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Linked List: November 26, 2006

Sunday, 26 November 2006

Bad Grammar Makes Me [sic] T-Shirt ★

T-shirt humor for grammar pedants.

(Thanks to Christopher Culbreath.)

David Young’s Analysis of F-Secure’s ‘iAdware’ ★

David Young:

So anyway assuming that this program does use the dyld debugging facilities to inject some ad-opening code — so what? In order to get this or even an input manager onto my system you’ve still got to trojan me.

The point is: there are all sorts of ways any semi-competent programmer can write “adware” for Mac OS X. F-Secure’s ‘iAdware’ is, apparently, one. The real trick is getting the adware installed on people’s computers, either via trickery or some sort of exploit. iAdware is not such an exploit.

And Young is right that the way F-Secure has reported this — with few actual details of what it is — is more about sowing fear than anything else.

ErrorSafe Is Malware ★

ErrorSafe, one of the primary perpetrators of the aforelinked “scary JavaScript confirm dialog via web page ad” trick, is classified by Symantec as malware. Any Windows IE user who clicks OK instead of Cancel will wind up with this installed on their computer.

Pernicious JavaScript Confirm Dialog ‘Advertisements’ ★

There’s a resurgence in the use of JavaScript’s confirm command by scummy web page advertisers. What you get is a dialog box that looks like a warning that something is wrong with your computer; in this particular example, that your computer might have “errors in the registry database”.

These “ads” are utterly despicable. The intent is to trick Windows users into downloading and installing software from the advertiser, just by clicking the OK button in the alert window. If you’re using Safari, you can identify these bogus JavaScript-driven alerts by several tell-tale indicators: the boldface headline in the dialog is the URL of the originating site of the JavaScript; the app icon in the dialog is Safari’s; and the buttons are always Cancel and OK (JavaScript’s confirm command doesn’t let you specify button names). Hit Cancel if you see one of these things.