An army of infected computers can have the equivalent power of several dedicated servers and more, and some have even speculated that these botnets can rival supercomputers in terms of computing power. That is a scary thought as the hacker behind the botnet might be malicious, I am not saying that all hackers are, but he just might be.

I think I’ve found a front runner for this year’s blind leading the blind awards.
You’ve all been out looking for a solution to some minor puta hiccup, done a google and landed on a site where someone with a problem similar to your own is assured that their problem is a dis on the universal smoke grinder or some such claptrap, so the poor unfortunate folows the advice of the self assured ‘techie’ only to find the problem has been vastly exacerbated.

We collect them here because they are so illustrative of the communications disconnect that occurs around the world on milllions of sites every day.

People shout any old garbage at each other to achieve some sort of sense of self aggrandisement I spose.

This thread’s sub-text of seeing the anarchic fun of the outlaws who create botnets as some sort of organised subversive conspiracy is such a wild distortiion of the reality of the internet in 2011 that it beggars belief.

The forces of darkness aka the peeps with all the money and power don’t need to run worms to collect data eny more because they have all the joe users using a few easily monitored conduits for the bulk of their dialogue, that is facebook, twitter et al.  All of the so called protections such as ssl encryption have back doors built into them that the forces of darkness hold all the keys to so they have nothing to gain from worms.
Anyone who truly wants to use the internet to engage in meaningful communication who lacks the skills & knowledge to make their own stuff, to prevent outsiders eavesdropping can still find a range of late 90’s early noughties open source tools that have been thoroughly checked for backdoors.  Those will generate encryption that requires incredible (ie several years of high resource computing) effort to decrypt, so the worms aren’t going to effect them either.
And even Joe User who just wants to protect his/her limited assets can easily do so by observing some basic net hygene.  The operating system they use is irrelevant to this.
Most normal citizens don’t have the resources to use the expensive & elitist mac systems and they don’t have the knowledge to get across linux so windows is their only option.  The only real vulnerability is that it is too popular because so many use it, that many more malware coders work in windows, although this is decreasing as other systems have increased uptake of late.

It is plain silly to use the same machine to communicate with strangers as you use to manipulate your assets, or communicate confidential matters.  Especially on open networks.

Virtualisation allows peeps to maintain sterility without having to spend up large.  It is also so straight forward nowadays that even my mother has no trouble maintaing a number of discrete VMs.

One link in the story above went to an article which had more amerikan imperial propaganda in it than actual facts.  Particulary the outrageous lies that Russia attacked Georgia followed by further lies that there was an official Russian effort to attack Georgia’s internet.

That is the tenor of this whole story.  It is designed to make you so scared you won’t mind, will welcome in fact, the next lot of intrusion on citizen’s privacy by private and public sector agencies under the control of ‘the forces of darkness’.
DDOS Distributed denial of service attacks are one of the most important tools in the resistance’s chest. Advocating any changes that will make the ability to implement ddos harder provides aid & comfort to the enemy.

Fuck you worm!!!

I have nothing against worms, but your synthetic type, if I may boldly say, are not some divine agant of chaos, they are just a cowardly attempt at becoming important, probably because you suck.

@ gerard

Facebook is originally based on a school year book model. So one’s school friends automatically are attached to anyone who adds you. With the addition of work/job, area etc. they are added as well.

If that’s not enough facebook takes the liberty of adding your skype, msn, yahoo, icq contacts and whatever else it can find, if you let it. This is highly dangerous as you don’t want your school bully or your mean boss start yaking with your kids.

Some get on facebook as other PPL, usually taken from year book sites, start talking and find young [but still legal] victims to do their bidding. Certain admins [administrators] and anons [anonymous] try to stem this tide by suckering the predators in. These anons have been quite successful in catching 1,000’s of such predators.

Trends say the predators are mostly rich and super rich bastards, many are into Satanic cults. And wouldn’t you know it, are also Elites of business world, military, churches, government, etc.

Facebook also tends to edit your contacts if you don’t contact them for a time as part of “personalizing your internet experience”.
So, You’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t.

Best way to handle this is by getting on your kid’s page and marking unwanted contacts as spam or rejected. It sends a message to facebook to get their act together. 10,000 or million PPL do it and facebook tends to jump. Complaints don’t do much as they operate on “policy” and not Law.

Now you send them a Notice of Understanding… , as link provided, and they tend to perk up as it means it’s the first step in a Law Suit.

It’s same to similar with all social media sites.
They work on the premise that if you’re fool enough to post your private info then you’re fool enough to take responsibility for any damage.

You’d be surprised how many have lost their kids to CSA [child services] and other such private agencies because of things that showed up on social media sites.

Robert-Arthur: Menard of http://worldfreemansociety.org/ started as loosing his or his girlfriend’s kids to Child Services for no valid or known reason.

There’s a big business in such stolen kids. It’s NOT a joke I present “Freeman” material from the start http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/robin_hood_in_reverse_20110712/#414225
Anyone who took the time to find the history of my links knows this, and much much more.

I suggest you take your kids off any social media sites until you learn those and related links with your kids.

Thanks to Gabriel for keeping an eye on Truthdig!
Most of us who comment here need tech help at every turn. 

Here’s another question for Gabriel:  My grandaughter has a page on Facebook.  I am a “friend.” Within a day or so after I signed in, I took another look at her page to see if she had answered my previous note.  She had not.  But guess what!  On her page appeared (from out of nowhere!) names of six people who happen to be friends of mine with absolutely no connection to her; they don’t even know she exists, and our last names are not the same.
There is also no context connection as my friends are all way older than my granddaughter, live in entirely separate places and have little or no interest in her interests, though they and I have common interests.  Please tell me how this happened, why it happened, what’s it all about, and whether complaint should be registered, and if so, with whom?  Thank you very much.

How many of the searches for this WORM will in fact lead people to a site or a
node or a whatever where the malicious code will be waiting?

And Gabriel is dead-on about the Virus business.

Adios!

Merci, que si le monde était comme vous proposé, Gabriel.

@ Shenonymous

no probs, i have lots of patience .. even though it might not seem like it
only ones that rarely irritate me are shills.

whole idea behind our net/internet is to learn .. anything and everything as much as possible then use it for your/our best benefit, in turn creating a world as it was meant to be = Free Equal Loving Prosperous and Just for All

Enjoy

Thank you Gabriel.  I claim no techie genes at all.  But I do get
pissed when privacy is invaded.  I appreciate the microcourse
in webworming.  I’ll save your comments for further reference.
The techie in you seemed to understand my mixed words well
enough.  I promise not to test your patience any further.

@ Shenonymous
with all due respect you mix your words to the point that they are unrecognizable by a techie.

- ads have nothing to do with worms
- worms are little programs consisting of viruses, intrusion code, vulnerability exploits, sometimes self activating code, etc. that install on a computer to take it over ... usually by the actions of the nut behind the keyboard. This combination of code is usually so high tech that only big corporations have the resources and the brain power to build. Or, it has to be some genius to build one properly so it doesn’t attack his/her computer instead.
- theft of email accounts is usually done by pros who know the code, in your instance, to gmail.
- worms and other intrusion code can be sent via email but most anti-virus programs catch them.
- “advertisements on his browser site” is a totally different matter and can easily be solved by an ad-blocker plugin.

It doesn’t matter which ISP you have, most ISP’s track your emails and keep copies of them for legal purposes, not lawful purposes. The difference is that “legal” is part of business/corporations and “lawful” is part of your Rights/Sovereignty/Law of the Land. Law of the Land takes precedent over legal/business and you can sue them in a Common Law Court [with a jury of your peers] to force them to your wishes.
If you don’t want to take that route you can bill them according to a fee schedule you have given notice of previously. This requires you know the going rates:
10k per hr
100k per incident
1 Million in case of injury or damage
5 Billion in case of death
example:
http://www.exploringinfinity.com/2010/01/how-to-craft-an-effective-notice-of-understanding-and-intent-and-claim-of-right/

Note: a “judge” is nothing but an administrator for accounts, as in accounting ... think business. They don’t give a shit about Justice but only care about getting paid. The only ones you will receive justice from is your peers.

No matter what an Aussie friend emails me about, it could be
circuit breakers, fixing roofs, making an Indian curry dish,
insomnia, he gets advertisements on his browser site.  We even
have tried whacko test items on his server just to see if they would
show up.  They did!  Email servers track what is written.  That
is wormy, but not necessarily a viral one that would damage your
computer.  It is unconscionable of corporations to invade private
emails to worm hunt for possible products to sell to emailers!  It
should be illegal.  My email service is secured and I don’t have that
problem.  My server has worm protection and takes care of problems
before it is sent to me.

However, not too long ago I had a gmail account commandeered,
hacked, and embarrassing emails sent to untold number of recipients. 
I deleted the account.  That is the kind of worm theft ordinary people
have to be concerned about.

Oh bullshit! No worm will ever take over the net. There are way too many different kinds of operating systems for a worm to take over all of them.

Most worms are created for Microcrap / Microsoft Operating System .. if you can call it that. It’s a hunk of junk with more than 400,000 bugs / holes in it which Microcrap deems “not important”. This gives any Spy Agency or big corporation access to private info, your private info.

Without extensive protection and aftermarket security you are vulnerable. This means it’s also a scam to get more money out of you.

Stick in a Live CD of Linux and boot from it and no worm can compromise you. http://www.livecdlist.com/
Better ones are Desktop or Secure Desktop versions of Ubuntu, Mepis, Knoppix etc.
Most will work on an older machine = P3 to P4 with less than 512 MB of memory. There ... you also just figured out how to save your old PC instead of junking it.

Do your research to find the most convenient for your needs.
Situation solved

Whoever posted this article should really do their research before spreading such fear.

The real war is about corporations using your browser to access your machine and your private contents of your machine. Biggest offender now is Google and subsequently all major corporations, government and spy agencies. You run anything Google on your website and you are participating in spying on users.

Next in line are social media sites who abuse your private info.
Spammers are next
Intruders / hackers are close to bottom of the list. They are the ones who actually tell you what your vulnerabilities are ... so you can fix them.

Sorry, typo, make that Conficker.

A more thorough article regarding the worm, Conflicker is at:
http://tinyurl.com/683w59h