* I received an mp3 player for review last week. It came loaded with a… chinese song and with the Downloader.Banload.GZH trojan. Apparently, the device had an autorun.inf file in there, and a usb2.0.exe file. The autorun.inf file was calling the execution of usb2.0.exe during the mounting of the player. So you end up getting the trojan without even having to execute the file yourself. The interesting thing is that the usb2.0.exe file was NOT visible by Windows Explorer, but it was visible under Mac OS X and Linux. Thankfully, my anti-virus seems to have caught the file and removed it, although this happened only the second time I mounted the device, so I wasn’t sure if I caught any spyware or not. I later ran the latest AVG anti-virus, Windows Defender and Ad-Aware, but none of the apps found anything suspicious on my system. I have emailed the sellers of the device and I expect them to remove the whole range of these devices from their shelves. If you have any of these devices (1, 2, 3, 4) you might be in danger (it doesn’t mean that all the batches have the trojan attached, but many might).
* Today we went for the second round of shopping for my brother in law’s wedding. JBQ got two beautiful suits, I got a nice business suit too among others. Oh, and two new bras…
* After shopping we went to eat out. We decided to go to Menlo Park’s “Chillies”. I started crying when we arrived, I couldn’t stop. Reason? The restaurant is just across where the Be, Inc. offices used to be (20 meters away, across the street). I only visited the Be offices 3 times I think in my life, but remembering the whole “hope” around BeOS at the time and the effort the community and engineers put back then, reduced me to tears. JBQ became annoyed which I interpreted it as “don’t remind me please, I am trying not to care, and I do a good job so far”.
