29 January 06 - 04:01GPL is crap

Well actually, no.  I'm a big fan of it - at least GPL1 and GPL2.

As for GPL3:  I cannot do anything but agree with Linus in that the provisions about security Keys are quite ludicrous.  Maybe it was unintended way that it was written - in which case I would expect that it would be addressed in the redraft.  You will find section 1 interesting in this regard.  It seems to require the publishing of private keys.  This makes as much sense as our ATO when it instuted a public-private key identification system by generating your private key for you.  A private key must be private - otherwise how can it have any value??

To quote the great man: "I think it's insane to require people to make their private signing keys available, for example. I wouldn't do it. So I don't think the GPL v3 conversion is going to happen for the kernel, since I personally don't want to convert any of my code."

There is also a restriction on how the program can be used.  It appears to be the equivalent of the old "TV tax" Australia used to have till the populous said "enough!" and refused to pay it.  Basically it dictates what can be done with GPL3 licenced software.  Is that not the purview of the the author?  (of course it is, and the way to maintain you coding freedom is to use GPL2 or something else other than GPL3)

htp://frakkle.com

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24 January 06 - 09:46Run anywhere BSD Secure Desktop OS

A desktop system with everything you should need for securely networking, in an easy to use, bootable CD that you can use anywhere.   To network OS guessing tools, it looks exactly like Windows XP.   Sound like your idea of heaven?

Check out the http://theory.kaos.to/projects.html.  Definitley will have a place in my toolkit!

http://frakkle.com

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16 January 06 - 09:46You know you want to

v7ndotcom elursrebmem

"Because it's worth it"

If you have not idea what I am talking about, you may wish to read this.

frak

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12 January 06 - 23:29The Man that Sold the Web

The Million Dollar Webpage has had its last pixels sold.  From August 2005 to January 2006 he's picked up over 1 million dollars.

It really does illustrate the value of something left-field enough to become truly viral.

Cheers,
Mathew

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07 January 06 - 08:1075 percent of Traffic is Scraper bots!?

I was checking my logs recently on a site I run - that has a lot of content on it - and I found that in the last 7 days I had 1700 hits to forum threads.  Of those hits only 700 (or less - I only bothered filtering out 5 rather obvious leachers) were actual traffic.  Most of the filter traffic was at 2 second intervals.

I spent quite a few hours searching for something that would bot-detect like Yahoo! does - threshold requests/minute and requests/day.  I eventually found it in this post on wmw.

So I'll just add the PHP code to my host so it runs before site requests, and all is ok again

frak

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04 January 06 - 12:10Telstra - still the (worst) one

Yesterday I wrapped up the latest of what turned out to be Telstra's further attempts to generate hate mail from its own customers.

For my own business, I run payments via SSL secured tunnel to a payment gateway provider (quite common for EFTPOS but also unknown by quite a few people for some reason).  In early December payments stopped going through.

Spent quite a few hours on the phone with the support team at the payment gateway company - paycorp.com.au - really good company that have been around for years.  Really know there stuff technically and provide great service all round.  "Unable to establish SSL" errors were being recieved, after a successful connection to the host.

I noticed after I left site again and came home, that I could process payments from my development machine (laptop).  I then went on holiday with a view to having a bash next year.

The end result of all this was that it occured to me that Telstra may have started blocking SSL traffic on non web-standard ports.  So I tunnelled this traffic over SSH to a host outside the network (as I was already doing to send email given that I could never get Telstra's to work anyway and they also block that) and suddenly all was well with the world again.

Only a couple more months and I can ditch them at work - and I will be happy again.  Going without the worst ISP ever(tm) always makes me happy.  I suggest you try this too, for your own sanity.  I posted this online just in case somebody else has similar hassles.

frak

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02 January 06 - 21:16Secret Revealed: Heaps of Affiliate Links DIRECT to Your Sites when using Clickbank

If you've ever used ClickBank, you would have noticed two things: 

1. you cannot really sell more than 1 product at a time, as  there is only one destination sales page for affiliate links (when other people link to your product as an affiliate)
2. you will earn no linkage to your sites, as all links will be to clickbank.net's "hoplink" system.

The following system will solve both of these issues.

To solve issue 1, you just need to get your affiliates to add an extra piece to the standard hoplink so that this:
        http://[AffiliateID].[VendorID].hop.clickbank.net
becomes
        http://[AffiliateID].[VendorID].hop.clickbank.net?item=[X]
Where [X] is one of your 50 allowed product IDs.  This will get passed to your "destination sales page" like this:
    http://example.com/switchboard.php?hop=[AffiliateID]&item=[X]
So the switchboard.php file (or whatever you tell clickbank is your destination sales page) can redirect to the actual sales page for a product using this information using PHP or similar.

switchboard.php example:

<?php
$sites = array('1' => 'http://salespage1.com',
               '2' => 'http://salespage2.com',
               '3' => 'http://salespage3.com',
               '4' => 'http://salespage4.com');
$url = $sites[ $_REQUEST['item'] ];
if ($url) {
    header('Location:' . $url);
} else {
?>
<HTML><HEAD></HEAD><BODY>
some error message, or list of links or nothing at all.  This HTML will come up when an invalid item is specified.
</BODY>
<?php
}
?>

So how do we have affiliates linking directly to our sales pages?  We use another redirect on the sales page to clickbank like so, and call the file cb.php:

<?php
if ($_REQUEST['hop']) {
    header('Location:http://' . $_REQUEST['hop'] .  '.[VendorID].hop.clickbank.net?item=' . $item);
    die();
}
?>

So now that is done, the last step is to add the following to the VERY TOP of our sales page code (make sure our sales page is a ".php" file):

<?php
$item = [X];
include('cb.php');
?>

Remember to change the [X] to your clickbank product id for this sales page.

So what have we contructed in all of this?  We have a redirector page that goes to our indivual sales pages.  We have a redirector from our individual sales pages to clickbank.

So now we get our affiliates to sign up for clickbank, and create affiliate links like the following example (assuming our first example site for item 1 above):
    http://salespage1.com/?hop=[AffiliateID]

Looks much more professional to our affiliates, too.

So what happens to a link to http://salespage1.com/ ?  The normal sales page is displayed (ie none of this code is run).  What happens when an affiliate link like the above link comes in?  A chain of redirects like this (using the our fictictious product ID 1):

http://salespage1.com/?hop=[AffiliateID]
    \/
http://[AffiliateID].[VendorID].hop.clickbank.net?item=1
    \/
http://salespage1.com

Hope this all made sense.
frak

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