We've had so many problems with false positives by irresponsible antivirus vendors that i feel bad picking on Eset, which by my account is actually one of the most responsible antivirus companies in terms of avoiding false positives.  I'm hoping that the attention they get from this embarassing incident will cause them to even more seriously watch out for such mistakes.

Antivirus companies MUST stop this reckless and irresponsible behavior of simply wiping out files that match some hastily added new heuristic file signature.  It scares novice users to death and damages the reputation of software authors.

ESET, the developer of the NOD32, made the subject of a new anti-virus false positive incident that affected operating system files. Due to a quality control error, an update to the heuristics module improperly tagged at least two legit Windows files as being infected with Win32/Kryptik.JX.

According to the company, the flawed v1091 update was released to users on Sunday, March 8th, at 9:52PM PDT. The ESET products that had the misfortune to "benefit" from this upgrade, quarantined vital Windows components such as the dllhost.exe, the Microsoft DCOM DLL Host Process responsible with the proper operation of DLL-based applications, or the msdtc.exe, the Distributed Transaction Coordinator used by the Microsoft Personal Web Server and Microsoft SQL Server.

Fortunately, the glitch was noticed and addressed very quickly by ESET and did not have time to affect a lot of users. "The update downloads were stopped within ten minutes of the update release, and the update was reverted to its previous version. Due to this immediate response, less than 5% of our users were affected," the company said.

We previously reported about a UK company selling flower arrangements online, whose image was damaged by a false positive on one of its newsletters by the products of Symantec-owned e-mail security company MessageLabs.

When such incidents involve systems files, they are also potentially dangerous. In November 2008, AVG Anti-virus deleted user32.dll and left computers unable to boot into the operating systems, because it confused it with a banking trojan. A month earlier, McAfee incorrectly tagged the Windows Vista console IME as a password-stealing trojan. Trend Micro also had its share of buggy updates, as in September last year a similar mistake left the computers of its customers unbootable or unstable after three Windows components had been wrongfully removed.

http://news.softpedi...licious-106553.shtml

DC member April Russo (app103) has an essay in her blog today that is worth reading if you run a website and are guilty of this sin..

As a developer, I can't help but be more than a little bit bothered by the fact that some bloggers chose to direct link to application download files (.zip, .exe, etc) in some of the articles they write, rather than the page on the developer's site, in which the download links can be found. If this is how you do things when you write articles & reviews, then I'd like to inform you that this isn't a very nice thing to do, for the following reasons:
...

http://cranialsoup.b...-direct-link-to.html

Very well done techny evil humor..
This is a promo video for a new book called Be Amazing.

If you want to destroy the world, don't bother building a hydrogen bomb, just steal some self-replicating nanobots and cover the Earth in a layer of all-consuming grey goo. That's the moral of a hilarious video, which appeared this morning on the Mental Floss website:

Longtime readers may recall a number of other films I’ve created for mental_floss, including Famous Last Words and Attack of the Parasites! It’s been awhile since I’ve unveiled a new floss movie, and for those rabid fans who’ve been wondering where the next one is (uh … I’m sure there are a few of you), wait no longer! I and a small team of talented animators have been working on a super fun promotional video for Be Amazing! for A YEAR — and we pulled out all the stops. It was created with cutting-edge motion capture technology (which is why it took so darn long), and it dramatizes one of my favorite chapters of the book: “How to Destroy Civilization with Nanotechnology.” So check out the video, buy the book and Be Amazing!

http://www.mentalflo...blogs/archives/23426

Portable Application Wrapper

Portable Application Wrapper is a small application designed to do one thing; launch another application.  It was inspired by geek.Menu's insistence that an application be in the root of the installation path in order to add it to the menu.

Here's a cool free online image generator that could be useful..
It creates an animated gif image that shows a series of text lines being typed and scrolled.. A simple but effective typewriter effect.

http://wigflip.com/screedbot/

Hi all. No meta-news this week. Enjoy.

• 1. Russian Youth Organization Cops to 2007 Estonian Cyberattacks (Thanks 40hz)
• 2. Obama Administration Declares Proposed IP Treaty a 'National Security' Secret
• 3. EBay Scammers Work Unpatched Weaknesses in Firefox, IE
• 4. BBC Botnet Investigation Turns Hacks Into Hackers
• 5. Norway's Public Broadcaster Launches BitTorrent Tracker
• 6. SSDs Likely to Help 6.0Gbps SATA3 to Reach Speed Potential
• 7. Hypocrisy Or Necessity? RIAA Continues Filing Lawsuits
• 8. Google's New Behavioral Ads Already Raising Privacy Worries
• 9. Latest Conficker Worm Gets Nastier
• 10. Experts Agree: Giant, Razor-Clawed Bioengineered Crabs Pose No Threat