website or Blog

You can develop your own website or blog that is geared strictly towards marketing the products and services that are provided by others. Building an affiliate website or blog usually involves identifying a profitable product or service, developing content that is geared towards that product or service, and displaying affiliate links that will send visitors to pages for that product or service. Affiliate websites and blogs can be used to target single products or services, or multiple products or services. Those that are built for the purpose of promoting one product or service are often referred to as “minisites”. The profitability of the affiliate website or blog will depend on the quality of the content, the cost of the product or service, and traffic.

2. Product Reviews

Another great strategy for making money as an affiliate marketer is with product reviews. You can set up a website or blog that is strictly dedicated to reviewing popular products in different categories. The idea is that when customers search for particular products or services, hopefully they will find the reviews that you have created. If your reviews are compelling enough, visitors will click your affiliate links which will lead them to where they can make a purchase.

3. Email Campaigns

You can also use email campaigns as a means for distributing your affiliate links. If you have a large email list, you can send out occasional emails that contain links to interesting products and services that your target audience might be interested in. Emailing, when done properly, can be a great way to reach a large audience quickly. Not only will your email contacts receive the email, but there is the chance that they will forward the email to other contacts as well.

4. Forum Posts

Forum posts are also an effective strategy that can help you make money. If you’re an affiliate for a particular product or service, you can locate forums where that type of product or service is discussed in order to provide your input to the users of that forum. In most cases you can place your affiliate link(s) in your profile and even your signature. If you provide a lot of valuable input to the users of the forum, they might click on your signature links to the products or services you are advertising.

5. Article Marketing

Article marketing is another great affiliate marketing tactic that you can use to generate traffic to your affiliate website, blog, or other online or offline publication. Articles that provide valuable information to readers can attract a great deal of traffic as well as help improve search engine rankings.

PCs lose to Smartphones

For the first time in history, mobile products have exceeded computer shipments.

According to a report by the Financial Times, manufacturers shipped more smartphones than personal computers in the fourth quarter of 2010. Over 100 million smartphones were distributed in the last three months of 2010, up 87-percent from the year prior. In contrast, PC shipments reached only 92 million units in the same timeframe, up 3-percent from 2009.

While certainly a noteworthy turn of events, the data should be taken with a grain of salt, and special consideration should be given to the high turnover of smartphone units. In other words, customers buy new smartphones more frequently than they do PCs, due to the lower costs and rapid evolution of mobile technology.

Nevertheless, we expect to see these sort of results become an ongoing trend as tablet devices and smartphones begin to edge out netbook and laptop sales.

Windows 7 Service Pack 1

Microsoft put the finishing touches on Service Pack 1 to Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008. It will be available to home users starting February 22, through the Microsoft Download Center and Windows Update. [The Windows Blog via @Windows]