A “not so funny” April Fools 09

Malicious code that was recently classified as a worm, surfaced in October 2008 exploits MS08-067 vulnerability in the Microsoft Windows family Operating System (surprise surprise !!). The worm is known by various names Downup, Downadup, Kido, and the most popular being Conficker.

Conflicker has gone through various stages of development that make it harder to understand; credits to the use of P2P mechanism encrypting the traffic using the latest and greatest MIT MD6 algorithm. A noteworthy mention about the client on an infected machine is that, it uses an intelligent algorithm that creates a daily list of 250 random domain names to communicate with its mother ship that advertises different domain names each day. Guess what, it gets even better, the newer variant Conflicker. C just upped that number from 250 to 50,000.

What makes this one extra special is that no one seems to still know what its gonna do on “D day”. Experts guess that April 1 could probably be that D day, but we never know…

Let the guessing games continue; in the meantime, if you don’t have the habit of installing Microsoft Windows security fixes or keep you Windows auto update OFF, it’d be a good idea to get to the Symantec website and attempt a removal of a possible infection.

Cheers, and have a SAFE April 1.

dogs sniff out cancer

As i signed outa my y! today i was struck by news which said that dogs can sniff out cancer. Now this was interesting, and a little digging around took me here

“The anatomical structures used by dogs and humans for detecting and processing odor information are not the same. Detection thresholds of dogs are many times higher than for humans. The biggest anatomical difference is the number of sensory receptor cells (Moulton et al., 1960), which is best illustrated by a comparison of the size of the scent organs. In humans, the scent organs are approximately 5 square centimetres in surface area, whereas for dogs they are 75-150 square centimetres. The cerebral cortex processes information from the olfactory sense. In dogs, about 33 per cent of the entire cortex is used for this task, whereas in humans it is only 5 per cent”

Image Source

So now that they sense cancer, how are we going to know, how do we communicate with them or vice versa? Apparently, research has proved that dogs can be trained to sniff out bladder cancer from urine. There have also been claims that a dog actually sniffed his owners’ breast cancer when he started sniffing, snuffling and becoming agitated when he sat on his owners lap, which drove his owner suspicious and got a scan with a positive indication of cancer.

So the next time your dog starts acting funny around you, remember its trying to tell you something that could just save your life.
There will come a time when the nurse would say “Now the dog will see you” ;)
It also gets me wondering where the name LABrador was coined from … hmm..