Hadden's Adnix
The other night, before leaving the shop for home, I've took down a very tough piece of French malware -- a Virtumonde variant to be precise -- residing in the server that even NOD32 couldn't root it out. All it required was to boot into DOS using the XPSP2 boot disc and try to access the hard disk to delete the offending files.
Which brings me today recalling my readings of the late Carl Sagan's Contact pertaining about Sol Hadden's Adnix gadget (which made him immensely wealthy from ad-sickened people buying his gadgets and at the same time the archenemy of ex-broadcast/advertising executives).
Plugged to the TV set, what Adnix does was that it detects for the presence of TV ads by means of monitoring the amount of volume the ad uses. And because TV ads in the Contact universe have their volumes ratcheted slightly higher than normal, Adnix will either block off the ad or switch channels automatically. From Adnix came the Preachnix add-on device, which also dealt with religious programming.
Sounds a bit foretelling, right? Yes, and right now I've used every piece of software that combats viruses, hostile scripts, trojans, malware, adware and spyware, and of course the war is still on.
Which brings me today recalling my readings of the late Carl Sagan's Contact pertaining about Sol Hadden's Adnix gadget (which made him immensely wealthy from ad-sickened people buying his gadgets and at the same time the archenemy of ex-broadcast/advertising executives).
Plugged to the TV set, what Adnix does was that it detects for the presence of TV ads by means of monitoring the amount of volume the ad uses. And because TV ads in the Contact universe have their volumes ratcheted slightly higher than normal, Adnix will either block off the ad or switch channels automatically. From Adnix came the Preachnix add-on device, which also dealt with religious programming.
Sounds a bit foretelling, right? Yes, and right now I've used every piece of software that combats viruses, hostile scripts, trojans, malware, adware and spyware, and of course the war is still on.