Happy Belated Juneteenth

What is Juneteenth you say? juneteenth is a holiday celebrated on June 19th to commemorate the abolition of slavery in Texas. Sadly,it’s still creating violence (as indicated by today’s CNN news.)

Anyway, go read about it.

June 20th, 2007

Thank Bill for System Restore Points

If you’re like me you barely noticed the system restore point feature of windows XP - unless of course you noticed the amount of space it took up and turned it off.

Last night I was very thankful that this computer came with it enabled by default.

When somebody asked me if they could use my computer to check their MySpace I thought nothing of it. After all my default browser is FireFox, I have Avast Anti Virus, and Spybot Search & Destroy. I’ve even got every Windows update - including Windows Defender. What could possibly happen?

The worst spyware I’ve ever seen happened, that’s what.

Somehow my friend managed to start IE (which is hard on my computer since it’s not the default browser, and not on the desktop or taskbar) and visit her MySpace page.

Next thing I know, I was looking at ads for blacksingles.com, arcade software, and spyware removers every 30 seconds. I even had something in my system tray called “windows spyware something or other”

All of a sudden it started going crazy. It said some spyware was being installed would I like to block it. It then presented me with 2 buttons: Allow this spyware or buy the full version of this software to block it. There was no way to close this alert. The close and exit parts of it’s menus were restricted to paying customers, and killing it’s process didn’t accomplish anything. They were forcing me to pay to not get their spyware!! What a concept!

A quick run of spybot found 34 NEW things installed. 34!!

It removed all but 2. That’s where the ingeniousness came in.

This particular piece of spyware did a few creative things:

1.) It renamed itself to a random string every time my PC booted.
2.) It got involved in the boot process early so it was already running when anti virus programs tried to boot prior to windows.
3.) It didn’t leave a trace in win.ini, or any other part of the msconfig utility.
4.) It didn’t add anything in the Run or RunOnce sections of the registry.

After 3 hours of looking at affiliate pop ups I was about to look for my windows CD. Before I did that I looked at the properties of my computer (because I couldn’t remember if this was XP pro or home… I know my laptop is one and my PC is the other) when I saw the restore points.

Thank God they were enabled! 10 minutes later and I was good to go. Just in case I now lock my computer every time I leave the room - both at home and at work.

June 19th, 2007

magsforless.com ripped me off

We’ve all seen those ads online for cheap magazines right? About 17 months ago I saw them myself.. and decided that the offer was too good to be true. Guess what, it was. It’s been 17 months since magsforless.com charged me $15 for subscriptions and I’ve yet to receive one single magazine.

I have, however, received a couple of emails from them. The first one asked me if I was satisfied with my subscription and wanted to extend it.

I replied that I haven’t received it and was contacted by somebody from the company. She said there was an error and that she resubmitted my subscription. She also gave me 15% off of my next order.

Sadly, it’s been 4 months now and I still haven’t received a magazine. In fact, the site now shows no mention of my order whatsoever and emailing the woman who contacted me sends back a reply of ” This is not a monitored email box.”

Has anybody else been burned by this company?

5 comments June 14th, 2007

RIP Mr. Wizard

The man who played Mr. Wizard (Don Herbert) died today at the age of 90. I remember spending lots of afternoons at my grandparents house watching shows like Mr. Wizard on Nickelodeon.

One of my favorite parts of the show is how he’d have a new assistant all the time. It spawned various jokes (cue the dinosaurs “we’re gonna need another Timmy!”) Looking back, Don and his show were a much larger part of my upbringing than I realized.

Don was responsible for getting many of my generation interested in science, and he will be greatly missed.

June 12th, 2007

What’s Your URL History?

Are you the first person that’s ever owned your URL? Do you know how to find out? Why does it matter?

If you’re thinking of registering a new domain name, you might want to see if it was ever registered before. It’s possible that your new name might have been owned by a domainer or a spammer. If so, it can have some pretty bad consequences for your SEO campaigns.

Just ask Marianne Jones (no relation). When she registered her own name as a domain name for her business, she had no idea that it was previously owned by a domainer trying to cash in on the actor with a similar name.

That move was obviously unprofitable so he let it expire and she picked it up. The problem is, while owned by the spammer it managed to get banned from most major search engines.

As we all know, getting re-included in Google can sometimes be a royal pain in the ass.

So what can you do to check your domain name?

First off, I’d suggest heading over to domaintools.com and running a WHOIS on the domain. It’ll tell you if it’s ever been registered before. If it is, search for the domain name and see what comes up.

You might also want to visit archive.org and see what used to be there before you owned it. This won’t work with all sites, but it will with some. dotCULT has a very rich history there if you’re bored.

Once you’ve got it up and hosted, you can also visit my ip neighbors and see if you happen to share an IP with any spammy sites. If you do, you might request that your host issue you a different IP address. While there’s no proof that sharing an IP with a spammy site hurts you, it also won’t hurt to be free of it.

so should you avoid previously owned domain names? No, not at all. In Marianne’s case it made sense to register her own name. Why would she not? Just be prepared to deal with the hassle of trying to get re-listed once you acquire such a name.

If you’re interested in learning how to get re-included into search engines you can find some more information here and here.

UPDATE: As of 6-12 Marianne’s website has started showing up again in Google. It took about 1 week from the time we submitted a re-inclusion request for this to happen.

June 11th, 2007

The Effect of Registered and Trade Marks on SEO

The other day at work we came upon an interesting question. Do using symbols like ®, ™, and © affect your SEO ratings?

It’s an interesting question. In other words, will searching for “coke” vs “coke®” yield different results.

It turns out they don’t. As we expected, Google simply drops the symbols in the name. They’re probably taking them out because they’re assuming most users can’t type them into a search engine.

Sadly, this issue arose while trying to do a search to see if more people used the ® mark vs not using it on certain registered terms. I’m still uncertain if it has to be used in every instance or if it’s just ok to use it once or mention it at the bottom of a page. If anybody knows the official rules on this please let me know.

Similarly, it’s also impossible to use a current search engine to see the amount of results for “Internet” compared to “internet” (anybody who knows me knows I’m totally against capitalizing words like internet and web)

If you know how to do searches that care about case please let me know… I’d really like to see the answer.

June 10th, 2007

Sodium Benzoate, Adam, and Eve.

By now you’ve probably seen the news about the dangers of sodium benzoate (a chemical commonly found in diet cola.)

The fear mongering ranges from cancer causing to DNA damaging. But is it legit?

Personally, I think it’s all bullshit. If you look closely you’ll see that the amount of sodium benzoate in an apple is far higher than the FDA approved amount in cola.

Are they suggesting that we stop eating apples?

Maybe that’s why God forbid Adam and Eve to eat the apples from tree of knowledge (which probably weren’t even apples but pomegranates)

June 7th, 2007