The weekly newsletter for Fed2 by ibgames

EARTHDATE: January 30, 2011

Official News page 1


NEWSDROIDS BROUGHT DOWN BY ANTI-VIRUS SOFTWARE

by Hazed

Following the incident that I reported in last week's Star which saw the droid left on duty in the office over the holiday period catch a virus and get conscripted into a botnet, I thought I should have a look at the security settings for the newsdroids, to try to avoid this happening again.

But what do I know about droid software? Absolutely nothing. So I brought in some security consultants to check it out for me, and they came back with an alarming report that listed all the deficiencies in the security software installed in the newsdroids, and a long list of things that had to be done to fix the problems, which culminated in a large number of groats they wanted to charge me to implement the fixes.

Well, the Star has a tight budget so I sacked the consultants and threw away their report, and told the newsdroids to check their own security settings and make sure their anti-virus protection was up to date so they were all safe from infection. Turns out it wasn't, so they all downloaded and installed an update and rebooted themselves.

But when they came to write the articles for this issue of the Star, suddenly all kinds of alerts starting coming up. The newsdroids started detecting viruses all over the place! Not just in the newsfeeds they were using, but in all kinds of everyday objects around the office. Even the teadroid suddenly refused to bring me my tea because, it said, the kettle was infected with a virus!

It was impossible to produce the Star in these conditions - I mean, no tea? - so I just reverted all the newsdroids to their previous settings and wiped out the anti-virus update, and then they could carry on with their work. Ok, so they are still vulnerable to viruses, but if they do get infected, I will just replace them with new ones.

But all of this messing about with updates and so on meant the newsdroids could not produce as many stories before the deadline, so this issue of the Star is shorter than usual.


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