Last Sunday, after a visit to a nearby casino, we dropped by Sacramento. Walking around old town, this train was pulling into the station – I had to run to get in front of it for this photo. You can find out more about the trains at the California State Railroad Museum.
I have received three emails today all claiming to be from Yahoo. The first and last had the subject “Your password has been successfully updated” and read like this:
Dear user john_94501,
You have successfully updated the password of your Yahoo account.
If you did not authorize this change or if you need assistance with your account, please contact Yahoo customer service at: webmaster@yahoo.com
Thank you for using Yahoo!
The Yahoo Support Team+++ Attachment: No Virus (Clean)
+++ Yahoo Antivirus – www.yahoo.com
The second one was a little different. It had the subject “Important Notification” and read like this:
Dear Yahoo Member,
Your e-mail account was used to send a huge amount of unsolicited spam messages during the recent week. If you could please take 5-10 minutes out of your online experience and confirm the attached document so you will not run into any future problems with the online service.
If you choose to ignore our request, you leave us no choice but to cancel your membership.
Virtually yours,
The Yahoo Support Team+++ Attachment: No Virus found
+++ Yahoo Antivirus – www.yahoo.com
All three had a ZIP file attached. In the file was a file with a name that had either a .exe or .pif extension, but cunnningly separated from the name by a lot of spaces (and a fake .htm extension attached to the name to try to fool people). Regardless of the name, the contents are the same Windoze executable file (MD5 = bf389ebd4b5a057259395f6a633f110f).
So what you ask? Well, the first of these landed in my mailbox this morning. Tonight, over 12 hours since I first saw this, as you can see from the screen grab above, Yahoo’s anti-virus system is still not catching this threat.
I tried to report it this morning, but had every email message bounced as unacceptable. One because I forwarded the offending message to them so they could pass it on to the anti-virus people; the next attempt, without the attachment, I don’t understand why it bounced (no reason provided). This afternoon I tried the web form and got an auto-response (case KMM38976014V69174L0KM), but apparently they are still not blocking this attachment.
The first photo I took on my walk last Saturday; by Sunday morning these had all been destroyed by somebody.
The view from my balcony, at around 10:30pm. Taken with a 15 second exposure at ISO 100, and with a little bit of photoshop treatment, this looks very close to what my eyes were seeing at the time.
A weblog from Antarctica! Be sure to check out the gallery while you’re down there for some cool photos.
Thanks to the Daily Irrelevant for the link.
The Unofficial Apple Weblog has a roundup of iTunes podcasting reactions this morning.
They also have some information about the iPod update that went with iTunes 4.9 (not that I noticed this – I need to run software update I guess). The two new podcasting features that they mention are chapters in AAC files and inclusion of the podcast description on the iPod. It will be interesting to see if the chapters idea catches on. As far as I can tell, it would require me to transcode my podcasts into AAC and then listen to them to add chapter markers. I don’t normally listen to these things more than once, so unless the people producing it do this I won’t have much use for chapters!
For a few weeks now I’ve been exploring the world of podcasts. My initial reaction to this technology was simple: why would anybody listen to these things? I have found some though that are worth listening to.
Today, Apple added support for podcasts to iTunes. While this is probably a negative step for the iPodder and iPodderX projects, having support in one of the main audio software packages can only make podcast listening more widespread. By the way, those two packages do have additional features over the iTunes podcast support, and are worth checking out if you become really addicted to these things.
So, what are the podcasts that I’ve been listening too? Well, This Week in Tech and the Engadget podcast are the two that I’ve listened to more than one episode of. I am exploring some more from the iTunes podcast directory now (first up are Linux News Log, Inside Mac Radio and the Linux Links Tech Show)
Another close-up view of flowers from my walk around Crab Cove on Saturday. You can see the full flower in the gallery version of this photo.
Not quite as sharp as Saturday’s photo, but not bad considering I took it hand held with the standard 18-55 mm lens and no shelter at all from the wind (which was coming off the bay pretty strong on Saturday morning at times).
Thanks to Carl once again for the average price information for the last two releases. I have updated the graphs (and will do the master plan as soon as I’ve posted this).
A close up shot of the same squirrel as yesterday’s photo.
