XRumer is a Windows program that posts forum spam with the aim of boosting search engine rankings. It has been claimed that the program is able to bypass techniques commonly used by many websites to deter automated spam, such as account registration, CAPTCHAs, and e-mail activation before posting. The program makes heavy use of a database of known open proxies in an attempt to make it more difficult for administrators to block posts.

In addition, the software can avoid the suspicions of forum administrators by first registering to make a post in the form of a question which mentions the spam product ("Where can I get...?"), before registering another account to post a spam link which mentions the product. The side effect of these innocent-looking posts is that helpful forum visitors may search on a search engine (e.g. Google) for the product and themselves post a link to help out, thus bolstering the product's Google stats without falling afoul of forum posting policies.

According to The Register, the latest version^[which?] of XRumer can defeat CAPTCHAs of Hotmail and Gmail. This enables the software to create accounts with these free email services, which are used to register in forums that it posts to.^{[1] [2]}

Most spam attacks on forums generally occur in waves, and the software will not spam at full speed initially. Thus, a good strategy for limiting the damage of such attacks is to target new members who have random series' of alphanumeric characters for their usernames. The multiple instances of a spam bot will have obvious similarities in their email addresses (and will usually be random themselves), allowing members that match the profile of other spam bots to be banned before they even post. As mentioned - proxies are used, making IP bans ineffective, however it is possible to block the posting of threads containing certain text, or links to a certain site. Once a product or site has been spammed, it can be blocked, preventing the software from successfully uploading its payload.

One way to defeat the software (at least for now) is to add extra hidden password fields to the registration form. You can hide those fields with css "display:none;" so that normal users would not see them. (Do it by enclosing the fields in a div with style display:none).

XRumer seems to be filling out all fields of type "password" with the same value. So validation is rather simple at this point. If your hidden password fields are not empty, chances are the new registration was a result of XRumer run.

For further protection, you can generate random names for your password fields and include 10+ of such hidden fields into your registration form.

Issued by The National Weather Service
Seattle/Tacoma, WA
4:57 pm PST, Sat., Mar. 6, 2010

... A QUICK CHANGE TO MUCH COLDER WEATHER IS EXPECTED ON SUNDAY NIGHT...

A COLD FRONT WILL PASS WESTERN WASHINGTON FROM LATE SUNDAY AFTERNOON THROUGH SUNDAY EVENING. THE FRONT WILL BE FOLLOWED BY THE COLDEST AIR MASS TO BE SEEN IN WESTERN WASHINGTON SINCE AT LEAST FEBRUARY 10... PERHAPS LONGER.

BY MONDAY... DAYTIME HIGH TEMPERATURES WILL ONLY REACH THE LOWER TO MID 40S OVER THE LOWLANDS WITH 20S OVER THE MOUNTAINS. AFTER WEEKS OF ABOVE NORMAL TEMPERATURES... THIS CHANGE IN THE WEATHER MAY FEEL ESPECIALLY ABRUPT. LOW TEMPERATURES ON MONDAY NIGHT SHOULD BE AT OR BELOW FREEZING FOR ALL OF THE LOWLANDS.

IN ADDITION... SHOWERS AND SUN BREAKS WILL PREVAIL ON MONDAY AND MONDAY EVENING. SHOWERS WILL BE MOST NUMEROUS IN THE PUGET SOUND CONVERGENCE ZONE BETWEEN SEATTLE AND EVERETT. GIVEN THE COLD AIR MASS... HEAVIER SHOWERS WILL BE CAPABLE BRINGING LOCALIZED SNOW ACCUMULATIONS... ESPECIALLY ON HILLS NORTH AND NORTHEAST OF SEATTLE.

Microsoft will use geo-positioning startup Navizon to power geolocation for mobile users. Navizon said today in a statement that it had signed a licensing agreement with Microsoft to allow the tech giant to use Navizon’s global location database for its mobile technologies.

Navizon crowdsources GPS positioning with its community of more than 1 million registered users from all over world. The startup’s users build a dynamic database of Wi-Fi access points and GSM, CDMA and 3G towers. Navizon’s software triangulates signals broadcast from Wi-Fi access points and cellular towers to determine geolocation. Navizon also has the ability to run in the background, allowing the user to open other applications on a device at the same time.

Yahoo also uses Navizon to power geo-location for Yahoo Mobile. Microsoft just launched a new version of its Windows Mobile operating system a few weeks ago but its unclear exactly how Navizon’s technology will be incorporated into Microsoft’s mobile offerings. Navizon faces competition from Skyhook Wireless, which is used by Apple to help power geolocation on the iPhone.

Microsoft: what we learnt from the iPhone, and what Apple can learn from us

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David Flynn26 February 2010, 1:30 PM (5 days ago.)

Apple’s tight integration of hardware and software pointed the way for Windows Phone 7, admits Microsoft, but it sledges the iPhone’s UI as out-dated.

If you’re looking for some of the inspiration behind Microsoft’s revamped playbook for Windows Phone 7, cast your eyes towards Apple HQ.

The iPhone provided vital cues in both elegance of UI design and consistency of the user experience – cues which Microsoft has enacted through tighter control over the hardware and software in Windows Phone 7 devices due to appear by year’s end.

“We’ve seen that with the iPhone, where hardware and software are tightly integrated together, what it gives is great quality in the experience, and that’s what consumer wants” recounts Natasha Kwan, General Manager for Microsoft’s regional mobile communications business.

Kwan told APC that this led Microsoft “to look at the entire design, not just the font and layout but the motion of when you wipe the screen, to take (full) advantage of good hardware features. We rebuilt the entire way you interact with the phone.”

At the same time, it’s hard to dispute that the fresh face of Windows Phone 7 has left the iPhone’s iconic UI looking, well, like the three-year old design that it is. And that’s a design which Microsoft believes is out-dated.

The face of the smartphone, circa 2010: is the iPhone’s simple but elegant app launcher still the best solution, or is a more informative live home screen like that of Windows Phone 7 the best approach for today?

“The iPhone has a very very nice UI, and thats why everybody has copied it” admits Tony Wilkinson, business operations director with Microsoft Australia. “But a lot of the commentary that’s come out following Windows Phone 7 is that this  UI has made the iPhone start to look a little bit old – this is a generation beyond what Apple has done.”

“I find it a big problem (on the iPhone) not being able to see what I’ve got on each day. I like the idea of having a home screen where stuff that I care about is immediately visible, and that’s really what the Live Tiles in Windows Phone 7 achieve” Wilkinson says.

He also considers that the iPhone interface “is all about individual apps. I go into Facebook or I go into Twitter, and I interact with each app one service at a time.”

“With Windows Phone 7 we want to give users an integrated experience – with Facebook and Twitter you’re talking about people, so you go into the People hub and all the interactions you can have with anyone you want – Facebook, Twitter, instant messaging, texting them or calling them – are all visible through that hub.”

“So rather than looking at it on an app by app basis, we’re looking at it from the perspective of things you want to do and people you want to communication with.”

Windows Phone 7 also packs hubs based around sets of people-centric or task-centric activities
(shown here in an exploded panorama view)

Wilkinson also seems the whole issue of app switching as being the wrong model for the small screen of a smartphone.

“On a computer where you’ve got a big screen, switching between programs or applications is a very easy and very natural thing to do. But when you’ve got a very small screen, switching from one app to another has a much higher cost than doing it on the PC – a heavily app-based model on a small device is much less efficient, and that’s where integrated experiences or hubs are really a very good way of getting access to your information.”

Of course, Microsoft isn’t the only one pushing a smartphone UI where the homescreen sprouts all manner of informative and interactive widgets rather than simply being a launchpad for apps. HTC, Samsung, Nokia, Sony Ericsson and Google Android have all introduced similar ‘live’ screens.

So what’s your call – is the iPhone’s UI due for an interactive overhaul? Or is a simple app launcher all that’s really needed?

Where does the money come from that private equity (venture capital, growth equity and buyout) firms invest?  It might indirectly come from you.  Key constituents include the likes of government employees, employees of large corporations, trade organizations (e.g. teachers) and wealthy families.  Here’s the quick synopsis:

Wealthy Families / Foundations. The original investors in venture capital firms were wealthy families.  The Phipps family was behind Bessemer.  The Rockefeller family was behind Venrock.  These wealthy families often invest out of vehicles like family offices or foundations.  From those roots, many wealthy families have played impactful roles in backing some of the best names in private equity.  As the asset class has became more known and attractive, the sources of capital grew to include more institutional sources.  But, behind every institution are regular people.

Endowments. One of the most aggressive investors in venture capital has historically been school endowments.  When you make that annual class gift to your college, if you designate it for the endowment, some of your gift just might be put into various venture capital and buyout firms.  Typically, universities are charged to protect your endowment gift, so they invest it, and use the returns generated from the investment to fund various school initiatives.  Major universities like Harvard, Yale, Stanford, MIT, etc. have been big proponents of investing some of that endowment principal into private equity firms.

Pension Funds. Another prominent investor in venture capital has been corporate and public pension plans.  Pension plans (of the defined benefit variety) are just another type of retirement plan used by state governments, labor/trade unions, and large corporations.  As you work at a company or state government and thereby accrue pension benefits, the company or organization funds a pension account based on actuarial models tied to its potential pension payout obligations.  A portion of these funds are often allocated to the private equity asset class.  Major states investing in this asset class include New York, New Jersey, California, Oregon, etc.  Major corporations like AT&T, General Motors, etc. have also been active investors.

Fund of Funds. Many foundations, endowments, and pension funds lack the capacity or resources to evaluate and monitor different private equity firms.  Hence, the fund of funds industry has sprung up to pool capital from these sources into funds and then invest on their behalf.  Unlike the other sources of capital, fund of funds have to raise their capital from third party sources, just like the firms that they invest in.

So, if you follow the money through, your child’s college financial aid package or your pension plan – might be tied to a couple engineers working on some project in Silicon Valley or tied to the big buyout you read about in the Wall Street Journal.

Ultra-Secretive Bloom Box Fuel Cell Device is Revealed

23% Failure Rate for IRCTC Transactions in Jan 2010

Shared by tsiva
cool !

In a demo that drew gasps at TED2010, Blaise Aguera y Arcas demos new augmented-reality mapping technology from Microsoft. (Recorded at TED2010, February 2010 in Long Beach, CA. Duration: 8:14)

Watch Blaise Aguera y Arcas' demo of augmented mapping on TED.com, where you can download this TEDTalk, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances from our archive of 600+ TEDTalks.

I find myself in a situation where I am logged in remotely to a server and have started a long running process, only to realize that I didnt kick off a screen session before, neither did I use nohup

In such a situation, the disown command comes in handy

disown -h %1

After I background the process, I disown it from the current terminal. The disown prevents a SIGHUP to the process if my terminal dies!

from the man page –

disown [-ar] [-h] [jobspec ...]
Without  options,  each  jobspec is removed from the table of active jobs.  If the -h option is given, each jobspec is not removed from the table, but is marked so that SIGHUP is not sent to the job if the shell receives a SIGHUP.  If no jobspec is present, and  neither  the  -a nor  the -r option is supplied, the current job is used.  If no jobspec is supplied, the -a option means to remove or mark all jobs; the -r option without a jobspec argument restricts operation to running jobs.  The return value is 0 unless a jobspec does  not  specify  a  valid job.

Thats it for a sunday morning! To own something can be a lot of responsibility, disown it and rest in peace

The idea was dreamt up by an expatriate Indian physics professor from the University of Maryland who, travelling back home, found himself harassed by endless extortion demands. He gave the notes to the importuning officials as a polite way of saying no. Vijay Anand, president of an NGO called 5th Pillar, thought it might work on a larger scale. He had 25,000 zero-rupee notes printed and publicised to mobilise opposition to corruption. They caught on: his charity has distributed 1m since 2007.

One official in Tamil Nadu was so stunned to receive the note that he handed back all the bribes he had solicited for providing electricity to a village. Another stood up, offered tea to the old lady from whom he was trying to extort money and approved a loan so her granddaughter could go to college.

Eco Printer Concept

Samsung's first Bada phone with Super AMOLED to be announced on February 14th? Sure. originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 09 Feb 2010 06:52:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

See our live notes from today’s Google Buzz event here.

Google has a problem. Despite having their hands in just about everything online, they’ve never been able to tackle what is a key part of the fabric of the web: social. Yes, they have Orkut and OpenSocial, but no one actually uses them. Okay, some people use them, but not in the meaningful social ways that people use Facebook or even Twitter. Today, Google may have just solved their social problem.

Google Buzz is easily the company’s boldest attempt yet to build a social network. Imagine taking elements of Twitter, Yammer, Foursquare, Yelp, and other social services, and shoving them together into one package. Now imagine covering that package in a layer that looks a lot like FriendFeed. Now imagine shoving that package inside of Gmail. That’s Buzz. If Google Wave is the future, Google Buzz is the present.

FriendFeed Reborn. On Growth Hormone.

Fundamentally, Buzz is a stream of status updates, pictures, links, and videos from your friends. You can “like” these items and you can comment on them. And if you use Flickr, Picasa, Google Reader, or Twitter, you can also automatically have those items imported into your stream. And Buzz will recommend items you might like based on your friends’ activity.

Yes, again, it sounds a lot like FriendFeed. But it has a critical component that FriendFeed never had prior to its acquisition by Facebook: a massive installed user base. Maybe you missed the key bit of wording above: it resides inside of Gmail. Rather than trying to build its own new social service from scratch, Google is making Buzz a key part of their email service (right below the Inbox tab) that 176 million unique visitors each month, according to comScore.

Social Curation

Buzz also wants to differentiate itself another way: social curation. As Mike wrote about the other night, the social web right now is largely a mess. There’s simply too much going on, and no one is really working to sort it all out. Google is trying to do that with Buzz by allowing you to import items from services like Twitter, but only show you the best ones. For example, Google says it will hide quick messages like “brb.” The plan is to also auto-collapse items that don’t have a lot of comment activity.

For now, this data is sadly only a one-way street. That is to say, you won’t be able to update your Twitter account from Google Buzz, we’re told. But Google seems to be indicating that this functionality will be included eventually, and that overall they’d like the product to be as open as possible. And yes, there will be plenty of APIs. But one company noticeably absent from all this talk of importing and exporting data is the 800-pound social gorilla in the room: Facebook.

The Big Mobile Social Play

Listening to Google tell it, you’d almost think Buzz is just as much of a mobile product, as a social tool inside Gmail. And it just may be. Google is heavily touting the ability to use Buzz immediately on the mobile web if you’re using an Android phone or an iPhone. The reason they’re singling out those two phones is that their HTML5-compatible browsers support location. Location is a big component of Buzz on the go because Google not only want users to update their statuses, but to tag them with where they are when they leave it.

And while Google has its own location app, Latitude, Buzz works a lot more like Foursquare in that you select places to say where you are rather than a specific coordinate. This is an extension of the Places pages in Google Maps that were launched late last year. The use of Buzz alongside these locations make them ever more powerful. You can search to see only the Buzzes written from certain places, for example.

Buzz will also work within the Maps app on certain phones (such as Android phones, but not the iPhone — at least, not yet). And it will work inside the Google Search apps on the iPhone and Android. Perhaps the coolest thing about that is that you can use the voice search functionality to speak your buzz update if you just say “post buzz” and then say your buzz out loud.

Social Issues

Some big question marks remain for Google. First of all, one big reason they’ve flopped in the past with social implementation is because they seemed to have fundamentally flawed views about what a social graph should be. For example, when they first tried to make Google Reader more social, they automatically ported over your Gmail contacts to give you friends. The problem with this was that they auto-chose people who you were in contact with often based on emails and IMs. But in some case that may be your boss, or someone else that you’re not actually friends with.

With Buzz, Google is giving users more granular controls for friend settings, but they’re still suggesting people based on your Gmail social graph, which may or may not reflect your actual desired social graph.

Also, believe it or not, there are plenty of people without Gmail accounts. Are they going to sign up and start using an email service just because of Buzz? People certainly haven’t started using Yahoo Mail just because it added social features.

The One Stop Shop

Another problem Google has had when it comes to social elements is that they’ve never really had one place to let users share all their social data. Now they have that with Google profiles, which apparently, Google Buzz will be built into. Still, because Profiles are separate from Buzz in Gmail, it might be a little tricky for some users to figure out.

Complexity

Speaking of complexity, overall it’s another issue that Google Buzz may run into. Twitter works because it’s so simple, if you have a public account, your tweets go to anyone who is following you. Buzz is not that simple. There can be public or private buzzes. The plan is to also have buzzes for enterprise and educational users. In those cases, public buzzes may only be available within your company or school, while private would still be private to other individuals in your network. You can see how the social graph is starting to get a little more complicated.

Another thing is if someone comments on one of your buzzes, it will leave the Buzz area of Gmail and go into the Inbox area of Gmail, so you know someone is talking to you. That actually sounds pretty cool, and even better, you can reply right from there (another feature taken from FriendFeed), but I could also see that getting a bit confusing for some users.

The Battle

Without having had a chance to play with it yet, it would seem that the core idea behind Buzz is to take on Twitter and Facebook as the easiest way to share content online. Google is offering a number of compelling features such as smart curation (it gets better as you tell it what you like and what you don’t), and a rich mobile experience including location.

Because of the features it adds on to what Twitter does, and its overall look, it’s hard not to compare Buzz to FriendFeed. That service was arguably the better product than Twitter, but never took off in the same way for whatever reason (though I would argue that simplicity was a big factor). You could say the same thing for Twitter rivals Pownce and Jaiku (which Google actually bought) in the past. But by adding it to Gmail, Google is giving Buzz a great weapon to succeed where all of those others could not.

The big question is: will Gmail users buy into this quick sharing? Google thinks so because it’s a part of the evolution from email, to IM, to status updates. It’s also, in their eyes, a part of the evolution to the next step, Google Wave. So far, the public has proven to be not ready for Wave yet. But Buzz might be the perfect tool in getting people to think about communicating in a way beyond email and IM. Or it may be another misstep in Google’s social quest.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.