If you're looking forward to Halloween, it's coming up in a couple days -- and there will probably be plenty of zombies roaming around your front lawn (if you have a front lawn). Just give them some candy when they come to your door, and they'll go away. If they keep coming back, start handing out rolls of pennies, maybe? Here are a few zombie-related links to help you prepare for this Wednesday.

• Some zombies aren't the undead, they're just unthinking folks who might be "in the zone" and focused on other things. Aren't we all zombies in a way? [url]
• ZAICO is the Zombie Apocalypse Insurance Company for all your post-apocalyptic needs. Don't get caught unprepared -- but maybe choose a low deductible plan because cash might be a bit tight after the zombies take over. [url]
• A mathematical model of how zombies spread tells us that we need to deal with the zombie apocalypse quickly or else things will get out hand rapidly and bring the end of civilization as we know it. But how would different kinds of international relations policies deal with a zombie threat? [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.

Since it's Halloween, there are probably a lot of folks dressed up like zombies. But as we've mentioned before, Mother Nature has created a few of her own actual zombies. Here are just a few more examples.

• Did you know that the government sprays a baculovirus into the forest that can cause gypsy moth caterpillars to act reckless and even suicidal? The virus infects the caterpillars, takes over their molting genes, and re-programs the zombie caterpillars to liquify and rain contagious bodily fluids down upon other gypsy moth larvae. [url]
• North American wood frogs can survive being partially frozen (up to 70 percent of their internal water turned to ice) and twitch back to life. The frogs can stay in suspended animation for about 4 weeks, and it takes them about a day to thaw out and return to the living world. [url]
• Ants in Borneo have been found with a curious ability to explode and spew a sticky yellow glue over their enemies. The lethal sticky substance can take out other insect invaders and protect an ant colony from attack. [url]
• European paper wasps, infected by parasites, are turned into zombies that leave their hive to gather with other zombie wasps -- so that the parasites can mate. Wasps with female parasites become crazy queen wasps that fly off to infect more wasps. [url]
• To discover more interesting biological curiosities, check out what's currently floating around the StumbleUpon universe. [url]  

By the way, StumbleUpon can recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

There are plenty of zombie movies where viruses decimate the human population with diseases that turn infected hosts into crazy, blood-thirsty undead bodies. Biotech research reports (and maybe even the CDC!) make some of the premises for these zombie movies sound plausible, but mother nature itself has created a few zombie phenomena as well. Here are just some examples.

• Toxoplasma gondii infects rodents, cats.. and people -- possibly causing weird behaviors and strange culture quirks. The Happening has already happened, sort of. [url]
• Fungus-controlled ants are compelled by their mold-masters to die in nice neighborhoods for spores to thrive. These ants are programmed to die on north-facing plant leaves, roughly 25 centimeters off the ground, in an area with 94-95% humidity and a temperature between 20-30 Celsius. [url]
• A wasp's venom can turn a cockroach into a "dog on a leash." The wasp ends up laying eggs in the belly of its cockroach-pet -- and the wasp young eat their way out. [url]
• Another kind of wasp lays its eggs in an orb spider, and the larvae control the spider to build a special web for them. Is there a Spiderman villan based on this wasp? [url]
• To discover more interesting biological curiosities, check out what's currently floating around the StumbleUpon universe. [url]  

By the way, StumbleUpon can recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

It's probably not all that exciting to blog for the Center for Disease Control (CDC) blog. It's probably not always easy to get attention from your everyday reader. So, kudos to the CDC for having a bit of a sense of humor in figuring out a good way to get its message on emergency preparedness out to folks who might never otherwise be compelled to look at the blog. It had Assistant Surgeon General Ali Khan explain to people how to prepare for (and hopefully survive) the Zombie Apocalypse:

There are all kinds of emergencies out there that we can prepare for. Take a zombie apocalypse for example. That’s right, I said z-o-m-b-i-e a-p-o-c-a-l-y-p-s-e. You may laugh now, but when it happens you’ll be happy you read this, and hey, maybe you’ll even learn a thing or two about how to prepare for a real emergency.

And, from there it goes into general disaster preparedness, at times relating it back to the impending zombie invasion. We do plenty of complaining about bad government actions around here, but I say kudos for not releasing just a totally bland (it does get a bit dry in the middle) disaster preparedness blog post, but instead, for coming up with a good way to get the info out there that might actually spread (in a good way...).

Amelia Andersdotter alerted us to a story coming out of South Korea, where there's an ongoing effort to pass a "Zombie PC Prevention Act," which would require every citizen to install special "security software," on their computers. But, some are worried about the unintended (or secretly intended?) consequences of such an act. The Korean government will officially designate which security solutions are allowed, leading to questions about what might be in or not be in such software. On top of that, this law also has quite a backdoor for government agencies to spy on pretty much any company, because it would empower the Korean Communications Commission to "examine the details of the business, records, documents and others" of anyone, without a warrant, based merely on the suspicion that an employee or the company as a whole did not use such mandated security software.

An interesting sidenote in all of this is that just as the push to pass this Zombie PC Prevention Act came about, suddenly a hard-drive destroying malware started making the rounds, and some have noted that it acts in a manner that doesn't make any sense when you look at typical malware. Instead, it acts sort of like a "zombie," but whereas typical zombies try to remain hidden, this one does a lot to make itself known. The suggestion -- though, admittedly, with little proof -- is that perhaps someone has released such an attack in order to build up support for the law.

That may be too much of a conspiracy theory for some, but it is still worrisome that the government might mandate a particular brand of security software. It's obviously a good thing, in general, for people to secure their computers, and to try to ward off malware such as zombies. But should it really be the government's job to step in and mandate what software you put on your computer?

ReallyEvilCanine alerts us to the news that the game Plants vs. Zombies has decided to change its dancing zombie, because Michael Jackson's estate complained that the zombie looked too much like Jackson. It's true. The zombie is obviously designed to look like Michael Jackson, and my guess (details are lacking) is that the estate threatened a publicity rights claim over the use: This seems pretty silly. Publicity rights rules were put in place to try to stop people from thinking a famous person had endorsed a product. I can't see how anyone could have possibly thought that Michael Jackson or the Jackson estate had endorsed this particular game, or the dancing zombie Jackson.

Last year we wrote about how rival online scammer gangs had their botnets fighting each other by disabling trojans of competing botnets on their computers -- but it appears that some researchers have a different idea for creating a "good" botnet to fight the "bad" botnets being used for denial of service attacks (found via Slashdot). This is quite different than some older proposals to create "good worms" that go about automatically patching infected machines (which are wide open to abuse). Instead, the idea is rather creative. It involves setting up a distributed system of computers that effectively act as a way station for connect requests -- which then wait for the actual server to request the inbound requests. This prevents the server from being overloaded (though, I would imagine it could slow down access somewhat). Either way, it's nice to see efforts under way to stop such zombie botnets. Hopefully someone isn't sitting on a patent for such an idea and waiting to sue, like we've seen with other security measures.

Over the last few years, we've all heard stories about how organized crime groups have taken to using botnets of "zombied" computers to run all sorts of scams and spam campaigns. ISPs have been somewhat slow to react. While they try to use fairly blunt instruments, like cutting off certain ports, many don't seem to have a very good process in place for tracking down and stopping customers whose machines have become unwitting members in a botnet. In fact, security researchers are growing frustrated that when they come across evidence of a hijacked computer, ISPs don't respond at all when told that a customer is causing trouble. There certainly are a few ISPs that are careful to help get rid of botnets, doing things like quarantining or cutting off certain users from their internet access until their machines are cleaned up, but most of the bigger ISPs don't appear to do very much at all. Of course, there is the other side of this story -- which is that when ISPs may be too proactive, it can often snag people whose machines aren't actually doing anything wrong. But, it certainly seems like completely ignoring reports with evidence of a botnet may be going to the opposite extreme.