Linked List: April 8, 2012

What You Need to Know About the Flashback Trojan 

Rich Mogull, writing for Macworld:

As Mikko Hypponen, Chief Researcher at F-Secure pointed out via Twitter, if there are roughly 45 million Macs out there, Flashback would now have infected more than 1 percent of them, making Flashback roughly as common for Mac as Conficker was for Windows. Flashback appears to be the most widespread Mac malware we’ve seen since the days when viruses were spread on infected floppy disks; it could be the single most significant malware infection to ever hit the Mac community.

Here’s what you need to know about Flashback, what you can do about it, and what it means for the future of Mac security.

Must-read piece, thoroughly and soberly reported.

Hotel’s Free Wi-Fi Comes With Hidden Extras 

Brian X. Chen, for the NYT Bits blog:

After some sleuthing, Mr. Watt, who has a background in developing Web advertising tools, realized that the quirk was not confined to his site. The hotel’s Internet service was secretly injecting lines of code into every page he visited, code that could allow it to insert ads into any Web page without the knowledge of the site visitor or the page’s creator.

Yet another reason to bring your own 3G or LTE hotspot with you when you travel.

Mike Wallace, Dead at 93 

Great remembrance by his long-time colleague Morley Safer. What a career; what a set of balls.