Apparently there's a new worm going around the internet, a variety of the Beagle worm. It takes the form of mails from a friend that have a subject that says "Thank You", or "Hi", or "Hello", or perhaps no subject. The content is usually a smiley face, with an attachment that SHOULD NOT BE CLICKED ON. Usually it's a PIF or an executable, and when clicked, it mails itself to everyone in the victim's address book. Needless to say, I now have hundreds of copies of the thing in my mailbox because I'm in a lot of address books. Anyhow, be careful! And, as is always wise, keep the latest antivirus software installed -- they can usually catch worms too if they're very current. Symantec updated their signatures today.

On Wikipedia, I managed to offend a hacker .. well, no, a self-proclaimed troll group. They basically have a self-aggrandizing vanity entry in the encyclopedia, and arn't really notable enough for an entry, so I proposed the article for deletion. The debate is still raging in the VfD, and I went to talk to them on their IRC server, but that didn't go well -- they display the same kind of mentality that the hacker groups I used to associate with in elementary and middle school had (although with less justification -- these people don't appear to actually have any unique skills), and they've "declared war" on me. So far they've targeted my page there, my BLOG, and the like. Fortunately, for people who really know how computers work, it's not really anything more than a minor nuisance. If I had more time, it would almost be cute -- they really are a lot less of a bother than a hacker group would be, and so far their attacks are limited to very easy to undo pranks. I've left two of their less .. interesting .. attacks up for people to see, as comments to the previous article. I, na klar, have blocked access to the anonymizing proxy some of them have used, but the others have visited using their raw IPs, so if I wanted to make a fuss I could contact their ISPs and probably get them in trouble. Ehh.. not worth it so far.

fMRI research really is fun. Some of the analyses take awhile to run though. You'd be surprised how much CPU and disk are used for a study of 8 people. I still have a lot to learn about it though.