Fire!

I have, as I’ve mentioned before, a fireplace in my apartment.

This is a novel experience for me. I’ve never lived in a place with a fireplace before. With winter’s chill approaching, we made a point to go out and buy firewood; the glow from a burning fire is quite lovely.

And that inspired some pictures.

At first, I was quite frustrated; I was using very long exposure times, always somewhat dicey with a digital camera, and I couldn’t find my minipod, so I had to make do with stacks of books to rest the camera on. I finally got ’round to offloading them, and was surprised and pleased that some of them turned out quite nicely.

Clicky for fireplace pics! (Caution: NSFW, nudity)

The election is over…

…and not even twelve hours after Obama’s acceptance speech, Eastern European organized crime are using America’s feelings about this historic moment to spread computer viruses.

A little while ago, I posted about a gang of computer criminals who, while building a network of hacked computers to use to spread viruses and fake bank sites, had hacked a system belonging to the US Department of Defense.

Those very same criminals are now hitting my inbox with messages attempting me to visit a server that downloads a computer virus disguised as a news story about Barack Obama’s victory.

I’ve received two of the emails so far. Both are formatted the same way, and are identical in formatting to the phish emails that masqueraded as a bank “security update.” The first carries a subject line reading “Obama win sets stage for showdown;” the second, “Priorities for the New President – TIME”. Both come from the forged email address “news@unitedstates.com”.

First, the technical stuff about how this computer virus is being spread.