TechBlog

One week ago, we heard that popular BitTorrent search engine Isohunt had been ordered by a U.S. judge to remove copyright-infringing content from their website. Following the court decision, Isohunt owner Gary Fung announced his resolution to replace Isohunt with a lite version that would turn the site into a very simple search engine, intentionally similar to Google, but specializing in torrents. This is now the case for visitors from the US, who are redirected to the new, lite version of the site. Fung explains the move to the site’s visitors: ...

Well, well… looks like someone has been singing along to one of Jay Chow’s songs while coding an exploit that corresponds to a vulnerability in Internet Explorer, which was addressed in Microsoft Security Bulletin MS10-018. The exploit that targets on the Peer Object component (iepeers.dll) in IE has been found in the wild, and today it was detected while attempting to exploit on the client browser. After decoding from a shellcode, it will download the payload and will be detected as Trojan:W32/KillAV.LD. ...

The United Kingdom parliament has passed the Digital Economy Bill, an extensive and controversial piece of legislation, by a vote of 189 to 47. The legislation encompasses online copyright infringement, Internet piracy, regulation of TV and radio, the classification of video games, regulations over ISPs, and a hodgepodge of other digital topics. The bill, which you can read in its entirety here, is rather complicated and extensive, encompassing over 40 different sections covering online and digital media. Its goal is to clamp down on Internet piracy and illegal file-sharing, although its many critics believe that it is an overreaching piece of legislation. Its potential impact on public Wi-Fi and its harsh penalties for illegal file-sharers have been hotly debated. ...

We have received reports of a malicious Windows Mobile game that creates significant phone bills to affected users. The game in question is called 3D Anti-terrorist action, and it’s manufactured by Beijing Huike Technology in China. The game itself is a 3D first-person shooter. Apparently some Russian malware author took the game and trojanized it. Then he uploaded the trojanized version to several Windows Mobile freeware download sites. ...

Sure, that Apple-flavored brushed aluminum finish might work for most iPad owners, but what if you’re a unique snowflake whose extremely non-conformist identity must be reflected in every item of consumer electronics you own? Enter the folks at ColorWare, who want to help add some serious Technicolor flair to your shiny new Apple tablet. You can customize your own look and feel by picking your a color scheme for the back, logo and home button separately using the company’s web-based Design Studio. ...

Microsoft has made the right decision to temporarily turn off Hotmail’s vacation (e.g., out-of-office) reply feature. Flip the switch off permanently, I say. “In our fight against spam, we sometimes have to make hard choices, and we had to make one this week. We discovered that spammers were using Hotmail’s automatic vacation reply feature to send spam from their Hotmail accounts,” Krish Vitaldevara, Windows Live Hotmail lead program manager, blogged late yesterday. I missed the post because of Apple’s iPhone OS 4 launch. I spotted the announcement first at LiveSide about an hour ago. ...

Adobe has fired back against Apple’s recent ban on building iPhone apps via Flash. And this time, Adobe’s not pulling any of punches. In a recent blog post on The Flash Blog, Adobe Platform Evangelist Lee Brimelow goes on the offensive for seven paragraphs, ripping into Apple’s recent change to its iPhone Developer Program License Agreement that only allows for applications to be written in Objective-C, C, C++ or Javascript and executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine. In fact, the post was so strong that Adobe asked Brimelow to delete a segment. ...

The new release rental is officially dead. As expected, Netflix has signed new deals with Twentieth Century Fox and Universal Studios Home Entertainment — similar to its deal with Warner Bros. — that delay new release rentals by 28 days and add new titles to its streaming collection. Both deals go into effect later this month; Netflix will start the 28-day hold for Fox titles with Avatar’s release and Universal flicks with It’s Complicated. ...

Back in November, we started hearing murmurs that Google was considering whether or not to factor site speed into its search ranking algorithm. In a blog post today, the search giant confirms it is now adding site speed to its list of criteria that could affect your Google ranking. It’s another step on Google’s long road toward achieving maximum speed and efficiency. The company even launched a Site Performance tool as part of its Webmaster Tools suite to help assess site performance statistics and make changes accordingly. Today’s blog post recommends a few other tools for evaluating your site’s speed as well, including the Firefox Add-on Page Speed, Yahoo’s YSlow and WebPagetest. ...

Northwestern Bank Online – Orange City is compromised and should not be visited until it’s clean. Embedded in the side is a malicious iframe, as you can see in this screen shot: (Testing the site with Wapawet doesn’t work, since it chokes on the javascript emulation. However, the iframe is malicious.)