Fox News Ties Flame Malware To Angry Birds Because Both Use LUA

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120604/04382119189/this-is-reporting-fox-news-ties-flame-malware-to-angry-birds-because-both-use-lua.shtml

by mrsebastian • 14 years ago

35 24 14 years ago

techdirt.com

bcl• 14 years ago

Morons. You can't really say much more than that.

Retric• 14 years ago

I think it's reasonable to add that their coverage is universally bad. If you knew a lot a about say Medicine or Law you would find their coverage just as bad on those topics. Worse yet most news organizations are just as bad if not worse.

mtgx• 14 years ago

Fox News is definitely one of the worst. There was a recent survey saying that watching Fox News makes you less informed, than if you didn't watch any news at all. Hard to believe that watching news would make you less informed, but in this case it's most likely true. In that survey Fox News also scored the lowest (worst).

Stratoscope• 14 years ago

It's a bit scary to watch a news report or documentary on a subject you know well. One of my favorite clips is the "Computator" from How It's Made:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBnQJxCXbFA

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B007JOPCP8

amitparikh• 14 years ago

And they refer to it as 'LUA', even though the About page http://www.lua.org/about.html clearly says to use the noun 'Lua' as the name of the language. First class journalism.

kbd• 14 years ago

They couldn't even report the name accurately. It's "Lua" not "LUA".

pygy_2• 14 years ago

Today's pedantic minute is sponsored by the Lua community.

Yes, Lua, not LUA, you dimwit journalists (the allcaps version is used in every article about Flame I've read).

Lua is not an acronym, it means "moon" in Portuguese, it is the successor of Sol (sun), a little known data description language.

ufo• 14 years ago

Todays's pedantic minute is sponsored by the non-existant SOL comunity.

SOL is an acronym fro Simple Object Language, so you should type it in allcaps and avoid confusing it with the noun :)

pygy_2• 14 years ago

You learn something new every day.

SOL, then, but I'll leave my first post intact in order not to ruin your joke.

The Lua community is also barely existent, BTW.

aaronharnly• 14 years ago

My favorite morsel, of many tasty bites, from the article: "this new weapon is twenty times the size of earlier cyberbombs and far more powerful."

ktizo• 14 years ago

That quote belongs on a t-shirt, but I wouldn't like to wear it while going through an airport.

moondowner• 14 years ago

And all those malware written in C? Shame on you Linus.

pyre2• 14 years ago

Linus? He's small potatoes! Intel makes their own C compiler! This is a conspiracy that goes straight to the top!

chucklarge• 14 years ago

Linking Angry Birds and terrorism is kind of brilliant.

pyre2• 14 years ago

Next Fox News headline:

"Angry Birds encourages children to launch themselves at buildings. Suicide bombings expected to rise in coming months."

droithomme2• 14 years ago

That's totally absurd and would completely destroy their reputation as serious journalists if they had one.

In tomorrow's news, Obama uses cell phones, wears clothes, and drinks water, just like al Qaeda operatives do.

jere2• 14 years ago

The content of the article really wasn't that bad (mentioning that Angry Birds uses Lua is a perfectly fine way to add some context).

It's just that god awful headline. Fox News is notorious for headlines that have no bearing in reality.

Deestan• 14 years ago

> The content of the article really wasn't that bad

Oh yes it was! Some quotes:

- "this new weapon is twenty times the size of earlier cyberbombs and far more powerful, making it practically an army on its own"

- "Flame is likewise a form of spyware that enters a computer system, though exactly how is unclear."

- "once you know the email address or computer IP address ... they can introduce Flame remotely."

Also phrases like "a code" and "built with gamer code".

jere2• 14 years ago

Ah, well, I meant with regards to Angry Birds.

The rest is par for the course for any news organization covering technology.

freehunter• 14 years ago

Some servers hosting/infected with Flame are running HTML... just like Fox News! I need to sell this information to MSNBC.

vegardx• 14 years ago

Did you know that Norway is not a democracy, because police don't carry guns? You heard it first at Fox News!

diego_moita• 14 years ago

If anyone is interested in real news: http://www.securelist.com/en/blog/208193522/The_Flame_Questi...

Flame is a "virus" with about 20 MB using all sorts of libraries: sqlite3, zlib, Lua, etc. Pure Lua code is relatively small, just 3000 lines.

nhebb• 14 years ago

And that, folks, is the value of a journalism degree: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catherine_Herridge

> Herridge's salary of $900,000 per year

Wait, never mind. :-/

Fox News Ties Flame Malware To Angry Birds Because Both Use LUA

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