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.

s some of you may have read, my site came under a large-scale denial-of-service (DoS) attack some while ago. It managed to endure it, but I was used as a ‘human filter’, getting sporadic exercise, sleep and food for a couple of days. Below I present the aftermath in my logs, which leaves lessons to be learned.

Click image to see it full-sized

As you can see, the motives of the attacker may have been high Google listings through referrer spam. However, as my site was requested for around 50 GB of dynamically-generated pages in just 1 day, there might be more to it. I suspect that the hundreds of hijacked Windows boxes were programmed to primarily wreak havoc; they were targetting my heaviest pages specifically.

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

Bill Gates arrested in his younger days (photo in public domain)

HE O/S industry continues to worry me. As a recent item suggests, if not practically reveals, Microsoft makes Windows-powered Dell computers cheaper than blank hard-drive computers, probably by subsidising hardware under the table.

This leads me to recalling a progmatic Ballmer reference to a $100 PC, possibly relying on kick-backs, lock-ins, steering of users towards MSN filled with adverts, not to mention extortionate Microsoft Office licences. When costs for hardware are being covered, it can be perceived as illegal practice if not bribery, which led to anti-trust lawsuits in the past. Software suffers the most from such legal loopholes due to (1) ‘duplicability’ and (2) compatibility, which make software different from most physical world analogies. Rules must adapt immediately to prevent a closed-circuit whereby competition is denied access.

If you are using Windows, be aware that 9 more vulnerabilities have been discovered today (check your favourite newsletter’s headlines for more details). Additionally while on the subject, Microsoft may soon be able to cash in on its own critical bugs, which is by all means outrageous.

As a sequel to my previous reference to Linux-powered tablets, it is worth mentioning the Nokia 770.

When the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet hits the streets in the coming weeks, it will mark a technological milestone for the world’s largest mobile phone manufacturer. The tablet not only is Nokia’s first non-voice Wi-Fi device, but it also runs on the Linux operating system (OS).

To me, this seems like an excellent (yet more expensive) replacement to Palm handhelds. Palm have recently lost their direction and their commitment to Linux appears to have been crippled.

Sun Microsystems, makers of the Linux-related Solaris, have formed a pact with the Linux-oriented Google. The exchange between the two is that of search technologies (i.e. search bar) and Java Desktop, most notably OpenOffice, which is treading strongly and becomes among the main dangers to Microsoft alongside Web-based Office.

Sun Microsystems Inc. and Google Inc. on Tuesday said they agreed to a multiyear pact for Google to promote Sun’s software technologies in what amounts to a direct challenge of Microsoft Corp.’s dominance of business users’ desktops.

HIS morning I received a flash reminder of how disasterous Windows can be. I tend to forget this as my professional life is Microsoft-free. My mother’s computer refuses to boot as the hard-drive cannot be mounted by Windows XP. Not even safe mode can do the trick.

This comes at a time when I strongly urge my mother to switch to Linux (probably Ubuntu), which perhaps would be a blessing as the computer reached a halt (over 5 minutes to boot) due to Registry bloat. Perhaps this O/S crash will wind up serving us well, but the amount of distress and required restoration work is enormous. This all comes at a time when we are reminded how mature Linux has truly become.

“Why choose Ubuntu for the parents?”, one might ask. I have 3 Linux machines at Manchester and 2 of them (the more recently set up) run Ubuntu while the main one (repository or so-called ‘mother ship’) runs SuSE, which is my favourite.

While I’m here at home I occasionally the Ubuntu Live CD because, let us face it, it can be a pain working under Windows as you cannot (trivially) SSH with X forwarding. Only the bandwidth is somewhat of a barrier at the moment (ADSL as opposed to proper LAN).