The Funky Apple | A New York City Blog

EPIC FAIL

As many know on April 21, 2010 McAfee had what we call in the IT realm as an “Epic Fail.”  As reported on CNET on April 22nd, McAfee released a buggy virus definition that attacked a specific Windows XP executable.  The virus software registered the SVCHOST.exe as a virus and either quarantined the file or deleted it.  This prompts a Blue Screen of Death that starts a reboot process.  Upon reboot the system cannot find the SVCHOST.exe and reboots again and this continues.  Svchost.exe is an executable that is needed to run certain services on your computer such as audio, themes and DHCP to name a few.  Without that file these services cannot run and crashes the system.  Many businesses such as police, hospitals, financial institutions and jails were brought to a grinding halt when their systems crashed.  McAfee quickly pulled the bad file from its distribution servers but the damage had already been done.  This raises a whole slew of questions such as, “Are Anti-Virus companies actually testing the virus definitions?”  If the answer to that question is yes then how did this get out without being noticed?  The biggest concern is if all it took was one bad bug to cause this much disruption, what must we do to fix this?  Just some food for thought!!!

^ That image doesn’t quite seem right, does it?

Exactly.

Hey look at that, it’s Follow Friday! In keeping with the spirit of suggesting people to follow, we’re going to be selfish and suggest you follow us.

And why not? We’re hip, we’re cool. We speak the fancy lingo the kids are talkin’ in these days.

You’ve got four ways to keep up with us: You can like us on facebook, you can follow us on twitter (although we can’t promise we won’t drunk-tweet), you can subscribe to our RSS feed, or you can join the discussion and talk to us directly on The Funky Apple Community.

If you’re still not convinced you should follow us, after the break we’ll give you twenty reasons why we’re awesome friends. Read the rest of this entry »

The New York Times needs your help, and no, they’re not begging you to buy a newspaper this time. They just want you (and a thousand other people) to take a picture at the exact same time.

The Times’ photography blog Lens is conducting a global project on Sunday. The project, ‘A Moment in Time,’ will feature thousands of photographs from all across the world and is sure to be five kinds of awesome.

So what do you have to do? Simple: at 11am on Sunday, take a picture. Then upload said picture to the NY Times [link here], and then sit back and watch as thousands of other people display their moments.

Kinda cool, huh? So remember, 11 am Sunday. We’ll give you reminders tomorrow and Sunday! [Lens]

With all of the hubbabloo around Facebook’s privacy policy changes lately, it seems like everyone has forgotten about Google and their frequent walks on the dark side.

It seems like everyone is in a big rush to close their Facebook accounts, and they’re emailing their friends to do the same thing, all the while using their trusty Gmail account.

So we have a simple question: who do you trust more: Google or Facebook. We want to hear from you, so vote in the poll and sound off in the comments!

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I came across this gem at the Kew Gardens E/F station. Stay classy, Queens.

Anyone got any good chicken on the subway jokes?

If you’ve ridden the subway in the past year (and  we’re assuming you have, since our subway posts seem to be really popular), then you might have noticed that on some of the older subway trains (the R, G, F, V, etc), these strange blue seats have been popping up left and right, looking highly out of place with the regular orange and red seats.

You might have wondered to yourself what the deal was, but then you went about your busy day and forgot all about them.

At first I thought it was some sort of crazy art piece that the city commissioned, but the real answer is far less exciting: The MTA is being cheap when it comes to painting new seats.

I know, you’re shocked, right? The MTA is cutting costs (and they damn sure need to cut costs) when they replace broken seats on the subway lines by leaving them unpainted.

So, as you’d guessed by now, as we continue to break seats by having crazy sex on them, the dull blue seats will become more and more prominent, until we are left with a world of only blue seats.

So pour out some liquor for the red and orange seats. They’re on borrowed time. [2nd Ave Sagas]