The Same River.

I was a bit intrigued by a certain referrer in my log file who has been drifting at the bottom for the past week+ but suddenly shot up into the top 5 yesterday. The link ostensibly goes to http://tvsetmp3.com/ but gets redirected to http://ismymovies.com/. The page is constructed to look like it throws a system dialog box—if one were running XP in the default blue theme.

The dialog box asks you to download a codec to view the movie. The image is dressed up like a dialog box even going so far as to enabling you to drag it around. The ultimate clue being you cannot drag it outside the browser window’s boundaries. Clicking the “Cancel” area on the image map throws a Javascript dialog asking you to click “OK” to download the exe file. Clicking “Cancel” here throws another dialog that insists you click “OK” to download the exe file. Clicking “OK” brings you back to the previous “Click OK to download the codec” pop-up.

Clever. I never did go so far as to try to view the embedded Flash Video file underneath. I mean, it’s likely that there has to be a video file to cover the social engineering that just occurred if they did manage to get the fake codec installed on you machine. Still, they steer really hard to get you to the place where you download that putative codec.

Like I said. Clever. The social engineering continues to get better.

I just really like this for some reason:
The Bureau of Communication

I’m sure they’re harvesting email but it’s almost totally worth it.

A fellow denizen of the network cube farm hipped me to this online comic. It starts here for the moment.

At turns silly and beautiful and poetic, it’s a delight to read. I hoovered up everything in the space of a few moments this morning. It now sits in my collection of RSS feeds. Simply fantastic.

I know it’s probably landed in you inbox once or twice already but Elz forwarded this one to me today. Particularly prescient given what’s been going on at work since I walked in the door this morning. Sometimes a plugin upgrade isn’t really a great idea. Then again, you never know until you test it out.

Flippin’ Atlassian. If their stuff wasn’t so good otherwise I’d probably be pissed right now.

The code4lib folks have launched their e-journal! I first heard about this project, and the group itself for that matter, at ASIS&T’s 2007 Annual Meeting. Although the whole conference was beyond excellent, code4lib was one of the top five highlights for me. Enough of my blather though, here’s the link:
The Code4Lib Journal

I found the article on the development of an OPAC API to be most interesting.

MeFi does some things poorly. It does other topics quite well. This he-said she-said over the possible US economic collapse is insightful even if the FPP contains some dubious linkage.