BravoBug News

Hackers in Austin, Texas broke into a highway road sign and changed its message to read ‘ZOMBIES AHEAD’, according to Texas Department of Transportation officials.

The road sign that was hacked was near the University of Texas in Austin.

Public works spokeswoman Sara Hartley said of the incident, “This sign was broken into, it was not just a ‘walk up and change the sign’ kind of thing. This is a new one for us, we’ve never had it happen before.”

According to the blog i-hacked.com, some commercial road signs, including those manufactured by IMAGO’s ADDCO division, can be easily altered because their instrument panels are frequently left unlocked and their default passwords are not changed.

(Full article here)

BravoBug is proud to announce the release of its newest freeware app for Mac OS X, Blackout. Blackout allows you to dim your Mac’s screen without any adjustment to your monitor’s brightness, color, or calibration settings. While your screen is dimmed, you can work as you normally would: clicks and keystrokes to Blackout’s ’screening window’ are passed through to underlying applications.

Blackout is fully adjustable, and best of all, it’s freeware, available as a universal binary for Mac OS X 10.4 or newer (Intel or PPC). Grab your free copy here.

ComputerWorld has an interesting article on a new Mac trojan that has been found hiding in pirated copies of Apple’s iWorks productivity suite. Users who download this iWork suite and run the installer will unknowingly install this trojan, dubbed ‘iServices.a’, which after installation phones home to a malicious server and awaits further instructions.

I haven’t seen any of these bugs on any of the Macs I’ve tested the game personally on, but if anyone notices any visual glitches, ie, anything that looks strange (such as a white box in the About screen, or similar things), please send me an E-Mail with some info on your Mac and what you’re seeing, I would really like to fix any of these bugs that might be in the game.

Thanks for your help!

I’m reminded how nice it is to be a Mac user.

(Ars technica link: Conficker worm spikes, infects 1.1 million PCs in less than 24 hours)

Latest BravoBug sale!

In light of the fact that that the economy seems to be taking a nosedive, and times are tough for many people (myself included), I decided to launch the Hard Times sale today, slashing prices on both MBB3K and IconBurglar – and EasyBatch’s Christmas price is still staying the same, too. So if you’ve been looking to register one of these apps and haven’t yet, now’s definitely the time! Thank you for supporting independent Mac developers like BravoBug!

Cheers,
-Matt Reagan

This is a website that generates those mosaic images based on thousands of tiny photographs, and when you stand back or squint your eyes you can see the original image in the mosaic. Love these things!

http://www.click7.org/image-mosaic-generator/?

Trailers for Living in the Shadow of the Moon-Dog: A South Pole Diary. I thought these were really cool, this looks like a fantastic documentary which I’m going to get as soon as it’s released. Apparently it is still in the editing phase so the full movie isn’t available yet. But check out these trailers below.

New to the BravoBug family of Mac apps is RainbowText, a simple, silly, but fun app for Mac OS X 10.5 that allows you to add colorful gradients to any text. Spice up emails, colorize word docs, and more. RainbowText can even generate HTML or save your text as an RTF.

RainbowText is freeware. Grab your free download here.

Mega BrickBash 3000 was selected as an Apple.com Staff Pick today. To celebrate this prestigious honor, BravoBug is putting MBB3K on sale while it’s a hot new front-page release. As such, the online store has been changed – a single user license is now $20, a savings of %16.

Thanks for downloading and thank you for supporting BravoBug’s work!

UDPATE: Sorry to those of you who re-visited the page for the online store and saw the flip-flopping price, it happened while we updated the page. Thank you for visiting and thanks again for your support!