Drive-by-DL experiment (noteworthy stats)
Now Playing: Nowhere Fast
Over the course of 6 months, 409 people clicked on an ad that offered infection for those with virus-free PCs. Didier Stevens, who ran the ad via Google Adwords, works for Contraste Europe, a branch of the IT consultancy The Contraste Group. Stevens says that he got the idea after picking up a small book on Google Adwords at the library and finding out how easy and cheap it is to set up an ad. "You can start with a couple of euros per month. And that gave me an idea: this can be used with malicious [intent]. It's a way to get a drive-by download site on the first page of a search."

Stevens bought the drive-by-download.info domain, set up a server to display a "Thank you for your visit" message and to log the requests. No PCs were harmed in this experiment, he emphasizes. Then he started the Google Adwords campaign, using combinations of the words "drive-by download" along with the ad. His ad was viewed 259,723 times and clicked on 409 times, for a click-through rate of about 0.16%. The experiment cost him $23, or 6 cents per click/potentially infected machine.

Of the 409 people who clicked, 98% were running Windows machines, according to the user agent string, which is a text string that identifies a Web site visitor to a server. Users using different versions of IE, Safari, Opera, Firefox and SeaMonkey all clicked the ad. Stevens says that he designed his ad to make it look fishy, but he had no problem getting Google to accept it and has had no complaints to date. And, although a healthy amount of people clicked on it, he said there's "no way to know what motivated them to click on my ad. I did not submit them to an IQ-test." Stevens said he's sure he could get much more traffic if he invested more in his Google Adwords budget and came up with a better designed ad.

View: Drive-By Download
News source: Physorg

MS Popyfly Alpha (this is some awesome stuff)
Now Playing: Priviledge
Microsoft has announced the alpha version launch of a new product called Popfly, a tool designed to help non-programmers in creating, sharing, and embedding mashups of content, feeds, web pages and gadgets. The tool is web-based and allows you to drag and drop “blocks” onto a working surface and connect various data sources together. Once you create a mashup, Popfly allows you to publish it directly to your space as a gadget using the “Add to Windows Live Spaces” link. Popfly is free for 25MB of storage and requires Silverlight to function. It supports Mozilla Firefox 2 and Internet Explorer 6.0 or higher as well as JavaScript, AJAX libraries, HTML, XHTML, CSS, WMV, WMA, MP3, Visual Studio Express projects, JPG, PNG, GIF, and EXEs.

Video: Popfly screencast
View: Popfly Overview | Popfly Blog
Link: Microsoft Popfly | Invitation Thread
News source: Windows Live Spaces Blog

Skinning research results are in
Now Playing: Pardon Me by Incubus
Topic: tech

After researching skinning using the below article and links, I have installed a nice MS theme using a patched dll file. See links below.

http://www.deviantart.com/download/28545438/ThallosVS_v1_2.zip 

uxtheme.dll

 

 

 

 

Enjoy. 

Best Skins of 2006
Topic: tech
Skinning has become increasingly popular over the years. People just seem to like to customize the way their stuff looks, particularly their computer screens.

Last year was a great year for users of skins as a lot of truly excellent ones were made. For the past month, we've been going through thousands of different skins, talking to users and skinners to put together a list of the 10 best skins made last year for the 3 most popular skinnable platforms -- Winamp, WindowBlinds, and UXTheme (msstyles).

Below is a compilation, in no particular order, of the 10 best in each category.

View: Best Skins of 2006
View: Neowin Skinning Discussion
View: Digg it

Five ways to defeat blog trolls and cyberstalkers
Topic: Blogs

Anyone who has participated in the blogosphere in the past two months knows the troubling story of Kathy Sierra, a prominent blogger who was the victim of online threats that included violent sexual acts and murder ("Death threats force woman to suspend blog, cancel talk at O'Reilly conference". When the harassment spread beyond her own blog to two others that were affiliated with other prominent bloggers, Sierra became so terrified that she canceled an upcoming speaking engagement and took a hiatus from blogging.

But Sierra isn't the only one to endure online harassment. In fact, some would argue that she's just the most visible -- if not the most historically egregious -- tip of an iceberg that has been around since Internet discussions began in the early 1980s. "Between now and the early days of Usenet, the level of abusive behavior has been distressingly constant," says Tim Bray, a veteran blogger and director of Web technologies at Sun Microsystems Inc.

The difference is, with 70 million blogs in existence today and 1.4 new blogs created every second, according to blog search engine Technorati Inc., there are just more people participating in online discussions, and "the more crazy people you've got reading them, the wilder the whole blogosphere can become," says Richard Silverstein, who advocates for a peaceful approach to solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in his blog.

 View: The full story
News source: ComputerWorld

The Beginning
Topic: Info

This is the 1st post of Merlin's new blog.

This blog will feature new and note-worthy tech news as well as comments and news on world events such as the gov't, politics, and war.

Starting Merlin blog experiment....