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 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 January 23rd, 2009, in: Data Portability (DataPortability)| Ideas, Observations, Opinions, Rants Etc| Marketing/Advertising In The Cloud| SEO, SEM, SMO Etc| Semantic Web| Social Software and The Social Graph| Technology

An interesting baby-step in Google improving Search Results (man are they ever holding out on us!)

From Read/Write Web (Written by Marshall Kirkpatrick)

Did Google Just Expose Semantic Data in Search Results?  Well did they?  No. The results pages don’t expose any “structured data”

I really believe that Google is trying to avoid becoming everyone’s scrape-able Semantic Query Engine. There’s tons of at least semi-semantic data out there and google simply doesn’t present it to us.  They have it.  They understand it. They could give it to us. But they don’t.  I mean for crying out loud, imagine how difficult it must be for google to return image search results that are anywhere near as good as google’s image results are?   Does anyone really think that google is completely ignoring microformats or service-wide presentational semantic data (an example of this would be the html classes and ID’s assigned to elements on social network pages)?? Does anyone really think so?  While they’re looking at things like alt tags and nofollow tags and everything else?  Would google just ignore piles and piles of metadata? No.  Would they decide to not let us use it?  I think so.  

I think they’re doing a classic ‘roll-out’ thing, saving their best search technology for when they absolutely have to whip it out for competitive reasons.  This is cause to resent google to a certain extent I think.

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Posted November 26th, 2008, in: Ideas, Observations, Opinions, Rants Etc| Marketing/Advertising In The Cloud| New Media| SEO, SEM, SMO Etc| Social Software and The Social Graph| Spam and Scams| Technology| Web 2.0

I like many NPR programs.  And this post about Weekend Edition’s mis-use of Twitter is just a way of pointing out a flaw in how one organisation is using Twitter so that we, and hopefully they (are you listening?), can learn from their mistakes.

1. I clicked to “Follow” Weekend Edition.
2. I got a weird impersonal messages sent “to me” via an “@ Reply” about how they’re getting the next episode of their show ready etc.  (why would they send that to me?  Smells like a strategy: “When someone starts to ‘follow’ us, respond to them with the latest tweet…” …a lot like automated thanks-for-the-add comments on MySpace, right?)
3. I responded suggesting they aren’t really using Twitter correctly.  
4. I gave it a day thinking I’d get a little response from their Team… Nope.  (What’s even worse than misinterpreting a medium, is not paying attention when people try to help.  Hello?)

Why would I want to be getting “personal,” direct messages from a media brand that wont respond to my own “personal” messages, when all of this is taking place via a platform in which I‘m already subscribing to a stream of anything that brand wants to say???  

Arghh!!

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Posted September 30th, 2008, in: SEO, SEM, SMO Etc| Semantic Web| Spam and Scams| Technology

IDEA: A MicroFormat for when it may be necessary to link to a Malicious, Dangerous, or Unethical Site?

Funny, the first thing that came to mind was using rel=”spam”  …but really what brought this up was a site that isn’t necessarily “Spam” in the traditional sense.  The site was a pyramid scheme, the operators of which were posting ads on my local craigslist for “social media” something or other.  This isn’t by definition, Spam.

The Wikipedia currently says:

“Spamming is the abuse of electronic messaging systems to indiscriminately send unsolicited bulk messages…”

The quantity is what makes spam spam, not the uselessness of what’s being promoted.

Maybe rel=”mal” as in malicious??

I’m not the only one thinking about this idea.

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Posted September 30th, 2008, in: Computer Problems and Fixes| Evil Robots| Ideas, Observations, Opinions, Rants Etc| New Media| SEO, SEM, SMO Etc| Spam and Scams| Technology| Web 2.0

If your blog has been deleted suddenly by WordPress.com, DON’T PANIC!  …that is, unless you use your blog for phishing scams or spam-commenting or anything else that brings down the experience of other people on the Web and/or makes it harder for people to find the information they need.  In that case, panic.  Scream and cry.  I hope your blog is permanently deleted, and everything you eat for the rest of you life tastes horrible. The Web is our garden!  

Assuming you are an ethical participant of The Cloud, pretty soon you should get an email from WordPress.com explaining the nature of the take-down.

[Anyway, my blog is back, obviously.  I guess I need to start backing up my blog? Jeeez.  What a hassle.]

[begin story]

I regularly blog about scams/spam on the Web.  It’s a way for me be discovered by, and to provide guidance to, people who happen to be googling around about some questionable content they find or are emailed.

One example of this is this search result for “paypal-cgi.com,” a site that mimics PayPal in order to trick people into handing over their paypal login info.  I come up number one for the search, and the title of the result makes it clear that you shouln’t trust PayPal-CGI.com… If you click thru to my post, I explain why these things exist and how to detect this kind of crap.

You see, I’m actually doing something good here.  And it’s good for me too.

Anyway, recently I encountered some scam crap on craigslist and blogged about it. And since my blog post contained a link to the spam/scam site I was exposing, WordPress.com’s evil-detectors went ape shit and my blog got automatically removed by wordpress.com.  

I was in the middle editing a post and suddenly my category selection buttons stopped working.  And there was a thing saying somethin like “you do not have permission to edit this..” or something like that.  When I refreshed the page, I got “The authors have deleted this blog. The content is no longer available”

…and my blog had been completely removed leaving only this scary screen saying: “This blog has been archived or suspended for a violation of our Terms of Service.”

Ironic. I got banned for merely exposing something malicious.

Current Spam-Filter technology isn’t context-aware. This is a slippery slope: Using words or links alone, without regard to context, to define what is untrustworthy content.

See the post in question for yourself HERE: 

Fortunately, about an hour later, I got a message from WordPress.com: 

from: Anthony – WordPress.com:

Hi,

Your blog was automatically flagged, as links to overnightcashexplosion.com were detected (and these are certainly not permitted). The blog is back – please remove all such links.

Best,

Anthony

Automattic | WordPress.com

I responded with:

if it’s a url in text, is that different in the eyes of your spam defenses from an actual link?  I’d like to leave the url if possible so I can still come up in searches for that url. 

WHat’s your take on that?

Thanks for communicating with me.

-A

Anthony from WordPress replied:

Hi,
Sure, you can leave it – I understand the context.

Best,
Anthony
Automattic | WordPress.com

So, there is a layer of discretion here?  That’s good I guess.

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Posted July 30th, 2008, in: Computer Problems and Fixes| Data Portability (DataPortability)| SEO, SEM, SMO Etc| Semantic Web| Social Software and The Social Graph| Technology| The Semantic Web (Giant Global Graph)| Web 2.0

Here’s my dilemma. I have a ton of bookmarks on my Del.icio.us account.  I love using an online bookmarking system. But still, Delicious and others’ systems for organizing bookmarks don’t really help with a need I bet most users have: Tag-Optimization.  

Del.Icio.Us Tags Gone Wild

On several occasions, I’ve set out to clean up my tags manually, but I’ve never made it very far.  It’s just too much work.

Maybe the coming overhaul to Del.Icio.Us will ad some of these needed features, although somehow I doubt it.

I’ve heard of the MOAT (Meaning Of A Tag) Project, and perhaps this could save us, but like many other ‘Semantic Web’ projects, I haven’t found a way, as a lay person, to utilize it.  At some point down te road,  maybe someone will make a Delicious-MOAT-erizer Web-App that will clean-up-shop-by-proxy and make the metadata available to the Semantic Web.

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Posted May 15th, 2008, in: Data Portability (DataPortability)| Marketing/Advertising In The Cloud| SEO, SEM, SMO Etc| Semantic Web| Social Software and The Social Graph| Technology| The Semantic Web (Giant Global Graph)

Update… this was actually news back in January.  Coincidentally, today it was announced that Comcast is buying Plaxo.  Goodbye Plaxo.  Nice knowin’ ya.

Got the rumor tip from Scoble (there’s no real info there so don’t bother)

Plaxo? Are you listening?  Keep doing what you’re doing, stay behind the scenes, work on enabling users to publish their own data, at will, in Semantic Standards as they become timely (now?) and stay independent of the little tug-of-war between closed, albeit increasingly API-enabled social apps.   You’re better than them!  Hang in there and you’ll be worth way more!  Don’t turn to the dark side!

Competition for traffic will get everyone using RDF and Microformats soon enough…  Semantics are like SEO 2.0… The next bandwagon everyone will want to pay way too much for.

Plaxo, you’re in the perfect spot to make money on this.  Think Virtual Private Networks, Semantic Publishing to the Web, and Semantic Productivity Tools at home.

Seriously.  

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Posted May 15th, 2008, in: Computer Problems and Fixes| SEO, SEM, SMO Etc| Technology

You know about using quotes to get an exact text string including spaces between words.

You probably already knew about -word to 86 any sites containing a certain word from the results.

And there’s site: url 

And you may already know about Define: word to get a dictionary entry.

But there are tons of these things.  You can use Google as a calculator, you can search for text in specific HTML tags and much, much more.

A good place to find many of these (if not all of them) is at GoogleGuide.com  

One interesting example of this is using intitle: or inurl: to get addresses of security cameras that aren’t password-protected.  Since the software that comes with these things is left to the default settings and someone wasn’t savvy enough to password-protect the cameras when they were set up, you can actually go to these cameras and control them as if you were in charge of them.  You can peer into other places in the world in realtime thru the lenses of un-secure security cameras!  And move them about!

Here’s a myspace blog entry where this guy lists many examples of this.

Here are some example google queries from the post.

• google – inurl:”view/index.shtml” – Axis Network Camera
• google – SNC-RZ30 HOME – Sony network cam
• google – inurl:indexFrame.shtml Axis – Axis Video Server(cam)
• google – intitle:”Live View / – AXIS” – AXIS Video Live Camera
• google – intitle:”Live View / – AXIS” | inurl:view/view.sht – AXIS Video Live View
• google – intitle:”The AXIS 200 Home Page” – AXIS 200 Network Camera
• google – intitle:liveapplet inurl:LvAppl – Canon Network Camera
• google – intext:”MOBOTIX M1″ intext:”Open Menu” – Mobotix Network Camera
• google – intitle:”WJ-NT104 Main Page” Or inurl:”ViewerFrame?Mode=” – Panasonic Network Camera
• google – intitle:”QuickCamPro WebCam” inurl:webcam – QuickCamPro
• google – intitle:”SiteZAP WebCam Control” – SiteZAP WebCam

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Posted May 14th, 2008, in: Data Portability (DataPortability)| Marketing/Advertising In The Cloud| SEO, SEM, SMO Etc| Semantic Web| Social Software and The Social Graph| Technology| The Semantic Web (Giant Global Graph)

In the suggested reading section of the page for the DIY Rel=”Me” project over at dataportability.org’s wiki, There’s a link to this blog post, which is an attempt to explore the usefulness of rel=”me” to the regular old web user.  The article is slightly tunnel-visioned at what you can or can’t do with your browser to exploit MicroFormats.  Of course, being able to detect locations or personal contact info thru a browser extension is useful and I’m all for it, but beyond a few obvious exceptions like those, The Semantic Web, MicroFormats included, wont be much use to us at the level of the browser.  We will still need Web based portals or “Libraries” or “repositories” or “Catalogs” or what have you, to connect to, in order to really take advantage of this stuff.  Semantic markup on pages is great. RSS is an example of how a little bit of semantics can go a long way.  But what’s of greater significance is the idea of the Web Of Data, where resources are “semantically” interconnected, by leveraging information that’s mapped to the domain of knowledge where it’s useful and the relationships between resources are also specified in a machine-understandable way.

Rel=”me” is the equivalent of saying “The person represented by this URL is the same person as the person represented by this other URL.”  Taking that into consideration, imagine how this would effect the experience of searching the “Web of Documents.”  I argue that if enough of us implement rel=”me” (or other microformats or RDFa) in our HTML pages, we will empower the Googles and Yahoos to take advantage to knowledge expressed by this markup.  So let’s do it!  

Quotes from the Article I mentioned:

“…So assuming that you went through the trouble to write up your HTML with rel=me, what next, where is that information actually consumed. I don’t think the 2 most popular browsers (IE 7 and Firefox 2) at this time have native support for XFN, I hear Firefox 3 is suppose to have native microformat support but I haven’t looked for it and if it is there, it isn’t immediately obvious to me. The closest thing I can find is a Firefox plugin called Operator. Operator is a microformat capable reader and for the most part seems to be able to consume most of the above microformat standards except rel=me, kind of odd but kind of understandable…”

“…At this time, I can honestly say that XFN rel=me proliferation is limited and experimental at best. It would take a while for mass adoption to happen and requires a lot of user education, adoption by popular social sites like Facebook, MySpace, etc, and native browser support…”

I commented there and when I take the time to write a long comment out, that isn’t something I’ve already written in so many words here, I like to steal my own comment and put it here for anyone who reads my blog.  My response:

I felt like I had to chime in and point out that the point of MicroFormats or RDFa isn’t really to make an overnight change in how we use the Web. It’s to create a backbone of linked data so that as Search Engines and other “Libraries” begin to have stores of these relationships between documents and other resources available to work with, they can begin to improve their services. It will be nice when Search is only partly based on scanning for text-strings or combinations of words.

If you were looking for Andrew in Sebastopol, CA, how would you do it? Perhaps you’d google “Andrew Sebastopol CA…”
But what if you could specify that you are looking for a person?
What if you could specify geocoding info or otherwise specify that Sebastopol is a town in Northern California?
What if you could filter your results by the time web-pages were created or filter by domain specifications (like show me wiki articles first or show me all MySpace profiles) or filter by type of site like say, show me blogs only, and finally, and this is where rel=”me” comes in, what if you could specify in your search results that you want to see every other document that is an expression of the same person, once you have selected from your query, a person named Andrew who lives in Sebastopol, CA? This is what it’s all about. It works because links work backward. In other words, you can already say “show me all the pages that link to this thing…” but what about being able to say “show me all the pages linking to this Twitter page that link using rel=”me” or better yet, show me all the pages linked to with rel=”me” from any page that links to this twitter page with rel=”me” …And so on…

The Web is becoming a library. By adding microformats and other semantic markup to our documents, we are making it possible for decent “card-catalogues” to be built, whether they’re being built by google, yahoo! or the guy down the street.

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