Russian Spyware Love Interest

Experts at SophosLabs have issued a public warning concerning the modus operandi of a Trojan discovered on July 27, 2006 that delivers what appears to be a slide show of a Russian girl looking for love. The promises of an amorous match are incentive enough for users to be convinced to run the program. In reality, Victoria Stasova's slide show drops the Troj/Keylog-HD Trojan horse onto Windows users' platforms. “When first run Troj/Keylog-HD displays a slideshow of 3 photos called "Victoria Stasova" with three different pictures. The Trojan silently copies itself to Windows foldersvchst.exe and creates the file Windowssvchst##.dll, where ## is a random two digit number,” describes Sophos security experts. The Troj/Keylog-HD is a keylogger program that starts recording keystrokes as soon as it is installed and sends all gathered data to a remote server controlled by the attacker. "The danger is that people might think they are just looking at pictures of a Russian beauty who is on the lookout for love. But behind the scenes, information and keypresses - including usernames and passwords - are being secretly stolen from the PCs by hackers," explained Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos. "One of the ways in which malware like this could work is that computer users could find themselves being chatted up online by someone who they believe is a potential lovematch, and then be sent the slideshow as the virtual romance blossoms. Having found new love victims may rush to run the slideshow with their head in the clouds, and not realize their finances are being consigned to the gutter."

THE FINGER-SIZED MOUSE

Do you think that your ordinary mouse is too bulky and it occupies way too much space, and you'd like to go for something a lot smaller and lighter? Well, in this case, you could try out the new product manufactured by LG (at least that's what aving.net tells us), a mouse the size of a lighter that can be operated with just one finger.

As you can plainly see from the picture, the Finger Mouse, as the device has been dubbed, has a tiny form factor, one button and a scroll wheel placed on the side, and its dimensions make it quite appropriate to be used whenever space is an issue, as it measures just 24.5 x 85.0 x 19.0 mm, and weighs around 45 grams. Moreover, it has a cable with a length of 0.7 meters, which can be extended up to 1.5 meters, thus allowing it to be used quite easily in very crowded spaces. 

THE WiFi PEN

With the extraordinary increase of the demand for mobile computing systems (and thus, also of the number of such devices), WiFi
networks have also become quite popular. One on the most serious problems faced by the users of such networks is that of finding an area where the signal is strong enough to allow a decent connection to the Internet. That's exactly the reason why all sorts of devices that indicate the quality of the signal have been developed, one of the most interesting being the WiFi Pen.

The device is quite user-friendly, since it works by simply pressing a button, and, depending on the signal's intensity, a Green/Yellow/Red LED lights up. The device has a detection range of up to 15 meters and features a white LED at the top, which can be used as some sort of pen-lantern. And, quite surprisingly, it can also be used for writing.COURTESY : SOFTPEDIA NEWS

10 Totally Dumb Business Ideas That Made Someone Rich

1. Million Dollar Homepage

http://milliondollarhomepage.com/

1000000 pixels, charge a dollar per pixel – that’s perhaps the dumbest idea for online business anyone could have possible come up with. Still, Alex Tew, a 21-year-old who came up with the idea, is now a millionaire.

2. SantaMail.Org

http://santamail.org/

Ok, how’s that for a brilliant idea. Get a postal address at North Pole, Alaska, pretend you are Santa Claus and charge parents 10 bucks for every letter you send to their kids? Well, Byron Reese sent over 200000 letters since the start of the business in 2001, which makes him a couple million dollars richer.

3. Doggle.Com

http://doggles.com/

Create goggles for dogs and sell them online? Boy, this IS the dumbest idea for a business. How in the world did they manage to become millionaires and have shops all over the world with that one? Beyond me.

4. LaserMonks.Com

http://lasermonks.com/

LaserMonks.com is a for-profit subsidiary of the Cistercian Abbey of Our Lady of Spring Bank, an eight-monk monastery in the hills of Monroe County, 90 miles northwest of Madison. Yeah, real monks refilling your cartridges. Hallelujah! Their 2005 sales were $2.5 million! Praise the Lord.

5. AntennaBalls.Com

http://antennaballs.com/

You can’t sell antenna ball online. There is no way. And surely it wouldn’t make you rich. But this is exactly what Jason Wall did, and now he is now a millionaire.

6. FitDeck.Com

http://fitdeck.com/

Create a deck of cards featuring exercise routines, and sell it online for $18.95. Sounds like a disaster idea to me. But former Navy SEAL and fitness instructor Phil Black reported last year sales of $4.7 million. Surely beats what military pays.

7. PositivesDating.Com

http://positivesdating.com/

How would you like to go on a date with an HIV positive person? Paul Graves and Brandon Koechlin thought that someone would, so they created a dating site for HIV positive folks last year. Projected 2006 sales are $110,000, and the two hope to have 50,000 members by their two-year mark.

8. Designer Diaper Bags

http://www.diapeesandwipees.com/

Christie Rein was tired of carrying diapers around in a freezer bag. The 34-year-old mother of three found herself constantly stuffing diapers for her infant son into freezer bags to keep them from getting scrunched up in her purse. Rein wanted something that was compact, sleek and stylish, so in November 2004, she sat down with her husband, Marcus, who helped her design a custom diaper bag that's big enough to hold a travel pack of wipes and two to four diapers. With more than $180,000 in sales for 2005, Christie's company, Diapees & Wipees, has bags in 22 different styles, available online and in 120 boutiques across the globe for $14.99.

9. TruGamerz.Com

http://www.trugamerz.com/

Faux-suede padded covers for game controllers and gel thumb pads for analog joysticks? No one will buy that. Forget it. The product proved to be so popular, it got picked up by Target.com and Walmart.com and annual sales now exceed half a million dollars.

10. LuckyBreakWishbone.Com

http://www.luckybreakwishbone.com/

Fake wishbones. Now, this stupid idea is just destined to flop. Who in the world needs FAKE PLASTIC wishbones? A lot of people, it turns out. Now producing 30,000 wishbones daily (they retail for 3 bucks a pop) Ken Ahroni, the company founder, expects 2006 sales to reach $1 million.
by JOHN DEPRICE

THE USB EGG - A COOL GADGET

It seems that the USB frenzy is at its peak these days, as more and more manufacturers launch all sorts of weird devices that use a computer’s USB port for charging/connecting various devices to the system. And one of the strangest devices of this type is the USB Egg, manufactured by the Japanese company EverGreen and “dug up” by our colleagues from Akihabara News.

You might wonder what could and egg have to do with USB? Well, quite a lot, it would seem, because the device (whose relation to an actual egg refers just to shape and color) includes several pretty nifty “trinkets”. Thus, the USB Egg actually is “cracked” in 2 parts to reveal a pair of USB speakers (2 Watts each), combined with a SD/CFMS card reader and a USB 2.0 HUB with 2 ports.

This device illustrates quite well the imagination of USB devices manufacturers, who, due to the actual flood of such devices, are forced to come up with all sorts of crazy (and cool) ideas. As for the actual utility of such a gadget, well…it’s relatively arguable, but there will probably be some people out there willing to buy the USB Egg, just for the fun of it.(SOURCE)