Flour Power

UPDATE: Check this list of scam sites that I compiled and will be updating when some more sites show up.

I wasn’t affected by last weeks areps.at Facebook phishing scam, but it seems like another one is underway right now. I’ve been getting some messages on my Facebook account with the subject “Look at this” and ”wwww whiteflash be” as the message body. The site whiteflash.be looks like a Facebook log-in page, and is designed to steal your credentials and use them to send similar messages to all your friends.

Mashable mentions some other sites that are also part of the attack:

goldbase.be
greenbuddy.be
silvertag.be
picoband.be

So, if you receive such a message, DO NOT go to those sites.

UPDATE: You can add simplemart.be to the list of culprits, just received one message poiting me to it, with the subject line “Hello” and the text “Check simplemart D0T be, , 575222″. The weird thing here is that when I went I actually went to Facebook to check it (I saw it as an email notification) is it said I had deleted the message, which I didn’t. Maybe the Facebook staff is now onto it.

If it wasn’t clear enough in my post about the conviction of the Pirate Bay founders, I’ll say it again:

I don’t believe piracy is hurting the movie/music/game industry.

On the contrary, I believe piracy is helping these industries, by giving even more visibility to their products, with no cost for the publishers. They’re basically getting free publicity and benefiting from the fact that people who wouldn’t even think about buying their album or watching their movie might just feel inclined to do it or to buy some other kind of related product.

You might argue that there’s no proof of this. Well, of couse this theory is very hard to prove, but a blog post over at The Inquisitr presents some interesting facts on the recent X-Men Origins and Star Trek movies.

A month before X-Men Origins hit the movie theaters, a workprint copy of the movie was leaked to teh Internets. The copy was far from being finished, and most of the special effects were not yet included. 20th Century Fox screamed in pain and begged the authorities to find the culprits. The FBI was called in to investigate and one movie reviewer from Fox News was fired.

Star Trek had a flawless release, with no leaks or any other kind of fuss surrounding it. Pretty boring, uh?

Now let’s look at some numbers, more speficically to opening weekend box office dollar figures:

• Wolverine - $85 million
• Star Trek - $75 million

Interesting… So the movie that was leaked 1 month before the premiere and presumably was downloaded 4 million times actually had a  better opening weekend than the one that managed to remain safe from those horrible pirates and had everyone dying to watch it. I know what you’re going to say. Maybe the Wolverine movie was just so much better than Star Trek, and that’s why so many more people went to watch it. Right?

Wrong!

It turns out that, according to Rotten Tomatoes, X-Men Origins is pretty crappy, while Star Trek is one of the best movies of the year so far.

So there you have it folks. The movie that caused the most uproar over piracy in recent time actually earned more money than the other hot movie that garnered critic praise and not a peep about piracy. In the process an ISP data host lost millions of dollars and had their reputation severely impacted. As well a long time FOX freelance movie reviewer has lost his livelihood. All because of the pirating of an incomplete film that ended up earning more money on opening weekend box office that the golden boy movie.

Still think piracy is hurting the movie industry?

In the last few days I started getting this error when trying to login to Windows Live Messenger:

Which is a bit odd, since I didn’t do any recent changes that could have caused it.

A quick Google search returns pages saying that this is quite a generic problem and there are a lot of possible causes for it. Those include incorrect system date and time definitions, corrupted security libraries, incorrect proxy settings, access blocked by firewall, etc. In my specific case, none of these were the problem: firewall-blocking and incorrect proxy settings are easy to check by asking a coworker to try it, checking the system clock is even easier, and I didn’t even try to fix the security libraries as I thought it highly unlikely for the issue to be there.

Digging a bit further I found this page with a similar set of possible solutions and one that caught my eye: DNS cache flushing. In short, DNS (Domain Name Service) is a component responsible for translating domain names meaningful to humans into the numerical identifiers associated with networking equipment. The rationale behind this solution was that domain names that have already been translated into “machine-speak” are kept in a cache, avoiding the need to query the DNS server all the time. So if the underlying address changes, the cache has to be updated so that it contains the correct address. This usually happens automatically and no changes have to be done by the user, but “flushing the cache” is a way to force it. This reminded me of error 8100030F.

The solution to error 8100030F was adding the following line to the hosts file:

65.54.239.80 messenger.hotmail.com

What this does is bypassing any DNS service and using the specified IP address all the time. I figured that the address had changed and I was still using the old one, with no way for Windows Live Messenger to get to the new one because I was bypassing the DNS service. All it took was removing that line and everything is back to normal now.

The hosts file can be found at C:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\.

Instead of simply paying the €2.7 million fine, the Pirate Bay founders came up with a way of making the IFPI (International Federation of the Phonographic Industry) spend even more money – a DDo$ attack.

Gottfrid Svarholm (anakata), one of the four Pirate Bay founders, has come up with the DDo$, a Distributed Denial of Dollars attack – not to be confused with a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service). The plan encourages people to pay extremely small ”internet-avgift” (Internet fee) of 1 SEK (less than €0.10) to the Danowsky law firm, which represented the IFPI in the Pirate Bay trial. Because the the bank account to which the payments are directed only has 1,000 free money transfers (after which any transfers have a surcharge of 2 SEK for the account holder), if enough people send a fee to them, it will actually end up costing the Danowsky firm and other music companies to handle and process all the payments.

More details, including an explanation of “internet-avgift” (if you understand Swedish), can be found at the Blog Pirate.

Is it just me, or this is a stroke of genius?

To promote Terminator Salvation (premiering on the 21^st of March), Terminate Yourself is a cool little app that can turn your picture into an evil robot from the future. It’ s as easy as uploading a headshot (or taking one with your webcam) and adjusting the level of “damage”. The result is somewhat disturbing.

If you like creating these mockups, you can also embed your face in several “famous” images, turn your picture into a “Obama Hope” poster and create your own Warhol-esque gallery.

(via Gizmodo)