have just become aware of Flock, which is an interesting fork of Firefox 1.5. The much-anticipated version 1.5 has not been formally released yet, which makes this a somewhat controversial scenario. Flock is now being promoted by WordPress.com, where a download of Flock warrant a free WordPress blog (at least for the time being).

With all due respect, I am always slightly apprehensive when it comes to adopting, thus relying on forks. I am also aware of the problem associated with forking one’s own application. Once you lag behind, the long-invested dedication can wind up being disposed of. Flock appears to me like the conspicuous rationale behind Mozilla becoming a foundation and going by the identity of Mozilla.com.

As regards WordPress.com and the Flock relationship, I might give it a try, but I would certainly seek plenty of convincing arguments before I do so. My past experiences with Firefox 1.5 betas (AKA Deer Park) have been fairly disappointing and led to regrets. I have made two such attempts to migrate to a version that was not finalised.

Having said that, a certain other fact is worrying me slightly more. According to ZDNet, the lead developer of Flock said:

“Please note that this is a developer preview and that there are still plenty of bugs, many of which we are aware of.”

To me that sounds as if the application is not quite ready for “prime time” so WordPress.com are possibly getting users on a dangerous wagon.

It was also said, however:

“In architecting our software, build systems and engineering processes, we have given considerable thought to how our code will be able to evolve alongside the Mozilla code, without forking it”

This sounds rather re-assuring and I sure hope these folks will walk as they preach.

Related item: Best Technology Products of 2005

The number of sites with PageRank 10 is tiny when compared to the number of sites with PageRank 0. Conversely, traffic is largely centralised in sites with a high PR (more details)

little tour around Google has led me to a questionably out-of-date article from the Register. This Article is 2 years old, but it seems more true than ever these days because scraping and link-related spam/attacks are constantly on the rise.

Google has made no secret of its goal to “understand” the web, an acknowledgement that its current brute-force text index produces search results with little or no context. The popularity of Teoma demonstrates that even a small index can produce superior results for certain kind of searches. Teoma leans on existing classification systems.

While Google relied on PageRankâ„¢ to provide context, all was well. But PageRank is now widely acknowledged to be broken, so new, smarter tricks are required.

Regarded as heresy when we raised the issue last spring, now some of Google’s warmest admirers, MetaFilter’s Matt Haughey and web designer Jason Kottke have acknowledged the problem.

As Gary Stock noted here last May, Google “didn’t foresee a tightly-bound body of wirers. They presumed that technicians at USC would link to the best papers from MIT, to the best local sites from a land trust or a river study – rather than a clique, a small group of people writing about each other constantly. They obviously bump the rankings system in a way for which it wasn’t prepared.”

The intersting fact is that Google themselves acknowledge the problem and I am sure difficulties have intensified, if anything, in the past 2 years. The specific reference to bloggers proves that very point as a new blog is set up every second these days.

Regarding the point about pages being indexed rather than learned from or understood, that is one of the catalysts that led me to starting Iuron. That site has attracted tremendous levels of interest since the idea had been conceived on the night on October 9^th. I set up the Web site and made an official announcement the following day. Yesterday I finished a 1-page formal proposal and I contacted the person who is perceived by some as the father of the Semantic Web. He was once my lecturer.

Content scrapers: where is the original content? Which one is the ripoff?

UCH that we see on the Internet these days are mirrors, although we are rarely aware of it. Several crooks make good money out of it. Some search engines are crippled by the fact that they have no knowledge as to which sites are known ‘mirror culprits’ and which ones can be trusted. Consequently, search engines like Yahoo tend to return many references to content scrapers, which is a deterrent.

As I go about looking at some SERP‘s I suddenly come across a commercial site — a Wikipedia mirror — that had been registered since January 2005. Its description in Google (judge for yourselves):

Wikimirror.com – Free encyclopedia search a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z _ · Google Web Encyclopedia.
 

WTF? Is the Creative Commons Licence an invitation to massive, huge-scale ripoffs? A community of WikiPedians around the world is voluntarily spending time in vain? To get somebody else rich(er)? I have had a look around the site in question. It appears like a complete mirror, which I must stress cannot be edited, unlike its much superior source. I recently discussed the issue of people mirroring the CIA Factbook, which is public content, in a relevant newsgroup. When will this end? And why has Google not banned Wikimirror.com yet? Does the domain name not say something? Helloooooo…?

I spoke to Chris Pirillo about Blogspot spam yesterday. After our discussion he posted an item that makes a nice little read. That item is titled Google: Kill Blogspot Already!!!, which is a venturous and strong title to be used by somebody as prominent as Chris.

Also while on the subject, have a look at Networkmirror.com [rel='nofollow']. In its defence, this one-among-many Slashdot mirrors does not archive content and it serves a defensible purpose — that of mirroring sites before they go down due to the Slashdot Effect. Then mirrors sites at least get exposure while they cannot cope with the demand.

UPDATE: 1-script argues that I may have been a little hasty in posting this item. The site states:

Content Credit

Wikimirror financially supports the Wikimedia Foundation. Displaying this page does not burden Wikipedia hardware resources. This article is from Wikipedia. All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License. Contact: info [AT] wikimirror [DOT] com

As a side note, I still think that Wikipedia contributers (me included) ought to be aware of these facts (or the existence of this mirror), which may imply that their contributions become commercial and thus money-making.

The command-line is the front line

OT many Linux hosts permit SSH access to one’s own Webspace. There are concerns that the extra freedom and flexibility of the *NIX shell might lead to servers going down. If servers are shared, the problem is somewhat magnified and the threat is just not worth it.

There are, however, workarounds if you use cPanel as I revealed hack. I have also recently been told about PHP Console by its author. That shell can be installed on your Webspace and allow you to do what you otherwise could not.

It is neither the time nor the place to post promotional links, but I am very satisfied with my host that helped me combat the recent zombie attack on 2 of my sites. The attacks have now ended fully and I removed all my defences, namely filtering through re-directions. If you experienced some locational oddities recently, this must have been the cause.

Refuse to explore and stay a monkey forever

oogle algorithms are very complex at present. The very core of these remains PageRank — a mechanism that often gets misused and leads to disasters (referrer spam among other link spamming techniques). For my recent zombie attacks I blame:

• Google – for unintentionally leading to ‘link greed’, not understanding or anticipating streetsmarts and penetration of second- and third-world countries into the Internet
• ISP‘s – for apathetically harbouring traffic that is pure spam or targetted attacks
• Microsoft – for creating an operating system that is so easy for crooks to capture

Google’s algorithms have become like a horse that has lots of decorations upon it, but is nothing more than a brute-force horse underneath. You can take a pig, put it in a dress and take it out for dinner. But it’s still a pig in dress, not a girlfriend.

Search must Evolve. A flawed or limited principle at the heart of something is bound to fail no matter how many bits you hang atop to patch it up and improve it. This is why traditional page indexing is not a good method for approaching the problem of information extraction and discovery. Microsoft’s operating system, for instance, suffers from the very same problem where a flawed and too complex an operating system was build from ‘code spaghetti’. It was recently heard through the grapevine that Longhorn was thrown away and reverted merely to ground zero to be based on the XP-related Server 2003 code. This comes to show that weekly updates were merely patching a mordid mess. Microsoft recognise their inability to complete with Linux performance (uptime, flexibility — the a reason for Monad). Linux just took a right approach — a right paradigm if you like — all along and was therefore able to sweep along all the best programmers in the world.

Returning to Google, by relying heavily on PageRank and making ad-hoc improvements, no real innovation will be made. This is why I intimated Iuron a few days ago. It ought to turn a large pool of indexed page into actual knowledge and provide definitely answers rather than a linear scatter of related pages.

Also comes to mind are AltaVista and other antiquated search engines with very fundamental and not-so-cunning methods for scanning pages. These were very quickly relaced by backlink-based engines, i.e. link counting in 1998. No progress has been made in nearly 8 years, however. One may begin to conceive a Google killer rather than a Windows killer. The required resources, however, in particular data centres, make the (financial) entry barrier too high to initiate a substantial enough threat. Proprietaries, however, are no concrete barrier, in contrary to the case with operating systems. So, I remain optimistic and I might soon meet some professors whose expertise is the semantic Web.

With reference to the famous 3-monkey image on top (I also have one on top of my monitor), those who refuse to evolve (Ballmer) show ‘zoo symptoms’ already. I vividly recall the day when Scoble quoted Microsoft CEO, Steve Ballmer, saying that RSS has no future. This was roughly 7 months ago. Ballmer also said that Google would vanish in 5 years and promised that MSN search was bound to ‘kill’ Google. I say: live in the past, be the past.

Moving on to a different topic, the latest article with the theme of aging at Microsoft came out on the day when I first composed this item: Pity poor Microsoft’s midlife crisis. Another recent article I have just been informed of is At 30, Microsoft Grapples With Growing Up.

Recommended reading:

• Insightful Microsoft Hatred FAQ – snippet below

Q: What about all the people in the corporate environments who are forced to use MS products and aren’t allowed the option/choice to use Mac/Linux/UNIX?

A: Kick your boss’s ass, or, choose to work for a company who have decisions that you liked.

Dear Windows users,

Please get your act together and always patch up your operating system, if not migrate to a less vulnerable operating system. The Macs, for example, are not so hard to use.

Your current machines are occasionally getting infected and then used as zombies in the midst of our network. Subsequently, under the control of evil hands, they commence a collateral onslaught on Web sites. Such sites, if not computers in your network, can be powered by Mac O/S, Linux or other UNIX variants. You must become responsible as you reside in a networked environment and can affect it tremendously without you being aware of it.

I am currently suffering from an international army of infected Windows machines. This is no laughing matter as I can confirm all zombies are Windows-driven and there are hundreds of them all over the world.

Windows out-of-the-box (i.e. unpatched) is somewhat of a weapon. It can easily drain bandwidth of other users and inject spam content. It can also lead to downtime of others in a global village that is the Internet. We are now hearing about a Dutch network of people who exploited vulnerable Windows machines world-wide. Be more cautious than ever before or else get disconnected by your ISP. Here at the University we already charge people if they continously get disconnected due to viruses in their Windows machines. Viruses (virii as the common slang) are causing a great deal of distress to network administrators, which is the reason for monetary penalty.

If the attacks on my site do not reach a halt or some solution is found, it might have to be isolated (READ: brought down), which is unacceptable. If not isolated, my site may take other sites down along with it in the future. I am not alone in the recent batch of attacks according to Tao of Mac.

Related items:

• Internet Explorer Breaks the Web
• MSNBot Fights Linux Servers
• Explorer 7 Against Web Standards

am never too aure as to how E-mail should be counted (if it can be counted at all). There is a certain amount of traffic that can be quantified when it comes to E-mail, but not all E-mails should be equally treated. Points to ponder:

• Should spam be counted?
• Or spam that sank in a BoxTrapper and gets reviewed on occasions?
• Should mailing lists be counted?
• What about newsletters that anyone can sign up for?
• E-mails with multiple recipients?
• Uninvited E-mails that are not spam?
• Automated messages?
• E-mail one-liners?
• E-mails sent to deprecated accounts that are rarely checked, if ever?

I have reached the conclusion that if E-mail bulk is ever to be counted, there must be some weighting applied to the variety of E-mail ‘types’. I have never counted my mail, but I am somewhat fed up with people who brag about the quantity of mail (or spam) they get. I have recently read somewhere that there services that one can sign up for in order to increase the amount of incoming spam traffic. Amazing, is it not? More amazing is the fact that people may actually sign up and welcome the increase in junk. It’s a market niche, right?