Friday, September 12, 2008

Offtopic: Vacation in Prague

offtopic - my vacation.

Not only Alex Papadimoulis of TheDailyWTF has his vacation now - I'm having one too :)

Let me introduce my younger brother:

He keeps sending me photos from parties in Prague, like this
source - monsterbeat.cz


so I have finally decided to pay him a visit. I'm going to Czech Republic to hang around with my brother and some friends from IBM - that will start my vacation. Where will I go after that - I don't know yet, and that's the part that I like the most :)

The vacation will last around 2 weeks - I won't probably post much in this time, yet I will try to do some updates on my Twitter profile.

Meanwhile, Happy Programmer's Day, everyone, and have a nice weekend :)

John McCain and Barack Obama on social networks

John McCain's profile on linkedin professional network
Barack Obama's profile on linkedin professional network

Social and professional networks take a big share of Internet activities of modern users. Thus, company activities like marketing on social sites emerge, and presidential candidates are no different. (Barack Obama friends 52,000 users on Twitter).

Public profiles of USA president candidates on LinkedIn (in alphabetical order :)
John McCain
Barack Obama

Oh, btw, profile links on LinkedIn do pass PageRank.

Social media is important. Do it. If your company still doesn't have a page on Twitter - it's about time. Friend me there as well.

And, as a bonus: John McCain recommends Sarah Palin on LinkedIn ;)(you will need to log in) :

Sunday, September 7, 2008

Download Metallica - Death Magnetic (2008) - the newest album from legendary metal band

READ THIS: This was a SEO experiment, there's no unlicensed music here and never was.

metallica death magnetic album download logo
Some fast guys have already put Metallica - Death Magnetic album for download: http://letitbit.net/download/a58339622514/Metallica---Death-Magnetic-28200829-www.hard-mus.com.rar.html
Update: the link doesn't work anymore. You can try this one:
http://www4.sendthisfile.com/d.jsp?t=fj5yZgZvwTCfgMU78XZgvET8">http://www4.sendthisfile.com/d.jsp?t=fj5yZgZvwTCfgMU78XZgvET8

Update: I have put all the music to dedicated hosting. Links down in the post.

Make sure you download it fast, until it has reached it's download limit. Metallica's last album from 2008 - it's something we all were waiting for. I will buy Death Magnetic as soon as it is in stores, yet I'm glad I can have at least a peek at this album right now :) (P.S. "The Unforgiven 3" and "That Was Just Your Life" are cool).

List of tracks for Metallica - Death Magnetic:
1. That Was Just Your Life
2. The End of the Line
3. Broken, Beat & Scarred
4. The Day That Never Comes
5. All Nightmare Long
6. Cyanide
7. The Unforgiven III
8. The Judas Kiss
9. Suicide & Redemption
10. My Apocalypse

Metallica - Death Magnetic

  1. That Was Just Your Life(10mb)
  2. The End of the Line(11mb)
  3. Broken Beat and Scarred(9mb)
  4. The Day That Never Comes(11mb)
  5. All Nightmare Long(11mb)
  6. Cyanide(9mb)
  7. The Unforgiven III(11mb)
  8. The Judas Kiss(11mb)
  9. Suicide and Redemption(14mb)
  10. My Apocalypse(17mb)


Special thanks to Cheese for sharing the link.

Saturday, September 6, 2008

Google Chrome security flaw - first vulnerability found

Google Chrome Buffer Overflow vulnerability

The SVRT-Bkis guys have found a first vulnerability in Google Chrome that allows a malicious website to execute code on remote system. It works on Windows XP SP2 - on other systems the exploit just crashes Google Chrome.

How to check: goto http://security.bkis.vn/Proof-Of-Concept/PoC-XPSP2.html and click SaveAs.
(you will need win XP SP2 however).

It is super sad that this 'vulnerability' is a stupid buffer overflow. Somehow I believe there will be way more to come. Welcome to the real world, Google Chrome.

Thursday, September 4, 2008

Twitter nofollow bugfix yields angry reaction from exploiters

twitter logo
Yesterday, Twitter fixed a bug that allowed you to have a value-passing link from Twitter to your website. This caused a big reaction, and since it was Matt Cutts who pointed this bug, Google took all the blame.

It is popular nowadays to nofollow all the links that go from your domain. Wikipedia does it. Twitter was no exception. The scenario is simple:
  1. get all the link juice in
  2. give no link juice out
  3. Profit $$$. 
 This boosts your pagerank a little, but also turns you into a "black hole", sucking link juice from everyone and keeping it all for yourself, thus giving you a reputation of a bitch.

All the links that you would drop in your twitter messages were nofollowed. A website that you specify in your twitter profile was nofollowed as well. However, due to poor skills of Twitter engineers, a good workaround was found by inventive blackhats SEOs. All you needed to do is to put a link to your website into your One Line Bio profile field - and stupid processing engine would turn it into a fancy value-passing link from a high pagerank page (Twitter currently has PR8, your page could be PR5-7).

Of course, everyone who had even a slightest idea what SEO is, exploited this heavily.
Now it has been shut down. Oh well, happens - exploits usually don't last long. But what the hell is the reaction to this?
I will quote Sugarrae in her post to which I have linked before:

An even bigger question for me is, if, IF, Google is really coercing companies like Twitter based on threats of dropping them from their index for non-compliance, at what point does someone decide that due to Google’s reach and power, that doing so is no longer a case of “guidelines” but rather one of blackmail?
What the fuck is wrong with you, people? It was a bug - if Twitter creators really intended to give you a credit for your work on Twitter they wouldn't nofollow your webpage link from the very beginning. You exploited this bug as hard as you could - and once it's been shut up - it's Googles fault - because it was Matt Cutts who finally pointed this out.

The biggest flaw in your claim is that Google actually gives a damn about followed/nofollowed links from Twitter. Why would it care? How will it influence Google? Google would actually benefit more — because if you are a smartass that can build a nice internal PR on Twitter, and then pass it to your website, then you are obviously smart and worth showing high in search results. Now, instead of this 'extra information' that would do Google even better, Google has one more black hole on its hands.

So give it a break, stop whining and don't blame Google because you have just lost a fancy high PR link that you got by cheating anyway.

Tuesday, September 2, 2008

Google Chrome - download it or it will download you!

google chrome logo

Today Google releases it's browser - Google Chrome. The download page is here: http://www.google.com/chrome



Meanwhile, while you wait, feel free to check the comic about Google Chrome: http://books.google.com/books?id=8UsqHohwwVYC&printsec=frontcover#PPA2,M1
It's fun, I promise :)

google chrome comic