Archive for the 'Opinions' category

Malware Downloads Via Flash Ads on IGN

Jan 19 2012 Published by under Opinions

I hate it when I come across Flash-based malware ‘ads’. In the screen capture above, you can see the well established lure: interact with the ad, and something — god knows what — will happen.

In the case of this ad, a click will immediately initiate a file transfer without any warning or prompts from the ad itself.

Fortunately, I’m on a Mac (a hackintosh to be precise), so the ‘setup.exe’ that it tried to send me would of been useless had I tried to run it.

Regardless, this is quite obviously a deceitful and malicious act.

There’s no information of what the ad is actually offering — it doesn’t appear to be advertising anything, and it certainly doesn’t warn you that clicking on it will initiate a file transfer. Furthermore, should you accept the file, there’s no explanation of what the program will do to your system — one should only assume the worst!

I’m not surprised by the existence of such ads, but I was greatly surprised to find them on an IGN owned website.

I found this particular ad while browsing VE3D (Voodoo Extreme 3D). Although this once popular gaming blog is now just a sub-domain back alley within IGN’s large constellation of websites, I’m still shocked that they would allow this ad on any of their properties.

I contacted the website about removing this ad some weeks ago. They’ve yet to respond…

2 responses so far

Beware of The Online Marketing (MMO) Niche

Oct 14 2011 Published by under Opinions


The make money online niche (MMO) is one of the most bizarre and saddest communities I have ever come across on the entire internet.

It is a group of people that blog and market to other people that blog and market. It can be described as a pyramid scheme, a parasitic relationship, a circle-jerk, or simply a fraud.

It’s hard to put into words, but imagine, if you will, a group of first graders who study how to become teachers for other first graders. Then, long before they’ve passed any exams — and certainly before they’ve graduated the first grade — they begin to teach the next batch of students that arrive!

It is the blind leading the blind.

It is people who do keyword research on the phrase “keyword research.”

It is people who recycle other people’s ideas — without a shred of creativity or input from their own experiences.

It is people that start from day-one as presenting themselves as knowledgeable and successful entrepreneurs.

It is people with clip art sports cars in their header graphic.
Continue Reading »

8 responses so far

Siri: It’s More Than Just Voice Commands

Oct 06 2011 Published by under Opinions

iPhone 4S Siri

After reading reactions to Siri in the comments section of various tech blogs, it seems to me that a significant portion of commenters believe that the feature is little more than voice recognition technology re-packaged by Apple. True, it performs speech-to-text rather brilliantly (like all Nuance-based solutions), but surely Apple didn’t pay $200 million for just voice commands.

Siri is a unique service that boldly promises artificial intelligence on your iPhone: It can guess the intention of your commands — even when you’re being somewhat vague — and can use past information to help interpret future requests.

It’s clear that Siri isn’t just a collection of voice command templates, as some would have you believe; there’s something a lot more clever happening behind the scenes.

Also, one would have to ask, if Siri-like features were easy to develop, why aren’t there other competitors out there? It was public knowledge when Apple purchased Siri a year and a half ago, and yet today, Siri is without rivals.

Back in 2007, Apple’s implementation of multi-touch revolutionized mobile computing. But today, Apple has dwarfed that achievement. The company has likely opened the door for AI and natural language commands to hit the mainstream; this is textbook Apple!

True, Siri is not yet HAL 9000 — we’re still, literally, in the beta days of this cutting-edge technology, and furthermore, it’s debuting on some relatively low-powered hardware — but does anyone doubt that AI and natural voice command will become must-have features on all mobile devices in the years to come? How about on all computing devices?

3 responses so far

This Blog Uses CommentLuv Premium For DoFollow Back Links

Oct 02 2011 Published by under Opinions

Want a “do follow”, keyword-loaded backlink from Aibal.com?

Read on.

I’ve just installed CommentLuv premium on Aibal.com. I hope it will strike a balance between offering bloggers a potentially valuable backlink and keeping my site high-quality and spam-free.

Here are the rules I’ve tentatively set:

  1. Comments are now instantly approved, so long as you don’t trip the spam filter. As alway, I’ll manually screen the comments afterwards, so don’t waste your time leaving short, off-topic or low-quality remarks.
  2. If you Google +1 my post, CommentLuv will set your backlink to Do Follow.
  3. If you ReTweet or Facebook Like my post, I’ll let you select one of your last 10 blog posts. (Otherwise it will just backlink your most recent post — unless you own CommentLuv premium!)
  4. If you have 2 comments approved on my site (use the same name and email), I’ll let you input KeywordLuv style anchor text. The format is: Name@keyword1 keyword2 keyword 3.

You can have it all — keyword loaded, do follow backlinks — and these perks are automatically handled by CommentLuv premium, so the effects should be instantaneous!

As CommentLuv will likely increase the amount of commenters and spammers to my site, I’ll probably tweak the rules as time goes on to maintain a high quality environment. So I’m not making any long-term promises here, but I’m hopeful this plugin is the solution I’ve been looking for; I love the idea of offering incentives.

And finally, if you haven’t gotten it yet, I highly recommend trying CommentLuv premium. Think of it as an automated bribe system! :)

13 responses so far

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