Ugh, we were already sick of digital photo frames -- and now it looks those now-discontinued
virus-ridden Insignia units from Best Buy and several other models produced in China were carrying a much nastier trojan that we'd
originally heard. According to an analyst form Computer Associates, the trojan, called Mocmex, is able to block more than 100 types of security and anti-virus software from killing it, and bypasses the Windows firewall to download files from remote locations, spreading them randomly over your hard drive and any portable storage device you plug into your PC -- like, for example, a digital photo frame. The trojan is apparently set to only steal gaming passwords at present, but CA says it's capable of stealing nearly any information on your machine, and thinks it might be a test for a much worse virus yet to come. Infected frames have come from Sam's Club, Target and Costco, in addition to Best Buy, so we'd say to avoid picking one up until this mess gets sorted out -- or, you know, forever.
posted Feb 15th 2008 7:24PM
good thing I have no use for one of these things.
Me too. I prefer old school photo frames since they don't break if dropped.
oh that best buy!
don't you mean "oh that china?" f china and everyone there. all 432 billion of them. lead painting virus sending mother f'ers!
and this is why i make sure all my shit is from south korea, taiwan, or japan...
I suggest you take a look at all the products in your house then given that China is the largest producer of goods for western business.
I meant in regards to electronics, smartass. I'm sure all my furniture is made in China, but then again I dont have to worry about my furniture bypassing Windows Firewalls and disabling my antivirus software, now do I?
rank me low you dumb ass made in china buying idiots. stop being so cheap and look for american made gear, and pay more for it.
american made gear isn't all that cracked to be...
I agreed that whenever I have a choice I'd stay away from Made In China products.
But before you write another ignorant comment, you should keep in mind that all Apple products are made in China, and they are often perceived as the least virus-prone computers/electronics.
Best Buy should be responsible for the quality of their products regardless of where it is made.
@Carbonize
>......Made in China.....
Along with my laptop, my Playstation 2, my LCD tv (5"), my PSP, my cellphone, my Wireless Router, my modem, etc. etc...
P.S: Have you noticed the commenting system? Weird... They changed it.
@Aguiluz - What do you mean about the commenting system? Not noticed any changes but then my last post was over an hour ago ;)
@mark lee
only other product I can't think Didn't the iPod come with a virus!!!
dont think the zune comes with one ;)
Not tryin to bash apple here, I too think they make some very nice products. Just that the fact that apple stuff is made in china doesn't mean people can't mess with it
oh and before you tell me that the virus on the iPod was for a windows...i know...probably why apple didn't want to warm people.
@ Carbonize:
Sometimes they send me a confirmation email. There is this "please confirm comment..." mail popping in my mailbox. I thought it was a ploy to prevent double-posts or "first!" spams. Plus
Here's a screenshot, see what I meant:
http://img509.imageshack.us/img509/3567/blahhhhhhei5.png
"Aguiluz replied to your comment!" Wow, they have to inform me that I replied to my own comment.
what about haier they are a pretty good brand
You only have to confirm if you only supplied a username and email address. I always use my password so never get them type of emails. I also only get notification of replies if I started the thread.
Either way digital photo frames suck.
@ Dave
and exactly how do you do it dave ? when most of the manufacturing of Taiwan, South Korea and Japan are now outsourced to China. You mind sharing us some tips ? Name some products that has the label "Made in Japan, Made in Taiwan, Made in South Korea" these days.
@ andy.
american made gear are still made in china.
or just get a mac :-)
get a MAC and use it as a photo frame ? no thanks!
Yes I'd sooner have something decent to show my photos on.
or get a photoframe, get a mac, and not have the trojan affect yoru mac. duh.
Wow and who said there were no stupid Mac owners?
ha.. i thought he was mac hatin'. my brain just couldn't process the inanity of that being a literal post.
I use Ubuntu Linux, so I can laugh at Windows users /and/ mac users.
Ha. Ha. Ha.
@ ethana2
I use Ubuntu too, but "Ubuntu Linux picture frame" doesn't really roll off the tongue...
Then again, there's not much point to digital picture frames so we shouldn't really have to worry about it
I use Windows and Linux and laugh at people who install Ubuntu and think that makes them better than Windows users. There's a big difference between installing an OS and knowing how to use/secure it.
Actually, I have an old 15" 800 mhz G4 "Lampshade" iMac and it makes quite a nice digital photo frame. As a bonus, it could show RSS photo feeds, news and weather if I had it connected to the Internet.
(Yes, I realize this could be done a number of different ways but I happened to have the machine, it looks somewhat stylish and it otherwise would have gone unused--for what it's worth I also have a wall full of good old fashioned analog photos)
I think that'll be so pointless... suing someone from China, yeah right. But it's worth a try! :)
It's fine to blame Best Buy. They should have some quality control. Oh, wait...
2112 FTW
I think Best Buy has been framed.
I'd resisted getting one of these for years.
Then my parents, frustrated that we weren't developing digital pictures of their granddaughter fast enough, got us one for the holidays.
The first thing I did was buy a 1GB SD card for it, the first time I saw them on sale for $10 at Office Depot (the frame only came with an anemic 128MB of RAM).
It never even got hooked up to any of our PC's. Just the SD card that came out of the digital camera and went into its slot. Now I'm glad we've kept it in digital isolation.
you might wanna run a virus check on the card ;)
or make sure you're running linux, osx, or windows vista.
viruses are only possible because of three prime aspects of horrible security policy.. vista is the first microsoft product not to exhibit all of them.
Of course, if you want hardware compatibility, ironically enough, you're looking at linux. And if Google keeps up the awesome work on WINE, it may surpass Vista for software compatibility too ;)
I now know what I will be getting my boss when he retires next month.
Gotta love the wooden trojan horse in that pic - do you Engadget guys have too much time on your hands or something?
It just "bypasses" Windows Firewall? Makes it sound so easy.
When will ZoneAlarm come out for 64-bit XP?
Makes it sound easy? It is easy.
You know you're doing something wrong when you even need a firewall.
..well, maybe i have one and just don't know it.
Guys, does Ubuntu come with a firewall?
@ ethana2
Yes, Ubuntu comes with iptables (you just don't know it). You can use Firestarter if you want a GUI for it
I could live with poison in my pet's food...I could live with lead in children's toys...I could even live with poison in MY food...but, this is just too far! This is the last straw! I will not buy anymore junk from China...
Oh wait...I decided not to buy Chinese cr*p long before we knew they were poisoning us, our pets, and our computers.
oh no look at your MP3 player and turn over and read the label of the keyboard you'r typing on right now
Exactly my point...We have let China become our supplier and we are now paying for it many different ways.
You know when you say u don't have any "made in China" in your home, you know that you are lying to yourself and to us also.
Yes, in the last few years, it has become impossible to not buy somethings made in China including my iPod or my computer hardware (which is sad as none of it lasts as long as it did just six or seven years ago). But, that said, I do avoid it as much as possible; given a choice, I will always buy the option not made in China and often I will go without when it is the only option.
The bottom line is that while I have spent the last 10+ years avoiding Chinese cr*p and trying to convince everyone else to do the same, most haven't and now we are all paying the price. My apparently too subtle point in my original post (where I DO NOT claim to own nothing made in China) was to point out that the populace as a whole saw nothing wrong with our stuff being made more and more in China (I debating many a person who thought I was nuts for worrying about it) and that now we are all paying for it (at least those who are willing to eat food made in China or see the need to buy an overpriced picture frame, etc.).
In the end blame, Wal-Mart because they started the trend and pushed their suppliers to go there or loose the business (a trap, I believe, originally set by China). To this day, I avoid buying from China when Possible and everyone should do the same. More so, I am vocal about it to store owners, and if we all were to stand up and say no more, we could start fix this problem. Otherwise, we will just sit here and take until China collapses under the weight of themselves or we collapse because we have no real jobs that can afford all of the Chinese cr*p.
Please excuse me on this matter, as far as i know China did not mass produce anything for the USA back 10 + years ago, only recently stuff are made in China become so prevalent I believe. I don't really agree with what you said, when stuff were made in Taiwan and Korea, it was made fun and joked about in America, and people would say the same thing you're saying right now. I mean if you look at the quality control of each company then you'll see, it is not the label of "made in China" , ask yourself why does a Sony Vaio last much longer than a crappy Dell although both are made in China ? heck don't even need to use Sony Vaio, just take HP for example, it lasts way longer than Dell and yet both are made in China.
Yes, ten years ago stuff was beginning to be made in China - not much of the electronics yet, but the trend had started; and ten years ago was about when Wal-Mart opened their office there.
As for quality...yes, the company can control the quality to some extent, thus why my Mac is superior to the Dell OR the Sony Vaio (I had two $3000 Sony Vaio laptops, both of which were dead, dead, dead within two years). BUT, all of these companies that have screwed lately with tainted food or lead paint or bad dog food all BELIEVED they had good quality control over there and it wasn't enough.
Also, Taiwan has been a tech hotbed for years and Korea has just recently gone from being the place the cr*p was made to a place with better quality control (though still far behind the Japanese). Thailand is another place with better quality control than China. But, in the end, none of these countries possess one other "quality" that dictates that we should avoid Chinese stuff...none of them are our enemy, which in some ways China is. By buying Chinese, we are helping the most over-populated country with a poor human rights record continue their ways; and this is likely to lead to confrontation at some point.
I've got a 32" LCD photo frame (Apple TV).
Really bro? Sweet. I've only got $2,000 :(.
But a picture is definitely worth two grand. Especially when it's not made out of paper and framed in wood and doesn't cost all of $50.
off topic that's pretty annoying it has a remote, what if it gets lost
Nilay, you aren't the only one sick of digital photo frames: http://lowtechtimes.com/2008/02/10/four-reasons-to-choose-old-fashioned-picture-frames-instead-of-digital-picture-frames/
Honestly...Anyone who buys a "digital picture frame" deserves to get a virus.
Haha. I'm just sayin' what we're all thinking.
Anyone who uses software susceptible to viruses deserves to get a virus.
I wonder if those photo things can run X..
..fluxbox, matchbox, or xfce?
Are they ARM?
Another nice present from China:
http://www.theledger.com/article/20080215/NEWS/802150412/1338/news
Wait... kids are still into Pokemon?
Oh, not THAT serious then...
*grabs a Mac/Linux computer and a roll of camera film and runs to a bunker*
Why dont you buy a photo frame produced by a reliable company instead of crap made in china?
can you reformat the digital frame? do these things have an OS or something? if so, why?
seems simpler to hw the display app, rather that have some sort of CPU, I mean, what else could it be used for?
sorry if stupid - i know nothing about these things.
This is the tip of the tip of the iceburg. The Chinese have so much CRAP coming into the United States and other countries. If they were to load their exported electronics equipment with viruses built to attack our infastructure, they could easily take down our electricty, communications, etc.. and a war with the US would then be a much easier one to win. Its quite sad really that noone has thought of this sooner and we all blindly buy Chineese garbage products because they are cheap. The Chineese have a history of cyber warfare and spying, How could anyone not see this coming? I tell you this, it will bite us in the end (no pun intended)
The US government is smarter than you think.
Most of the US military telecom equipments and important equipments are provided by American companies like CISCO.
Someone opined that, "I dont have to worry about my furniture bypassing Windows Firewalls and disabling my antivirus software, now do I?"
Actually that may not turn out to be true. At some point you will probably have a RFID reader in your house. If 1) they embed a RFID tag in their manufactured goods (very likely), and 2) that tag contains even subcomponent of a robust security threat (again, very likely considering that the frame virus was clearly the work of a group, not some hacker at the frame factory), then it may well be a sofa, books, clock or toaster oven that supplies the final code which "hacks" your homes information infrastructure!
Just how awesome is this threat? They can embed lots of it right on your motherboards and microcontrollers--sleeping like a dormant viral gene--ready to be activated when the conditions are right!
well i think we cannot make the generalisation that all made in china is crap though, I am pretty sure if all made in china is crap like people said here then most of us here would have been dead already, not sitting comfortably in front of a "made in china" PC typing on a "made in china" keyboard.
if people here are old enough, we can remember that back in 10 years ago, "made in taiwan" and "made in south korea" were considered the laughing stock of late night television shows.
My uncle has a haier fridge and it's been running for over 5 years now without any problems.
"block more than 100 types of security and anti-virus software" - All I care about.
I'm surprised that this kind of thing happens as rarely as it does, and it's a QC issue, I am sure will be dealt with by firing squad. I want to know more...
At least it's pretty innocuous, that is unless you are loaded with purples.
I'm confused. So the OS of the picture frame has a trojan. How is that going to get to my computer? Does it drop itself into the SD card and then jump onto the hard drive of a computer when it is used to download more photos?
ENGADGET!!! THESE SITE STOLE YOUR POST
http://www.ifiwasamillionaire.com/category/mocmex/
ENGADGET!!! THESE SITE STOLE YOUR POST
http://www.ifiwasamillionaire.com/category/mocmex/
My Ford is better than your Chevy. I like Dale Ernhart. He had a digital picture frame and now he is dead. Too bad he didn't use SuSE or Red Hat. I think VMS is much more practical - no virii there. I buy all my food from China, I pick it up already cooked at the China Wok down on Main St. What a bunch of fools you people are who live on the lower left of the Bell curve.