email for pics

I just read an article at Ars Technica about a virus that chats with you and tries to convince you to install it. It first disables anti-virus software and software firewalls on the infected computer. It then sends out instant messages to everyone on the buddy list of this machine’s IM client. The user of the infected machine never sees these outgoing IMs or any of the conversations that result.

The virus sends a link to all the buddies and asks them to click on it. The kicker?

If the user queries the bot about the link, the virus will respond: “lol its not a virus.”

If you ever ask someone about a link they sent you, and they respond “lol it’s not a virus”…it’s a virus.

Talk about a false sense of community.

I am going to give you a headline, and let’s see how you read it at first sight:

Teacher’s plea deal for sex with boy rejected

Hmm. A teacher whose plea deal was to have sex with a boy was rejected. Obviously. Wouldn’t community service or something be more appropriate? Oh, the plea deal for the teacher who was convicted of having sex with a boy was rejected. Ah, I see. That’s a little different.

I would be remiss if I did not provide a link to the article with this headline. It turns out the online headline is different. The headline I quoted above was from CNN’s RSS feed. It was enough to draw me in. Maybe that was the point.