Archive for January, 2006

Google Pack - The Ultimate Utility?

Thursday, January 26th, 2006

So you just got a new computer and you want to load all of those cool free programs that are almost essential now. The Google Pack makes it easy. Good provides a downloader proggram that automatically retrieve and installs all of those free programs you need:

  • AntiSpyware Ad-Mail
  • Adobe Reader 7

  • Mozilla Firefox

  • Stream-reading RealPlayer

  • Norton AntiVirus (6 month demo)

You can choose to load any or all of these. The package also includes the Google Desktop, which includes (also free):

  • Googke Destop program
  • Picasa - photo manager

  • Google Talk

  • Google Toolbar

  • Google Earth

To install Google Pack you download the Google Updater.

It is currently only available for Windows XP. If a utility is already loaded on your computer, it will not load it again but may update it if necessary.

To learn more, go to: http://pack.google.com/
Watch for its availability soon - at least we don’t see the downloading button now.

Google watcher John Battelle comments on Google Pack:

Google Pack strikes me as an obvious play for Google, the company has made no secret of its intention to poke Microsoft in the eye from time to time. And honestly, they are right - setting up and maintaining a PC is a right pain in the ass. I very much hope this thing works, and plan to try it out on a new PC Federated Media is buying this week. (More on Pack here at SEW).

I spoke to Marissa Mayer about Pack, and she had some fun stuff to say about it. I noticed no version of Open Office in the Pack, and she reminded me this is just the first version of the Pack, and since it updates itself automatically, why, there might be Open Office in an update shortly. They are in active discussions, I was told.

Pack, if it becomes popular, will bring a whole new set of users to Google, mainly because it includes Toolbar and Desktop, which of course means more searches, and more data, and more money for Google.

“We realize software distribution will have to become one of our core competencies,” Mayer told me.

“Some of (the applications in Pack) will result in increased revenue to us,” she also noted.

Well, I asked, might you ever include Microsoft products in a Google Pack? “If they are interested,” the ever on her feet Mayer responded, “we’d be more than willing to discuss it with them.” Over to you, Mr. Ballmer….

Microsoft - Another “Lost” Reality Show?

Wednesday, January 11th, 2006

Some of you have noticed that our black list of spammers doesn’t work at the moment. If you want to hack these IPs at the moment, just email us from our contact form and we’ll email you the ACCESS file. Meanwhile, here is what happened.

The black list is kept on a local database on our Windows 2000 system and it drives a MySQL database on the Linux host using a MySQL driver 3.51. We recently updated our Windows 2000 SP3 to SP4 and got all those security fixes installed. Now the SQL driver doesn’t work. Yep, I uninstalled the driver and ACCESS and re-installed both. The error message when we try comes from ACCESS is that the OBDC call failed. It use to work. No additional messages. The system is a Dell workstation. Dell has no clue as to what happened. It is, of course, a Microsoft problem. Microsoft wants $245 dollars to tell me what happened. That’s more than my Windows 2000 cost. And what they will probably tell me for $245 is to reformat my disk and reload Windows and all my programs. (Yes, our data is all backed up.) I’m willing to bet the register is corrupt and that is the problem.

Do you want to know why Microsoft has all the security problems that it does? It isn’t the number of Windows systems out there, but rather the register design. Vista won’t help Microsoft unless they are serious about fixing Windows, and Microsoft has lost trust on that.

Summary
To quote Cringely from the 1/9/2006 issue of Infoworld:

Desktop Linux is looking more attractive every day.

Our host system is a Linux. We couldn’t afford to run our web site on a host that crashes like Windows does. At the desktop level, Microsoft is now competing with Linux, Apple (now using Intel processor chips), and soon GoogleDos. Why should I have to pay for a Microsoft problem, such as my ACCESS problem?

The answer, I would think, would be for Windows’ users to rise up with a class action suite. This was suggested in Inforworld 1/9 by Dave Rosenberg. When do Windows’ users get compensated for Microsoft’s mistakes?

Meanwhile, we are loading the SQL driver onto another system and hope to have the black list up again soon. Our responsibility is to our clients first, so this is considered non-productive and may take some time yet. Please be patient or ask us to email the database. We’ve sent a printout to the FTC, but the Administration and the FTC are pretty dead the next few years.

Our web traffic is growing - 200% since early November

Friday, January 6th, 2006

Adding Darcy to our home page and giving her a special Darcy page increased our web traffic initially by 300%. It’s now more like an increase of 200% over early November. Quite a respectable increase.

On our ministry blog, the blog there is really driving the traffic, which has increased by 50% since October. It’s hard to see the corresponding traffic increase on this business blog, as there are over 800 pages on the site and many people come in from other areas of the site. The city crime mapping and charting on this site, for example, is a VERY popular area. There are a lot of external links in the search engines to that area, so we see the resulting traffic.

We can put Darcy or a blog on your own web site. Let us know if you are serious about wanting more web traffic.

Stopping Spam or Having Fun with It

Wednesday, January 4th, 2006

Our spam load has increased dramatically during the last few weeks in spite of spam filters on our host and system. We trap the IPs and domains of spam hosts and load them to a database. This is our black list, and is available and uncopyrighted at http://www.creatingnewworlds.org/stopspam.cfm.

Note: This page is temporarily down. We upgraded our Windows 2000 from sp3 to sp4 and lost the driver that updates the MySQL database in the process. We hope to have this page back soon. The local Access file is still being updated during this time.

The government is doing very little. We just mailed our end-of-year copy of this to the FTC, President Bush, and one of my senators, Senator Ron Wyden. We’re giving them a few suggestions. Here is Senator Wyden’s copy of the letter. Then we’ll tell you what you can do:

Re: Failure of CAN-SPAM Act

Please find enclosed a listing of the spam reaching my system that is illegal or fraud. The FTC is supposed to be finding these and stopping this using the CAN-SPAM act, but it is obvious that the CAN-SPAM act is a total failure. In fact, looking at this indicates that their recent 100+ page report on the FTC “success” with the CAN-SPAM is spin, not facts.

As the government has failed to stop the spams, we are putting the domain name and domain name of spam that reaches us online in a public database and encourage hackers to destroy the IPs and domains. The IP, then, becomes dead for whoever uses it next. That is the only alternative we have at the moment. The page, located at http://www.creatingnewworlds.org/stopspam.cfm, has a very good PageRank of 4 on Google. We blog the page. When we get a gripe or someone threatening to sue, we send their illegal email to their state attorney general (when they are US based) and that stops them. We’ve had no foreign complaints. As other people do this (which we encourage), there is an erosion of available IPs. Spam has to be stopped at its source.

In my world, if I had employees at the FTC with this level of failure I would fire them. Failure to do this puts the responsibility of the failure directly at the commission of the FTC and on the President, to which the commission reports.

Here are some suggestions I would encourage you very strongly to make:

  1. Raise the current fine level to finance what needs to be done. Germany charges $65,000 a spam. (This probably requires an act of Congress). Without the proper resources and if doing nothing, you are sending a message that the government (Administration and Congress) is owned by the DMA. Is that the message you and the President want to send?
  2. Enforce the fine. They break the law, they pay the fine. No nice talk.

  3. Return a portion of the fine (10% split between whoever reports the IP) to the people reporting the spam to finance their processing.
  4. Hold accountability at the FTC. Fire when people aren’t doing their job..

I will be blogging what the FTC, the President and Congress does. This letter is in a blog posted at http://www.netadventures.biz/wordpress.

What You Can Do
Here are some suggestions on what you can do.

  • Build you own black list of the sites that the spam email points it. We put some email addresses in our database for sources of the spam. For example, if the spam tells you to go to http://www.thisdomain.com, then put that domain and its IP in the database.
  • If you want to include the host systems IPs and domains of where the email spam is coming from, we have a $15 dollar paper that shows you how to read those email headers. Certain lines in the header can’t be forged. The paper tells you where and are and how to use them. Order from our store.

  • Fire your listing off to the FTC, the President, and your senators and representatives. Remember some of them are up for election next fall. Don’t try to blackmail them with your vote. they are already running scared - or should be. Don’t be a one-issue voter next fall, but hold your senator and representtives accountable.

  • If someone complains about being on the list and they are in the U.S., send the information to the state Attorney General where they reside. Keep your spam email so you can send that to the Attorney General. We never get complaints from foreign hosts.

  • Know the CAN-SPAM Act so you can tell when they violate it. Use the Federal Trade Commission’s web site to find that.

  • Hack the spam hosts if you like. They are already illegal.

Have fun. If you want to use our ColdFusion program on stopspam.cfm, go for it. Look at the source code and copy and paste into a page on your site. Change the database pointers to your own web site. Change fields as necessary. We just put the IPs and domains in a local Access database and then upload it periodically to the MySql database on the host. Very simple. Check with your host on how to do this. Change hosts to our host if they can’t

New Virus could be major threat

Wednesday, January 4th, 2006

A new virus threat has been identified that could affect any version of Microsoft Windows. It is particularly dangerous in that it can be carried in an email attachment and can be tripped from simply visiting a web site that contains the virus. For more information see

Info on Microsoft Virus

Be sure you are using anti-virus and that it is up-to-date and avoid unfamiliar web sites.
Microsoft plans to have the patch to fix it on 1/10/2006. For more see.

Hits and Misses for 2005

Sunday, January 1st, 2006

Misses

VOiP – Vonage lost a big lead by spending for advertising instead of service improvement and endorsing as a company to a very unethical set of core values. See vonageproblem.htm.

The Government – Both Executive and Administrative branches rolled over and died. They, like Vonage, were driven by unethical values and money. Congress votes 223 million to build a bridge to nowhere in Alaska. (Read the full article. Congress didn’t vote to build the bridge, but rather voted to give them the money to do it. The Washington Post title is misleading. That doesn’t save anyone’s political neck.) At the same time, Congress can’t build extra lanes for congested Interstates in Oregon. Both of my senators and my representative voted for the bridge to nowhere. Maybe they should move to Alaska. And Bush has a long, long, long list of misses. The Republican party has died.

The Search Engines – CNN advertising, which is driven from Yahoo, leads their advertising with ads for a company that has poor ethics. So they make lots of money for the advertisement; but who wants to advertise with Yahoo when you can’t trust their advertisements? We are pulling our own ads with them.

e-Commerce – currently protects the seller but not the consumer.

Spam - Our spam load continues to increase, even with filters on the host and our own system. The latest is some joker with a site selling watches with a whole colledtion of different domain names making it difficult to block him. The FTC, of course isn’t doing anything with the blokes. In Germany they find them $65,000 a spam. Who will you vote for next fall?

My Motorola cell phone went dead three times this year. I’m on my third phone. The last time it failed all I had to do was reboot (does Microsoft own Motorola?), but the cell phone didn’t tell me that. After it didn’t ring for a few days, a support store showed me how to reboot and find the 12 lost messages that had been left.

Broadband is overpriced. New Orleans is leading the way with free WiFi, but other cities are afraid of the broadband companies and not offering any free WiFI – including my own city of Portland, Oregon.

HDTV - Most of the HDTVs sold now are not really high resolution. The display is tricked down to the lower resolution, more like a DVD quality. It still looks great, but you aren’t getting all the pixels.

Hits

VOiP – If you avoid Vonage, you can save about 30% on your telephone by going to VOiP. There are almost no surcharges and long distance is often free.

With the Government non-functioning, thanks to someone that imported Venezuela gas and was selling it in New Orleans at about 33% of the current retail price. What does this tell you about the oil companies and President Bush? And thanks to many, many people, organizations, and corporations that did take responsibility in helping the people on the Gulf Coast during the Katrina disaster.

Search Engines - In the search engine war between Google, Yahoo, and MSN – the consumer will win. Most people trust the organic (free) listings. Why pay for advertising and compete with unethical companies?

e-Commerce passed the 30 billion mark in sales over the Christmas holidays. That’s a 30% increase from last year.

Stopping SPAM - We load the spamming domains and IPs to an online and uncopyrighted database on one of our web sites at http://www.creatingnewworlds.org/stopspam.cfm. We invite hackers to lanuch viruses, trojans, and DoS at the IPs and domains, destroying them. This has gotten to be a very popular page (PageRank=4) and gets lots of hits. One guy threated to sue, but we sent copies of his email (which violated the CAN-SPAM) to his state attorney general. We haven’t heard from him any more.

My blogs have doubled the traffic on my web sites that last month. There are over 19 million blogs out there now.

HDTV - Some of the newer HDTV sets and a few of the leading HDTV manufacturers (Toshiba is one) use a new and special chip in their televisions that gets the promised HDTV resolution. Be wise if you are purchasing HDTV. Find out who is using the chip and then make your purchase as a wise buyer.