p2pnet virus update (with Lars Ulrich ;) )
p2pnet news view | P2P:- What I thought was a relatively simple e-bug infection turns out to be major problem.
The bug seems to have been eradicated, but now functions are collapsing, one after the other.
A system failure of some kind with the virus as a coincidence? I don’t know.
Anyhow, it’s now evident a re-format and O/S re-install are necessary. (My laptop came with XP already loaded and I don’t have a copy of my own, which means a 1.5 hour trip to the Big City, and back.)
I’m typing this on an old machine and the best I can do for now is to give you guys a roundup.
Hopefully, things’ll be back to normal tomorrow.
Cheers! And all the best … 
Jon
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Lars Ulrich of Metallica Thanks YouTube Fans
That’s the header to a YouTube post.
Here’s a clip from the first comment: “thanks lars for allowing us subhumans to enter your world and being able to do what it is we do for a living since none of us have respectful jobs and we’re all eating sphagettios with old bread.”
And the second: “You’re a corporate shill. You sold your soul after MOP and everything after is shit. Shit. The universe knows you sold out, everyone knows you sold out. Corporate fucking shill. Corporate fucking shill.”
And here’s another: “BoomButt2054 – you blow Lars. ”
You get the picture. Now here’s the video
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New Court Decision Affirms that 4th Amendment Protects Location Information – EFF
In an unprecedented victory for cell phone privacy, a federal court has affirmed that cell phone location information stored by a mobile phone provider is protected by the Fourth Amendment and that the government must obtain a warrant based on probable cause before seizing such records. The Department of Justice (DOJ) had asked the federal court in the Western District of Pennsylvania to overturn a magistrate judge’s decision requiring the government to obtain a warrant for stored location data, arguing that the government could obtain such information without probable cause. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), at the invitation of the court, filed a friend-of-the-court brief opposing the government’s appeal and arguing that the magistrate was correct to require a warrant. Wednesday, the court agreed with EFF and issued an order affirming the magistrate’s decision.
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OiNK Uploaders Charged with Copyright Infringement – TorrentFreak
Today, after almost a year, the OiNK investigation came to an end. Earlier today we reported that OiNK administrator Alan Ellis was charged with “conspiracy to defraud”. Now, just hours later the alleged uploaders are charged with copyright infringement for uploading one CD. This May, five men and one woman were arrested for sharing music on OiNK. The suspects were taken in for questioning, and required to provide DNA samples and fingerprints. Two months later, two of the six alleged uploaders were released from further investigation, but (at least) two of the remaining four have been charged today. The alleged uploaders were charged with copyright infringement for uploading one CD. The “conspiracy to defraud” accusations vanished, as they were not mentioned. The case(s) will be heard in two weeks at a Magistrates Court, after which there is a possibility that it will be passed onto a Crown court. TorrentFreak had the chance to talk to one of the charged uploaders. “I think it’s a sledgehammer to crack a walnut,” he said. The alleged uploader is convinced that he is being used to set an example.
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Tribune blames United Airlines article mixup on Google – LA Times and Bloomberg News
The search engine confused breaking and archived news, the media firm claims, leading to the recirculating of a 2002 bankruptcy story. Google denies it had been asked to stop crawling Tribune news sites. Tribune Co. said Wednesday that the confusion over a 2002 article on UAL Corp. started because Google Inc.’s automated search couldn’t separate breaking news from older stories on the South Florida Sun-Sentinel’s website. Tribune said it identified problems with the search engine months ago and had asked Google to stop using the function to find stories on its newspaper websites. Google continued to pull articles from the Sun-Sentinel’s website, where a link to the old story on United Airlines parent UAL appeared last weekend, according to Tribune. Google spokesman Gabriel Stricker disputed Tribune’s characterization.
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TiVo control coming to BlackBerry – CNET News
TiVo and Research In Motion are teaming up to enable BlackBerry users to remotely schedule recordings of TV shows on their digital video recorder, the companies announced Thursday. Under the partnership, BlackBerry users will be able to use their smartphones to review television schedules and set their TiVo DVRs to record select television programming.
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Internet drug trafficking skyrockets, experts warn – Agence France-Presse
Drug trafficking on the web has soared as Internet use has become commonplace, presenting far more challenges and dangers than traditional trafficking, experts warned at a conference in Stockholm that wrapped up Wednesday. “Buying drugs on the Internet is really easy. You only need an Internet cafe, a credit card, and it’s done,” said Daniel Altmeyer, an Interpol officer attending the World Forum Against Drugs in the Swedish capital this week. While he said there were no available statistics, drug sales via the Internet have skyrocketed in the past few years. “It’s a new kind of audience, helping new people to try many new things,” he said.
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September 11th, 2008 at 1:14 pm
Gotta love systems now a days, don’t even come with the software you buy.
I guess you lost the recovery CD too (if it even had that) ? Sometimes the OS/hardware hides on there. Also there is often a hidden second recovery partition.
More money for mickysoft, selling you your OS twice.
September 11th, 2008 at 2:05 pm
make sur eto flash your bios too never know what ya got inside
September 11th, 2008 at 4:01 pm
Lars Ulrich you are a piece of crap I wouldn’t play any of your music if you were the last band on earth.I pray for the day I see you standing on the side of the road begging for a handout.
September 11th, 2008 at 4:27 pm
Lars is finding out what a few artists over time have found out. When you piss off your fans, they got long memories. He dumped on them with the p2p downloading and is being granted his wish and more. Very few are willing to offer Metallica music for share. So they are now descending into obscurity from whence they came. With that obscurity comes lack of sales and lack of income.
Lars has since had a chance of heart about p2p but as you can see, the public hasn’t forgotten the original message he put out. He will never live this down and his career as a leading musician is pretty much over. He’ll never recoup his once gained levels of fame and fortune.
There are many other groups out there without Lars penchant for dumping on their fans. No one will miss him nor return to his groups fan base.
September 11th, 2008 at 6:20 pm
Sorry about your system, man — that sucks
(Have a sneaking suspicion it might not be “accidental” however, given the fact that you’re rather outspoken against the stupid shit big media/software conglomerates are trying to do to “our” culture (which they’ve sold us for years under the guise of their “fundamental right” to perpetual monopoly, but I Digress….)
The “Metallica Youtube User channel” is interesting to me for a few reasons:
1. Metallica’s response to the “Digital Age” has always been a big odd. They built their fanbase around not merely allowing — but ENCOURAGING — tape-sharing and “bootleg” recordings of their gigs, but got all pissy when some of that (and their major label recordings) showed up on Napster. Irony? To say the least: if you’ve built your career on a particular sort of “understanding” with your fans, don’t be suprised if they turn on you when you attempt to “change the rules.”
2. Y’all ever heard of a group called “Beatallica?” They’re basically a parody band doing funny remakes of Beatles songs in a style similar to Metallica’s earlier (good) material.
Well (as you can probably guess) the corporate Megalith who own the “rights” to the Beatles catalog attempted their usual “cease and desist” bullshit tactics. However, for some reason — maybe because Lars & Pals found them to be funny, Metalica actually showed a negligible amount of “balls” by defending Beatallica’s stuff. As a result, at least as of a year ago, the stuff was still available.
NOW — after having thoroughly alienated the vast majority of their original fanbase with their response to Napster AND having experienced a steady decline in interest since then (”St. Anger”, anyone?) they — or more likely, their Corporate overlords — come up with the “brilliant” idea to create a Youtube channel where their fans are not merely “permitted” — but even ENCOURAGED — to perform Metallica’s material — one would hope without fear of having their accounts closed for “copyright infringement”.
Never mind the fact that Youtube users have already been technically violating “copyright law” by singing/playing their own “cover versions” of ALL SORTS of stuff for years. Never mind the fact that — under any other circumstances what Lars & Pals are advocating would likely get a lot of people slapped with “Cease and Desist” letters and/or lawsuits. Disregarding both of those facts, one is left with the inescapable conclusion that this is a desperate — and one hopes, futile — attempt to get back into the “good graces” of the “digerati”.
In the words of some 14 yr. old “3l33t HaxXorZ” somewhere; EPIC FAIL!
Groove on, Y’all!
September 11th, 2008 at 6:24 pm
Perhaps you should consider ubuntu…
September 11th, 2008 at 6:37 pm
Out of all the hundreds of operating systems why dose a man of your political/commercial views use XP? might i recommend CentOS(red hat clone stable and secure) as a replacement.
September 11th, 2008 at 8:47 pm
“Out of all the hundreds of operating systems, why does a man of your political/commercial views use XP?” – Reader’s Write
“[Jon's] laptop came with XP already loaded”, which is the same, and only, reason so many other misinformed Windows users still use Microsoft’s OSes. If they were forced to buy the worthless crap, they might as well use it. However, there is a cure to your Window’s problem Jon.
A website with tons of information about Microsoft and how to switch to Linux.
http://www.groklaw.net/staticpages/index.php?page=2006061302494935
I’ve never used or seen CentOS, but Ubuntu is much more stable and secure than XP and Vista. I recommend Ubuntu.
September 11th, 2008 at 9:12 pm
I would recommend Ubuntu or any popular (larger) distro of Linux, even Fedora, CentOS, SuSE etc…
P.S. My other 4 computers are running either Linux or BSD. Out of all my machines, one is running Windows.
September 11th, 2008 at 10:09 pm
People are still listening to Metallica in 21st century?????
September 11th, 2008 at 10:09 pm
http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/3374/1/
Concordia University has taken the remarkable step of blocking campus access to Facebook for students and faculty connecting via a wired connection (wireless connections can still access the site). The University claims that it is doing so because of “concerns that the continuing reliability of the Concordia network could be compromised because of spam, viruses and leaks of confidential information related to Facebook use.” Say what? The University is concerned about spam arising from Facebook use and so decides to cut off access?
September 11th, 2008 at 10:13 pm
Do NOT use Red hat or Fedora.
Why?
They gut their “media player” software (xmms etc.) of mp3 functionality so as to avoid “licensing concerns”.
Meaning — of course — that to get what is nowadays a mandatory MINIMUM level of functionality back, you have to go through extra steps — grabbing down source and recompiling.
Ironically, Debian and it’s numerous derivatives (which tend to be some of the more overtly “political” factions in the Linux scene) preserve mp3 functionality “out of the box” so to speak.
Go with a Debian deriv of some kind — I’m personally quite fond of Knoppix myself.
Ubuntu may be stable and all, but the fact that they disable “Root” access and make you “sudo” your ass off to even get minimally-basic tasks done just strikes me as shameful on some level. Attempting to “User-proof” the OS by making it’s use vastly more annoying and complicated than it has to be is just cheesy.
(Of course, the user-base of Ubuntu have relatively easy tutorials about how to “unlock” root access, but it just strikes me as an unneccesary amount of bother.
Just wondering: has anybody here tried ReactOS? It claims to be a fully “open” work-alike to NT written from a completely fresh code-base, but compatible to 3rd party drivers and software etc. Unfortunately, I’ve never actually gotten a version of it to run on any of the computers here — tried their “LiveCD” a few times — several versions in fact — but for some reason none of them actually boot.
Just wondering if anybody has had any success with that?
Sounds like a great idea in principle.
September 11th, 2008 at 10:18 pm
If you haven’t reformatted already, give this a shot – http://www.malwarebytes.org/
It finds a lot of nasty trojans that similar programs don’t find.
Good luck.
September 11th, 2008 at 11:47 pm
Have you tried using Windows System Restore?
That should always be the first go-to option.
September 12th, 2008 at 7:08 am
Hi all. I’m back in action. And I’ll check malwarebytes out, Drake. Thanks. (I’m now running Avast as well as AVG. Like wearing two condoms. Right?
)
And watch for Henry. He’ll be writing for p2pnet regularly.
Cheers!
September 12th, 2008 at 1:41 pm
Jon:
GLAD to see you back, man!
Unfortunately, the two virus programs might interact badly — typically the advice on this is to only use one at a time — sometimes when they’re scanning they read one another’s “virus vaults” as sources of infection. It’s actually rather similar to how multiple firewalls don’t play well together sometimes. Google around, you’ll figure stuff out.
L8r