Subjects:
Be Afraid of the Googlebot
Some call it "Google Hacking", or a "slick data-mining technique". Yahoo reports that it "triggers security fears". There's nothing sophisticated about it, despite the mysterious undertones used by hacks not knowing what they're reporting about. If you can read Google's or Yahoo's search syntax description [see their help pages] and know, from reading security related lists or sites, what to search for, you should also know what not to put on a public web server, and how to prevent it from disclosing things you don't want it to disclose. If you don't, you can't.
Google was Here
Yesterday I mentioned Yahoo's plan to introduce an API to modify the presentation but not the order of search results. To give you an idea of what this'll look like, head over to Matt Cutts, who details An easy way to add new features to Google in his blog.
Google Lock in
Hardly a day goes by without a new "free" Google service, but most seem to require a "Google Account" to work. I'm not so sure it's a good idea to have Google look over your shoulder at each and every and yet another opportunity, learning more and more about you as an individual and identifiable person.
Yahoo Launchpads
Yahoo is still creative. It just launched buzz, a site built to compete with Digg and similar products. This is followed by an API which allows clients to add content to Yahoo search results. What the API can't do is take things away or change the order of search results. Strangely Yahoo has never understood that it's information overload that's pushing users to sparser destinations.
Dressing up Linkbait
In a long but interesting article dealing with the falling prices for processing, storage and bandwidth Chris Anderson, editor in chief of Wired, claims that these three factors change everything, when in fact he just dresses up one of the first net culture rules: give something people want and have some advertiser pay the bills. Still, with words such as Freeconomics and subheads such as Waste and Waste again or The Economics of Abundance it'll attract a ton of links, whetting the appetite for Andersons next book, "Free".
Adobe wraps Flash in DMCA
Seth Schoen warns that Adobe will use encryption as part of its DRM in its latest versions of applications for the creation, distribution and playing of Flash content, now that sites such as Youtube have made Flash the de facto standard for online video. Intentions by the big content owners such as the BBC to provide video as long as it's protected are probably part of the equation, as the price for the server software sold by Adobe takes into account the amount of data shifted. DRM won't stop infringement, but it'll give right holders a powerful legal weapon.
Security 2.0
Looks like the security of so called Web 2.0, including sites such as Facebook and Myspace, is coming under scrutiny at last. The problem is, that "Most companies are barely providing sufficient protection in the context of Web 1.0."
Hide & Seek
If you search for piratebay and pirate bay at Yahoo, www.piratebay.org is in first position now. Click on it, and it redirects to the real The Pirate Bay site.
Know How to Help Yourself
Google's Webmastercentral Blog has a list of helpful posts which are, according to Google's blog, must read. The first one explains how to verify Googlebot's IP.
Yahoo hides Pirate Bay
The searches pirate bay and piratebay no longer produce results linking to the site at Yahoo. It's still in Yahoo's database as of now as can be seen from the screenshot, so it appears Yahoo is filtering the site for some reason. Question is, who do they want to please?
Is MSIE 7.0 Evil?
After having worked on some very straightforward HTML & CSS, which renders identical in all browsers except those made by Microsoft, I've come to the conclusion that not every time one of Microsoft's products deviates from accepted standards, evil intent is the cause. I'm sure not even Microsoft with all its resources is able to anticipate the order of list items and the way random sentence length influences the wrapping of code. If it's not evil, it can only be mind numbing stupidity.
Malicious Intent
Google just published an interim report on the security of the web, emphasising that a lot of malicious code is installed on users' PCs via drive-by downloads. While experienced users find it strange that the rest don't even know the fact that browser settings can be adjusted to avoid all of these infections, Slashdotters have highlighted two issues discussing Google's finding:
The WWW and HTML was never meant to be something that runs active code on the client. Period. Most of us realise there is no way this problem can ever be solved without revising exactly what a browser is supposed to be, as long as browsers will run code instead of interpreting data there will always be malicious sites set up to exploit this.
And then someone pointed at a very interesting tidbit in Google's publication:
The underlying problem is that advertising space is often syndicated to other parties who are not known to the web site owner.
Time Bomb CMS
Because CMS are often targeted at "Management", a lot of advice on problems with files and folders suggests to chmod 777 the lot to make life easy. That makes it easy for everybody, including people you have never heard of. Because setting the permissions of a file or directory so that everybody can do anything is asking for trouble. And it is despite the fact that Wikipedia gives such an example.
The User Generated Public Perception Problem Fix
Sometimes the solution to real issues is surprisingly easy. Just prohibit the publication of bad behaviour on the web, and no one will be the wiser.
Google Toolbar improves Error Messages
The next version of the Google Toolbar copies Microsoft's IE behaviour by intercepting server errors 404 of less than 512 bytes length and provides some hopefully sane alternatives. It's a configurable option, so it can be deactivated in the toolbar configuration, similar to how people who configure their IE settings decide if they want such a feature.
Amazon and the Lost Marbles
Sometimes I really would like to know, how Amazon arrives at the recommendations they make. Is it the sedate progress, the ballast, or the worms, aka weevils, unpredictable elements or what? And yes, it's true, I do own Hownblower in the West Indies. Bought it online. At an outfit called Amazon.
Death of a Legend
It appears there are some Natural Born Clickers, representing appx 6% of all online users, that cause about 50% of all ad clicks. On top of that one now seems to know that brand awareness and click-through behaviour are not depending on each other. Which leads me to assume that in future it'll be sufficient for ads to be delivered to a filter to be called a justifiable investment.
MSFT:Yahoo Deal Numbers
Philip Greenspun had an interesting take on why Microsoft deperately needs Yahoo: "The interesting question is why a company that claims to know how to program would pay anything for Yahoo, much less a P/E ratio of more than 60.". Indeed.
http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2008/02/09/microsoft-is-2000-times-less-effective-than-google-yahoo-board-seems-to-be-insane/
Windows Firewall
Talk about Microsoft and Programming reminds me to show you this picture which is probably as close as you get to a representation of the way the Windows Firewall works.
Search Engine Speculation
Lots of stuff you read about on the web is either common sense, sound IR theory or just plain speculation of those without an understanding of the first two. Here are 8 Theories with one click.
Monster Traffic
Most ordinary sites, when linked by Slashdot, are brought to their knees as long as the link is on Slashdot's front page, because there are a lot of people reading "/." news.
The W3C gets about 600 times as much in pointless traffic, because even more people apparently cannot read or don't bother to. All wasted, and almost always caused by robots and other crawlers programmed and used by people who shouldn't be allowed near a keyboard.
Even today, two and a half years after killing my RSS feed because of excessive and unneeded requests, some so called newsreaders - including Feedfetcher-Google - still try to access that resource every few minutes. Status and Error codes are apparently something understood only by a select few.
Ballmer: Yahoo to survive as a brand, MSN not so likely
There's a lot of speculation of what's going to happen if Microsoft is allowed to take over Yahoo. Now Ballmer says, that Yahoo is going to be continued as a brand, and that MSN is the likely casualty. Ballmer also says that Linux users are thieves. And that Microsoft holds hundreds of patents on methods and techniques used in Open Source applications. In fact, this person says a lot of things when the day is long enough.
Literal Recycling
Frightening what one finds off the beaten tracks.
Greedy Search
Amazon's search function has never been brilliant. It returns acceptable results when there are plenty of results giving absolute matches. But you misspell, don't know the exact name of an author, or are searching for one who produced very few titles and you're out of luck more often than not, because it ignores word order and doesn't know adjacency.
Now it's been changed. If you're searching for an author it'll present works similar to the ones you were looking for at the end of the list. Not a bad idea if the top of the list offers what you're looking for. But not quite right if there isn't a single match.
Flickr Users are Not Amused
Microsoft's idea of a Yahoo takeover is not appreciated everywhere. Flickr users - Flickr is part of Yahoo - voice their opinions the way they're used to, by posting often quite creative images.
How to be a Youtube Star[let]
How difficult it is for most of the rest to do "viral marketing" via Youtube is revealed at Googlified. There's also a link to a step by step guide for the persistent.
Microsoft lusting after Yahoo?
You can't miss it. Microsoft wants Yahoo at any price, because Microsoft can't accept that it can't do to Google what it usually does to businesses it's interested in or bothered by. If that deal goes through, it would be for the best of all concerned. Microsoft gets drained, Yahoo can blame Microsoft in future, and at Google it's business as usual. To explain the need for such a deal along some people actually compiled a list of [failed] promises made over the last few years.
Clumsier Mod_Rewrite Method Patent granted
Amazon's A9 has been granted a patent to protect a clumsy way of doing, what is and has been done almost from day one on the Web - first by custom code, later by Apache's mod_rewrite.
Social Surveillance
Google's Marissa Meyer hints in an Interview at the possibility that Google might identify your friends through Gmail or third parties. Probably not, to help you meet those friends again.
http://venturebeat.com/2008/01/31/googles-marissa-mayer-social-search-is-the-future/
© Copyright 1998 - 2008 Klaus Schallhorn.