Anyone that wants to steal your traffic can take advantage of this. Nearly all the sites that I have created in the last year have been purposely hijacked by this and don't show up in any Google rankings. I've learned to live with it despite contacting the jerk responsible who pleaded innocent and said he wasn't very technical and didn't know what was going on.
Historically, good content meant good search engine placement. Now that this little trick is being more publicized, it just decreases the amount of time required for someone to hijack your entire site and remove it completely from the search engine results.
I had a meeting with our Google rep on Friday, and they always tell me the same thing - "We have hundreds of PhDs working on this problem." I would like to hear the solution, not that they have people working on it.
The problem is detecting the fraud. If you have access to thousands of open proxy servers throughout the world, it's fairly easy to write a program to maximize your clicks while keeping your click-through-rate below 1.7. If the proxy servers (or spyware'd computers) can't be detected as such then you can't tell if it's a real user or not.
Just imagine what's going to happen when botnet owners that have access to 20,000 computers realize they can profit from their botnet by scamming AdSense rather than blackmailing online Casinos?
Why would anyone have a problem with a totally unaffiliated company buying the copyright of a work from a bankrupted company for pennies and then holding that copyrighted content hostage for the next 75 years?
Anyone that has a problem with that is applying too much common sense to the copyright system.
Isn't the real question "What can Google do to become more like Yahoo?"
Obviously, no user of Google wants that to happen. But now that Google is a public company, you can expect them to wring every last drop of shareholder value out of their various and many properties:
I'm not sure Yahoo wants to implement an AdSense-like program. Is anyone else expecting some big blowout in regard to AdSense in the near future? The system appears (to me) to be so rife with fraud with Google having no idea how to combat it. Every monkey that knows how to spell "mesothelioma" is setting up a site hoping to cash in on the high cost per click.
The costs per click used to be very high but as more and more scammers jump on board using various anonymous proxy servers to initiate fake clicks, the costs per click are plummeting pretty rapidly.
To see various costs per click on Overture (you can't see Google's AdSense exact amounts) go to Overture Cost Per Click.
I can remember 22 years ago when I was 10 years old watching my math teacher at the time programming in BASIC on the one Commodore Vic-20 that we had in the classroom. For whatever reason, I was fascinated with the mystery of how this guy knew the right things to type in to make the computer do what he wanted.
I think the things that fascinated me most at the time were seeing how programming languages could be used to create games. I spent many hours on my Commodore 64 typing in BASIC and ML source code from magazines like Compute!'s Gazette.
Hexus seems very excited about this, and I guess if I were a hardware reviewer that was benchmarking chips it would be pretty handy to have an apples-to-apples comparison by using the same motherboard between AMD and Intel chips. Beyond that, I don't see many end users implementing this.
I know that they're selling some lower-end models now, but every Seagate Barracuda hard drive I've ever purchased is far quieter than comparable hard drives. I have been using them exclusively for a few years now and really enjoy the PEACE and quiet.
From reading about this earlier, it is a very exciting technology for embedded systems. It does seem a bit expensive though:
Hindsight will go into beta sites in May, with production slated for July. Incremental cost over Simics is around $5,000 per seat, but Hindsight won't target single seats. A typical engagement, including Simics, Hindsight and some initial model development, is estimated at $200,000 to $300,000 for a software development group with 10 to 20 seats.
Concidering that MS is one of the largest companies, the reform they are pushing for is not in their best interest. They are going to have to end up paying more to file their patents if the proposed shift in the patent processing fee takes place.
The more I think about this, the more I believe that more expensive patents are in Microsoft's best interest. That seems to be the tone of their entire argument - make it more expensive to patent something and further make it more expensive to to enforce your patent. If they can make it prohibitively expensive to attain and enforce patents, they (as the richest software company in the world) might be the only one with software patents.
Microsoft executives on Thursday stepped up their calls for reform of the U.S. patent process, saying the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) too often focuses on quantity instead of quality.
What they're saying here seems to make perfect sense, but I really have a hard time trusting anything that Microsoft says about software patenting considering their history.
Do you think in some secret lab somewhere deep within the walls of a mobile phone company there are prototypes of cell phones with all sorts of things attached to them?
Things to Try Mounting on Phone:
Philips-Head Screwdriver
Can Opener
Scissors
Deathray
A little-noticed provision of the Democratic governor's proposed state budget would extend the sales tax to those Internet transactions, officials said Monday. There would be no Internet sales tax police, however, because compliance would be on the honor system.
Voluntary tax sounds similar to a voluntary catheter insertion.
As future technology enables games to be more and more realistic, this will get worse.
What percentage of people were addicted to playing Trade Wars 2002 or any of the other 90's BBS games? How about textual based MUDs on the Internet? I bet it's far lower than 15%, and I also bet that as games become better and better that the number will be far higher than 15%.
We apparently can't afford $4.2 million per year for discovering the origins of universe and having a presence beyond our solar system, but $1 million per year for studying wild shrimp is apparently a needed project.
I know that pointing out frivolous spending is the easy way to attack spending cuts for what one considers important, but this is just goofy.
The newspaper moved to have the case dismissed and argued that if it were allowed to proceed in Ontario, any news organization could be sued anywhere over material posted on its website.
Their defense doesn't appear to be "What we posted that got him fired was truthful", but rather that if you allow the lawsuit to proceed that you could hold anyone responsible for what they post on the Internet anywhere in the world.
On the one hand, how do you protect true speech if someone who posts it can be sued everywhere in the world, but on the other hand how do you protect everyone in the world from people posting false speech?
In addition, a 1 per cent sales tax would be placed on Internet services and new computers -- two industries that many argue have profited enormously from rampant file-sharing, but haven't had to compensate artists.
This is the same scheme that we have today on blank CDs and the like and it is total BS to apply it to computers. I have no idea why anyone outside the entertainment business thinks that it's OK to put a music-stealing tax on every computer, or DRM on every computer when not every computer is even considered for such use. What about the company that buys 10,000 computers per year and because some 12 year old is "stealing" music they have to pay an additional tax and further have to have their computers crippled with DRM?
Nelson Pratt, marketing director of the pro-Linux organisation, which boasts Linus Torvalds among its top brass, said that unnamed vendors are trying to scare firms with a campaign claiming that Linux is inadequately supported for enterprise use.
Did anyone else picture Nelson Pratt coughing "MICROSOFT!" right after saying "unnamed vendor"?
Slashdot Mirror
Google Translation of press release.
Anyone that wants to steal your traffic can take advantage of this. Nearly all the sites that I have created in the last year have been purposely hijacked by this and don't show up in any Google rankings. I've learned to live with it despite contacting the jerk responsible who pleaded innocent and said he wasn't very technical and didn't know what was going on.
Historically, good content meant good search engine placement. Now that this little trick is being more publicized, it just decreases the amount of time required for someone to hijack your entire site and remove it completely from the search engine results.
You mean U.S. laws don't apply everywhere? We should get that law changed!
This is Sun's Niagara Design. The more I learn about it, the more I think that it's nothing that exciting.
From the lack of non-Sun-supplied buzz regarding this technology, it would appear that many people aren't finding it very exciting.
I had a meeting with our Google rep on Friday, and they always tell me the same thing - "We have hundreds of PhDs working on this problem." I would like to hear the solution, not that they have people working on it.
The problem is detecting the fraud. If you have access to thousands of open proxy servers throughout the world, it's fairly easy to write a program to maximize your clicks while keeping your click-through-rate below 1.7. If the proxy servers (or spyware'd computers) can't be detected as such then you can't tell if it's a real user or not.
Just imagine what's going to happen when botnet owners that have access to 20,000 computers realize they can profit from their botnet by scamming AdSense rather than blackmailing online Casinos?
Why would anyone have a problem with a totally unaffiliated company buying the copyright of a work from a bankrupted company for pennies and then holding that copyrighted content hostage for the next 75 years?
Anyone that has a problem with that is applying too much common sense to the copyright system.
Isn't the real question "What can Google do to become more like Yahoo?"
Obviously, no user of Google wants that to happen. But now that Google is a public company, you can expect them to wring every last drop of shareholder value out of their various and many properties:
local.google.com
maps.google.com
images.google.com
scholar.google.com
answers.google.com
catalogs.google.com
www.froogle.com
www.keyhole.com
etc, etc, etc.
In other words, expect the Google start page at some point in the future to look even more cluttered than Yahoo's.
I'm not sure Yahoo wants to implement an AdSense-like program. Is anyone else expecting some big blowout in regard to AdSense in the near future? The system appears (to me) to be so rife with fraud with Google having no idea how to combat it. Every monkey that knows how to spell "mesothelioma" is setting up a site hoping to cash in on the high cost per click.
The costs per click used to be very high but as more and more scammers jump on board using various anonymous proxy servers to initiate fake clicks, the costs per click are plummeting pretty rapidly.
To see various costs per click on Overture (you can't see Google's AdSense exact amounts) go to Overture Cost Per Click.
New features listed in ZENWorks 7 will really help to shutter the FUD in regard to Linux's TCO.
Now CIOs will have an even more robust product to be able to tell their MS reps to stop chanting "TCO" as a reason to stick with/switch to Windows.
I can remember 22 years ago when I was 10 years old watching my math teacher at the time programming in BASIC on the one Commodore Vic-20 that we had in the classroom. For whatever reason, I was fascinated with the mystery of how this guy knew the right things to type in to make the computer do what he wanted.
I think the things that fascinated me most at the time were seeing how programming languages could be used to create games. I spent many hours on my Commodore 64 typing in BASIC and ML source code from magazines like Compute!'s Gazette.
The missing emails were actually attributed to a rarely-used update to Outlook's Clippy-assistant:
"It looks like you're being sued. Would you like me to delete all correspondence related to the lawsuit?"
Does the ensuing release mean they'll stop suing people that revealed details about Tiger prematurely?
Hexus seems very excited about this, and I guess if I were a hardware reviewer that was benchmarking chips it would be pretty handy to have an apples-to-apples comparison by using the same motherboard between AMD and Intel chips. Beyond that, I don't see many end users implementing this.
I know that they're selling some lower-end models now, but every Seagate Barracuda hard drive I've ever purchased is far quieter than comparable hard drives. I have been using them exclusively for a few years now and really enjoy the PEACE and quiet.
From reading about this earlier, it is a very exciting technology for embedded systems. It does seem a bit expensive though:
Hindsight will go into beta sites in May, with production slated for July. Incremental cost over Simics is around $5,000 per seat, but Hindsight won't target single seats. A typical engagement, including Simics, Hindsight and some initial model development, is estimated at $200,000 to $300,000 for a software development group with 10 to 20 seats.
I did RTFA.
Concidering that MS is one of the largest companies, the reform they are pushing for is not in their best interest. They are going to have to end up paying more to file their patents if the proposed shift in the patent processing fee takes place.
The more I think about this, the more I believe that more expensive patents are in Microsoft's best interest. That seems to be the tone of their entire argument - make it more expensive to patent something and further make it more expensive to to enforce your patent. If they can make it prohibitively expensive to attain and enforce patents, they (as the richest software company in the world) might be the only one with software patents.
Microsoft executives on Thursday stepped up their calls for reform of the U.S. patent process, saying the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) too often focuses on quantity instead of quality.
What they're saying here seems to make perfect sense, but I really have a hard time trusting anything that Microsoft says about software patenting considering their history.
Do you think in some secret lab somewhere deep within the walls of a mobile phone company there are prototypes of cell phones with all sorts of things attached to them?
Things to Try Mounting on Phone:
Philips-Head Screwdriver
Can Opener
Scissors
Deathray
A little-noticed provision of the Democratic governor's proposed state budget would extend the sales tax to those Internet transactions, officials said Monday. There would be no Internet sales tax police, however, because compliance would be on the honor system.
Voluntary tax sounds similar to a voluntary catheter insertion.
As future technology enables games to be more and more realistic, this will get worse.
What percentage of people were addicted to playing Trade Wars 2002 or any of the other 90's BBS games? How about textual based MUDs on the Internet? I bet it's far lower than 15%, and I also bet that as games become better and better that the number will be far higher than 15%.
We apparently can't afford $4.2 million per year for discovering the origins of universe and having a presence beyond our solar system, but $1 million per year for studying wild shrimp is apparently a needed project.
I know that pointing out frivolous spending is the easy way to attack spending cuts for what one considers important, but this is just goofy.
Recipe for disaster...
Mix one part success
With two parts confusion
Bake for a few months, and see what FireFox's market share is.
The newspaper moved to have the case dismissed and argued that if it were allowed to proceed in Ontario, any news organization could be sued anywhere over material posted on its website.
Their defense doesn't appear to be "What we posted that got him fired was truthful", but rather that if you allow the lawsuit to proceed that you could hold anyone responsible for what they post on the Internet anywhere in the world.
On the one hand, how do you protect true speech if someone who posts it can be sued everywhere in the world, but on the other hand how do you protect everyone in the world from people posting false speech?
In addition, a 1 per cent sales tax would be placed on Internet services and new computers -- two industries that many argue have profited enormously from rampant file-sharing, but haven't had to compensate artists.
This is the same scheme that we have today on blank CDs and the like and it is total BS to apply it to computers. I have no idea why anyone outside the entertainment business thinks that it's OK to put a music-stealing tax on every computer, or DRM on every computer when not every computer is even considered for such use. What about the company that buys 10,000 computers per year and because some 12 year old is "stealing" music they have to pay an additional tax and further have to have their computers crippled with DRM?
Nelson Pratt, marketing director of the pro-Linux organisation, which boasts Linus Torvalds among its top brass, said that unnamed vendors are trying to scare firms with a campaign claiming that Linux is inadequately supported for enterprise use.
Did anyone else picture Nelson Pratt coughing "MICROSOFT!" right after saying "unnamed vendor"?