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Filed under: Security, iPhone

Jailbroken iPhones in Australia getting Rickrolled by a worm

If the possibility of having your jailbroken iPod Touch or iPhone held ransom for 5 Euros wasn't enough of a scare to make you change your root password, maybe this will. Users on an Australian forum site are reporting a new attack - one that's no stranger to love.

You guessed it, the newest attack on jailbroken devices is a wallpaper Rickroll. Along with Rick Astley's devilishly handsome headshot, the image also includes the message "ikee is never gonna give you up."

It's actually a pretty tame attack. There are no reports in the forum of sounds being replaced with that all-to-familiar opening verse or repeated, mind-numbing video assaults.

At least one variation has also popped up. In addition to Astley, one user commented that his image had been changed to a New England Patriots logo.

The moral of the story?

If you jailbreak your iPhone or iPod Touch, make sure you change the root password to something other than alpine so you can avoid the shenanigans.

Filed under: Weekend Review

Download Squad Week in Review

DLS logoBeen so busy waiting for your American Airlines flight to actually take off that you haven't had time to catch up on the week's other news? Wait, that doesn't make sense. You've had nothing but time on your hands. Aww, whatever. Here are some of our favorite stories from the past week. No excuses necessary.

Flickr launches video uploads

We've been expecting Flickr to add a video upload feature to the online photo sharing site for some time now. But we never would have guessed that when it finally arrived, Flickr users would be limited to uploading videos of 90 seconds or less. Flickr's justifying the move by saying the clips should be seen as long photos, not YouTube-style content. But that hasn't stopped Flickr traditionalists from forming and anti-video group and starting a petition asking Flickr to withdraw the feature.

Organize your music collection with TagScanner

Have a few thousand music files scattered around your hard drive and need a good way to organize them? While iTunes, Windows Media Player, and several other music players will help you edit your music's metadata to add things like artist names and song and album titles, TagScanner is probably the easiest music tagger for Windows we've ever seen. And it's free to boot.

Read more →

Filed under: Audio, Internet, web 2.0

The Mets have been Rickrolled, fans not particularly happy


Your voices have been heard. And by you, we mean the faceless mob that is the internet, not baseball fans who actually attend Mets games at New York's Shea Stadium. Last week, the team asked fans to vote in an internet poll on the song they'd like to hear during the 8th inning sing-a-long for the rest of the year. And some Digg, Fark, and other users decided it would be funny to write in "Never Gonna Give You Up" by Rick Astley. (Note, this does not count as a Rickroll, because you absolutely know what you're getting if you click on that link... unless we decided to link to something else. Only one way to find out).

Apparently Mr. Astley's pop tune got the most votes and the Mets played the song during last night's season opener. But the Mets have decided that you can't trust anything you read on the internet, especially poll results. So the team will be playing the top 6 songs once per game for the first six games of the season to see which one the actual fans in the stadium like the best. Judging by the booing in the fan-made videos floating around YouTube, we're going to go out on a limb and assume that last night may have been the last time anyone will hear "Never Gonna Give You Up" at Shea.

[via Techdirt]

Filed under: Fun, Internet, web 2.0

Want to Rickroll the New York Mets and fans for the rest of the year?

rickrolling the new york mets
In what could only be described as genius and wonderful, a web user submitted the recent NY Mets song contest to Digg, asking Digg users to enter Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up." The winning song will be played as a sing-a-long during the 8th inning of at the Shea stadium for the rest of the year.

During this year's April Fool's Day, YouTube "Rickrolled" -- as its called -- every user that clicked on a "Featured" video on its front page. Rickrolling refers to getting unsuspecting victims to watch or listen to "Never Gonna Give You Up." There were several efforts that linked to YouTube vidoes of the music video on April 1st, but getting a giant crowd to sing it on a regular basis for the rest of the year is... well, ridiculous. Here's to supporting ridiculousness.

Note: The dancing in the video is also ridiculous, and if you happen to need an extra identity (hey, some of us don't like being counted only once), the fake name generator is always good to go.

Filed under: Internet, Web services

NSFW.in is like TinyURL for pages you wouldn't want your boss to see

NSFW.in
There's no shortage of services that let you convert long URLs into tiny ones. But there's one major problem with most URL shortening services: they make it tough to figure out exactly what you're clicking on. While this comes in handy if you're up for a little harmless rickrolling, if you share a NSFW (not safe for work) link over email, your blog, or Twitter, be prepared for some angry comments.

NSFW.in solves this problem by shortening your link and directing visitors to a warning page before pulling up the original link. On the off chance that you don't know what NSFW stands for, NSFW.in also makes it fairly clear that the site you're about to visit might not be something you want your co-workers to catch you looking at.

[via Digital Inspiration]

Featured Time Waster

Graveyard Shift - zombie-busting Time Waster

With Halloween fast approaching, it's a great time to get in some practice defending your territory against zombies. In Graveyard Shift, you take aim at zombies and other creepy-crawlies, blasting them into splatters of cartoony green guts. It's a casual first-person shooter, and it's very easy to get the hang of - use the mouse to aim, click to fire. Graveyard Shift has at least 15 levels, and it might even have some secret stages I haven't unlocked yet. They key to getting good at Graveyard Shift is learning to use ...

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