Morph3ous’s Weblog

Valleywag: Kevin Rose Explains the BusinessWeek Cover Photo

He aparently thought that the particular picture that made it to the cover was a joke picture.

Computerworld.com has published a good article titled: So how do you code an AJAX Web page?

Give it a read if you’re interested in this sort of thing.

Scott Rosenberg, editor and co-founder of Salon and Jason from 37signals both weigh in on BusinessWeek’s cover proclaiming Kevin Rose to have made $60 million dollars in 18 months. (more…)

I have not spoken much about the Long Tail on this blog, but I am about to start to. The phrase was coined by Chris Anderson, the editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine. He has published a book titled The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More (Hardcover). I am currently reading the book and have found it to be very enlightning.

While visiting his blog about the book, I encountered this video on YouTube:

I definitely recommend that you visit longtail.com and consider purchasing the book.

The idea of using FastCGI first struck me on Monday. I had previously transitioned my server to use SuEXEC for PHP. Pages were loading slower than I would have liked. PHP was running as a CGI application. Each time there was a request for a page the server woud have to open a new instance of PHP. This on a VPS server is not always fast.
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Tomorrow I will write about how I was finally able to get suexec, php-5.1.4, and fastcgi working on a cpanel server. It took a lot of trial and error. The solution is not as perfect as I’d like it to be, but it does work.

I have written the post. suexec, php-5.1.4, fastcgi and cpanel

One of my clients recently complained that one of the servers was a bit slow at times. Upon checking the logs I found a string of attacks against that server. People from Russia, China, Bolivia, the US and many other countries were running scripts to attempt to hack into the server.

I investigated many potential solutions. Then I came up with a plan. This method seems to be making it much more inconvenient to try to guess at the passwords. This is what I did. (more…)

You have got to see this. It is absolutely hilarious, yet has me horrified at the same time. Old news, but just stumbled upon this video on youtube. Watch and be scared. No more details, just click the link!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kiZ-TqvVdGM

DSLReports.com has recently come under a few DoS (Denial of Service) attacks. Some have speculated that it relates to their coverage of the Pluto Data credit card theft coverage. The coverage made it into an article at MSNBC.com that mentioned BroadBandReports.com (same website as DSLReports.com).

Regardless of why it happened, it has happened. The attackers could not have picked a worse target. DSLReports.com is a wonderful site where industry professionals chat and help each other solve technology problems. The site is chock full of useful FAQs and intelligent users waiting to help out.

DSLReports.com proved to be very resilient through all the attacks. It was slowed down somewhat but available most of the time. The investigation to catch the attakers is still ongoing and as such the site has smartly been quiet on what they have found out so far.

I hope that this will not be a continuing trend in the years to come. I fear it will be. Website A says something that Annoyed Company B does not like and so they hire BotNet Operator C to set Unwillingly Infected Home User #1-4,000’s computers to attack.

There are many ways to combat these problems. I do not favor government regulation of the Internet. I believe, perhaps naively, that we can force computer software and security awareness to change. Microsoft has been doing some great work to clean up its operating system mess. If Microsoft is able to make it harder for a home user to have their computer unwillingly hacked, then this problem will be less pervasive.

BotNet operators will not be able to rent out their attacking bot infested computers if they find that it is next to impossible to infect other people’s computers quickly and efficiently. They will have no army of co-opted computers.

We’ll see how this all pans out. It is things like this that scare many people away from the Internet. Was all of this ordered by the Pluto D Nicosia scam artists? I doubt we’ll ever know. It is still a big deal either way. Smaller sites can easily be shut down or monetarily hurt by these sort of antics. We were lucky this time that DSLReports.com is huge and has some great minds behind it.

First there was Gator, now there is iDownload. The two programs are spyware, yet the companies do not like us calling their products by that name. My personal definition of spyware is any software program that installs itself on your computer without your permission through stealth techniques. I’m not sure what they consider the definition of spyware to be.

Quoted from this news item on DSLReports.com:

As we were the first to report (picked up by Slashdot), the makers of the IDownload and ISearch (“Crapware”? “Adware”? “Irritation-ware”?) have been sending cease and desist letters to security sites that dub their software “Spyware”, “Malware”, or even “Foistware”. Brian Livingston of the Windows Secrets Newsletter speaks to IDownload’s CEO, who claims “The majority of sites we’ve contacted have taken down or properly classified iSearch.” Our users have clearly documented that the software uses unethical installation techniques, and want it gone regardless of what it’s called

Trying to force public opinion by blocking free speech is a horrible thing to do. The best way to produce a product that gains positive public opinion is to develop a product that is useful and people actually want. The product would also need to be asked to be installed, not foisted upon unsuspecting prey. It is horrible that companies are installing products on consumer’s computers without their permission The legal threats to the anti-spyware companies and independent websites demanding that they stop referring to the software as spyware is just as horrible if not worse.

These companies remind me of little kids. Many young kids have problems taking criticism. When criticized they simply get upset and insult or try to take some sort of action against the one who has criticized them. When we grow older we learn not to be offended as easily and to take the criticism and learn from it. These companies need to grow up. They need to realize that forcing your products upon consumers is wrong. They need to scan the business environment and either shut down their companies, or find positive business models.

Here is some more scary news I obtained through DSLReports.com from this news item:

Salon and CNET are reporting that D. Reed Freeman, the “chief privacy officer” of Claria Corporation (makers of the much loathed Gator application) has been appointed to the Dept. of Homeland Security’s “Data Privacy and Integrity Advisory Committee”. So we’ve got this straight: an exec for the same company that sued websites for calling its product spyware, buries ridiculous demands in its EULA, has a history of using stealth installation techniques to mislead customers, and has been sued by a half-dozen web publishers for being a “parasite”, is now advising Uncle Sam on privacy and integrity?

I find this to be absolutely ridiculous. When appointing someone to a position that is tasked with making sure that data is not compromised and that the data remains private, it is absolutely absurd to appoint someone who worked for a company who was the antithesis of this and who’s job was chief privacy officer for the company.

Could it be that he was hired because of the “turn around” (legal threats to abridge free speech) of Claria and its Gator software? I was under the impression that the Gator software was still installing itself without permission. I also find it hard to trust a company that once tried to force their software upon unsuspecting victim’s machines and tried to change public opinion through legal threats.

I doubt that Reed Freeman was responsible for all this. He could be a very good candidate for this position. It just seems very odd that of all the people that could be appointed to this position, he was.