random neuron misfires

There’s a lot of fraud happening on the Internet. Everyone already knows this.

But there’s a rising frequency of people advertising themselves as “experts” in the field of SEO, or “Search Engine Optimization“, who are there for no other purpose than to confuse, mislead and trick people into handing over their cash for the hope of having their websites show up higher in the Google rankings.

I’ve had cold-calls at the office number here, from people advertising that they can bring my website up in the rankings. Mind you, the websites I run are already PR6 and PR7 (PR is an SEO acronym for Page Rank). Bringing these websites up from their current ranking, would be VERY difficult for anyone to do. CNN’s website for example, is a PR9 website, and it would take a lot of work to get my sites up another notch or two to PR9.

But there are some true experts out here among the masses. And there are a lot of tools out there that are pretty useful. One of the tools I’ve been using for a couple of years to help my own website development, is the “Auto Keyword Generator” written by Chris Green at WebCreationz.

The tool is hosted in England, and from my location, it got to be a bit slower than I would have preferred. No fault of Chris or anything else, just distance and latency.

So I decided to rewrite it, and add some additional features. I’ve called it the “SEO Auto Keyword Generator“, and after using it to help a few new websites I’ve launched over the last week (with over 1,000 separate, high-quality articles of content, each with their own keyword matrix), I decided it was time to let others use it as well.

Everyone can do SEO, its not magical or voodoo.

The next step, which will be the hardest for most of these fraudsters to accept, is that SEO 2.0, the next wave of SEO, has absolutely nothing to do with keywords, MFA sites, stuffing content, autoblogging, or any of the other garbage whitehat and blackhat tricks they use to try to trick people into clicking on their ads or buying the sham products they’re selling.

“Definition of MFA: Made-for-advertising page. A broad class of generated webpages whose real purpose is to draw visitor traffic in the hopes people will click on the banner and link ads from Yahoo!, Google, or whomever else they partner with. MFA sites rarely have unique, original content, and exist solely to duplicate other content with the intent to make money on other people’s work.”

SEO 2.0 is about the content, about the quality, and about keeping users interested in reading it, and coming back for more.

If you know how to write original, quality content, market and promote it properly, your site will do fine… and that’s what it is all about. My PR6 and PR7 sites have been around for 7 years, with ZERO promotion or “traditional” SEO done to them, and they do fine. One of them has over 11,000 unique, organic backlinks.

It’s all about the content. The quality. Stick with that, and you’ll do fine.

As I was looking for the REAL answers behind why my Google AdSense earnings had dropped over 80% in the last month, while my clicks, impressions and CTR tripled… I found this information:

Google smart pricing is a system that will automatically adjust costs of contextual click for Adword advertisers based on a set of values. Google Smart Pricing system designed to help AdWord advertisers to improve their return on investment (ROI). Google does not disclose many information about the values that being used for its smart pricing system. The mechanism of smart pricing system remains largely undisclosed.

The best way to ensure your AdSense site is not affected by smart pricing is to create a great environment for advertisers and your visitors. Creating unique contents for your targeted readers is as important as providing good user experience on your site. If you have more targeted traffic to your AdSense site, then it would be better quality clicks for advertisers.

Google Smart pricing system will use the information it gathers to make price adjustment for an ad. The smart pricing system will reduce the price advertiser pays for any clicks, when there are any clicks generated from its contextual network is less likely to turn into business for advertisers.

Google Smart pricing is designed to help advertisers to improve the effectiveness of their advertising campaign over Google content network. As a result, Google is making less money since the cost to advertisers is reduced in order to provide a strong ROI. Indirectly, smart pricing affects the earnings of AdSense publishers because they are paid lesser.

Some AdSense publishers maintain good quality AdSense sites as well as “less than quality” sites under a single AdSense account. They are facing higher risk of getting their AdSense account smart priced because any of the “less than quality” AdSense site does not perform well could be smart priced easily. The increase in revenue of putting these “less than quality” websites could be less than the loss of revenue due to smart pricing on the entire AdSense account.

Google provide a tool that can track a conversion of a contextual click. Every time an AdSense ad is clicked, Google will place a conversion tracking cookie on a user’s computer. The conversion tracking cookie will be stored in the user’s computer for 30 days. It is used to track a conversion for Advertisers.

The smart pricing system should not only be viewed as a system to protect the interests of AdWord advertisers. It is also a system that indirectly benefits quality AdSense sites in the long term. The smart pricing system could force some AdSense publishers to drop those “low quality” sites. Perhaps with more quality sites, this could boost the advertisers’ confidence to advertise in Google content network. Hence, it will bring more competition for keywords. Eventually, AdSense publishers will benefit from the high paying keywords.

Smart pricing is not just affecting publisher’s earning on one AdSense site, it affects the entire AdSense account. Regardless of the high performance of other AdSense sites across the AdSense account, if one of your AdSense sites is smart priced, all of your AdSense sites will be affected.

AdSense publishers are earning less because of the low eCPM. You could find AdSense publishers revealing their eCPM in a forum when their accounts have been smart priced. They normally have low eCPM ranging from $1.50 to $5. However, low eCPM does not necessary implied that your account has been smart priced. AdSense sites in lower earning niche generally have lower CPM.

2007-09-27: Press Release: New Plucker website released with lots of new features

The Plucker website has been around for many, many years (since 2001), and it has been through many different iterations with varying levels of usability and features.

The last version of the website was reported by many users to be “too complicated” and in some cases, confusing (the download page was one example).

I’ve taken some time to clean up the site, layered the options on the download page, changed all of the wording to make things much clearer, and added some new features.

With this new site, you’ll notice that the new download section has been streamlined and broken into separate sections for Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, as well as other sections.

I’ve also added a new section to the samples section. Now you can download many of the most-popular Project Gutenberg ebooks in Plucker format (as well as text and HTML versions).

Don’t forget to read the “An Open Source Success Story: A History of Plucker“, which includes an interview from the original author of Plucker, Mark Lillywhite.

I’ve started a “blog” called “Plucker Projects” (or “Plucker Workshop”) that showcases many of the custom Plucker documents and works I’ve been creating over the last few years. Visit the site and take a look!

There’s a few more very exciting features I’m building to add to the website that everyone will want to use. I’ll launch those very soon.. stay tuned!

I am a long-time fan of Gaim, the multi-service IM chat client. With it, I can chat with friends and colleagues on MSN, AIM, Yahoo! Messenger, Jabber, Google Talk, ICQ and so on. I’ve used it for years, and it works great.

Then the developers decided that it had too many useful features, so they renamed it “Pidgin” and ripped out just about everything useful about it. Now it’s just a pile of broken garbage, and I’m not the only one who is upset about the changes.

If you look at the Pidgin bug reports, there are thousands of users who are upset and angry about the direction the project has taken. Here are two example bug reports and associated comments.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve had some trouble on our production webservers from entire countries hammering and abusing the services we provide. It used to be a good chunk of Brazil, but now it appears to be Costa Rica.

I found this useful tool that lets me see the ranges used by these countries. For example, I put in 200.91.76.117 and it returns this useful output:

Country = Costa Rica
Decimal IP Range = 3361423360 - 3361456127
Dot IP Range = 200.91.64.0 - 200.91.191.255

From here, I use iptables and issue the following:

$IPTABLES -A INPUT -m iprange --src-range 201.192.0.0-201.207.255.255 -p tcp -m tcp --dport 80 -j DROP

No more abuse from that entire country on port 80.

There’s seems to be this alarming trend in media lately, where commercials for movies, sitcoms and other things on television are stitched together of various sound bites from completely different parts of the movie or show.

For example, they’ll show one scene of two women talking at a breakfast table saying:

“So do you think this is helpful?”

And the next scene they show is of two different women at a gun range shooting guns, and one of them says:

“Probably not.”

Why, why, why do they do this? It’s like they pulled their own alternate plotline out of their rectum, because they didn’t like the original plotline.

This reminds me of these “armchair athletes”, the overweight men who watch sports all day, then get on the radio or television and try to explain how THEY would have done it better.

“If I was on the ice, I would have skated to the right, and put the puck behind his right leg, to score.”

Maybe if you weren’t overweight, under-motivated, and got yourself out on the ice every day for the last 10 years, you MAY have a shot at that.

But because you have no skills, and only exist to point out mistakes from people who have done better than you, that’s where you remain… on the chair, bag of potato chips in your hand, ranting about others.

We’re all aware of the hundreds upon hundreds of lies the current President has spewed upon the citizens of this country. He continues to make things up, falsify facts, fabricating quotes and mis-representing information as documented in hundreds of other places, as if we can’t see what is going on here.

He has sold this country out in order to dismantle the Constitution, Habeas Corpus and the Bill of Rights… all to try to preserve a 1-party system of World Government, and for what other stealth means we can only surmise to guess.

What is interesting is that all of these FEMA camps are being rebuilt, restocked, and are staffed and guarded… yet remain completely empty. What do you suppose a mental hospital in Alaska that holds 2 million people, would be used for?

This country’s current apathy disgusts me. It should disgust you too.

As Keith Olbermann says…

“Please sir, do not throw this country’s principles away because your lies have made it such that you can no longer differentiate between the terrorists, and the critics.

Its embarrassing to see this country run by someone who can’t even construct a proper sentence; someone who makes a complete mockery of the founding principles of this country.

Pathetic.

From the ‘Yes-they-really-are-doing-it-again’ department comes this news from the August 13, 2007 issue of NEWSWEEK:

The controversy over President Bush’s warrantless surveillance program took another surprise turn last week when a team of FBI agents, armed with a classified search warrant, raided the suburban Washington home of a former Justice Department lawyer. The lawyer, Thomas M. Tamm, previously worked in Justice’s Office of Intelligence Policy and Review (OIPR)—the supersecret unit that oversees surveillance of terrorist and espionage targets. The agents seized Tamm’s desktop computer, two of his children’s laptops and a cache of personal files. Tamm and his lawyer, Paul Kemp, declined any comment. So did the FBI. But two legal sources who asked not to be identified talking about an ongoing case told NEWSWEEK the raid was related to a Justice criminal probe into who leaked details of the warrantless eavesdropping program to the news media. The raid appears to be the first significant development in the probe since The New York Times reported in December 2005 that Bush had authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on the international phone calls and e-mails of U.S. residents without court warrants. (At the time, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said of the leak: “This is really hurting national security; this has really hurt our country.”)

A veteran federal prosecutor who left DOJ last year, Tamm worked at OIPR during a critical period in 2004 when senior Justice officials first strongly objected to the surveillance program. Those protests led to a crisis that March when, according to recent Senate testimony, then A.G. John Ashcroft, FBI Director Robert Mueller and others threatened to resign, prompting Bush to scale the program back. Tamm, said one of the legal sources, had shared concerns about he program’s legality, but it was unclear whether he actively participated in the internal DOJ protest.

The FBI raid on Tamm’s home comes when Gonzales himself is facing criticism for allegedly misleading Congress by denying there had been “serious disagreement” within Justice about the surveillance program. The A.G. last week apologized for “creating confusion,” but Senate Judiciary Committee chair Sen. Patrick Leahy said he is weighing asking Justice’s inspector general to review Gonzales’s testimony.

The raid also came while the White House and Congress were battling over expanding NSA wiretapping authority in order to plug purported “surveillance gaps.” James X. Dempsey of the Center for Democracy and Technology said the raid was “amazing” and shows the administration’s misplaced priorities: using FBI agents to track down leakers instead of processing intel warrants to close the gaps. A Justice spokesman declined to comment.

“The House of Representatives voted 227-183 to update the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to allow warrantless wiretapping of telephone and electronic communications. The vote extends the FISA amendment for six months. ‘The administration said the measure is needed to speed the National Security Agency’s ability to intercept phone calls, e-mails and other communications involving foreign nationals “reasonably believed to be outside the United States.”

So the next obvious answer is to just use encrypted or “secure” cellphones, right? Use encryption, right?

Wrong. Looks like the NSA has pressured the Telecommunications Industry Association or TIA to cripple the algorithm used, so the NSA can crack that easily too.

Unfortunately, the TIA created a poor algorithm, and thousands of digital cellular users are now using it. How much of this is due to direct government intervention is unclear, but David Banisar, attorney for the Electronic Privacy Information Center, is ready to place the blame squarely on the NSA. “This is another illustration of how US government efforts to control cryptography threaten the security and privacy of Americans.“

Perhaps a handset like the OpenMoko, based upon Linux, will leverage a stronger encryption than the TIA has provided on commercial handsets.

Privacy advocates are outraged, as they should be. This administration wants to make it possible for the Attorney General to wiretap anybody, any place, any time without court review, without any checks and balances. We all know how well the current Attorney General is doing, with charges of perjury against him.

“The technotronic era involves the gradual appearance of a more controlled society. Such a society would be dominated by an elite, unrestrained by traditional values. Soon it will be possible to assert almost continuous surveillance over every citizen and maintain up-to-date complete files containing even the most personal information about the citizen. These files will be subject to instantaneous retrieval by the authorities.” –Zbigniew Brzezinski

“Today the path of total dictatorship in the United States can be laid by strictly legal means, unseen and unheard by the Congress, the President, or the People. Outwardly, we have a Constitutional government. We have operating within our government and political system, another body representing another form of government – a bureaucratic elite.” — Senator William Jenner 1954

“We shall have world government whether or not you like it, by conquest or consent.”— James Warburg, to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, February 17, 1950.

Lovely.

I’ve written a couple of previous posts about saving power around the office and home, and have been using my Watts-Up Pro power analyzer/data logger to measure every power-enabled device that I use.

In that range, I’ve been tweaking the kernel on my Thinkpad T42p to minimize the power consumption of it during running hours. Here’s some things I’ve found:

Enable these kernel options:

# Set the kernel to only use the CPU speed that is appropriate to the load. 
# If you're reading email, there's no reason for your 2.4Ghz processor to 
# be running at that speed, so train it down to 600Mhz instead, etc.
CONFIG_CPU_FREQ_GOV_ONDEMAND

# Use the new, "next generation" high-performance timer instead of the
# legacy 8254s. 
CONFIG_HPET_TIMER

# The in-kernel irq balancer is obsolete and wakes the CPU up far more 
# than needed.
CONFIG_IRQBALANCE

# This is required to set longer CPU sleep times in the kernel
CONFIG_NO_HZ

# This enables the aggressive power-saving support of  the AC97 sound 
# codecs.  In this mode, the power-mode is dynamically controlled at each
# open/close. This will save roughly ½ watt of power.
CONFIG_SND_AC97_POWER_SAVE

# This automatically disables UHCI USB when not in use. This saves 
# roughly 1 Watt of power.
CONFIG_USB_SUSPEND

And add these tweaks to your startup scripts:

# Wake up the disk less often
echo 1500 > /proc/sys/vm/dirty_writeback_centisecs

# Enable laptop mode
echo 5 > /proc/sys/vm/laptop_mode

# Enable powersave mode for AC97
echo 1 > /sys/module/snd_ac97_codec/parameters/power_save

After you set these and rebuild your kernel with those options, you should now be consuming a lot less power than the “stock kernel”. Good luck!