Month: November 2005

Sunbelt is famous (or infamous, depending on your viewpoint) for its annual Halloween event.

It started as a tradition years ago, and probably the ultimate of Sunbelt Halloweens was 2002 (video), when the technical support team all dressed as aborigines. Now, this was not just dress-up. The support manager actually saved up chicken bones for weeks to make real bone jewelry.

You can see me here in 2003 Halloween, in a costume that will be well understood by those who have seen Office Space .

At any rate, it all culminates in mass walk (some loosely describe it as a “parade”) down to our local Starbucks, and the local citizens look on bemused.

After that, there’s a contest and both individuals and teams are judged for the best costumes.

And that brings us to Halloween 2005
Once again the crazies at Sunbelt overtook the streets and bum-rushed Starbucks in Downtown Clearwater with Scarecrows, Pirates, Ghouls and even a Pizza Delivery Guy for this year’s festivities.

(I make a brief appearance as an aging 80s rocker talking nonsense).

View Video 5:50 WMV – Low Res
View Video 5:50 MOV – High Res

See The Photos
View Photo SlideShow

You can see these videos and more at the Sunbelt Underground site, here.

Alex Eckelberry

It’s bad enough that we’re shipping waste PCs to third-world countries (thereby creating immense environmental hazards with lead, cadmium and other toxic materials used in PCs), but the Basel Action Network has also found some pretty sensitive information on these discarded PCs sitting in dumps.

You can see some of the examples here via beSpacific.

Alex Eckelberry

Our spyware seminar in Miami is being cancelled due to Wilma.

Oh well, I guess here come more cease and desist letters.

But last week, DirectRevenue CEO Jean-Philippe Maheu indicated to OnlineMediaDaily that the company is prepared to go on the offensive, and raised the possibility that the company will intervene to prevent its software from being deleted by adware removal companies.

“I think that if we’re going to clearly mark opt-in, [anti-spyware companies] should clearly mark opt-out,” he said. He was referring to some software removal programs that consumers either purchase or download to rid their computers of unwanted programs; these programs often automatically delete Direct Revenue’s adware.

Link here.

Alex Eckelberry
(Thanks Suzi!)

Wow, a great example of why having an open architecture is so powerful.  Within weeks of Google Maps coming out, we saw enterprising developers come up with all sorts of “hacks” to Google Maps.

Now, the latest – a game based on Google Maps — Brewster Jennings Protects America.  Link here.

Alex Eckelberry 

Bill recently wrote a piece in iMediaConnection, where he talks about the state of behavioral advertising:

• The software must never be installed without the explicit consent of the consumer. That means showing a short, clear notice outside the EULA (“Here’s the deal…”) that says what the software will do. Download Google’s toolbar for a good example.
• If the software transmits people’s browsing histories and shares that behavioral data with third parties, then that needs to be stated up front (for the record, WhenU software doesn’t do that, so we don’t state that in our notification screen).
• It also means that the EULA and privacy policy (the links go to ours) are as short and as free of legalese as possible.
• There should be no affiliate distribution because it’s impossible to police in order to make sure that all downloads are permission-based.
• Marketing (banner-based or otherwise) should be carefully monitored, and Active-X ads or advertise on sites aimed at children just shouldn’t happen.
• The software must be extremely easy to uninstall and shouldn’t slow down the computer’s performance.
• Finally, consumers must be constantly reminded of the source of the ads (to combat what iMedia’s executive editor Brad Berens has aptly dubbed “application amnesia”). At WhenU, we do this by putting our logo — and the logo of the software with which it came bundled — on the “wrapper” of every ad, along with our toll-free number for live help.

Now, check this out:

Some have posited that if complete disclosure were provided, no one would consent, but that hasn’t been WhenU’s experience — in fact since I became CEO a year ago and we upgraded to dirt simple notification screens, downloads from some of our long-term distribution partners have reached historically high levels.

Similarly, you might think that putting a toll-free help number on every ad would require an outsourced call center, but volume has been low enough to be handled easily in-house by two staff members. Eliminating un-policeable affiliate distribution is a no-brainer.

The goal is to build a highly qualified audience of people who know what they are getting; if they got it by mistake or they change their minds later, we must make it easy to leave.

Alex Eckelberry

From Reuters:

This week, Mattel’s Fisher-Price unit is undergoing a full rollout to store shelves of its “Knows Your Name Elmo,” a doll that can greet a child by name when it is unwrapped this holiday season, even before being taken out of its box.

The new Elmo comes with a CD-ROM and a USB cable that lets parents download personal information about a child — like his or her favorite color or birthday — into the plush doll.

Link here via Catherine.

Alex Eckelberry

Ever sent an email only to regret it?  As Thomas Jefferson once said “When angry count to ten before you speak. If very angry, count to one hundred.”  Well, sometimes the Send button gets pushed before you’ve had a chance to think things through.

Deb Shinder, who writes Sunbelt’s WXPNews, has a neat little technical trick to avoid Sender Regret:

1. In Outlook, click the Tools menu and select Rules and Alerts.
2. Click the New Rule … button.
3. In the Rules Wizard dialog box, click Start From a Blank Rule.
4. Under Step 1, select Check Messages After Sending.
5. Click Next.
6. Don’t select any conditions so the rule will apply to all messages, and click Next again.
7. Click Yes when asked if you want the rule to apply to all messages.
8. Under “Step 1: What do you want to do with the message?”, select Defer Delivery by a Number of Minutes.
9. Under “Step 2: Edit the Rule Description,” click “a number of” and set the Deferred Delivery setting to 1 minute. Click OK.
10. Click Finish.

Now when you hit Send, the message will remain in your Inbox for a minute, giving you a chance to recall it or change it.

 

Alex Eckelberry

WindowsSecurity.com has an article by Massimiliano Romano, Simone Rosignoli and Ennio Giannini on “How Botnets work”.

It’s a very in-depth (and technical) article that will give you lots of gory details.

What you will learn…

• what are bots, botnets, and how they work,
• what features most popular bots offer,
• how a host is infected and controlled,
• what preventive measures are available and how to respond to bot infestation.

What you should know…

• how malware works (trojans and worms in particular),
• mechanisms used in DDoS attacks,
• basics of TCP/IP, DNS and IRC.

Structure of a typical botnet.

Botnet hardening

Link here.

Alex Eckelberry

Pretty interesting post here by the venerable Mark Russinovich at SysInternals (Mark is one of the super gurus of Windows kernal programming).

Turns out that the Digital Rights Management (DRM) software that Sony is using (made by First 4) acts as a rootkit.

Last week when I was testing the latest version of RootkitRevealer (RKR) I ran a scan on one of my systems and was shocked to see evidence of a rootkit. Rootkits are cloaking technologies that hide files, Registry keys, and other system objects from diagnostic and security software, and they are usually employed by malware attempting to keep their implementation hidden …The RKR results window reported a hidden directory, several hidden device drivers, and a hidden application…

Link here. (Note that I have linked to the main page of his blog, as the permalink has been having problems).

Alex Eckelberry
(Thanks Jarrett)