The Inquirer Hit by a Virus

Jimmy 2004 · Dec 4, 2007

Any techPowerUp! readers who also read The Inquirer may want to stay away from The Inquirer for a while after reports that the site is infected with a virus. According to NOD32, the virus is a variant of the BAT/Emilia.D trojan, although the screenshots would suggest that this could be result of heuristic proection rather than a confirmed infection. The screenshots from VR-Zone are below, so I'd recommend that you don't go to the Inquirer for at least a few hours to be on the safe side, and if you do then make sure your virus software is up-to-date.

View at TechPowerUp Main Site

Jess Stingray · Dec 4, 2007

www.the.inquirer.justgotowned.com

F-22 · Dec 4, 2007

I just went to that site and I have no Virus.

Jimmy 2004 · Dec 4, 2007

F-22 said:
I just went to that site and I have no Virus.

At least you don't think you do...

Did you visit that story in the screenshots?

FR@NK · Dec 4, 2007

Jimmy 2004 said:
At least you don't think you do...

Did you visit that story in the screenshots?

That article looks interesting....

mdm-adph · Dec 4, 2007

I don't get it -- the HTML file had a virus? I'm thinking this guy's computer was just infected and for some reason he thought it was the site.

zekrahminator · Dec 4, 2007

I would have laughed so hard if the news source was Fudzilla

.

wiak · Dec 4, 2007

this is some ads that has virus in them
this has happend to many sites that gives you "scan you computer" ads etc
so it can happen to ANY site, that uses some dubleclick or some other ads thingy, i think TechPowerUp uses text (google ads) and png/flash images added by w1zzard, not dubleclick etc

kakazza · Dec 4, 2007

Will people ever learn to not make JPEG Screenshots of their desktop and use PNG instead?...

wiak · Dec 4, 2007

kakazza said:
Will people ever learn to not make JPEG Screenshots of their desktop and use PNG instead?...

+1

v-zero · Dec 4, 2007

NOD32 is seriously retarded software. You might as well ask a cucumber to accurately detect viruses.

zekrahminator · Dec 4, 2007

kakazza said:
Will people ever learn to not make JPEG Screenshots of their desktop and use PNG instead?...

Why? As far as I can tell, JPEG is superior. Screenshots I took just now:

JPEG: 61KB

PNG: 611KB

theonetruewill · Dec 4, 2007

v-zero said:
NOD32 is seriously retarded software. You might as well ask a cucumber to accurately detect viruses.

Nod32 is damn good. The heuristics can just be set to be extremely sensitive. Don't knock it just because it has the options to allow scanning for unidentified threats.

kakazza · Dec 4, 2007

zekrahminator said:
Why? As far as I can tell, JPEG is superior. Screenshots I took just now:

JPEG: 61KB

PNG: 611KB

5 bucks say you took the screenshot of your background image

Just took one myself of the full screen with Firefox/TPU open.

1920x1200
PNG: 92KB
JPEG 80% Quality: 291KB
JPEG 100% Quality: 660KB

JPEG _will_ give you noticable artifacts with text, as it softens the edges, adding ugly shit around the text. JPEG is considered a "lossy format", you will lose quality, whereas PNG is lossless.

For photos (graphic background, i.e. non-browser, non-text screenshots) JPEG will result in a smaller filesize.

Edit:
Comparision:
Top: JPEG 80%
Middle: PNG
Bottom: JPEG 100%

Compare quality and colors (my nick)

zekrahminator · Dec 4, 2007

kakazza said:
5 bucks say you took the screenshot of your background image

Just took one myself of the full screen with Firefox/TPU open.

1920x1200
PNG: 92KB
JPEG 80% Quality: 291KB
JPEG 100% Quality: 660KB

I stand corrected, I will from hence forth save all my images as PNGs whenever possible :toast:

.

DarkMatter · Dec 4, 2007

kakazza said:
5 bucks say you took the screenshot of your background image

Just took one myself of the full screen with Firefox/TPU open.

1920x1200
PNG: 92KB
JPEG 80% Quality: 291KB
JPEG 100% Quality: 660KB

JPEG _will_ give you noticable artifacts with text, as it softens the edges, adding ugly shit around the text. JPEG is considered a "lossy format", you will lose quality, whereas PNG is lossless.

For photos (graphic background, i.e. non-browser, non-text screenshots) JPEG will result in a smaller filesize.

Edit:
Comparision:
Top: JPEG 80%
Middle: PNG
Bottom: JPEG 100%

Compare quality and colors (my nick)

Although you are right about png being superior, I get a lot better results with jpeg than that of your example. 100% same true color and much sharper letters and I am talking about 7 out of 12 quality in Photoshop CS3. At 1280x960 that jpg is 302 KB and the png is 357KB. So I guess it depends on the program you use to save them.

wiak · Dec 4, 2007

come on stop whining about jpg vs png hehe
NOD32 is the best antivirus, its lightwight, scans fast, dosnt use you whole system,
people that use norton are stupid, it takes around 80% of you system resources from you

so i will recommend NOD32 before ever recommending norton
norton has to much crap and uses javascripts in their interface, nod32 uses pure c+ interface so no problems what so ever with missing text etc

you wont even notice NOD32 running, and if you enable advanced herutices it will give you false postives on crackes/keygens irc system scripts and so on but it wont on the default settings

F-22 · Dec 5, 2007

---

PNG is only smaller when dealing with TINY files... I posted my results 2 times. The top one is JPEG80, the bottom one is PNG32. The JPG result image is 77.7KB while the PNG result image is 90.6KB.

kakazza · Dec 5, 2007

F-22 said:
PNG is only smaller when dealing with TINY files... I posted my results 2 times. The top one is JPEG80, the bottom one is PNG32. The JPG result image is 77.7KB while the PNG result image is 90.6KB.

Resaving fucked up jpegs with artifacts as png doesn't really help... but thanks for trying

Jimmy 2004 · Dec 5, 2007

Btw, I would have done better quality screenies but those are straight from VR-Zone - I didn't want to get the virus myself.

And obviously there is no point 'resaving fucked up jpegs' as kakazza put it

Necrofire · Dec 6, 2007

I did look at the article...waht does the virus do?
png is superior when saving text and pics with a small amount of colors.
jpeg is superior when saving complex pictures like from a camera.

png is superior over jpeg for screenshots involving simple colored windows and lots of text.

the png is bigger on the jpeg comparison, because the jpeg inside has lots of colors and noise.

W1zzard · Dec 6, 2007

dont forget about gif which works on every platform, even with transparency (no png transparency on ie). file sizes are pretty nice too, especially for screenshots with lots of text. also it doesnt have those gay jpg artifacts

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