30 December 05 - 05:14Digg and Bounty County
I'm doubling up on news today. You may or may not have paid much
attention to DIGG. In my case I ignored it as something else that
was interesting but not worth my time to check out...
I guess I was wrong about that. If you want a fast track on why I think I was, read this link on digg
The seond item I have to tell you about is something called Bounty County.
It aims to be a central resource for OSS projects that have posted
bounties for getting code written. It looks well put together,
and I hope it succeeds.
frak
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28 December 05 - 22:31Google Hacking
I mean using Google to find targets - not hacking google itself...
Check out this site for a rather huge published list of interesting searches:
http://johnny.ihackstuff.com/
Be sure to check out the rest of the site while you are at it. Very interesting guy.
Frak
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28 December 05 - 04:45Go anywhere Server PHP Debugger
I never realised there was such a thing! The name of this great
program is GUBED (debug backwards) and it is based on a really simple
idea.
To run the debugger, you call some PHP scripts (also installed on the
same website) that grab the code of the web page you want to debug, and
call you back (as other 'hard server install' solutions do) How
these PHP scripts work is extremely simple (that's probably why it took
so long for somebody to think of it) Because this is just some
PHP code for the server, the only real restriction on the webhost is
whether the script can make an outbound connection or no. I do
think there is another way around this which I may hack away at if I
find the time.
If you are a PHP coder it's really worth checking out:
http://gubed.mccabe.nu/
frak
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26 December 05 - 23:13First Bird Flu Vaccine
I know this is not usually the thing that I blog about, however I had to pass it on.
China is claiming to have just produced a
vaccine for the bird flu in birds.
Apparently they have been working on one for the last 4 years.
Which is not surprising given that the disease itself is 10-15 years
old. Its quite cheap, too.
What is not said is how long it would take to produce a vaccine that works for humans.
frak
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25 December 05 - 22:02YPN Pays more than Google Adsense
Was reading on ihatgoogle.com of his trial of YPN over Adsense.
He had not tracked things with a split test (the best way) and only had
some empirical results that it paid a lot better. A comment by
one of his readers that did a 10 day test and extrapolated from that
however is quantitative: "What this means is that I have seen a
1112% increase in revenues for this month using Yahoo over this month's
Google"
This reminds me that Adsense used to pay out a lot more, till Google
made a change last year(?). It's a pity it's still for US people
only...
frak
PS thankyou
blackhatseo.com for pointing out the ihategoogle blog - it's now on my subscription list.
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17 December 05 - 02:11Bye for now
Well I'm about to head off to the middle of nowhere for a week off, so not posts for a bit.
Something funny before I go - makes me glad to have my trusty
multimeter. My laptop has a rated supply of 16.5v. I just
bought a regulated power supply for the car and the closest it supplies
is 16 or 18v. This would be a bit of a worry, however when I
tested my official power supply it runs at 18.8v! So my new car
power supply is fine at 18.2...
See yuou
Frak
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14 December 05 - 11:13Jason Potash's new software
You may have missed out on the other SE oportunitity like I did, however do youself a favour and check out
Orwell.
It article management on steroids! If you are out for content on
your sites (and who isn't??) then it is really the easy way to dig up
good content and work with it. It's free too!
Every five minutes there is the next greatest this and that in terms of
marketing online - I do strongly suggest you check this one out.
frak
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12 December 05 - 20:53Cheap, Easy CD Printing
Have you every thought about plugging in large size ink bottles to an
inkject printer - at a reasonable price, instead of the inflated
variety?
An
Australian company has organised just that - and it seems with a potential increase in quality due to optional higher quality dyes.
A simple idea that would take effort to get working just right.
Tubes go to the printing heads, from bottles of ink, next to the
printer. Just the thing to make that Epson R210 attractive again.
As for the easy CD printing part - that's coming. It's a system I
came up with years ago, but was not attractive till the printer got
cheaper to run. First will come the cheap inking system.
frak
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12 December 05 - 02:29Sony's Rootkit Infringes Open Source Copywrite
Not sure how I found this post, however it seems that Sony's legally
reprehensible actions of installing Rootkits on peoples computers
without permission has another lawless streak:
It appears they have wripped off this guy's code:
http://nanocrew.net/2005/11/16/sony-drm-rootkit-saga/ from the VLC project.
Personally I will be very dissappointed it Sony does not get hung for
this too. Please read his post by following the link.
frak
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11 December 05 - 22:46Sober Worm Update system cracked
One of the nastiest/coolest (note: I am both a fan of the coding
techniques used by some virus writers, and a loathe virus writers
results at the same time) things about the Sober worm is the way it
updates itself.
On the face of it, updates can be stopped by looking at the program and
seeing where it grabs the updtes from - be it IRC or HTTP or anything
else. The problem with Sober is that the sites updates are
downloaded from varied using crypto technology.
It seems F-Secure cracked this system in May, and have now informed the
world of this only now. Presumably so that evidence could be
gathered against the author, or something similar.
frak
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11 December 05 - 09:20John Lennon's Imagine
There has been a lot said about John with the passing of a milestone anniversary of his death.
Still one of the most moving of his songs, and hence the one most
talked about, is Imagine. One of my favourite Lennonisms (is that
a word?). My other is his great idea of holding a protest from
bed, and just inviting the press.
What I didn't hear on any of the specials is where the song came
from. I was quite surprised to hear how - though it always makes
so much more sense now whenever I hear the song - it came about.
Julian Lennon was out on concert tour in the 80s, and did an interview
for (ABC?) Hobart radio. He was asked about that song.
He said that his dad wrote the song after reading "The Truth that Leads
to Eternal Life" published by Jehovah's Witnesses. That song is
very much a thumbnail of what Witnesses beleive to be true.
Now I wonder what box the "Jealous Guy" EP is packed in...?
till next time,
frakkle.com
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09 December 05 - 23:56Webrings - Can they be brought back to life?
Jim's hit on something simple here.
Webrings used to rule the roost for traffic. I used to - and
really still do - love them. There's one problem in todays SEO
climate: you get no link points (goes back to webrings.com or
whoever runs it)
His idea if you changed the code so links were worth something it would
be good SEO-wise (particularly with the death of various link-swap
strategies).
Jim: I don't think this is SPAM. Google has been cool with
Webrings version 1.0. Why would they have a problem with a
webring that passed linkage?
In short webrings define a "neighbourhood" and as a result I think Google will appreciate that.
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09 December 05 - 04:18All your really big questions answered
Is the
pen mightier than the
sword?
Is
clothed really more popular than running around
naked?
Is
my girlfriend better than
Pamela Anderson?
Find out the vital answers to these questions and more at
http://www.googlefight.com
(such a simple yet very cool idea)
frakkle
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03 December 05 - 23:35The SONY root kit fiasco
The following I got from
QuarkIT's
newsletter - reprinted here with pemission. It provides the best
summary of the issues that I have read. As far as I am concerned
they should get crimininal charges for what was done - I would if I did
the same things..
Sony and Rootkits
Firstly let me say that
I have no issue whatsoever with a company protecting its intellectual
property, copyrights, trademarks or other assets by legal and safe methods
of enforcement.
What I draw the line at is any company using
nefarious means such as viruses, trojans, rootkits, baseball bats or
anti-competitive behavior to force another party into
submission.
What I'm riled about at this point in time is Sony BMG using a program known as a
"rootkit" as part of its anti piracy protection mechanisms. Of course,
this rootkit is only installed on the systems of those purchasers of the
original CDs that use this copyright "protection" method and is never
going to stop those who want to pirate any Sony BMG CDs. This is
tantamount to a car manufacturer putting components in the brake system
that are dissolved by brake fluid on all of their new cars to ensure that
owners don't drive the cars over 110 Kmph.
Because of the publicity
that this mind numbingly stupid move on Sony BMG's part has generated, not
only have their been a number of trojans written to exploit this rootkit,
but Sony BMG looks to be in legal trouble in a number of countries over
this malicious software they install.
In California and New York
there have been class-action lawsuits filed against Sony for the damage
that this rootkit has caused to the computers of those people who bought
any of the 20 copy protected CDs in question (including artists such as
Natasha Bedingfield, Neil Diamond, Sarah McLachlan, Ricky Martin, Santana
and Celine Dion).
While on the topic of Celine Dion, I think they
need playback protection on her discs, not copy protection!
As an addendum, the NOD32 already picked up the rootkit and will prevent it from installing, and also will remove it if found.
frakkle.com
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