Computer Tips -Tech Info

There is a new twist on the bot networks that have been the plague of computing in recent years. This one is called ClickBot. The story is from Incidents.org Many sites, (like this one) use adsense to “monetize their content”. The idea is that advertisers bid on “clicks”. So, if I wanted to advertise on the keywords “asheville computer repair” I might bid 5 cents for every click on one of my ads. The problem is many content owners are less than scrupulous.

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The biggest problem with Audio and video content is the variety of different codecs that are supported by different players. On Windows this usually means having Windows Media Player, Realplayer and Quicktime installed, plus who knows what else. I was having a discussion yesterday about some videos that I had given to someone that work fine on my linux desktop, (divx format I believe), however Windows media player fails to find a codec. I told him that I’ve always felt Media Player was a bit “snobbish” with regards to codecs. It’s a great idea to be able to detect and download the codec on demand, but in reality, I didn’t recall seeing xvid/divx being among those that would auto-download (may have changed by know I’m not certain.) Anyway, I suggested mplayer as a good multi-format video player. Mplayer will handle most any video format thrown at it.

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This weekend has been a bit of an introspective for me on why google is still the primary search engine I use. I know, I’ve been a big “fan(?)” of google for quite some time, I’ve obviously incorporated many of their products into my pages and used Google for 99% of my web searching. In recent months though, I’ve certainly had frustrations from the “site owner” side of the Google relationship. My North Carolina Genealogy site had traditionally been hosted as a subdirectory of averyjparker.com and had always enjoyed the lions share of traffic, so when I gave it it’s own domain, I did a 404 page not found for those following outdated links and I added an automatic 5 second redirect to the northcarolinagenealogy.net page. I soon learned that was a mistake, as the site vanished from Google around the first of December.

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There are a couple news stories about a McAfee SiteAdvisor report about the search engines responsibility for sites that distribute malware.

McAfee said Friday that the epidemic of spyware and viruses could be linked to search engines. According to research from the company, even seemingly benign search terms could bring up sites loaded with nasty payloads.

The study looked at the five major search engines — Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL, and Ask — and covered a period from January through April. Researchers found that in every search engine, popular keywords returned sites that could be potentially dangerous.

What’s worse, in popular keywords such as “free screensavers,” “digital music,” “popular software,” and “singers,” as much as 72 percent of the returned results contained some kind of risky link.

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Well, these days with gas prices climbing and unstable, the media is always on the lookout for related stories. When the headline blared 8,000 MPG car…. I knew there had to be either 1) a tremendous technological breakthrough with hybrid gas/electrics… or 2) a SERIOUS catch. Skynews has the story on what may go down as the most fuel effecient vehicle on record. To call it a car though might be a stretch from the photo. It looks more like a luge sled of sorts, enclosing the driver and running close to the ground (those are the wheels visible in the photo when you get there.) The driver, lays down….

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Freedom to tinker brings us this BIG problem. I guess what concerns me most about this, is the way I see it, voter fraud has pretty much gone on since there have been elections. Let’s face it, there is always someone, acting officially or not that will jockey for the best advantage for their candidate. If that means “helping” someone cast a ballot, or contesting a hanging chad… it cuts both ways, no party has clean hands in this. (Even if it’s something that is done by someone acting on their own, I would say it reflects back on the party.) Anyway… up until know I’ve seen voter fraud as something that is hard to really successfully accomplish on a VERY large scale, AND with assurance of results. With electronic voting machines, I’m afraid there may be a revolution in MASS voter fraud.

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There’s a proposed bill that would block access to “Social networking sites” like myspace and Friendster for minors. The main concern with the social networking sites is that they have profile information on their members, in many cases under the age of 18 and the children then can be targetted by child predators. One of the problems is that “social networking” sites are loosely defined and could be interpreted quite widely.

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I’ve run across a couple of interesting things. The first was linked to from the second one I’ll mention. I know, some time back, I visited a publicly available Google Adsense tool a few months back and at that time found an interesting tool that gave you keyword suggestions based on a term or keyword that you supplied. Interesting and very likely it gave results that you might not have thought of without the tool. However, I don’t recall being able to get quite as much information as it appears they give now…

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Well, for the second month in a row (I don’t recall one in March..) Microsoft has re-released a patch for Windows. This time it’s the Flash patch (which really falls under 3rd party software). They’ve re-worked the version detection of the update in an attempt to solve all the problems that people have run into with this update. The MS Security blog information is here.

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This is one worth checking out anybody using vnc for remote administration. It looks as though intelliadmin has come across a vulnerability in Real VNC 4 (the slashdot post I saw suggested “any machine running VNC 4.1”) I haven’t tested yet, so I don’t know if this ONLY affects REALVNC’s implementation or is broader. They have a proof of concept page which attempts to connect to the ip of the browser at the vnc port and display a screenshot. The site is getting slashdotted at the moment, so revisit this page and link until you get a chance to test out your VNC serving machines.

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