Monthly Archives: October 2007

Attack of the SuperWorm ! ‘Storm’ Surge Growing !

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sky.jpg

I quote Bruce Schneier from his wired blog Security Matters goes into greater detail about the gathering StormBot Threat. I posted a brief riff about this Sept, 9,07 about the DDoS attacks on the the anti-spam, anti-phishing sites that track the activities of the online scammers and spammers, 419Eater and the anti-scam site Scamwarners.

This Bot-Net-Worm coordinated DDoS attack was very sophisticated in both how it went after these sites and why. Bruce Schneier has some excellent research and reveals some possible insight into the root of this attack, and some facts about the techniques of the programmers and social engineers behind the Storm Worm.

“Worms like Storm are written by hackers looking for profit, and they’re different. These worms spread more subtly, without making noise. Symptoms don’t appear immediately, and an infected computer can sit dormant for a long time. If it were a disease, it would be more like syphilis, whose symptoms may be mild or disappear altogether, but which will eventually come back years later and eat your brain.” Link

Enjoying the Twitter Experience

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I have been having a good time using Twitter lately. Lots of cool people, throwing out info about the daily minutiae of their lives. Being online all the time during the work week and beyond, it is nice to have a little SMS type broadcast device for the Wild West that is the Web.

I was remarking to someone today how Twitter is like having your own personal live PR feed to the internet, cause in Twitter your can broadcast relevant links, combined with Tiny URL, it makes for a powerful tool.

After I first started using Twitter, I was re-doing my ancient photography site, and I put into Google my name. EGADS ! I saw all my Twitter thingys all over the first page of Google. I quickly changed my real name in my settings, and re-thought how silly I was going to allow myself to go.

I am hoping the spammer types are not going to get a hold of this information, cause it could bring down the whole Twitter network, or whatever it is.

It id pretty awesome, even though Twitter is not a syndicated PR feed, the fact that it can be used to broadcast relevant links, coupled with the way Google currently appears to index Twitters ‘broadcast’ brings up some interesting ideas.

Semiotics vs. Semantics

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from: Toward a Semantic Web

“At this point, nearly every Web designer that learns about microformats starts using them,” Tantek Çelik, chief technologist at Technorati and co-founder of Microformats.org, told InternetNews.com. “Because microformats require only some HTML authoring ability, millions of Web authors and designers are able to use them immediately. This is a much lower barrier to entry than many previous Web technologies, such as XML and RSS, which require the skills of a programmer.” -Tantek Çelik

Developer
September 21, 2007
Microformats: Toward a Semantic Web
By Sean Michael Kerner

Found on Twitter Microformat’s Twitter Account.

Meanwhile, I have enabled ‘Operator’ a Firefox Plugin created by Mike Kaply, and now, just the last few minutes I am surfing the web with it enabled, wow ! Kinda like the scene from John Carpenter’s 1988 movie They Live ! , Roddy Piper, putting the sunglasses on and seeing a new world, only this one is positive.

Really hooked now !

Tantek, XFN, Matt Mullenweg, and Microformats

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XFN is an amazing concept, and after looking at the incredible Page Rank of these various URLs, and not a theoretical one.

I first heard about Tantek when someone posting a thing on Digg about putting the term ‘Tantek’ into Flickr’s search engine, and finding all these pictures of this Uber Geek looking guy with all these hot geek intelligentsia babes. It you looked at the photo stream from the search you are looking a some sort of geek-tech-babe-magnet.

So I made him a contact a while back, not knowing who the hell he was. Fast forward to about 8 months ago, when I discovered Blue Host through the recommended Word Press.org hosting lists, that let to the Open Source auto loader Fantastico, which let to the top of my head being blown off and finding myself slinging hosted Word Press blogs built primarily for the ease of use, CMS and ,most of all, the stunning indexing potential + power with the search engines. (ridiculous sentence there ;)

What is my point ? The point I am trying to make, is that, over the last 8 months, I have immersed myself in WordPress though building the things for clients. There has been some shift, a profound one, in my understanding of this emerging technology.

The word ‘Semantic’ for instance. Like the word ‘relevance’, which I never used years ago. Google changed all that, fer sure. Kind of like the word ‘obfuscate’, you never heard that one before the Bush Administration came to power. Semantic as it relates to HTML, CSS, metatdata and the deeper structures in the application Word Press.

GMPG Efforts , XFN and XFN 1.1 Creator. These three links are filled with some mind boggling technology as it relates to ‘relevant’ linking over the Internet. XHTML Friends Network (XFN) is such a pure concept, very interesting, for the ‘microformat’ is, and I am going to have to quote Wikipedia here, is:

“Microformats emerged as part of a grassroots movement[4] to make recognizable data items, (such as events, contact details or geographical locations), capable of automated processing by software, as well as directly readable by end-users.[4][7] Link-based microformats emerged first. These include vote links that express opinions of the linked page, which can be tallied into instant polls by search engines.[8]” Wiki

Tantek is one of the key players in this initiative,he is also one of the founders of Technorati and the whole full circle thing is pretty exciting. Matt Mullenweg, on the other hand, is the main man behind WordPress, and developed the first version of XFN Creator.