Jun 272017
 

Some days I wonder if we are completely screwed. So today’s post is a perhaps slightly hysterical outburst.

The news is not paying enough attention to the Petya/NotPetya ransomware, and the effects it is having on the Ukraine and on a bunch of businesses worldwide. I think it may be a harbinger of how the Internet could kill us all.

Based on what little I have read so far… A piece of widely used tax software — one used by the Ukrainian government — did its usual “phone home” to check for updates. Instead of getting back a few hundred bytes of acknowledgement, it got a viral payload. Basically, this tax software served as a means of auto-updating the virus to thousands of targets. The result is not just accounting systems down, though. It’s gas stations and point of sale systems in grocery stores.

This kind of thing basically makes me wonder how long we’ll have the Internet.

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Maybe it’s not generational after all

 Posted by (Visited 5584 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: ,
Jun 252008
 

Slashdot | Children Concerned By Parents’ Web Habits

“Children are becoming increasingly worried about their parents’ Internet habits, according to a report just released in Sweden. Unsurprisingly, dads surfing for pornography is the most common problem, but chatroom addiction also featured in the report — as is a mother who has become obsessed with World of Warcraft. ‘This summer she has been sitting up all day and all night and she forgets what’s important to me,’ wrote the woman’s 13-year-old daughter. ‘And when she’s not at the computer she’s like a lost soul. She just looks straight ahead and says nothing.'”