Posted November 3rd, 2009, in: Computer Problems and Fixes| Evil Robots| Humanity, Culture, Philosophy, Politics, Ethics Etc| Marketing/Advertising In The Cloud| SEO, SEM, SMO Etc| Technology| WordPress
The site links to sites who are also under attack and when the bug is running correctly on those sites, the sites redirect the hits to the final destination,
which is http://www.zml.com/
I don’t know if zml.com knows this is happening. I mean I suppose it’s possible that some unscrupulous SEO or Marketing guy promised them traffic and then resorted to this to get it. I’m contacting them now to inform them of this uncool practice being committed on their behalf, and if they are not willing to cooperate on putting an end to it, I will have no choice but to give them some negative attention.
The process of extracting the bad links from the content was long and hard since the strings of code inserted were very inconsistent.
The following is a list of the sites being linked thru, which I assume are all victims of this malware. If you own one of these sites, feel free to drop me a line and I will point you in the right direction as far as putting an end to this.
- http://blog.segd.org
- http://www.investorsunited.com
- http://www.oca-gla.org
- http://www.thunderstruck.org
- http://subway.com
- http://verdadeabsoluta.net
- http://yourrnc.com
- http://wordpressthemesbox.com
- http://mp3db.org
- http://webconsultingdc.com
- http://turtlesurvival.org
- http://turtleconservationfund.org
- http://truenorthbrass.com
- http://tarabooks.com
- http://kolenalaila.com
- http://techbostonacademy.org
- http://pie-flex.com
- http://www.philebrity.tv
- http://www.landmarkwine.com
- http://artsinbushwick.org
- http://brettmartin.org
- http://bsf.org
- http://www.popandpolitics.com
- http://womanhonorthyself.com
- http://www.brainstorm9.com
- http://webdev.entheosweb.com
- http://www.topicus-healthcare.com
- http://www.vfilings.com
- http://constantinessword.com
- http://www.dopiska.com
- http://writingcenters.org
- http://www.radisson.com
- http://notjustaprettyface.org
- http://www.arizonacriminaldefenseblog.com
- http://www.sembrarpaz.com
- http://www.apostilla.com
- http://www.geektechs.net
- http://johnquiggin.com
- http://blog.pdma.org
- http://bluesheaven.com
Message to ZML:
Hello,
I am a developer and recently one of my clients who is running WordPress for her personal website was attacked by some Malware that inserted thousands of links throughout her content. Those links resolve to your site, but via redirects thru other sites that I assume are also victims of the malware.
You look like you’ve built a pretty nice site here. And I’m writing to give you the chance to get on board with fixing this problem before I am forced to create some negative attention in the blogosphere and social media.
It doesn’t seem like you would want to be resposible for malware. But it also doesn’t seem like anyone would go through the trouble to make all these links back to you unless you were paying them. Perhaps you hired some marketing or SEO people and were not aware that they would be using these tactics? Please write back soon as I have very little patience for this kind of thing.
Thanks,
Andrew A. Peterson
Some samples of weird code that the bot inserted:
<wp:tag><wp:tag_slug>%d0%b0%d0%b2%d1%82%d0%be%d1%80%d1%81%d0%ba%d0%b8%d0%b5-%d0%bf%d1%80%d0%be%d0%b3%d1%80%d0%b0%d0%bc%d0%bc%d1%8b</wp:tag_slug><wp:tag_name><![CDATA[????????? ?????????]]></wp:tag_name></wp:tag>
<wp:tag><wp:tag_slug>%d1%81%d0%b2%d0%be%d0%b1%d0%be%d0%b4%d0%bd%d1%8b%d0%b9-%d0%bc%d0%b8%d0%ba%d1%80%d0%be%d1%84%d0%be%d0%bd</wp:tag_slug><wp:tag_name><![CDATA[????????? ????????]]></wp:tag_name></wp:tag>
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Posted October 31st, 2009, in: Humanity, Culture, Philosophy, Politics, Ethics Etc| Ideas, Observations, Opinions, Rants Etc
I don’t even remember how I found his website, which is beautiful.
I mainly wanted to draw your attention to a thing Mark “Jake” Baker wrote that was touching to me. It’s sort of a manifesto for modern life called ”The Human Condition.”
It’s an interesting Internet find. It says so much!
HERE it is. I think we will all be wiser people if we read it.
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Posted September 26th, 2009, in: Humanity, Culture, Philosophy, Politics, Ethics Etc| Ideas, Observations, Opinions, Rants Etc| Intellectual Property| Music Industry| New Media| Technology| Web 2.0
I just got a newsletter update explaining that they support a three-strikes policy for file-sharing.
Our meeting also voted overwhelmingly to support a three-strike sanction on those who persistently download illegal files, sanctions to consist of a warning letter, a stronger warning letter and a final sanction of the restriction of the infringer’s bandwidth to a level which would render file-sharing of media files impractical while leaving basic email and web access functional.
How backward-ass!!
As an artist, I am going to have to revoke my membership if they don’t do some serious back-peddling in the next few days.
I thought the FAC was a forward-thinking organization. Maybe not.
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Posted August 18th, 2009, in: Art Etc| Ideas, Observations, Opinions, Rants Etc| Projects| Visual Art
Juicy Butt Sweats
A few years ago I noticed this new paradigm in logo placement on clothing. I think it was the Company Juicy Couture that first put their logo right on the ass of the customer. I’m not sure if they were indeed the first, but the word “Juicy” is the first word I remember actually reading from the seat of the pants of a young lady walking in front of me on the street.
I don’t need to explain why the the word “juicy” is so provocative when placed prominently on a woman’s rear end, and perhaps this is why I remember it as the beginning of this era, whether or not the credit (or blame) is really owed to the JC clothing line for making this a trend.
Fast forward a few years and many colleges and indeed even my twelve-year-old niece’s junior high school’s athletic clothing line has the institution’s name featured in this manner.
But not on the men’s/boy’s shorts and sweats. Only on the women’s/girl’s.
Hairy Butt Jeans
I have therefore decided to examine the cultural subtext of this phenomenon further by adding a twist to it, which I shall be wearing around town in search of truth.
Behold, the unveiling of the Hairy Butt Jean by Andrew A. Peterson.
Sorry for the camera-phone pic. I’ll have better photos as soon as I’m ready to do a proper shoot for this amazing new addition to my artistic legacy.
Also, I know I’m not the best butt-model but I work with what I have.
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Posted July 19th, 2009, in: Ideas, Observations, Opinions, Rants Etc| Marketing/Advertising In The Cloud| Music Industry| New Media| Reviews & Thoughts About Products| SEO, SEM, SMO Etc| Technology| The War on Free Culture| Viral Marketing| Web 2.0
OK so I have to admit that I’ve overestimated the popularity of Last.FM. At least, I am realizing how different LastFM is for a user like me that mostly has mp3s on my hard drive, and users who stream music from lastfm.
PowerPlay isn’t going to do a lot of good for me very quickly since I’ve chosen to buy impressions on radio streams for artists that are pretty obscure. I did this because conversion rates (see web marketing 101) are higher in a narrower target, so if I try to compete for impressions/plays on Bjork’s radio stream, the chances that the users will actually like my music are considerably smaller than if I target people who like more obscure music like the constellation acts or something. Going for Bjork is more like going for Britney Spears in that there’s a fairly diverse audience and the users are more likely to be fairly mainstream (Bjork being one of the strangest things they like). Going after a band like Excepter or HRSTA is a better bet for me because these are people looking for fairly unconventional soundtrack-y experimental music.
In ten hours since I launched my first $20 Powerplay campaign (100 plays on radio streams of ten artists I chose), I’ve gotten ZERO plays.
On the upside, twenty bucks is going to provide my with at least 3 months of entertainment since I’ll have one more site to check in with a few times a day when I’m being neurotic.
The music industry is a mess. The best discovery tools suck because the content owners are afraid of change, while the best music delivery systems are either incomplete (legal or illegal but private) or unreliable (illegal but public).
And legal or not, there’s no real integration between the streaming services and the OS environment.
Maybe the Chrome OS or the Smartphone market will change that. I’m sick of storing tons of MP3s.
OH! If these other music acts are so obscure, maybe I should buy their Keywords from Google. Hmmm…
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Posted June 28th, 2009, in: Cultural Acceleration| Data Portability (DataPortability)| Humanity, Culture, Philosophy, Politics, Ethics Etc| Ideas, Observations, Opinions, Rants Etc| Semantic Web| Social Software and The Social Graph| Technology| The Semantic Web (Giant Global Graph)| Web 2.0
The following is a bunch of predictions. Mark my words. Three areas to pull out your wallet for.
- Personal Web Hosting/Cloud/Sync/Backup Services – I’m not sure what to call this space that I think we’ll be seeing a lot of. I don’t believe that these kinds of services will be bundled with mobile accounts anytime soon, but that’s clearly what will happen. The definition is this: Add-On ISP-like services that make mobile and desktop apps work together more effectively. This would include backup services and services that bridge gaps across the various hardware networks we use.
- Genealogy – The Baby Boomers love this stuff, and actually so do humans in general. Who doesn’t want to know their own family history? And with DNA analysis becoming more and more standardized, I think that Social-Media-Driven Genealogical Information will probably be mashed together with known hereditary data to create really compelling information services for average people. The word “Rich” comes to mind but that’s really in the hands of designers and visionaries. Imagine what’s going to happen in this space. It blows my mind.
- Library Sciences Related Anything – The so-called “Public Library” is probably about to explode into something much more tangled with our daily lives. I believe that tax-funded Public Libraries are increasingly getting closer to being able to easily use cutting edge Information Technology to serve the public. The abolition of hard-copy card catalogs went slowly. But we’re in the age of Moore’s Law. It’s no stretch of the imagination that soon there will be title-to-isbn translators that cross language barriers and so on… But that’s just the beginning. Imagine the Public Library as place that has cached, categorized databases from all sorts of sources, and Librarians as people helping you to mash data together (while you’re still at home in your underwear or on a train heading to work) …This idea is so hard to see for some people. I could go on for pages about the possibilities. And for you asshole cynics, remember: Facts Cannot Be Copyrighted. “(b) In no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such work.” …Libraries are worth so much to us as people. And when they merge into a global archive of ‘verified’ sources, we’ll really start to see the Web’s potential.
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Posted June 22nd, 2009, in: Art Etc| Humanity, Culture, Philosophy, Politics, Ethics Etc| Ideas, Observations, Opinions, Rants Etc
On par with Radiohead and Bjork, Xiu Xiu is an amazing project.
I had a hard time with it at first. Remember when you were a kid and didn’t like onions? or coffee? Xiu Xiu is a savory experience.
I borrowed all of Xiu Xiu’s albums from friends. It’s definitely going to inform my own art.
Production-wise, Xiu Xiu is some of the most interesting stuff I’ve heard that isn’t clearly “avant garde.”
Just google it. Great music vids on YOuTube too.
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Posted May 14th, 2009, in: 1| Cultural Acceleration| Data Portability (DataPortability)| New Media| Semantic Web| Social Software and The Social Graph| Technology| The Semantic Web (Giant Global Graph)| Web 2.0
This is a draft version. Suggestions welcome.
Short answer: People.
What the Semantic Web (now officially called any number of other things besides that) needs in order to become mainstream, in my opinion, is people and the connections between them. The phrase “The Social Graph” comes to mind a la Brad Fitzpatrick’s once famous, but now all but forgotten manifesto which even Tim Berners-Lee eventually commented on.
The Semantic Web would catch on if it was seen as even remotely useful by the young people who are most likely going to be building the next big thing on the web.
The beautiful thing about the Web2 era is that highly useful tools can sprout up overnight simply because of the desires of more or less ordinary people with no credentials or affiliation with a company. Everyone knows someone who’s a programmer. The next big social software application just might come from the bedroom of a teenager. There is hardly any barrier to access anymore. This is why Web 2.0 happened. A new tool or service doesn’t need a business plan and a data center to launch and go viral.
The trajectory of innovation throughout the last five years or so, the “Web 2.0″ years, has been around capitalizing on people, the content they create, their interests, and the value added by crowd-sourcing. The benefits in the social media space are clear from both the perspective of normal end-users, as well as giant companies. Mostly, these benefits are about filtering noise and finding relevance on the user-side and on the giant company side, gathering metrics, targeting messages and acquiring free content. The SemWeb standards have a lot to offer the Social Media realm, dare I say, probably even more than CSS with rounded corners does (I hope I’m not offending anyone here).
But the way things are today, for most programmers, implementing SemWeb standards is a lot of extra work with no immediate benefit. Why not just use MySQL or cook up a new XML format?
So why are these standards being completely ignored by the coders on the street? RSS took off. Why not FOAF? I think it’s because there’s no useful directory of URIs for people. There are lots of SEmWeb geeks who have URIs, but the kids on MySpace and FaceBook don’t have URIs or FOAF files. And those kids’ eyeballs and participation are worth real money!
One fine day, back in 2006, Tim Berners-Lee came down from the mountain and gave us a commandment (or at least he logged into his blog and made a suggestion):
“Do you have a URI for yourself? If you are reading this blog and you have the ability to publish stuff on the web, then you can make a FOAF page, and you can give yourself a URI.”
Then, apparently fifteen minutes after the first post was published, Berners-Lee really got at the importance of URIs in a post called Backward and Forward links in RDF just as important:
“One meme of RDF ethos is that the direction one choses for a given property is arbitrary: it doesn’t matter whether one defines “parent” or “child”; “employee” or “employer”. This philosophy (from the Enquire design of 1980) is that one should not favor one way over another. One day, you may be interested in following the link one way, another day, or somene else, the other way.”
For those of you who don’t yet understand the idea of the Semantic Web, here’s the deal. If there’s one web-address that represents each person, place thing or idea, it becomes possible to crawl the Web (documents as well as databases) looking for links to that person place or thing. And if those links contain tags which specify the meaning of the links, the web-at-large begins to look more like a giant database. This is the “Web of Data” (in contrast to the “Web of Documents” we know and love). This is what people call The Semantic Web. So what’s stopping people from being in the “Web of Data” (AKA Semantic Web)? Like Tim Berners-Lee suggested, we need URIs for people. That’s where it all starts. Once there are URIs for people, and there are semantic links (ones that contain tags explaining what they mean) pointing at the those URIs, we can start making tools that use that data.
This is a fairly simple concept. And Berners-Lee makes it sound simple enough. Sure, we’ll all just give ourselves URIs and viala, the Social Graph will go Semantic. That sounds great but there are a few problems with leaving it at that.
- Most ordinary people do not have websites or hosting of their own and instead rely on Social Networking Services’ profile pages for their web presence. This means that most people have no way of easily publishing themselves to the Web of Data.
- For-Profit Social Networking services have a conflict of interest with regard to providing the Web-at-large with useful, granular “Social Graph” data. Instead we see APIs that give approved developers limited access to data. No love for the average joe like me that is not a programmer.
- The Web currently has no trustworthy repository for facts about ordinary people. Trustworthy means not-for-profit at the very least. The closest thing we have is Wikipedia, but Wikipedia does not allow entries on ordinary, non-notable people. (keep in mind that the Wikipedia publishes the facts in its ‘info boxes’ in RDF one of the core Standards of what we have been calling ‘The Semantic Web’)
We need to start thinking of the Web more like we think of a Public Library, but completely decentralized and with infinite shelf-space. I think WikiMedia, the organization behind the Wikipedia is the best bet for a trusted librarian for all the information about normal people.
I think what is really needed right now is a non-profit run directory of people, possibly even modeled after the Wikipedia, especially when it comes to the concurrent DBPedia project, which publishes the contents of Wikipedia facts to the Semantic Web. Really I think because of WikiMedia’s established trust, they would be the ideal organization to do this. Wikipedia could simply have another layer which reveals non-notable results or ‘all results.’
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Posted May 2nd, 2009, in: Humanity, Culture, Philosophy, Politics, Ethics Etc| Ideas, Observations, Opinions, Rants Etc
The following is a little illustration in the form of a hypothetical scenario of why I think that individual behavior makes a big difference. I end up giving this example to just about everyone that I end up discussing my personal philosophy with. The hypothetical scenario is not something I invented, but I can’t remember where I got the idea. I’ve surely altered it a bit but the point is what is important.
[beginning of story]
Imagine a small town. In this small town, everyone has more or less the same ideas about how to behave and treat one another.
In this town, it’s understood that if you were to find money on the ground outside the local grocery, you would turn it in because that’s what everyone has always done. And in turn, if a citizen of the town got home from the market and realized that she didn’t have in her pocket the twenty-dollar bill she had left the store with, she would likely call or return to the store, quite confident that one of her neighbors would have noticed the bill on the ground in the parking lot and turned it in to the management of the store.
Now imagine that you [addressed to you the reader] moved to this nice little town. And one day you come across a twenty dollar bill on the ground outside of the local grocery. You pick it up and stick it in your pocket. That’s how things are done where you’re from. You just got lucky!
A while later, one of the town natives calls over to the store and is quite surprised to find out that no one has turned in the money he surely must have dropped between the market and his car.
At this point, in his mind, it is no longer necessarily an active custom of the culture of the town to turn in found money. In fact, later on, he reinforces this by not turning in money that he finds outside the market since he no longer believes that it is the normal thing to do.
Since you moved to this town, a chain-reaction has begun that will change what people think is the ‘right’ or ‘normal’ thing to do when they come across their neighbor’s accidentally misplaced money.
[end of story]
I know this is a fairly silly narrative, and I swear it comes across as much more believable and compelling in verbal communication, and I’m sure I could have written it more interestingly, but bare with me,
The idea is this:
The number of interactions we have with other humans in our lives that give us a real sense of how people behave is small. If you’ve ever visited a foreign place for a few days and left with the idea that “The people there are so friendly and helpful..” remember that it was probably only one or two interactions that gave you that idea. Maybe you were confused about a train map and someone offered to explain it to you. Maybe it was something else like that.
Later today, or tomorrow or next week, you might see someone who obviously could benefit from the help of a stranger, but you might be inclined to not help them because that’s not really how we do it around here. But if you do help them, in their mind, it’s likely that it will become the way we do it around here, and in turn they will be more likely to do the same kind of thing for others.
I believe that a lot of the time, people behave according to how they think other people behave. The good news (or bad news) is that the opportunities that people have to really get a sense of how people behave are few and far between.
So in the next 24 hours, something you do in your interaction with a complete stranger could actually have a fairly large ripple effect.
You can change how people act just by treating people differently.
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