That's not what they mean by "Open Door Media Policy." What Best Buy is saying is that for today, and today only, store-level management employees are authorized to speak to the media and allow media outlets into their store... every other day of the year all media requests need to go through public relations.
Makes me think that SearchKing could be the next $CO purchase. They could link to your site and bring down your google rating. Then they could extort money from you for them to remove the link.
Again, schemes self-defeat. If this fictional "SCOking" existed, it'd be deemed a legit directory site by Google, because all "victims" would have to do is NOT link to it on your site, which is so easy you can even do that passively. They'd have to limit the number of extortion victims to a small number to not risk stepping out of the penalty zone, and they'd be subject to Google simply causing that threshhold level to be a random number within a bounded range just to make the perfect balance impossible to find because it keeps changing.
It's a classic cat and mouse game... but Google is one big cat.
I think the point they're trying to make is that sometimes a user wants shopping links, sometimes a user wants product review links... and when the use wants one, they don't really wanna see any of the other. So, the result is to find a subtile way to ask the user: if they want reviews, ask Google... if the want store results, ask Froogle.
SearchKing's alligation was that Google singled out SearchKing in its code, and hit them with a value-of-death (displayed as 0 in the Google Toolbar, but in the actual raw numbers negative) that kicked them down and caused any links from them to hurt a site rather than help a site, knocking their customers to worse-than-they-started scores.
Google's defense is that's not what they actually did to cause SearchKing to become negative. They identified the characteristics of the a link-farm (by my guess, that'd be a site that has a lot of outbound links, all of whom just happen to have a link path that in few hops lead back to the original link farm, and also most of the outbound links just happen to end up with a low score if not for the help of this one site and its clones) and decalred that all link-farms get the death penalty rating. Legit search engines like Yahoo and OSDN still get high credibilty, but a link-farm scheme that compels its sites listed to return a link and is willing to admit anybody who can write a valid check self-defeats by tripping the penalty.
Don't try to cheat Google... if you ever find a way to do so that works, keep it to yourself, because once Google hears about it they'll write a rule that's makes sure nobody ever can use whatever scheme you're using again.:)
That's not gonna help you much, though, because your random mission statment of the day is not likely to have much relationship to the keywords that associate your business, and likely more relation to meaningless business words that trip the filter.
Incuring a different penality every day will assure you never get flagged for the same offense twice, but still will have you going in the wrong direction.
That was the logic used on the purely academic google.stanford.edu site. However, as the site became more popular that published formula became just plain too easy to corrupt with nonsense. Modern PageRank formulas, which they've been using ever since there was a Google.com, are not published, and are much more comlpex. It's likely best expressed now as a computer function rather than a mathematical one, and one that has certain conditions that assign sites that appear to employ cheating tactics (meeting conditions established in the program as cheating behavior) negative values, meaning links to and from such sites are posionous links that hurt rather than help a score.
We can only guess what the present PageRank formula is now... it sure the one posted above.
I've seen the term "Google Dance" used to describe any situation where the results pages for many keywords change all at once. Small Google Dances get caused by index updates bringing a new dataset to the algorithm and happen frequently, but the more talked about events are larger changes that happen when the contents of the black box known as PageRank have changed, where large shifts happen in results, and particularly quirky results (such as the infamous time when "Go To Hell" got associated with Microsoft.com, or any time lowlife business scum get to the top of anything) go away.
PageRank isnt a secret, its basically a weight of how much money you pay google.
There's a nice baseless alligation with no proof. I know of plenty of AdWords buyers without a PageRank, and plenty of non-buyers who have good PageRanks. Doesn't tend to lend itself to a direct corelation...
Yep, and remember that Google AdWords rewards the most clicked ads. What that basically means that what decides who gets the #1 ad slot is a result of multiplying how much you're willing to pay for a click times how likely you are to be clicked. Have a higher CTR (click through rate) score, pay less per click and sometimes even move ahead of somebody trying to outbid you with cash but has a lame ad.
This is fair enough, however. If you want to be associated with high-value keywords, you must either use those keywords in a proper context, or pay for AdWords.
For every site that loses a spot on the first page, somebody new moves into the first page. The complaints here are from the owners of the sites getting bumped out, but nobody seems to be saying that inapproprate sites are moving into the first page. In fact, those who don't own such sites say it's the inapproprate sites that are getting kicked out.:)
It's not a pressure from the media elite that says blogs don't belong high ranked in Google, it's users. Blogs are great at telling Google what articles in other publications are most authoritative on a topic, but a "blog" is by definition not one. (Of course, blog software can be used to run an authoritiative site... but that's a different category all together.)
Blogs got highly rated because groups of friends linked to each other's blogs. However, those sites shouldn't be linked that high for that reason alone. So, if the only external links on a site lead in circles, then the site really isn't that good, and it gets bumped down.
Basicially, the idea of "I'll link to you if you link to me, and we'll both move up in Google!" now does more harm than good.
Google's "PageRank" formula is their top-secret way of determining in which order to display websites for any given keyword. Everyone knows that refering links is the main component of PageRank, but Google has always been hush-hush as to what else is included in the formula.
It's also known that PageRank isn't a static formula. Google reserves the right to change it at any time, in what is known by Google-watchers as a "Google Dance".
The only legit way to be highly ranked by Google is to be the most authoritative source for information about whatever you discuss, and naturally links will form from other quality websites on your topic and up the PageRank scale you go. www.microsoft.com being a 10/10 ranking doesn't indicate that Google likes Microsoft, it just simply indicates that site is the most authoritative site about a topic a lot of people talk about, Microsoft's products.
Any other way to cheat the system will result in penalties applied to your score. It's not so much a filter as it is negative factors in the formula. Google steadfastly claims that it doesn't maintain a blacklist of "bad" sites, but it is clear that sites designed to cheat Google's PageRank formula always fail once Google tweaks the formula. They don't need a blacklist, they simply identify the characteristics that define a "link farm" and then apply a penality. If a given site has a lot of links to external domains, very little non-link content, and absoulutely every linked to site returns a link back to the orignal site, it sure smells like a link farm and that's what the system penalizes.
To put it bluntly, anybody who's business depends on being displayed on the first page of Google results should be buying AdWords placements. If you're working hard to stay #1 in the editorial results, you're never gonna win. And no, just because your business depends on it doesn't mean you get to sue when Google pulls an ill-gotten #1 ranking out from under you.
Just wondering... even though you had normal capacity through the blackout, did your site maintain normal usage? Having the datacenter up is nice, but datacenters only exist to store information generated in the "real world".
If a datacenter's up, but nobody's online to use it, do the servers still hum?
Interesting point about the cable TV system (and therefore cable modems) in my hometown. When they were installing the new system they installed UPS-like backup power supplies throughout the city to keep the cable system going for 60 minutes after commercial power fails. So, I basically can hang on the Internet for about the time my UPS has life on my computer in a blackout... the cable company arrived at the 60 minute figure because they believe that's as long as people will ever be able to power their own equipment, after which point there's no need for a cable network anyway.
Hell, the recent blackout pretty much means that the electrical grid isn't ready to be critical infrastructure, either.
Let's not forget that part of the justification for building the Interstate highway system was that the high-speed roads could be closed down and used for military transport and possibly even as air strips in case the USA is even invaded. So, any civilian "in case of war" plan that depends on the highways being available is flawed because those roads just might not be open.
Truth is... there's no such thing as something that will always be there, all things can fail.
Because nobody's trying to sue the PSTN or SMTP providers out of business. It's also easy for those two protocols to be tapped if somebody is suspected of doing something illegal with them.
P2P is currently trying to accomlish two goals, moving files arround, and also hiding identities...
That's not censorship. That's the news sites protecting the business of Lexis-Nexis which they all contribute to. If you want to search for old news, you have to pay.
But the AAC format is already lossy to begin with... so most of the quality to be lost was already gone before you even got the file. Transcoding it into audio and back into the same format it came from isn't going to be as lossy as it seems, to the average consumer it's not going to matter.
Neither the CD or PCM "holes" are analog either... there is a slight "reencoding" loss but AAC's already a lossy format to begin with so there really isn't anything left to lose to the average consumer's ear.
So, what we have here is really a proof of concept more than anything useful. The average consumer will have an easier time and get acceptable results from the existing holes rather than needing this hack.
It's being compared to an analog hole attack because it doesn't actually solve the encryption scheme, but instead lets QuickTime do the decryption, and then captures the plaintext AAC file that is stored in memory.
Truely, it's still digital at that point, so it should be called the "plaintext hole".
Somehow, I seriously doubt the word "Wal*Mart" will appear on the machine itself... there's nothing stopping Wal*Mart from creating a made-up word like Ubertron to be their computer brand... they already do that in several places within the store by creating things such as Sam's Choice foods and Equate bathroom and medicine cabinet prodcuts.
If you've got a CCNA, you know the difference between outbound and inbound ports. If the new virus works on port 7654, and I have nothing on my network that responds to inbound communications on port 7654, I have no need for that traffic. Rather than block it at my firewall, why not block it at my ISP to keep it off my inbound bandwidth?
I know from experience that Slashdot is montiored by Moreover, however it doesn't come up very often.
Unless the story is exclusive to Slashdot, Moreover usually picks another source with a better "news credibilty" reputation and sends Slashdot towards the back of the pile. (Let's face it... Slashdot has a publish first, check facts later policy.) MSN seems to be filtering further by only taking the most relavant stories, so unless Slashdot manages to break into the top 10 you'll never see it.
I guess we'll have to see what happens the next time a SCO story breaks. Most of the world has started ignoring their pump-and-dump scheme in hopes it'll go away.
Yet it's questionable why MS needs to duplicate Google News... Google doesn't make any money off of its news page as I can tell. It's the AdWords service that pays for most of what Google does... why doesn't MS go after that?
Slashdot Mirror
That's not what they mean by "Open Door Media Policy." What Best Buy is saying is that for today, and today only, store-level management employees are authorized to speak to the media and allow media outlets into their store... every other day of the year all media requests need to go through public relations.
Makes me think that SearchKing could be the next $CO purchase. They could link to your site and bring down your google rating. Then they could extort money from you for them to remove the link.
Again, schemes self-defeat. If this fictional "SCOking" existed, it'd be deemed a legit directory site by Google, because all "victims" would have to do is NOT link to it on your site, which is so easy you can even do that passively. They'd have to limit the number of extortion victims to a small number to not risk stepping out of the penalty zone, and they'd be subject to Google simply causing that threshhold level to be a random number within a bounded range just to make the perfect balance impossible to find because it keeps changing.
It's a classic cat and mouse game... but Google is one big cat.
I think the point they're trying to make is that sometimes a user wants shopping links, sometimes a user wants product review links... and when the use wants one, they don't really wanna see any of the other. So, the result is to find a subtile way to ask the user: if they want reviews, ask Google... if the want store results, ask Froogle.
SearchKing's alligation was that Google singled out SearchKing in its code, and hit them with a value-of-death (displayed as 0 in the Google Toolbar, but in the actual raw numbers negative) that kicked them down and caused any links from them to hurt a site rather than help a site, knocking their customers to worse-than-they-started scores.
:)
Google's defense is that's not what they actually did to cause SearchKing to become negative. They identified the characteristics of the a link-farm (by my guess, that'd be a site that has a lot of outbound links, all of whom just happen to have a link path that in few hops lead back to the original link farm, and also most of the outbound links just happen to end up with a low score if not for the help of this one site and its clones) and decalred that all link-farms get the death penalty rating. Legit search engines like Yahoo and OSDN still get high credibilty, but a link-farm scheme that compels its sites listed to return a link and is willing to admit anybody who can write a valid check self-defeats by tripping the penalty.
Don't try to cheat Google... if you ever find a way to do so that works, keep it to yourself, because once Google hears about it they'll write a rule that's makes sure nobody ever can use whatever scheme you're using again.
That's not gonna help you much, though, because your random mission statment of the day is not likely to have much relationship to the keywords that associate your business, and likely more relation to meaningless business words that trip the filter.
Incuring a different penality every day will assure you never get flagged for the same offense twice, but still will have you going in the wrong direction.
That was the logic used on the purely academic google.stanford.edu site. However, as the site became more popular that published formula became just plain too easy to corrupt with nonsense. Modern PageRank formulas, which they've been using ever since there was a Google.com, are not published, and are much more comlpex. It's likely best expressed now as a computer function rather than a mathematical one, and one that has certain conditions that assign sites that appear to employ cheating tactics (meeting conditions established in the program as cheating behavior) negative values, meaning links to and from such sites are posionous links that hurt rather than help a score.
We can only guess what the present PageRank formula is now... it sure the one posted above.
I've seen the term "Google Dance" used to describe any situation where the results pages for many keywords change all at once. Small Google Dances get caused by index updates bringing a new dataset to the algorithm and happen frequently, but the more talked about events are larger changes that happen when the contents of the black box known as PageRank have changed, where large shifts happen in results, and particularly quirky results (such as the infamous time when "Go To Hell" got associated with Microsoft.com, or any time lowlife business scum get to the top of anything) go away.
PageRank isnt a secret, its basically a weight of how much money you pay google.
There's a nice baseless alligation with no proof. I know of plenty of AdWords buyers without a PageRank, and plenty of non-buyers who have good PageRanks. Doesn't tend to lend itself to a direct corelation...
Yep, and remember that Google AdWords rewards the most clicked ads. What that basically means that what decides who gets the #1 ad slot is a result of multiplying how much you're willing to pay for a click times how likely you are to be clicked. Have a higher CTR (click through rate) score, pay less per click and sometimes even move ahead of somebody trying to outbid you with cash but has a lame ad.
This is fair enough, however. If you want to be associated with high-value keywords, you must either use those keywords in a proper context, or pay for AdWords.
:)
For every site that loses a spot on the first page, somebody new moves into the first page. The complaints here are from the owners of the sites getting bumped out, but nobody seems to be saying that inapproprate sites are moving into the first page. In fact, those who don't own such sites say it's the inapproprate sites that are getting kicked out.
It's not a pressure from the media elite that says blogs don't belong high ranked in Google, it's users. Blogs are great at telling Google what articles in other publications are most authoritative on a topic, but a "blog" is by definition not one. (Of course, blog software can be used to run an authoritiative site... but that's a different category all together.)
Blogs got highly rated because groups of friends linked to each other's blogs. However, those sites shouldn't be linked that high for that reason alone. So, if the only external links on a site lead in circles, then the site really isn't that good, and it gets bumped down.
Basicially, the idea of "I'll link to you if you link to me, and we'll both move up in Google!" now does more harm than good.
Google's "PageRank" formula is their top-secret way of determining in which order to display websites for any given keyword. Everyone knows that refering links is the main component of PageRank, but Google has always been hush-hush as to what else is included in the formula.
It's also known that PageRank isn't a static formula. Google reserves the right to change it at any time, in what is known by Google-watchers as a "Google Dance".
The only legit way to be highly ranked by Google is to be the most authoritative source for information about whatever you discuss, and naturally links will form from other quality websites on your topic and up the PageRank scale you go. www.microsoft.com being a 10/10 ranking doesn't indicate that Google likes Microsoft, it just simply indicates that site is the most authoritative site about a topic a lot of people talk about, Microsoft's products.
Any other way to cheat the system will result in penalties applied to your score. It's not so much a filter as it is negative factors in the formula. Google steadfastly claims that it doesn't maintain a blacklist of "bad" sites, but it is clear that sites designed to cheat Google's PageRank formula always fail once Google tweaks the formula. They don't need a blacklist, they simply identify the characteristics that define a "link farm" and then apply a penality. If a given site has a lot of links to external domains, very little non-link content, and absoulutely every linked to site returns a link back to the orignal site, it sure smells like a link farm and that's what the system penalizes.
To put it bluntly, anybody who's business depends on being displayed on the first page of Google results should be buying AdWords placements. If you're working hard to stay #1 in the editorial results, you're never gonna win. And no, just because your business depends on it doesn't mean you get to sue when Google pulls an ill-gotten #1 ranking out from under you.
Just wondering... even though you had normal capacity through the blackout, did your site maintain normal usage? Having the datacenter up is nice, but datacenters only exist to store information generated in the "real world".
If a datacenter's up, but nobody's online to use it, do the servers still hum?
Interesting point about the cable TV system (and therefore cable modems) in my hometown. When they were installing the new system they installed UPS-like backup power supplies throughout the city to keep the cable system going for 60 minutes after commercial power fails. So, I basically can hang on the Internet for about the time my UPS has life on my computer in a blackout... the cable company arrived at the 60 minute figure because they believe that's as long as people will ever be able to power their own equipment, after which point there's no need for a cable network anyway.
Hell, the recent blackout pretty much means that the electrical grid isn't ready to be critical infrastructure, either.
Let's not forget that part of the justification for building the Interstate highway system was that the high-speed roads could be closed down and used for military transport and possibly even as air strips in case the USA is even invaded. So, any civilian "in case of war" plan that depends on the highways being available is flawed because those roads just might not be open.
Truth is... there's no such thing as something that will always be there, all things can fail.
Because nobody's trying to sue the PSTN or SMTP providers out of business. It's also easy for those two protocols to be tapped if somebody is suspected of doing something illegal with them.
P2P is currently trying to accomlish two goals, moving files arround, and also hiding identities...
That's not censorship. That's the news sites protecting the business of Lexis-Nexis which they all contribute to. If you want to search for old news, you have to pay.
But the AAC format is already lossy to begin with... so most of the quality to be lost was already gone before you even got the file. Transcoding it into audio and back into the same format it came from isn't going to be as lossy as it seems, to the average consumer it's not going to matter.
It's new, but not needed.
Neither the CD or PCM "holes" are analog either... there is a slight "reencoding" loss but AAC's already a lossy format to begin with so there really isn't anything left to lose to the average consumer's ear.
So, what we have here is really a proof of concept more than anything useful. The average consumer will have an easier time and get acceptable results from the existing holes rather than needing this hack.
It's being compared to an analog hole attack because it doesn't actually solve the encryption scheme, but instead lets QuickTime do the decryption, and then captures the plaintext AAC file that is stored in memory.
Truely, it's still digital at that point, so it should be called the "plaintext hole".
Somehow, I seriously doubt the word "Wal*Mart" will appear on the machine itself... there's nothing stopping Wal*Mart from creating a made-up word like Ubertron to be their computer brand... they already do that in several places within the store by creating things such as Sam's Choice foods and Equate bathroom and medicine cabinet prodcuts.
If you've got a CCNA, you know the difference between outbound and inbound ports. If the new virus works on port 7654, and I have nothing on my network that responds to inbound communications on port 7654, I have no need for that traffic. Rather than block it at my firewall, why not block it at my ISP to keep it off my inbound bandwidth?
I know from experience that Slashdot is montiored by Moreover, however it doesn't come up very often.
Unless the story is exclusive to Slashdot, Moreover usually picks another source with a better "news credibilty" reputation and sends Slashdot towards the back of the pile. (Let's face it... Slashdot has a publish first, check facts later policy.) MSN seems to be filtering further by only taking the most relavant stories, so unless Slashdot manages to break into the top 10 you'll never see it.
I guess we'll have to see what happens the next time a SCO story breaks. Most of the world has started ignoring their pump-and-dump scheme in hopes it'll go away.
1. It's called a beta... odd selections are known as "bugs" and you can't say they didn't warn us.
2. Moreover's gotta pay its bills somehow. Of course, I use Google's Toolbar for a popup blocker and that gets through the links just fine.
Yet it's questionable why MS needs to duplicate Google News... Google doesn't make any money off of its news page as I can tell. It's the AdWords service that pays for most of what Google does... why doesn't MS go after that?