Google PR ‘comment spam on blogs’ attack thwarted !

Attack Of The Fake Search Results

A massive attempt to defraud search users was thwarted yesterday, according to the BBC. Hackers created thousands of booby-trapped Web sites that tricked Google, MSN and Yahoo search crawlers into ranking them very high. The hackers used comment spam on blogs to achieve the high results. The Web sites would come up in search results for terms like “Christmas gifts” and “hospice,” the report said. Users who clicked on these fake sites risked having their computers hijacked and their personal information stolen.

However, the attack was uncovered yesterday. “This was fairly epic,” said Alex Eckelberry, who heads Sunbelt Software, one of the firms that uncovered the attack. Eckelberry said tens of thousands of domains were used in the attack and that most were Chinese registered and hosted in the U.S. He said the attack could be a harbinger of many more to come.

As usual, the malicious software exploited weaknesses in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. “If your machine was not fully patched, you were going to get hosed,” Eckelberry said. He added that the fake Web sites were only programmed to show on Google.com, even though Yahoo and MSN’s crawlers also indexed them. From MediaPost Link to BBC

Google mobile-It’s all about China

Google mobile strategy steals a march on rivals – China Financial Times 11.06.07

“Google vaulted past Microsoft yesterday by unveiling a long-awaited mobile strategy in a bid to speed up the use of the internet on mobile phones.

The plan, involving a new software platform for mobile handsets and a broad international alliance of more than 30 handset makers and communications companies, could prove a disruptive force to the economics of the mobile industry in the long-term, according to analysts.

Google’s success in drawing a wide group of mobile industry players to its technology marks a sharp contrast with Microsoft, which has tried for years to win support for a mobile version of its Windows operating system.”

It’s all about China – The USA and Europe are starting to take a back seat to the dazzling size of the Mobile Market in China.

Google Wireless: GPhone or Google Phone ?

Everyone has been waiting for this announcement, it comes as no surprise that Google is entering the wireless fray. Link.

From what I have read from the NYTimes article, it appears Google’s strategy is going to be brilliant, as usual. Rather than competing in the crazy wireless space, they are going to be building ‘open source’ software to offer ‘an optimized wireless Internet experience’. Google’s phone software is named Android.

“We are not building a GPhone; we are enabling 1,000 people to build a GPhone,” said Andy Rubin, Google’s director of mobile platforms, who led the effort to develop the software.

Android: The antidote for the ‘walled gardens’ of cell phone access to the Internet.

Social Trends for September

This was an interesting item that popped up from my iGoogle feed, ironic, I never considered the personalized Google page to be ‘Social Networking’ but apparently in stats it’s considered thus:

Found on Tech Crunch

On the bookmarking side, in September Google commanded a 17.0 percent share of all Web bookmarking activity, followed by native-browser bookmarking (i.e., “Favorites”) with a 16.1 percent share.

Social Trends for September

Here are the trends for September. The first graph shows the evolution of the ranking for the top 10 social bookmarking services.

A comment excerpted from the addthis blog:

Steve Ballmer

October 15th, 2007 at 9:18 am

“Must I say it again? All of this “Social” stuff is just a fad, a passing fancy, bellbottoms, flattops, Mac computers, …. It will soon be a distant memory and all that’s left of it will be the Microsoft Cloud !”

Link

(Addthis)

SocNetWrk – New Acronym

I just made this up, SocNetWrk. The time is 4:30pm on October 12 2007.

Yes it’s new, I just Googled it.

SocNetWrk is nowhere to be found. I just sent out a twitter to that effect alongside WikiSpam, which is from a twitter post that Tantek just twittered.

I have been writing out the words Social Network and Social Networking now in tags, and it is such a chore, I mean, really !

William Burroughs Auto Text Bot or The Anti-Google !

I have a lot of blogs these days, to test out the medium, play around, test SEO in real time. I have been plating with some of my incoming spam from my spam folder, marveling at how the spammers have been creating amazing ‘quasi-text’, that reads quite well. There is some internal logic that the spammers have hit on, mining text form the entire internet and running it through some sort of ‘Anti-Google’, a text ‘blender’ as you will that grabs random text from all over the web and ‘blenderizes’ it into a strangely coherent form. I have been trying to achieve this, and failing miserably. In my search for an effective ‘Anti-Google’ I found this: Link

Excerpt:

“Taking their inspiration from the philosophy of sampling, William Burroughs’ cut-up technique, Jeff Noon’s “Cobralingus” project and too many long nights spent on music mixing desks, art-text-terrorists the Lazarus Corporation have created an online mixing desk – for writing.

The text mixing desk manipulates your writing with a succession of outboard effects – such as the “transgenderiser”, which swaps the sex of any gender-specific words faster than a Thai plastic surgeon, and the Burroughs inspired “cut-up engine” which takes a pair of scissors to your work and dances gleefully on the bleeding remains of your carefully constructed sentences.

But why on earth would you want to mangle your precisely worded prose in this way? Well, the Godfather of Beat and author of “Naked Lunch”, William S Burroughs, explains it best:

“The best writing seems to be done almost by accident but writers until the cut-up method was made explicit … had no way to produce the accident of spontaneity. You cannot will spontaneity. But you can introduce the spontaneous factor with a pair of scissors.”

…or in the case of the Lazarus Corporation’s text mixing desk, with some sharply written lines of code. This is, after all, the 21st century.”