This is a fun cat-and-mouse story about the evolution of the Conficker worm, and the people who are trying to understand it. The story ominously concludes that while Conficker hasn’t done much that is publicly visible, there are possibly millions of zombie computers lying in wait.

RTFA: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20227121.500…

If every Windows user had downloaded the security patch Microsoft supplied, all would have been well. Not all home users regularly do so, however, and large companies often take weeks to install a patch. That provides windows of opportunity for criminals.

No one knows the identity of Conficker’s “patient zero” computer, or precisely when it was infected. It was probably a machine that the hackers already controlled. Once installed, the software set to work, surreptitiously scanning the internet for other vulnerable machines to send itself to.

The new worm soon ran into a listening device, a “network telescope”, housed by the San Diego Supercomputing Center at the University of California. The telescope is a collection of millions of dummy internet addresses, all of which route to a single computer. It is a useful monitor of the online underground: because there is no reason for legitimate users to reach out to these addresses, mostly only suspicious software is likely to get in touch.

The telescope’s logs show the worm spreading in a flash flood. For most of 20 November, about 3000 infected computers attempted to infiltrate the telescope’s vulnerable ports every hour – only slightly above the background noise generated by older malicious code still at large. At 6 pm, the number began to rise. By 9 am the following day, it was 115,000 an hour. Conficker was already out of control.

Fantastic video. Antarctica is the least hospitable, most inherently psychedelic environment on earth, and this guy has used a sky-tracking telescope mount to capture some eye-poppingly unreal time-lapse shots. He claims to have destroyed several cameras in the process, and based on some of the scenes, I can imagine how this could be.

RTFA: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TemK6CF6lF0&eurl=ht…

Time-lapse video filmed in Antarctica, in and around McMurdo Station and Scott Base.
Each year the sun is below the horizon for 4 months in the middle of winter, and above the horizon for 4 months in summer. During the couple of months in between we have more-or-less normal days.
Includes shots of auroras and the very rare polar stratospheric nacreous clouds, which form when ozone depleting gases crystallize in the upper atmosphere in the intense cold.
Summer population is about 1200 people, winter about 200.
This is just a small sample of an ongoing project to collect time-lapse imagery of Antarctica. I have taken over 1,000,000 individual photos and worn out a number of cameras that make up the collection of footage I have gathered so far over the last 6 years. Eventually a film will be released, keep an eye on my user page for more info in the future.
Check out my other videos as well for more of life on the Ice.

This is a picture of US Airways flight 1549, after it had crashed into the Hudson River, but before any rescuers had arrived. The people who look like they’re walking on water? They’re actually standing on the wings, and it looks like they’re being uncharacteristically patient about it. Consider this: the water must have been freezing cold, and anyone who survived the crash landing might not have survived falling into the water.

I am trying to get some background on this picture, but according to a comment on Facebook, this picture was taken by a private citizen through a telescope. Pretty amazing shot, IMO.