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Microsoft co-president Jim Allchin made an irrational statement back in Nov 2006 that Windows Vista is so secured it does not need Antivirus, saying his 7 years old kid is using Vista without Antivirus. Ofcourse this was back in November before public had theirs hands on it to start discovering holes.

Alex Ionescu posted a proof of concept program that utilizes Vista Protected Processes to it’s own advantage, making evil malicious programs as protected processes, be it keylogger or anything else you can think of (Thanks Slashdot for posting it).

This is ofcourse in addition to many other holes that are getting patched everyday, like last animation cursor that got immediate patch. My advise if you want to be mostly secured is to have good antivirus, good firewall (I like ZoneAlarm), and use the most secured browser, Firefox. Since I’ve started using it, very rarely I’ve seen any viruses coming in.

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This article speaks up my mind, and the minds of many others. Two decades back, Microsoft were the king of the hills in all, and was the force to fear in all aspects. Right now, I keep sayin, Google are gonna bring Microsoft down. Strange look on people’s face always comes and ask “How?”. Many people tend to underestimate the power of a search engine, and are unaware that Google right now is much more than just a search engine. While Microsoft’s power comes from the fact that they dominate the PC industry, the internet have opened complete new doors and somehow, the person owning the web can take control of the PC indirectly. Microsoft were not any where in this picture, and this time there was no Paul Allen warning Bill Gates “It’s Going to happen. Internet in every house”. As a result, million dollar businesses opened online and started dominating the market. Computers now come pre-installed with Google products, such as Google Desktop. Know what that means? 3rd party software is doing much better job than the OS it self! Very bad.

Anyways, read more why this guy thinks Microsoft now is Dead and not a force to fear anymore. Also, if you are interested in the history of this software giant, and how they became the leaders in this industry, I always recommend this book: Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire. Though the book is out dated (1993), as noted by one of my friends, it does cover the story up to where most people want it. Since Bill was 7 years old until he became the world’s richest person. It is so much motivating, full of business lessons (I don’t encourage you to fully follow them but rather learn from them), and reveals all the secrets behind the Microsoft monopoly, without underestimating the fact, Bill Gates is a hell of a genius. I guess now we can plan a new edition of the book, titled “The Fall of the Microsoft Empire”. Who knows. I will just copyright the name just in case.

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This is beyond the shadow of a doubt one of the best video game trailers ever made. The game it self is among the best as well. Somehow it didn’t get the attention it deserves. (Embedding YouTube videos stopped working on my blog for some reason, while Google Video still works, I had to hyperlink it)

Grimfandango was the last worthy adventure game from Lucasarts. After which, it was all gone and missed. If you still like to get your hands on it, or any other classic adventure game, GamePlanet New Zealand is having it with international shipping. Each game is worth $15. When they first promoted the classic games for sale, it was $7 only! Now it’s out of stock and rising in price. Can you believe the late 90’s game is now sold for the price of Prince of Persia!

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When you think you have seen everything from ISPs, soon you realize you’re wrong. Today I was trying what is supposed to be a neat trick on Google using certain parameters to get the results you want. However instead I was rudely blocked by Qualitynet. Another proof of our superior technological advancement in fighting pornography. I immediately realized the query excluded XXX from the results (-xxx) and that’s why it was blocked. It seems right now ISPs in Kuwait are taking a new turn in blocking sites, and that is, blocking certain post parameters as a whole!

Now, regardless of how they are violating my rights as a customer, why is that xxx post parameter important? First, internet site control is always based on the site it self, not the search results that points to the sites. This is like tearing off a whole page of the glossary in a book cause it has the word porn in it. Second, there are many valid non-porn sites with xxx in them, like for example xXx the movie. As much as I hate it, I still don’t see a reason to block it, mind you that it’s not a porn movie and is rather an action movie. There is also the technical sites listing IPs like 192.168.xxx.xxx. Why would you ban those results? Third, I could be a good citizen trying to exclude the XXX from my search results, using -xxx like in my case. Or to put it in a more bad shape, a person is looking for sexual disease information, and wants to get rid of the porn site results. Simply he can’t. He must make his way through them one by one because their filtering stops even excluding those results!

I wonder for how long do we have to put up with this kind of practice, and to what point it will reach. This is why I, and I advice all of you, to always have a good proxy server ready to use whenever you encounter this stupid site blocking. It seems ISPs have forgotten that they are years behind in technology and are just focusing on eliminating more and more sites from their service. I don’t need to mention some cities have the Fiber Optics ready in place in Kuwait, but we can’t utilize it simply because there is no technology supporting it yet.

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Following yesterday post on Amazon Context Link and as per Daniel noted Amazon have fixed the Firefox hanging problem, I have decided to give it a try on a separate page. What I did is simply post a little boring paragraph about me, with the intention to list down some of the item’s I’ve already purchased from Amazon to see how quickly and efficiently Amazon links those items. You can click the link and see how it renders the page. First, the main page is loaded normally, and then Amazon script runs to hyperlink the specific phrases to Amazon related product page. You can feel the waiting time for rendering to happen for this very small page, so a larger page might be troublesome. Below is the page I posted with Amazon Context Link code added to the bottom of it:

“Hi,This is a little brief about me. Mainly in an attempt to test Amazon Context Links. I am a computer software developer, love programming and all computer geek stuff. I usually program in Java, PHP, and right now going into Ruby on Rails. I am also a gamer… without proper time to play all the games I want. My game of all time is no other than Monkey Island. Adventure games is my favorite genre, though for some time we have lacked some real good games. It’s coming back now with Telltale games, Ankh Reverse the Curse, Syberia, Broken Sword and others. Action/Adventure game is another type I love. Prince of Persia and Beyond Good and Evil are what made me Ubisoft fan. As for 3rd person shooter, Mafia is a game that can be as good as GodFather if made a movie.

Away from the computer, if you ever find me, I like reading. There are many great books out there, cheap and so rich and useful. Book about habits of effective people, 7 habits of highly effective people. Don’t sweat the small stuff is another very simple, yet very effective book I enjoyed. Google Hacks and Spidering Hacks are two other books (for geeks) that I enjoyed a lot. If you are into biography, or inspiration, read about the life of the richest man on earth, and how he started an evolution. Bill Gates and the making of the microsoft empire could be the best book i’ve ever read. You learn quite a lot about Bill him self, how he made his fortune, how he made it, and why everyone is out there after him. It is also very inspiring. Bill him self wrote a not so bad at all book about Business running at the speed of thought.”

At the time of writing, the page had four links to Amazon generated automatically only, namely Bill Gates, Amazon Context, Prince of Persia, and Monkey Island. One of which, Prince of Persia, only was pointing where I wanted it. Monkey Island pointed to a book instead of the game, so the script does not have intelligence to determine what kind of content I am talking about. Bill Gates linked to a book other than the on I have hoped for, but that’s OK. You can see however that all the other intended items: Java, PHP, Ruby on Rails, Ankh Reverse the Curse, Syberia, Broken Sword, Beyond Good and Evil, GodFather (Can you believe that!), 7 habits of highly effective people, Google Hacks, Spidering Hacks, and Bill Gates and the making of the microsoft empire, all did not generate any hyperlinks, while most of them are highly rated items on Amazon. I assume it’s intentional not to overload the page with affiliate links, but it’s causing me to lose the items I want linked. 1 only out of the 14 items I wanted was properly linked, another was linked to undesired content. To sum it up, below are the Pros & Cons of the service:

Pros:

- Automatically embed affiliate links in the article without need of manual intervention. Could increase sales traffic.

Cons:

- Slight delay in page final loading time. For large pages, this might be an issue as well.

- Annoyance for end user, as all links open floating window with product description.

- Credibility loss: As users gets used to affiliate links in the site, he will ignore the real related links.

- Loss of desired links: Unless you link the specific desired products to Amazon manually, you may lose your intended links.

With all of this in hand, I think I will stick to manual linking to the items I want instead. Your experience as a publisher or end user on this is mostly welcomed.

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Amazon have recently started their Beta service of Amazon Context Link. A new service for Amazon Associates that identifies keywords or phrases on your page and automatically links them to Amazon. Associates do not need to bother any more about building manual links and maintaining them. The service looks promising for web publishers, and especially bloggers who write articles every day, some of them provide real valuable content out there and yet fail to make more than few bucks a month. From the other side, the service might be annoying for the visitor of the site who sees many links in the article, that eventually all point to Amazon. This could lead site visitors to avoid even clicking real related links at the end.

Since I’m not running the biggest blog in town, I didn’t think trying it for a while would be so bad. At least I get to see how it looks and behaves. I tried to add their script to the bottom of the page, but was frustrated it affected the web page design. When I went to Amazon official associates center, apparently my problem was the least affecting while others have had their Firefox and Mozilla browsers hanging because of that! Many reports confirm and add to the same hanging issue, I immediately removed it before I even got to see it in action. I wonder how did it past their internal testing and reach Beta when it has issues with Firefox. The service has only been announced on 22 Mar and there is no reply on the customer complains in Associates Central Discussion.

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“Only two things are infinite, Einstein said, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former.”

Now, the theory is no longer correct for sure. Yahoo Mail is giving their users infinite storage space. Well, that’s what they are promising at least. But could someone really commit to that amount of storage? Or is it just a marketing strategy to hit Gmail where it hurts? As I expected, Yahoo have reported that they based their infinite storage grant on their analysis of existing users, and how most of them are still below the 1 GB storage limit. In practice, Yahoo are not expecting perhaps even 30% of their users to reach the 1 GB storage, and even more, not all users will be enjoying this infinite storage privilege anyways. China and Japan will all be excluded from this feature as well. The statement does not give details about what are the conditions that makes a person eligible for the infinite storage. Perhaps they will only give it to people who are not utilizing the 1 GB after all. Who knows! Without any restriction, imagine what a handful of people could do with the Yahoo Mail in one day. This could lead to the largest Yahoo Mail black out in history, and lose the faith of their customers for good. Just like what happened to Google when Google Reader, Google Page Creator and Google Analytics all went down in one day.

Source for more information here.

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