

Fox News Ties Flame Malware To Angry Birds Because Both Use LUA - mrsebastian
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120604/04382119189/this-is-reporting-fox-news-ties-flame-malware-to-angry-birds-because-both-use-lua.shtml

======
pygy_
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
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_
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.

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nhebb
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. :-/

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

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amitparikh
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.

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diego_moita
If anyone is interested in real news:
[http://www.securelist.com/en/blog/208193522/The_Flame_Questi...](http://www.securelist.com/en/blog/208193522/The_Flame_Questions_and_Answers)

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.

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jere
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
> 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".

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

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

------
droithomme
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.

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

~~~
pyre
Linus? He's small potatoes! Intel makes their own _C compiler_! This is a
conspiracy that goes straight to the top!

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

------
chucklarge
Linking Angry Birds and terrorism is kind of brilliant.

~~~
pyre
Next Fox News headline:

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

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

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

~~~
Retric
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
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).

~~~
droithomme
I wonder if the study found that was true for all TV news. Honestly, people
who get their news from any TV shows at all at this point in history aren't
really all that informed in general.

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

