If you own a blog, you have probably experienced it: Spammers who fill your comment sections with ads for Viagra, porn and gambling. Its the new nuisance of the web: Link spammers.

The Register has gotten a hold of one of them, and bring us this informative interview:

Interview with a link spammer

So how and why do "link spammers" - as they generically call themselves - do it? Are they the same as the email spammers? What do they think of what they do, ethically? And what can stop them? If you're affected by this spam, say because you run a blog, or a website, or like the other 99.9 per cent of Net users just come across the stuff, Sam explain the important thing to remember is it's nothing personal. They're not targeting you personally. They're just exploiting a weakness in a system which blossomed just at the time that Google cracked down on the previous method that spammers used, where huge "link farms" of their own web sites pointed circularly to each other to boost each others' ranking.

[Via Ann Elisabeth's blog]

From Juicy Studio, although the article focuses on writing for people with "Cognitive disabilities and learning difficulties", it could just as well have been for "the typical stressed web-user". Many of the tips has to do with making your site as accessible as possible for anyone stressed out of their wits and trying to find some important information on your site.

Juicy Studio: Developing sites for users with Cognitive disabilities and learning difficulties

When people think about accessibility of web content, there's a tendency to concentrate on people with visual impairments. People with cognitive impairments and learning difficulties are often overlooked.

This is a first, at least for me. I got this as a comment spam to one of my blog articles today:

Please be aware that this guy is trying to scam people. There is no money, just a buttload of fees to "get to them". Read more about Nigerian 419 scams if you haven't heard of it before.

IP Address: 62.173.32.112
Name: ALBERT OKILO
Email Address: albert_20001@yahoo.com
URL:

Comment:

From The Desk Of:
Albert Okilo
First Bank Of Nigeria Plc.,
35, Marina Lagos.
Email: albert_20001@yahoo.com

Business Proposal

I am an Accountant with FIRST BANK Lagos Nigeria. My name is ALBERT OKILO,Banker I am the personal Account Manager to Engineer Frederick Wong , a National of your country, who used to work with shell Development company in Nigeria. He died with his entire family on the 31st October 1999 in an Egyptian airline 990 with other passengers on board. You can confirm this from the website below which was published by BBC WORLD NEWS.WEBSITE. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/502503.stm
Since then I have made several inquiries to your embassy to locate any of my clients extended Relatives, this has also proved unsuccessful. After these several unsuccessful attempts, I decided to contact you as any-one can stand as a relative of the deceased so that the funds can be released to the person as the next of kin.

I am contacted you to assist in repatriating the money and property left behind by my client before they Get confiscated or declared unserviceable by the bank where this huge deposits were lodged, particularly the FIRST BANK NIGERIA PLC., Lagos Nigeria Where the deceased had an account Valued at about ($15 Million U S Dollars) has Issued me a notice to provide the next of kin. Or have the account confiscated within the next ten official working days.Since I have been unsuccessful in locating the relatives for over 3 years now, I seek your consent to present you as the next of kin of the deceased as I have mapped out all necessary modalities to accomplish this and protect your interest.

The Bank will release the funds to you as soon as all necessary
document are presented in your name as the relative of the
deceased standing as the next of kin. The funds will be shared as follow as soon as it is transfered into your account; 50% will come to me, while 40% goes to you and the 10% will be used to settled all expenses incurred by both parties in the course of this transaction.

An attorney will be contracted to help us revalidated and notarize all the necessary legal documents that can be used to back up any claim we may make. Like the Order of Mandamus from the high court which will enforce the bank to release the funds to you. So provide the following informations so we can proceed;

1 FULL NAMES
2 CONTACT ADDRESS
3 OCCUPATION
4 DATE OF BIRTH
5 TELEPHONE AND FAX NUMBERS

All I require is your honest cooperation to enable us see this deal
through.I guarantee that this will be executed under a legitimate
arrangement that will protect you from any breach of the law.Kindly reply through my alternative email: albert_20001@yahoo.com

As i hope to hear from you soon
Best Regards,
ALBERT OKILO

Posted by jarle at 11:57 PM | Comments (2)

This is an interesting announcement through the Google Blog:

Google Video is a new product that enables you to search an index of transcripts from recent TV programs. It's just an early-stage beta product at this point; you'll only see stills and text snippets from shows that match your search terms, and you can only search shows from a few channels, dating back to December, 2004, when we started compiling the index.

Google promises to keep improving this early version of "video search". As far as I can tell all the major American TV-channels are represented with transcripts. The question is how much Google will be allowed to share though this system - will we see a video search that will give us access to video segments as well as transcripts and screen shots?

This one seems to be going the rounds on the blogs I read: Heavy metal umlaut: the movie

Its very interesting to see the evolution of this article through 2 years. To me it shows the power of Wikipedia as an encyclopaedia.

Being an old Flash developer, it was also nice to see him using a system that utilises Flash for presentation, its in my mind clearly the right choice on the web today.

Naturally I became curious to what tool he might have used. From what I can gather by my quick detective spree he is using a tool called Camtasia Studio. It records from the screen in full motion and also allows you to narrate with audio as it is recording. Camtasia outputs the resulting movie as Flash (swf or flv), Windows media (wmv), Quicktime, Realmedia, animated gif or as a projector file (exe).

With a price of US $299 its shouldn't be out of reach for people that want to easily make guides for software or even for web sites and web applications.

Scott Rosenberg says what I think much better than I can. But in essence, I am scared out of my whits.

Scott Rosenberg's Links & Comment

The world is a simple place to Bush. For him, "the moral choice between oppression, which is always wrong, and freedom, which is eternally right" is one that involves no hard calls. And since America represents freedom and freedom is eternally right, it must still be right even when it locks hundreds of people away for life without trial or it tortures prisoners in a war launched on a lie. We are the forces of freedom; we can admit no wrong because we can do no wrong.

Thank you Gisle, I knew there was support for "sudo" in Windows XP, but I have never used it.

As most of you know, most single users run their Windows setup as administrators, giving any program or script full access through your user at any time. Its one of the largest security problems facing Windows machines.

But there is a way to use Windows with a limited user and quickly change to administrator level when needed.

gisle's blog : MS Windows knows how to sudo. Use it!

Windows was born in a single user environment. The end user of a Windows machine was also its administrator, responsible for such tasks as installing new software, performing back-up and other maintenance tasks. This meant that for early versions of Windows, there was no restrictions on what the end user was allowed to do. Whoever was sitting in front of the computer was also its master.

[Via Anders Jacobsen's blog]

Its nice to see the largest search engines come together for this one:

• Google: Preventing Comment Spam
• Yahoo: A Defence against comment spam
• MSN: Working together agains blog spam
• Moveable Type: Introducing the nofollow plugin

This new attribute has been marketed as a solution to comment spamming, but I for one highly doubt it will do much for it, at least not in getting the spammers to stop spamming blogs, guestbooks and any other dynamically based feedback systems.

The rel=nofollow attribute will however cut the spammers results for comment spam in the hosted blog systems that implement the new attribute, and it will also allow people like Scoble and yours truly to link to sites we would never have linked to before. Such as said spammers and other people we would never dream to give any Google juice.

Most of the comments I have seen for this new initiative for a better link-onomy has been positive, but there are naysayers as well:

The Register: Google's No-Google tag blesses the Balkanized web

Anders made me aware of what might be a possible source for the idea of this new href attribute: Wired 12.1: "101 ways to save the Internet", #75, on their "Google TO-DO list" they write, amongst others:

Let us link to a page we hate without boosting its ranking

Personally I don't see myself implementing the new plug-in for MovableType for the nofollow attribute, my anti-spam features for this blog is working good as of now. I will only use it sporadically to link to sites I would otherwise think twice about linking to.

[Via Anders Jacobsen's Blog]

I have to admit, I am overjoyed that these kinds of topics are popping up. It means that we have finally come to a point where Internet Explorer has real competition. Well, lets be honest - Internet Explorer as we see it today is as antiquated as when we saw the first versions of Internet Explorer emerge from a Microsoft that had decided the Internet wouldn't be a commercial success.

Roger Johansson has written up a list of his favourite Firefox extensions and Arve Bersvendsen answers with his Opera equivalents to Firefox extensions

Both articles are worth reading if you are using either of the two browsers. And if you aren't, then you really should take the time to try either Firefox or Opera now.

This dumb ass (also known as Martin Schwimmer of Trademark Blog, has a problem with Bloglines picking up his public RSS-feed and redistributing it. Because they might at some stage serve ads together with the content.

For those of you unfamiliar with Bloglines; its an online feedreader that you can use to read most any feeds from any news source or blog on the net that has its own feed.

Martin: I have the perfect solution: Stop publishing the feed. Its that simple. Crying about copyright problems when someone distributes your content is just plain stupid, especially when you go after a service such as Bloglines. You could just as well attack Radio for making feed available, or any internet provider for distributing your content without your consent.

This "clarification" doesn't help either. More response can be found over at Scobles.

More and more of my writing happens in the browser, with much of the text being inputed into forms. Whether it is typing articles for my blogs or commenting in others or doing most anything else.

While some online applications have spell check built in, most doesn't. That's where a browser plug-in for spell checking comes in handy.

My favourite combination browser/spell check these days are Mozilla Firefox and SpellBound. Both are platform independent, easy to install and works perfectly. Even better, SpellBound has dictionaries for both the official Norwegian languages. With the cool extension support in Firefox I had this spell checker up and running in minutes.

Opera uses GNU Aspell - a open source spell checker that is also available in a Win32 version. It was easy enough to install Aspell for Opera on Windows XP, only problem is that I have yet to figure out how to actually get it working. As it is now its trying to spell check with no dictionary at all, and I have found no way to configure it. Opera could learn a lot from how Firefox handles plug-ins.

Theres also a spell checker for Internet Explorer, in case want to use a browser with multiple vulnerabilities. Its called iespell and its also fairly easy to install.

Jay Allen has written a very nice document on how to fight comment spam

Jay Allen should know a thing or two about comment spam. Before joing Six Apart he wrote the now famous MT-Blacklist plugin for Movable Type. If you are one of many thats experiencing problems with comment spam, then there really are three things you should take care of to get rid of the problem:

1. Upgrade to MovableType 3.x. The new version is better suited to combat comment spam, with features such as comment moderation built in, authentication via Typekey etc.
2. Install MT-Blacklist, this plug-in adds features such as url and keyword banning, auto-updates from a spamblock repository etc.
3. Last, but not at all least - install the MT-DBSL plug-in. It blocks all the open proxies used by today's comment spammers. (so they can avoid getting caught by their real ip-address, not to mentioned ip-banned). This plug-in effectively stops over 90% of all the comment spammers on my site right now. Its super easy to install (provided you have the right perl modules already in place) and works like a charm. No switches and no magic involved at all.

That's a few quick suggestions on how to get rid of comment spam from me, for more in-depth analysis of the comment spam problem, I refer you to the excellent article that Jay has written about the subject: Six Apart Guide to Combating Comment Spam

Arve has written a very nice tutorial covering how to set up Movable Type to use search engine and user friendly url's.

Not only does he show how to set up Movable Type so you can customise the url's yourself, but he also shows how to set up a template to do redirects from the old url format to the new url format in Movable Type. And it also works for customised url setups.

Slugs: Decrufting Movable Type URLs

Yet another huge exploit in Internet Explorer discovered and published by Secunia

The scary part? The exploit can easily allow any site you visit to create windows folders and files on your computer, and thereby destroy your windows installation, turn your machine into a spam zombie, turn your machine into remote storage for illegal material that could put you in jail for a very long time, etc. ad infinitum.

More information over at Virtuelvis: Stop using Internet Explorer! Now!

So whats the fix for Internet Explorer? Quit using it. There is really no reason to continue using Internet Explorer anymore. Internet Explorer 6 is outdated and VERY unsecure.

Instead I would suggest installing another browser, such as one or both of these two:

Thought I would share this old photo of fireworks, taken a few years ago. I was planning to take pictures of the fireworks this year, but used the time to be with my loved ones and pay respects to all the people that died in the worst catastrophe to hit our earth in recent time.

I hope you and yours are safe, and wish you all the best for 2005. This year I pledge to do more for those that are worse off than me, and to write more in my blog - the blog is turning 3 this february, and could really use coming to life again. I have a lot to share, but never enough time. The time aspect will probably not change any time soon, but I still believe I could be able to put some more time into this blog.

Anders Jacobsen has pledged to give money for every bloggers that links to the aid organizations or for anyone that gives money to any of these organizations. A good pledge if you ask me, so here is my small contribution with a list of organizations that you can donate money to and help the victims of the Tsunami.

International aid organizations:
UNICEF (United Nations Children's Fund)
United Nations' World Food Programme
Medecins Sans Frontieres / Doctors without Borders (donate!)
CARE International
The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies

UK/Europe:
Disasters Emergency Comittee (DEC) - comprises a raft of aid agencies, including the below and others
British Red Cross
Save the Children UK

North America:
American Red Cross
Canadian Red Cross
Save The Children

Anders Jacobsen: Webloggers: Give to tsunami victims and I'll give too!

Its a good question, that I will try to find the answer for. The problem isn't only limited to network printing, it also involves slower access to network shares, programs running slower when checking documents on network shares etc.

The solution to the slow network printing is however quite simple. I would love to know how he came up with it, but in any case - Pavel posted this solution in microsoft.public.windowsxp.print_fax some time ago:

Google Groups : microsoft.public.windowsxp.print_fax

I had the same problem and have found some workaround for limited number of network printers. At command prompt type NET USE LPT2 \\computername\printername password , and the port lpt2 will be assigned to the network printer. After that port assignment in the Printer Properties has to be also changed, or, if the Properites are too slow, the old printer deleted and the new one with LPT2 added. LPT3 (or maybe another port name) can be used for other printers.

After this assignment, I can access to the printer list and printer properties as fast as before SP2. However, this is not perfect solution and I hope that some patch from MS will appear.

PS: I have found that just adding the local ports with the comands

NET USE lpt[number] \\networkshare\printer