UPDATED! 11 April 2023 - H2O and USB

 

This post originally appeared on 19 July 2011

1. Vitamin Water is offering USB ports to charge mobile devices in bus shelters in various US cities.
2. This is in support of their "ad positioning" as an alternative energy source.
3. There is supposed to be nothing but electrical power being supplied by these ports.

While the pseudo-altruism of free electricity is somewhat appealing, and perhaps borderline clever as well, it is quite apparent that there is more here than meets the eye. It would be nearly incredible if for every USB session initiated by electron-hungry consumers, there weren't some kind of Trojan, Worm, or Virus being initiated and/or installed.
As we've known for most of recorded history, tanstaafl - There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch - and there ain't no such thing as a free charge either.

Just who is behind the applications being installed, and to whom will data be delivered? We'll have updates here as soon as more data becomes available.

Posted by Listener 43

--- UPDATE ---

It appears that our top-notch federal are finally catching up with us here at this site.

This link will take you to a legacy media site's coverage of this new discovery. 

1. This is not the same threat we identified here a dozen years ago.
2. This does show that we've been out in front of the pack, identifying threats to your security.
3. This also raises the question, "Has the FBI finished slurping your data (or injecting malware), and now they want to make sure no one else does it to you?" If not, why this warning?

As always, we'll look for further developments in this story, and updates will be posted here as soon as we have more information.

 Posted by Listener 43 (with thanks to Gyro Gearloose for his comments on the original post)

 

It's Ba-ack ....

Oh great. Just when it seems that people have finally figured out when they're being phished and pranked and otherwise being made into a sucker, one of the debunked scams of yesteryear has raised its ugly head again.

The "venerable" Yapbrowser is hitting inboxes again, and with the very same come-on they used last decade, down to the now defunct site the EULA links to that's just a parked domain name waiting for someone to capitalize on the traffic by selling ads on the site for all the chumps who are going to click on that ad-infested piece of garbage browser that never did anyone any good.

If you get something like this, please, don't click it, don't open it, don't forward it, just delete it and never look back.

Posted by Gyro Gearloose

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IP v6 is on the way - with Big Brother

H2O and USB

1. Vitamin Water is offering USB ports to charge mobile devices in bus shelters in various US cities.
2. This is in support of their "ad positioning" as an alternative energy source.
3. There is supposed to be nothing but electrical power being supplied by these ports.

While the pseudo-altruism of free electricity is somewhat appealing, and perhaps borderline clever as well, it is quite apparent that there is more here than meets the eye. It would be nearly incredible if for every USB session initiated by electron-hungry consumers, there weren't some kind of Trojan, Worm, or Virus being initiated and/or installed.
As we've known for most of recorded history, tanstaafl - There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch - and there ain't no such thing as a free charge either.

Just who is behind the applications being installed, and to whom will data be delivered? We'll have updates here as soon as more data becomes available.

Posted by Listener 43

The Colonel's New CCO

1. KFC has been selling vat-grown chicken-equivalent since receiving alien technology from the Air Force cooks at Area 51.
2. Far too many people know that KFC changed its name because they don't serve "Chicken" any more.
3. Health concerns are driving down the sales of Fried foods.
4. KFC is in a potential death spiral.

Given all these facts, it's not at all surprising that the KFC company has designated a new "Chief Chicken Officer" to train their cooks internally, as well as to be the face of the company to their potential customers.
We simply don't comment on mere suspicions, but this one is too obvious to ignore: the new CCO is apparnetly named A. Person, and is to be featured in training videos and possibly in television commercials as well.
Our guess - customers and employees will feel better if A. Person has told them that it's chicken and that it's been cooked in a real and / or healthy manner.

Stay tuned for further developments.

Posted by Listener 43

Another Agency to Police the Internet?

You've probably already heard by now that the largest ad agency - Group M - is going to stop putting its ads on sites with pirated content.
That's right, these Mad Men are going to try to stop the free flow of information that's the whole raisin d'etre of the world wide web!

You're probably wondering how they plan to do this, right? I am too. After all, the single smartest company in the world - Google (also the largest force for letting everyone know everything that there is) can't tell who has the rights to what content without the legitimate owners actually telling them, so how are these chumps going to do it?

As far as anyone can tell so far, they're just making a list of sites that they think are the bad guys and they're putting them on a 'don't buy' list so they won't buy ads from those sites on the list even if they make sense for their clients' needs for reaching the audiences that visit these sites to see the content they have there that nobody really knows if it's illegal anyway.

Of course apart from making themselves the police of copyright on the internet, they're also making themselves the financial executioners of the internet by denying some potentially legitimate sites the money they are trying to earn by giving their visitors what they want in terms of content and so forth. By taking away funding from these sites, they're going to destroy the free flow of information that has been the goal and glory of the internet since Tim Berners-Lee first made it happen for all of us (sorry Al Gore - it wasn't you, baby!).

Naturally we still have to wonder how they're planning to monitor all these sites to see what's what and what's where and so forth.
We have to wonder who will decide who is a pirate.
We have to wonder who will be told about these guilty-before-even-being-charged allegations.

I don't know about you, but I think it might be wise to let this bunch of madmen know that we're not going to take this all lying down, and that we want to find our content where we find it and that trying to stop the free flow of information on the internet is not only a bad idea as well as kind of un-American, but it's also basically impossible and they'll find out that there are forces out there that will pwn them in a minute if they don't let us have our content.

Posted by Gyro Gearloose