Shameless Words from Shameless Geeks

In the words of the great shameless geek (as he sits in a chair on the other side of the room) “this is as bad as a bad 80’s Schwarzenegger movie".

And trust me, it’s bad (and hilarious).

Over at Readwriteweb they post an article about the partnership forming between Facebook and AOL. Perhaps if they hadn’t used the keywords “Facebook” and “login", this mess never would have happened…

But they did, and sure enough, the very first commenter is asking to be allowed to log in to Facebook. And by comment five users are getting furious that Readwriteweb Facebook will not let them log in. I haven’t read through all the comments, but my personal favorite so far is #24: “What have they done now. It’s not simple enough for me to figure out.”

Simple enough, indeed.

Just when you thought it was safe to SCO into the water, Along comes a Singapore company trying squeeze free money out of the internet. If you check out their web site, you’ll see that they actually seem to believe their claims.

From what I can see, the patent is a useless combination of prior art containing nothing worthy of exclusive rights. Nearly all of it refers to things that have been in use since the early nineties. There is some tiny little chance that they may get away with patenting the idea of returning search engine results in the form of images on a “conveyer belt slide show", but the rest of the claims will blow the whole thing out of the water.

The odd thing is that the company has sent out invoices in an attempt to charge people for using an image link. It’s more than a little bit silly to claim rights to something that was part of a specification long before you filed your patent. It’s about as intelligent as trying to collect usage fees from every automobile driver in the country because you designed a car.

SCO for it boys!

Sometimes, you see a headline and you just have to shake your head. It looks like spam king Alan Ralsky may go to jail for various charges including “pump and dump” stock price manipulation. Does this mean that I will no longer get 15 spammails a day telling me to invest in some whacked-out Chinese stock? I sure hope so.

Hopefully, Mr. Ralsky will get paid back for all of his sleazy deeds… and his lawyer will to.

Here’s news of a SEO (Search Engine Optimization) scheme that was pushing the page rank of malware sites up to the top of the list. As everyone know, the higher the page is on the list, the more clicks it gets (and the more clicks it gets, the higher it goes on the list… but that’s another story). The most remarkable thing about this story is the sheer size of it. There were hundreds of ‘bots seeding the internet with 40,000 malware sites. That’s a lot of nasties to watch for.

Be careful about swimming in the Internet pool. The sharks will never go away.

Today, Google promised to cut or offset it’s greenhouse emissions by the end of the year.

OK… The idea of cutting your greenhouse emissions is just fine. Though the debate about the magnitude of the greenhouse effect is still raging, there is nothing wrong with cutting emissions. The concept of “offsetting” emissions by doing something environmentally friendly doesn’t cause me any heartburn either.

My problem is that you can get away with paying someone to remove the responsibility of your environmental damage by throwing money at them. The whole thing reminds me of all of the illegal dumping of toxic waste that happened years ago. Do you remember how that turned out?

If you say that illegal dumping and carbon offsets aren’t similar, let me remind you of a few things. The illegal dumping occurred primarily when a disreputable hauler would promise a “reputable” company to dispose of their toxic waste at a price lower than anyone else would. The price was so low that everyone knew that it wasn’t realistic, but the “reputable” company paying for the disposal didn’t question their good fortune. In the end, the waste got dumped in a local lake.

So… we now have a system where a major greenhouse gas emitter can pay someone to “offset” his greenhouse gases. Do you think he’ll go for the lowest price he can find? Do you think he’ll bother to do more than a cursory check on the company he deals with? Can I sell you some carbon offsets? I think that the only thing green about this scheme is the money that a few corporate jerks are going to use to line their pockets.

For those of you who are parents: How often do you let your kids go unsupervised on the internet? How many have computers in their room (and are they capable of going online?)

I know we let Shameless on unsupervised (A bad move, we know. We’re sorry.), but does the same hold true for parents with kids less than 6 ft. tall?

I’m asking because I’m very worried that parents today are viewing their child’s ability to go online as a right rather than a privilege. So I figuured I’d ask a slightly-more-informed group.

Thank you and back to your regularly scheduled “Geek-don’t-have-kids-they-don’t-have-***!” (fill in your own blank =P)

*Places down Soapbox and jumps on top of it*

Blogger geeks beware! If you have the wrong interests listed on your livejournal account, you might be eligible for deletion without prior warning.

On May 29th, hundreds of livejournal users woke up to find either their personal journals, or community journals they were watching/members of, gone without any sort of warning. Letters sent to these members later claimed that their journals were deleted due to violation of the TOS. Later, more than one member of the LJ abuse team admitted that they were sent lists of journals with certain keywords that needed to be deleted. This was because, according to their legal team, listing certain activities could be seen as the promotion of those activities, and if LJ knew and didn’t respond then they would become legally liable. They were not allowed, however, to admit who came up with these lists. (More below - Cut for length and possibly offensive topics)

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The recent flurry of online video deals is looks like it may be a good thing for all. All of the deals in advance of Google’s rumored takeover of YouTube.com involve large content owners offering their content for online viewing or downloading. Hopefully, this will lead to RIAA drying up and blowing away.

Whoa! Here’s a surprise! Congress has effectively wiped out online gambling in the US in a single stroke. It did this by making it illegal for banks and credit card companies to make payments to online gambling sites.

I haven’t had a chance to think too much about this development, and I’m not sure how I feel about it. Here are the Pros and Cons:

Pros:

• Because US companies were excluded, all revenues were streamed directly out of the country. Now, the playing field is level… off-limits to all
• There is nobody watching over these companies. Gambling in the US is closely monitored, not only for the generation of revenue, but also to make sure that the games are fair. Only God really knows if these outfits are honest… The rest of us believe that they aren’t.
• After cheap drugs and manhood-expanders, spam from these online gambling sites is some of the worst net-clogging garbage on the planet. Lets hope that the demise of the gambling sites is followed by the demise of the hackers and online scumbags that they were supporting. It would be nice to have fewer blog spamments to delete from the queue every week from now on.

Cons:

• I really hate the idea of the US government getting it’s nose into the Internet so deeply. Governments in general, and the US in particular, have a long history of ridiculously ineffective management of things. If they get their hooks in too far, we’ll all have to dig up our old 2400 Baud modems.
• This bill was tacked onto legislation that was supposed to help keep our seaports safe. Irrelevant attachments on good legislation are disgusting in the extreme. If the law is good, it will stand on its own.
• Prohibiting a vice only drives it underground. Does anyone recall the history of the US in the 1930’s?

In the end, online gaming probably will not disappear altogether. Hopefully, it will come back in a way that is more fair to all concerned.

There is a lot of buzz out there about Spiralfrog and their free ad-sponsored download service scheduled to come online by Christmas. I wouldn’t have considered this a serious possibility if it hadn’t been for the fact that it is backed by Vivendi, one of the big boys in the music biz.

There is lots of opinion on both sides of this story about whether it is good for music or not. For my part, I think it’s just a sign that the digital world is finally catching up with reality. If you look at it, this is nothing more than good, old-fashioned radio. One major difference: you won’t have some wiseass DJ slinging inane humor in your direction.

Details of the project are still somewhat sketchy, so I’m not sure how they intend to monetize the downloads. It does, however, look like it is a least a step in the right direction.

Mozilla Corp is patching 13 major Firefox flaws via it’s auto-update facility. Judging by the look of the flaws, I would advise everyone to allow the update to happen. The update takes Firefox to version 1.5.0.5, and fixes some rather nasty cross-scripting vulnerabilities. If this one doesn’t happen automagically for you, then I would advise going to www.mozilla.com and updating manually.

Kind of a twist to see Firefox with critical vulnerabilities. I guess Microsoft is becoming a reasonable alternative to Firefox after all

Firefox usage has increased to 15% in the US, 12% worldwide. The really good news is that adoption is starting to pick up speed again after a long period of stagnant growth. It’s clear that Firefox as a product is more than competitive with IE. Now all we can do is hope that it will someday be a true market competitor.

The next big thing on the net will probably be Google Checkout. I’ve always been afraid of Google taking all of the air out of online services, and this move does nothing to calm that fear. However, I would probably feel safer trusting my personal info to a large company under constant scrutiny than to a no-name web vendor that could possible be a phisher site. In the end, It will probably help all online businesses, but most especially the little guys.

So… Somebody please explain to me why a company that is being sued by MPAA is now suing them for hacking? This is one of those cases where you wonder where integrity has gone to.

On one side we have a company that is showing people how to obtain illegal merchandise… an Internet fence, if you will. They are now claiming that an operative who was sent to spy on them had a change of heart and is making amends by turning in his co-conspirator.

On the other side, you have a group of promoters and lawyers who (laughably) describe themselves as advocates for artists. This group routinely attacks children and un-knowing grandma’s in the quest for an easy buck, yet claims that they would never stoop to hacking.

Sorry. I see nothing but offenders in this fight. These kinds of things actually lend credibility to those wackos who want to bring back sterilization as a criminal punishment. I find myself hoping that none of these people produce offspring.

Here’s one that caught me by surprise: Internet giant AOL purchased Lightningcast Inc. today. That may seem like a small thing to most people, but I was once employee number 28 there. It’s good to hear that all of that hard work paid off for someone, even if it wasn’t me.

20-year-old botmaster Jeanson James Ancheta was sentenced to 5 years in prison for taking over a bunch of computers. Seems to me that punishment is fair enough, but we need to prosecute a whole lot more of these annoying script kiddies before spam volumes will drop significantly.

Speaking of spam… has anyone else noticed that it is mostly sent in Engrish lately? I’m not talking about those that disguise words so that they don’t trigger filters, I’m talking about those that are filled with strange Engrish words and structure. Some of them are actually entertaining, though I don’t think that a lot of people are going to trust an email from someone who doesn’t bother to have his sentence structure proofread by a native English speaker. Oh well. Nobody ever accused spammers of excess intelligence.

Mozilla has released Firefox 1.5.0.3, which fixes a recently revealed bug that may enable a hacker to take over a system. As far as I can tell, the risk was fairly low, and the most likely result was a crash not a takeover.

Even at a low risk, a takeover bug is always worth squashing. I would suggest that everyone take the time to upgrade. I’ve just updated my work machine, and I’ll let you know if I see any problems.

Sorry, I couldn’t pass this one up. While surfing the web, I came across an extraterrestrial Armageddon reference at FiringSquad.com that I have to pass on.

It seems as if a crop circle last year was meant to warn George Bush that, if he adopted a nuclear first-strike policy, pieces of a comet would hit the earth and destroy all life. All of this was revealed to a former French air traffic controller in a vision. If this doesn’t sound like clocks striking the hour (for the slow: Cuckoo! Cuckoo!) and this guy doesn’t sound like a duck talking (again for the slow: Quack! Quack!), then we aren’t reading the same article.

My question to the learned… former air traffic controller Jean Ederman… er… sorry… Eric Julian is: Can I talk you into sharing those drugs? This is the most masterful mixing of mysticism, politics, and pseudo-science that I’ve ever seen. You managed to squeeze the war in Iraq, Bush hatred, prescience, Extra Terrestrials, and the plot from the movie Armageddon into a very entertaining package. I can’t help but believe that you had some chemical assistance with it.

Well, sorta. Though the President himself may not have been the target, Air Force One was the subject of an elaborate and expensive internet prank. Ya gotta love someone with that much money to waste. The only thing that puzzles me is that they probably could have done the same thing by modifying stock footage. Renting and re-painting a jumbo jet seems a lot more expensive.

According to the IAB, online advertising increased 30% in 2005, up for the third year in a row.

The company that benefits the most at the moment is probably Google. Judging by the ShamelessGeeks account there, they don’t seem to have to pay much for the clickthroughs. Aside from the fact that many clickthroughs generate no income at all for the publisher, Google has a minimum pay out of $100. That means that small publishers, accruing clickthroughs at the rate of 1 or 2 a day, will have to wait years before they get anything at all. As an example, this site, with a typical clientele of a few hundred visits per day, has generated a total of $27.34 in 18 months. That means I can expect my first check in October of 2010. With that in mind, how many small sites will be around long enough to ever collect anything from Google?

If you were one of the 3 people in the world who believed that adware companies were just innocent little guys trying to make a living, here is a TechWorld article about some of the hardball tactics used in the adware world. Some of the stuff they have been accused of is pretty awful.

I disagree with some of the conclusions of the author. I believe he is right when he says that adware will probably end up going underground once their tactics are brought into the light. However, Unlike the author, I believe that these companies really do know how evil they are. Otherwise, why would they hide their actions?

The Beast of Redmond is showing it’s human side again. Microsoft’s Coding4Fun page has a few suggestions for how to play an April Fool’s prank using a computer. Some of you may remember that ShamelessGeeks.com was the victim of a sick practical joke by the very same people last year. The whole thing caused a significant amount of psychological damage to both of me, and we hope it is never repeated.

It looks like Google will be required to turn over a small amount of data in order to help the government in a child pornography case. The American public should be annoyed at both sides of this dispute. They should be annoyed at the Bush administration for forcing the data out of Google, and they should be annoyed at Google for giving in to the Chinese government, but not the US government.

On the one hand, the feds are trying to crack into the privacy policies of Google… not to mention the other web companies out there. Obviously, nobody wants to see a child pornographer go free. However, if we start giving in to big brother now, where will it stop?

On the other hand, we have a big company that gives in to a government that threatens to cut off it’s market, but squeals loudly for it’s consumers when there is no danger that taking a stand will lose them business. It’s nice of them to think of their consumers, but their altruism is in question. I don’t see “courage of convictions” here, just commerce.

Dulles VA based AOL is suing three international groups in the first test of Virginia’s anti-phishing law. Phishing is a tremendous annoyance in that it not only generates huge amounts of spam, the spam contains links to malicious websites that can ruin your life.

Kudo’s to the Virginia legal system for trying to make our life better. I’m glad to see that my state government is doing something useful.

This time, it looks like THG and AnandTech are having a very public fight… well at least their successors and proxies are. I read the reviews on both sites, then only listen to what they tell me NOT to buy. Some I pass on to you, some I don’t. If you’ll notice, I’ve been passing fewer and fewer on.

It’s a shame, but the the tech press is drifting into the same state that radio did during the 1950’s. The public is starting to pay attention to them, and those with the most to gain from their opinions are starting to notice that. If you’ll remember, this era in the radio biz brought us the “payola” scandals that dragged many down in shame.

Currently, there are an awful lot of payola-like accusations being thrown around. I can’t say for sure whether or not they are true, but I have noticed an awful lot of biased reporting going on. Rest assured that ShamelessGeeks doesn’t get paid for our opinions about anything. In fact, nobody has ever paid us a dime for anything. Period. We have only gotten one game and one anime DVD from manufacturers, and those ended up with mediocre (and honest) reviews.

The funny thing about this whole fight is that, on the surface, it is about nothing. The whole thing looks more like an attempt to boost readership through controversy than any attempt for either to smear or clear the other. If you’ll read the posts, you’ll notice that they are slinging mud at each other because they are incenses about… nothing of importance.

The fight does have one valuable thing about it… It is extremely entertaining. Go ahead and check out the posts, even though they are just a cheap attempt to boost the hit count. It’s really funny how juvenile some people can be.

In some ways, I wish someone out there would pick a fight with ShamelessGeeks like this. It would certainly boost the hit count. Then again, it won’t boost the non-existent revenue, so who cares?

Move over 12-Step program! China now has a hospital ward for internet addicts, where they’re denied use of both the internet and phones for a 20-day period.

I doubt such a method would ever come to the US - geeks everywhere would decry it as “cruel and unusual punishment” under the Constitution. Too bad, because if it did I could send my parents there. XD

In a major turnabout, the US Congress actually did something that the American people can agree with. The US House of Representatives spoke out against Internet censorship in an effort to chastise four large companies about their recent deals with the Chinese government.

Though it was a refreshing change from the usual partisan bickering about who said what about who, they still have a long way to go before they can be expected to actually accomplish anything that the people want. We’re all waiting patiently for the day when Congress can do something useful, but it probably won’t happen in our lifetime. But still… baby steps are good.

Well, half of the inevitable has happened. US companies have started to filter traffic to China, bowing to the totalitarian regime’s wishes. Of course, Google, Microsoft, and all of the other web companies have their “justification” that censorship is a necessary evil. Unfortunately for them, I think it will bite them in the end (pun intended) when the other half of the inevitable happens.

Eventually, the filtering will become a moot point. The growing affluence of the Chinese people will increase the size of this task exponentially as more and more people get connected. In addition, the people will become increasingly curious about the forbidden fruits that are being held from them, and will seek ways around the filters. Once that point is reached, the whole scheme will get overwhelmed.

In the end, when the censorship has collapsed, the Internet companies will have a hard time convincing us that limiting free speech was a good idea, no matter what it meant to their bottom line. Free speech is something that free people hold dear… especially bloggers.

This isn’t really news to most of us, but I thought you might enjoy it. The first IE7 Beta 2 bug reported was found in 15 minutes by a guy running a “fuzzer” program. Classic.

For those unfamiliar with the term “fuzzer", it refers to a program that tests another program by feeding it random input. Running such a program should be part of the test procedure for any commercially available software.

Fuzzers aren’t hard to create, and there is no excuse for a company as large as MS to fail to use one.

Bill Gates spoke out against Internet censorship at a Lisbon, Portugal forum today. Thank you, Captain Obvious. In Mr. Gates’s defense, his statement was far better than coming out in favor of censorship.

The whole thing was obviously in response to the heat that some large western companies are taking for the recent shutdown of free speech in China. Though his sentiment was good, nobody with 2 or more contiguous brain cells in their head believes that Microsoft was in favor of this. Bill’s time is better spent on his humanitarian missions than on trying to explain something that everybody already understands.

It looks like Google has decided not to hand search records to the Bush administration. This action comes after some of the other big search engines (MSN, Yahoo! and AOL) gave in to the g-men and turned over unspecified search records.

I’m not one of the tin-foil hat crowd, but I think that there is something a bit nefarious about demanding search records. If, as promised, there is no personal information included in these records, exactly what information can be gained from them that can’t be found in other places? Usually, I’m a little suspicious of the actions of a big company, but this time I think Google is in the right.

Researchers in Ottawa have found that web users decide whether they like the looks of a web page in less than a blink of the eye. or around 1/20th of a second. It really doesn’t matter how long they stare at it afterward, the opinion stays the same. It also doesn’t matter whether they are shown the same page a second time… the opinion stays constant. Now if only they would tell me exactly what I can do to avoid putting people off, I’d be happy.

Since you’ve gotten this far, I’ll take it that you like old pipes.

I thought CNET was supposed to be a “high tech” news outlet. So why are they warning about a practice that has been used for years?

In a recent post News.com.com brought up the evil specter of companies using blogosphere “shills” to promote their own products and pan the competitors. Anyone who has read more than 1 blog in the past few years knows that this has become common practice. Between the sweetheart advertising deals and the direct purchase of blog space, this whole concept has been done to death. The only problem I see with the whole thing is that CNET is just catching on. I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to decide what that implies.

Even though it is up significantly this year, online shopping hasn’t killed the shopping mall. As the article states, it appears to have changed it a bit, but it hasn’t taken more than a few percent of the business away.

I’m glad of that, even though I was never much of a mall rat. It gives me someplace to send the Mrs. while I’m shopping online

Want to know who to blame for your deluge of spam? According to TechWorld, London is the zombie capital of the world, and the UK is the most infected country. So the next time that you feel like complaining about all of the garbage in your inbox, just console yourself with the fact that much of it is imported from Britain.

I’m guessing the BOFH had a lot to do with this

Hang on to your hats, folks. Someone has released a worm that presents fake search results if you mis-type www.google.com. The worm itself doesn’t seem to harm the machine or OS. It’s only purpose is to put a few bogus entries on the first page of results.

Even though this one seems kinda clever and innocuous, the guy who came up with it should still be stomped into oblivion. I don’t know of anyone who wants an outside party messing with their hosts file and intercepting web searches. Also… as anyone whos has been hit by a worm knows, these things usually commandeer a large percentage of available badnwidth for spreading the disease. The innocuous ones always seem to mutate into something nastier, too.

Google has added a button to the map of New Orleans that allows you to toggle between pre and post Katrina maps. All you need to do is follow the previous link and click back and forth between the buttons labeled “Satellite” and “Katrina". It does a good job of illustrating just how devastating the flood was. Thanks to TheRegister.com for the heads up.

I guess my Dad was right. There is no honor among thieves. According to Reuters, some of the worms in the recent rash of malware have the ability to remove competitors. This is leading to a ‘bot war’ with several rival gangs of virus writers competing to create the largest zombie army. It really doesn’t matter who wins the competition… Everybody will lose the fight, even the virus writers.

How do you cause a geek to have mixed feelings? Show him a story about Microsoft winning a lawsuit against a spammer, even if it is technically just a settlement.

Geeks are almost universally anti-spammer. But then, who isn’t? A vast majority of geeks also believe that Microsoft has too big of a stranglehold on the software industry, and that handing them windfall profits from litigation is a bad thing. Hence the mixed feelings.

So… It’s lucky that Microsoft got this settlement. I was afraid that they wouldn’t make any profits this year, and that Redmond WA would become a ghost town. Yeah, right.

I’m really not sure what to make of this… but the non-profit Mozilla foundation has spawned off a corporate stepchild. It isn’t without precedent… Apache and Cygnus are similar concepts… I’m just worried that a big, public switch from an Open Source ideology to a corporate mentality will result in further mass defections to the dark side.

Just to be clear… nobody in the Open Source community has suggested that the “Open” adjective be removed, but I fear that it is coming. As these folks get more and more profitable, and thus more and more accountable to stockholders, the concept of exclusivity will get more and more attractive.

If you need any examples of this type of thing happening, just take a look at Microsoft. In the late 80’s and early 90’s, it was common knowledge that Microsoft would “never, never, ever copy protect their software". Though that is, very strictly speaking, still true, is it really true in practice? The original concept was that joe everyuser would take home a corporate copy of the software, install it on his machine and get addicted. It’s not a new strategy. It has been used by drug dealers for ages. The strategy worked… only too well. Now most corporations are so addicted to Windows that they can never break free.

Linux, Mozilla, Apache and other OSS packages were created by a dedicated community that had the high ideal of providing a publicly owned code base that everyone could build on. It would be terrible if big money started exercising control over something like that. It would be even worse if we found out that we were just fooled by a different kind of drug dealer.

Here’s one for all of the web-addicted geeks out there (like me). If you are looking for something a little different, check out Google Moon, Googles new out-of-this-world map service. It comes complete with all of the Apollo lunar landing sites marked.

Here’s a tip: if you zoom all of the way in, you’ll find out what the moon is really made of.

UPDATE:
If you follow the links on all of the pages, you will eventually end up reading about job opportunities with Google on the moon, how they generate oxygen for their facilities, and other really useful knowledge. I won’t spoil it with details, but I heartily suggest that you browse around the pages. Somebody spent a good deal of time creating some really unique geek humor.

Many thanks to Drog for the heads-up.

Get ‘em while they’re hot! Mozilla.org has released Firefox 1.0.6 and Thunderbird 1.0.6. The new versions were released to fix compatibility problems with the 1.0.5 releases, which were themselves released to fix security issues. It’s nice of Mozilla to do the mea culpa thing again, but it’s getting a little old. I’m guessing that there are a few red faces out at Mozilla.org these days.

It looks like the fight against spam is heating up. The Blue Frog initiative attempts to give spammer websites a dose of their own medicine.

I can understand the logic behind this, and I sympathize with the sentiment that brought it on. Unfortunately, this type of thing will only be effective for the few weeks it takes for the spammers to find a way around it. The really big downside to this is that there doesn’t seem to be an effective way of distinguishing real spammers from innocent victims of hackers. In the end, it will only be used as a tool by unscrupulous people to perform mischief.

We really need an effective way to fight spam. This just isn’t it.

I was doing my usual browse of the news feeds, trying to find a cute story or two to make a smartass remark about, when I stumbled upon a gem about Internet addiction in China. Go ahead… read the article, and see if you agree with my take on it.

Back so soon? OK… did you notice how there was lots of talk about Internet addiction, but the only actual obsessions mentioned were video games, with a brief nod to chat rooms? Did you also notice the mention of a dubious clear liquid meant to re-balance the brain? C’mon guys, you gotta be able to do better than that. If this clear liquid is such wonderful stuff, why don’t you tell us all about it so that the entire world could benefit from the brain-saving elixir? Why not also mention that the Chinese government is so deathly afraid of the information freedom of the Internet that they will do anything to discredit it? Didn’t the phrase “eroding public morality” tip you off?

I’m certain that there are people obsessed with video games. In fact, I’ve known a few… and I’ve even been there a couple of times myself (Civilization, Starcraft), although not at the level of these kids. You’ve got to remember that obsessions of this magnitude are not themselves diseases, but symptoms of a deeper problem that won’t be cured simply by denying the afflicted of their craving. I’m disappointed that I found something that is such obvious Chinese government propaganda coming out of AP.

It looks like DVD Jon has cracked the Google player this time. A quick trip in my wayback machine reminds me that DVD Jon was the Norwegian guy who cracked DVD scrambling and posted it on the web.

Based on the fact that it took less than a day to break, it doesn’t seem like Google took a lot of time securing it. Well… that’s better than the thought that they did spend a lot of time on it… or that they allowed Sunncomm to handle their DRM .

UPDATE:
I wasn’t going to say anything about the ease of hacking players, but I bumped into this pointer to the source code right on Google’s website. Not only was it an easy hack, but he was also given a monumental head start. Even my kids could have done this hack with this kind of assistance. I suspect that someone at USA Today was desperate for a story on a slow, slow news day and found a willing publicity seeker to help. There is no reason to lionize some guy who modified a few lines of source code to keep it from checking the source of a file.

The US Supreme Court was obviously in a big-business friendly mood when they made a ruling that Internet file sharing providers may be sued for encouraging copyright infringement. This is likely to bring a flurry of lawsuits against P2P companies throughout the Internet. In an industry that is almost entirely dependent on using lawsuits to protect it’s monopoly, you can bet that they will be all over this decision.

The entertainment industry is one of the last holdouts of the 50’s, with it’s exclusive contracts and a legally enforced monopoly. Despite their complaints about how P2P rips-off artists, they are really just protecting cushy executives who are primarily sleazy promoters. Considering that a scant 5% of the cost of a CD is given to an artist, maybe they should be a little more honest with us. Maybe they should tell us what percentage of this money is used to fund lawsuits, advertising, and the white powder that they chop on the mirror.

More and more large companies are using the Internet equivalent of vermin to spread their message. It’s an alarming trend that is a bad omen for those of us who spend a great deal of time online. The cost of this type of behavior just keeps on going up, as the spyware vendors make their annoying wares more difficult to remove from a PC.

Personally, I think that the most appropriate way to handle this kind of thing is to fine those who create AND those who use this type of advertising. Make the fine approximately the same dollar figure as the projected cost for a consulting company to clean up the mess. Unfortunately, there are too many lawyers in the world for such a practical remedy to be legal.

Until the lawyers and politicians come to there senses, the best course of action is to boycott anyone you see mentioned in a spyware ad. Period. Minimum: 1 year. Google into spyware? go with Yahoo. Yahoo into spyware? go with MSN. Since we know all of these guys have been implicated, how about Alta Vista? Just remember that there are always alternatives.

The real solution is to shortchange those who will sell their integrity for a few bucks, and the best way to do that is to make a major dent in the wallets of the cowards who pay them. Boycotting is only the first step in an effective anti-spyware campaign. Step two, which is something that is caused by the boycott, is to sell off stock in companies who advertise via spyware. Make the spyware campaign a net loss to the suits and they will pull their money out within nanoseconds. If the money goes away, the spyware goes away.

…And for pete’s sake NEVER click-through on a spyware ad.

One last thing… Don’t take “plausible deniability” as an excuse. If a major company tries to tell you that they are unaware of their involvement in spyware because they don’t track every dollar they spend on advertising… call them liars, or extremely bad businessmen. An advertising campaign that doesn’t track Return On Investment is something that just shouldn’t happen. I would make sure that I sold off any stock I had in a company with a management that stupid.

In the end, the government isn’t going to help. Politicians and lawyers will make speeches and arguments, they’ll pat each other on the back and tell you to vote for them, but the spyware won’t go away. This situation calls for a real people’s revolt, and I’m hoping one starts soon. Only by speaking with our wallets will we be able to kill this scourge off.

According to this AP News Feed, Microsoft intends to build RSS into all of it’s new operating systems. For the uninitiated, RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a way to monitor news feeds and other online content to see what has been updated at your favorite sites. If you want an example of what RSS feeds look like, just click this link to see the RSS feed for this blog. If you are looking for an application that works well with RSS, I recommend a Firefox extension called “sage”.

Increased support for RSS is something that I look forward to. However, I share the opinion of one of the experts quoted in the above article: I don’t see how Microsoft intends to monetize RSS. Lets face it… Microsoft isn’t known for doing things just to be nice. Even when they give something away for free, it is only so that they can force others out of the market. I’m wondering when we’ll get hit with the price.

It seems that the debate over paid inclusion on search engines is beginning to heat up again. The problem never fully went away. It was just masked by the dot-bomb explosion and the browser wars of the late 90’s.

For those uninitiated or too young to remember the days when Netscape was ubiquitous, paid inclusion is pretty much what it sounds like. Web sites pay a fee to be included at the top of the results page for certain keywords regardless of rank. In the old days, this kind of thing was done regularly and without any indication of which sites had paid the fee. As net surfers ended up with search results that were less and less relevant to their queries, they began to complain.

Nowadays, Google has added the “sponsored links” sections at the top and right-hand side of the results. Like most people, I have no problem with this as long as they are clearly marked. The complaint is that Google has been marking these less and less clearly lately.

We’ll keep an eye on this debate here at ShamelessGeeks and let you know of any further developments.

In a move that has been delayed for way too long, the FCC has recommended internet cutoff as a viable response to spam zombies. Though it will inconvenience a few of the clueless who have let their systems get hijacked by spambot programs, it may help to cut back on the huge volumes of junk mail being sent. Now we can only hope that these measures are enacted in short order.

I understand the reluctance to cut off grandma’s net access because she has become a victim of something that she doesn’t understand. However, it seems as if there are a lot of grandma’s out there who are completely unaware that they have been infected. I think that ISP’s should get strict about net cutoff, but balance the strict measures with assistance to those who cannot rid themselves of the bots.

It looks like someone over at TheRegister.com has come up with a justification for suing spyware removal vendors. As we all know, once someone finds a justification for it, the lawyers will start swarming. Luckily, there is no argument that would allow the “stealth” downloading that happens on some sites, only the spyware installed as part of a downloaded program with an honest-to-goodness EULA.

Thanks guys… Big help. Not happy about their lack of foresight in releasing this article, and not happy that they are advocates for the spyware houses. However, it shows ho any lawyer can make anything beneficial look illegal, while making anything shady look pristine.

Here’s a novel idea: stop downloading spyware!. It’s usually pretty obvious which application will load spyware on your machine. If not, then it is information that you will find all over the web. Here’s the first clue: If what the software is doing is something that is illegal, immoral, or shady, there is a good chance that it will have spyware in its payload. People who have no problem justifying one slightly illegal or immoral thing are unlikely to have a problem justifying another. Examples: P2P apps, DVD rippers, and anything downloaded from a porn site are likely to have big spyware.

This is a thorny question that tends to evoke passionate answers. USA Today has a pretty fair analysis about teen blogging, though I think their report missed a few options. I’ve actually allowed one of my teens to blog from my server. It gives her much better control of her own page, as well as someone to turn to with technical questions.

I’m aware that most people don’t have root access to a server. An alternative is to pay for a site on one of the many low-cost website servers out there. The teen will end up with a better web page, giving them access to a much better range of services. The parent will have easy access to the teen’s web site without having to sneak around behind the kid’s back. Everybody wins.

The most important thing is to let your teens know how bad things can get if they give out personal information. I’ve spent quite a few years lecturing my kids on the unspeakable dangers of the internet. I think it’s had the desired effect, but only time will tell.

It looks like those geeks who have gone to the dark side of programming (and I’m not talking about management this time) have a new way to steal your money. Its a form of extortion that has been dubbed “ransomware”. It involves a malware infection that encrypts your files and demands that you pay to have them unlocked.

Actually… this sounds like it could be a hoax to me. It seems unlikely that a criminal genius would actually have you mail him a ransom payment. Of course, I have seen dumber schemes that have hit people up for millions of dollars… but I’m accustomed to seeing them come out of Washington DC.

With a wonderful flourish and an intensely passionate statement of the obvious, the US Senate passed a bill that declares spyware illegal. I’m not one to argue with Congress when they declare that crime is a criminal act, but I would really prefer if they would spend more time enforcing the fraud and privacy laws that covered this in the first place. To make a second law against the same thing seems like a waste of government money.

I guess that my only response would be a soft sigh and an unspoken DUH!.

Unless you’ve been under a rock since Thursday, you’ve probably heard that Google is opening a portal service to compete with Yahoo! and MSN. Those who have been spouting venom about Google taking over the WWW should remember that this has happened long after MSN decided to intrude on the search engine sector. We are now back up to 3 major search/portal providers on the web. It almost feels like the 90’s never went away.

… well, maybe not, but soon your gas company may be able to give you broadband. This Forbes.com article takes a look at the prospect of broadband-over-gas that is expected to roll out soon.

I think Forbes got one thing wrong: they expect that the fact that 85% of people have broadband available to them means that there is no market left. I disagree. That won’t happen until more than 90% of the population has a choice between broadband alternatives. Currently, many of us are stuck with choosing between an unreasonable provider and dial-up. If I had any choice in the matter, I would dump my current ISP for just about any other one out there.

Another silly tech patent. This time, Google is attempting to patent news article ranking based on the “quality” of the source. Of course, it’s a good thing to implement in theory, but it shouldn’t be patentable. It’s about like patenting the use of the color red to indicate danger. And the theory breaks down after a while… quality based on what? someone’s opinion? the number of published articles? the number of times that the publisher is read? All of these would probably mean that someone like foxnews.com would outrank extremetech.com or shamelessgeeks.com when it cane to tech articles. Some things are nearly impossible to do fairly.

As reported by Reuters, many municipalities are embracing free, city-wide wireless connectivity in an attempt to patch up their poor broadband coverage. As expected, large telecoms and cable companies are lobbying for protective legislation that would stop the practice. Eweek has a related article.

I’m curious about why the companies would get so upset about seeing free wireless provided to areas that weren’t “cost effective” to cover. Well… not really, but I find it ironic. If they had actually provided the service, there would be no reason for the free wireless push. The municipalities would then have the option of taxing the broadband instead of watching their tax base wither as businesses migrated away from their low-tech towns. Seems like the free wireless push is poetic justice.

A self-described technology writer who squatted domain names for a few likely papal name choices has handed over his .com winners to an obscure charity. He claimed he squatted the domains: “to keep [them] away from pornographers, not grab a domain for some kind of papal superstore.". Hopefully, the charity he donated them to will be just as careful about who ends up with benedictxvi.com.

Uh oh. Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) has been named to head a Senate subcommittee in charge of overseeing the USPTO. If you’ll recall, Hatch is the guy who did an abrupt 180 degree turn on the subject of file sharing, prompting many to inquire as to how much the course correction cost RIAA. He also advocated the remote destruction of music pirates computers, and co-sponsored the “Induce Act” last year.

So, will we now see the introduction of a new branch of government that assasinates patent violators and burns books? Sometime, ya just gotta wonder what your lawmakers are thinking.

Google responded to charges that it practices ‘cloaking’ by removing the offending pages and promising to rewrite them. ‘Cloaking’ refers to the practice of presenting a search engine and a regular visitor with different content for the same page. The big problem is that Google has been so adamant about cloaking that they threaten to permanently remove anyone caught doing it from their index. Although cloaking would be easy to do by any webmaster with a rudimentary understanding of dynamic content, it is not something that is likely to happen by accident. I think Google needs to go a bit farther with their apology, and revisit some of the people they removed for cloaking.

For the record… This web site is trying to bulid repeat business, not page rank. Cloaking wouldn’t be worth my time, and certainly not worth the risk of embarassment, even if I were inclined to do that type of thing.