Today, I stumbled upon a new aggregator called Informatory. I'm unsure what exactly it is or intends to do, but I was really pleased with the way this aggregator goes about aggregating blog entries and linking back to the source. Things to note...

• Every entry links to both the blog entry and blog homepage. That's especially nice.
• No NOFOLLOW on the links, giving the original authors some Google juice.
• Every entry is excerpted.

There's lots of ads and it looks like it's a Google SERP play, but none-the-less, this is the way you should aggregator, excerpt and link. As an aggregator, it doesn't look that interesting or useful and I doubt I would use it, but they deserve some Google juice in return for playing by the rules. Informatory also looks a lot like TechRepublic.

http://svartling.hopto.org/informatory/

Sophos has a list of the top 10 hoaxes and an RSS feed. They are quite funny! People are so gullible.

http://feeds.sophos.com/en/rss2_0-sophos-hoaxes.xml

EFF: A federal district court in Nevada has ruled that Google does not violate copyright law when it copies websites, stores the copies, and transmits them to Internet users as part of its Google Cache feature.

http://www.eff.org/news/archives/2006_01.php#004345

Randy: Wow! That puts a canyon-sized dent into the protection of copyrighted material.

Examine this. Found [http://sympatico-interactive.blogspot.com/], which belongs to klelugi and is a splog. Found [http://loquineglupeseo.blogspot.com/2005/02/loquine-glupe-for-today_23.html], which belongs to Brian Nizinksy and a splog. Brian also runs this blog [http://v7ndotcom-elursrebmem-seo.blogspot.com/], another splog. v7ndotcom elursrebmem is an SEO contest [http://www.v7n.com/forums/showthread.php?t=23744]. Try searching on the term v7ndotcom elursrebmem at Google and you'll find 3 million entries. The winner of the SEO contest is the person who will be place #1 on the Google SERP for this odd term. The goal of v7n in running this contest is to put their PageRank thru the roof, as they require all contestants to link to the v7n.com homepage. What this means in the end is a lot of SERP SPAM and splogs. Now, let's go back [http://sympatico-interactive.blogspot.com/]. Found [http://chocoku.darkmioche.com/], which is another landing page for one of these contests. Found [http://tiger-osmose.darkmioche.com/], same. Found [http://v7ndotcom-elursrebmem.darkmioche.com/], same. Found [http://www.taggle.us/erazor], same. Found [http://v7ndotcom-elursrebmem.kult-lab.net/], same. Found [http://v7ndotcom-elursrebmem.grocodile.com/], same. I could go on and on. And each one of these found Webpages contains even more links to contest pages and their own Webpages. There does not appear to be an end to these Websites. Most of the pages are simply faked content. Many of these pages are actually plagiarized content ([http://www.americanshowparis.com/] and [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com]). And a little research indicates that many of these Websites are also hosting porn [http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aamericanshowparis.com]. I'm not talking half-naked girls here, I'm talking porn. And here's a nice map [http://forum-taggle-map.apocalx.com/]. They hang out on this forum [http://forum.taggle.org/].

It would be interesting to write an agent that would document this rather humongous link cluster.

Raven:  The purpose of this guide is to show the process involved in tracing an email.

http://www.onimoto.com/?post=50

Randy: This is a pretty awesome guide on reporting people who send you unwanted email, whether spammers, cyberstalkers or other.

CNN: Jeanson James Ancheta, of Downey, California, pleaded guilty in Los Angeles federal court to four felony charges for crimes, including infecting machines at two U.S. military sites, that earned him more than $61,000, said federal prosecutor James Aquilina. [cut] Ancheta and SoBe signed up as affiliates in programs maintained by online advertising companies that pay people each time they get a computer user to install software that displays ads and collects information about the sites a user visits. Prosecutors say Ancheta and SoBe then installed the ad software from the two companies -- Gamma Entertainment of Montreal, Quebec, and Loudcash, whose parent company was acquired last year by 180Solutions of Bellevue, Washington -- on the bots they controlled, pocketing more than $58,000 in 13 months.

http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/internet/01/23/hacker.ap/index.html

Shelley Powers: Mr. Palfrey, the Berkman Center at Harvard holding the copyright of RSS is completely beside the issue, and only serves to obfuscate the discussion–as does raising the specter of the Big Bad Media companies.

http://weblog.burningbird.net/2006/01/18/that-old-copyright-song/

Randy: Shelley continues the RSS and copyright discussion. Unfortunately, it's pretty apparent she doesn't actually understand copyright law. Yet, she seems so confident she knows better. Not that I'm a lawyer, but the legal minds saying otherwise.

A new Malware blog. Subscribed

http://www.mal-aware.org/

Matt Cutts: Okay, I’m most interested in hearing what people think Google should tackle in webspam. [cut] Once you’ve come up with the idea(s) that you think are most pressing, please add a constructive comment.

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/feedback-webspam/

Richard Owen: For the first time all papal documents, including encyclicals, will be governed by copyright invested in the official Vatican publishing house, the Libreria Editrice Vaticana. [cut] The decision was denounced yesterday for treating the Pope’s words as “saleable merchandise” and endangering the Church’s mission to “spread the Christian message”.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,13509-2005615,00.html

Randy: No really, this is a joke right? Spreading the word of the Pope is now a copyright violation, either that, or you have to pay $$$.

Kathryn Yu: I hereby notify Ticketmaster of infringements of my copyright. The infringing material is currently reproduced, adapted, displayed and distributed through Ticketmaster’s web site [cut]. The graphic shown on these ticketmaster.com pages is copyrighted material, originally found here:

flickr.com/photos/kathryn/57483/

This is a copyrighted photograph to which I own the exclusive right to reproduce, adapt, display and distribute. The copyright information is clearly noted on the page.

http://flickr.com/photos/kathryn/88718676/

Randy: It would seem Ticketmaster is scouring Flickr for stock photos of artist. I've seen these violations from many companies and individuals on many occasions. I suspect it's happening a lot more than we know. They've already removed the offending image.

Andy Pull: An anonymous source has claimed that Bin Laden is actually just generating media for the next version of the million dollar webpage. "Bin Laden is just generating press. He's gonna launch the Bin Laden Blog, binladensblog.com, and try to coerce the world into clicking on his text ads. If the world does not comply, he will launch a huge comment spam campaign that will target the billions of blogs with 3 entries or less."

http://www.gopulls.com/humor/binladen.htm

Randy: Andy wins SPAM comedian of the year.

Susan Mernit: Without some share in the revenue, it's not right to make $$ from anything more than a headline and a digest, unless the blogger has specifically given permission for a great depth to be published off site.

Randy: John replies with two examples.

John Palfrey:

1. If a for-profit company a) aggregates RSS headlines and digests of feeds only (presumably there's a norm around what is appropriate "digesting", but presume for these purposes it's something well short of a full feed, consistent across all sources aggregated); b) provides an easy mechanism for those who wish to opt-out to opt-out; and c) observes all licenses and other stated preferences of those who offer feeds, then it's OK to make money on the aggregated content with ads served alongside the content in some fashion. 
2. If a for-profit company aggregates full RSS feeds and makes money from the aggregation, it's not enough to give the source of the feeds some links back or a hat-tip or similar kinds of  non-cash remuneration. 

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/palfrey/2006/01/18

Randy: This makes perfect sense to me and I think pretty much any honest person would agree. Unfortunately, we're not all honest.

cross-posted

Robert Scott Leonard: If you’re going to use this site’s RSS feed, I don’t mind. What I do mind is if you’re stealing my words to rake in Google Adsense revenue, because that’s just spam. Sploggers know how to use RSS to increase their Google page rank — and it sucks in so many ways. I would like to thank Randy from kbcafe.com for pointing out that my site was being Splogged by these people.

http://www.phk.ca/2006/01/18/anti-splogs/

Brian McWilliams: Darren Brothers reports that Alex Polyakov, the target of his Kick a Spammer in the Nuts Daily retaliatory campaign, has cried uncle. Brothers says he got a call early this morning from Polyakov. (Brothers has posted a WAV file of the call. I created a smaller MP3 version of the recording, which can be downloaded here.) On the tape, an excited Polyakov complains that Brothers' "Refi Retaliator" program is "killing my business."

John Palfrey has a great discussion on how to properly aggregate RSS feeds and offer that aggregated view without stomping on your source and violating his copyrights. John runs an aggregation service called Top10Sources.

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/palfrey/2006/01/17

Here's the important points he makes.

1. Top10Sources attempts to contact sources before republishing.
2. Top10Sources removes content at the authors requests.

I would also add that Top10Sources doesn't not actually make a permanent copy of the RSS data. Rather, it simply lists the most recent items in the source RSS feed. He truly is aggregating feeds, not copying the content within.

Our first nominee in the splogger challenge has responded via email:

301powered is an agregator very useful for more search engine optimiser in France and in others countries. I don't understand your post on your website http://www.kbcafe.com/spam and why my mail was posted here ?

Splog is weblog that the only goal is to make trafic and clicks to make money with no content. My website have content from high quality rss feeds talking about search engine optimisation in french and english.

I will not remove my website because you don't like it. If you have a problem with it, don't visit it, the web is bigger and you can surf on websites without falling on mine. Barry have certainly an interest to point it to you. He is seo, isn't it ?

Last thing, I don't appreciate your delation on your website. I don't authorize you to post my personnal mail to public. So, please, remove it immediatly. You have not 24 hours to respond, but be sure that your provider will be alert if this is not removed.

Regards.

It's unbelievable to me, that this splogger believes he has the right to re-post the RSS feeds of others. Don't get me wrong. Reposting a blog entry with attribution is not wrong. Reposting every single blog entry from an RSS feed you don't own or license is called splogging. Feel free to post your own thoughts in my comments.

I'm starting a new feature on this blog. It's called the splogger challenge. Every once in awhile, I'll post the URL of a big-time splogger and we'll see how long his splogs stay active.

Barry Schwartz just sent me a link to a really dumb splog.

http://www.301powered.com << NOFOLLOWed

Not only is he re-posting more than a dozen blogs using their RSS feeds, but he's posting the YPN for feed ads and the FeedBurner FeedFlares. According to who-is records, his real blog is taggle.org and email address is found here. His hosting service is French, but I'm sure they'll appreciate lots of feedback via their feedback form. I've already posted and emailed him a nasty 24-hour warning.

Update: Siddartha has responded.

http://www.destroyallmalware.com/?guid=20060117142012

Update II: Email address removed at request of splogger.

Now that you know you've been blogiarized, what do you do about it? The last thing you should do is walk away and do nothing. Inaction will only mean more blogiarism and splogs in the future. It's simply a matter of speaking up and telling the right people about the blogiarism or splog. Let me tell you the ways I've used successfully in the past to combat blogiarism and splogs. Start by finding out who this guy is working with. You see, if he has AdSense ads, a FeedBurner feed, a blog hosting service or a Web hosting service, then you can usually go right after his partners and hit him where it hurts. Send them an email complaint. For some services, there are specific ways of contacting the right people. Let me enumerate them.

AdSense

Many blogiarizers or sploggers use AdSense as a way of monetizing their efforts. There's two primary ways of inappropriate blogs to the AdSense team.

1. Click on the Ads by Google link in the margins of the AdSense ad unit. This will bring you to a page with a link "Send Google your thoughts on the ads you just saw."  The content of this page changes from time-to-time, so this link may disappear. Click this link or one similar to it. You are then presented with a feedback form where you can tell Google that the publisher is a splogger or blogiarizer. If he gets enough submissions, then his AdSense account will be terminated and this does happen quite frequently.
2. The second option is to send and email to adsense-abuse@google.com with all the pertinent information included in the body of the message.

The first two steps failing (too often the case), I have found that Jason Goldman is a good contact on the AdSense team.

Yahoo! Publishers Network

Very similar to AdSense, some sploggers attempt to make their money using Yahoo! Publishers Network. Splogging is against many of the subsections of section 6, Members Conduct, of the YPN Terms of Service. The TOS says to report these abuses to Yahoo!'s Customer Care, but I can't find anything on that page that helps you report YPN splogs. Yahoo! must fix this.

FeedBurner

Some blogiarizers and sploggers, go to the extent of publishing a FeedBurner feed on their blog. You can report them to feedback@feedburner.com. I've done this in the past and the blog (not just the feed) actually disappeared within the hour. The blog may have disappeared for other reasons, but it's worth pointing out, even if it's a coincidence.

Blogspot

Most splogs are hosted on Google's blog hosting service called Blogspot. Each Blogspot blog is suppose to have a Flag button in the top right corner of each blog page. This is not always true and there are likely two reasons for this.

1. The author maybe adding script to his blog to disable the button or the entire Blogger bar.
2. Maybe Google removes the Flag button when the blog meets some criteria (it's about to be deleted).

Google

You can also try to get splogs de-indexed from Google. Remember, Google is every Webmasters best friend. Getting a splog removed from Google's index should have a severe negative effect on the splog traffic. Here's one way of reporter a splog. Type the URL of the splog preceded by the modifier "site:" (example site:www.the-splog-url.com/page) then hit enter. Then scroll to the bottom of the page and click-on "Dissatisfied? Help us improve." You are then presented with a form where you can give Google the appropriate feedback.

Another secondary approach is to contact Matt Cutts. On numerous occasions, I've sent Matt lists of splogs, which he quickly removed from Google's index and forward to other appropriate Google teams. Matt is likely the #1 warrior in the fight against SERP (Search Engine Result Page) Spam. Thanks Matt!

SplogSpot

Another way of telling the world about a splogger, is to list his Website at SplogSpot.com. SplogSpot has a difficult submission form, the CAPTCHA is a killer, but if you can bypass it then you are a smart human and your submission will be reviewed for inclusion in the SplogSpot database.

Michael Zimmer: Clearly, such practice amounts to plagiarism and is unethical. While the blogging medium certainly makes it easy to cut & paste & post to your own site, as if the words were your own, proper attribution is always required.

http://michaelzimmer.org/2006/01/16/ethics-of-blogiarism/

Randy: He posted this almost immediately after creating a new Wikipedia entry for Blogiarism.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blogiarism

He readily admits that he used (cut & paste) my definition in creating his own. No attribution. After catching him red-handed, he gives me a couple insincere apologies and starts attacking me with statements like didn't realize you had some type of ownership to the term and its definition and when it seemingly was Mr. Morin’s “intellectual property”. I also note, he deleted some of my comments on Wikipedia, where I exposed his fraud.

So, you find that your content is blatantly getting re-posted elsewhere without any linkage back to your blog. Did someone just steal from you? Yes, they did. Now, this isn't an article about copyrights and the merits of copyright laws. Nor am I trying to say in any way that blogiarism is a copyright violation. That discussion can best be held by two blogging lawyers. This article is about Blogiarism, not copyrights. Let's start with a definition of blogiarism.

When a blogger posts primarily content cut-and-paste from another source without linking to that source.

http://www.kbcafe.com/iBLOGthere4iM/?guid=20051018203244

Note, this definition has nothing to do with copyright law. It's a simple statement. It does not address the amount of content that is copied, nor does it address slight modifications made by the blogiarizer. Does this mean that copying one word from one blog to another is blogiarism? Of course not. How about a complete sentence? Yes, that would qualify as blogiarism. What if you modified the sentence slightly, like changed the text. Again, this is still blogiarism. It's as simple as this, when you lift text from a blogger (or any source for that matter), then it's blogosphere etiquette to link back to them as an appreciation for them having written that original content. It's about giving credit where credit is due, by taking advantage of the linkable Web.

Example

Let's examine a blatant blogiarism sample. This blog entry [http://blog.forret.com/blog/2005/12/google-introduces-music-search.html] was written by Peter Forret. You can find that blog entry re-posted twice here [http://blog.zcde.com/2005/12/google-introduces-music-search.html] and here [http://my.opera.com/yuebinliu/blog/show.dml/88049]. Although these blogs tend to be primarily non-English, there are occasional English posts and searching on the headers within these English posts indicate that the authors are making blogiarism a habit. It's also entirely possible that the blogs are programmed, that is, somebody is using automated software to steal content and populate the blogs. This is the most common form of blogiarism, but not the only form.

Now let's review. What is blogiarism about? It's about copying content and not linking back to the source when possible. That's it!

What about Splogging?

There's a second form of blog plagiarism called splogging. Even when you do link back to the source, that's not always enough. If your blog is created by automated software that steals content to populate the blog, then you are splogging. This is not the same as blogiarism, but is just as bad. The word splogging is the combination of two words; spam and blogging. A splog is a blog where nearly all the content is simply copied by automated software from somewhere else. Splogging is the act of creating and maintaining splogs. Note, that a link blog is not a splog. Even though nearly all of the content is copied, the fact that a human was involved in creating each link, differentiates a link blog from a splog.

What about SplogSense?

Let me point out at this time, that the definition of splog on Wikipedia is incorrect and fails to account for the vast majority of splogs. Not only are splogs created to affect the PageRank of affiliate sites, but they are also created to infest SERPs (search engine result pages) with pages that have CPC (cost per click) advertising. These are often also called SplogSense. A SplogSense blog is a subset of all splogs. These splogs contain CPC (cost per click) advertising, like AdSense, and the creator of the splog is hoping to attract enough traffic to make money off the occasional ad click.

Next

In my next article, I will review techniques I've used to put sploggers, splogsensers and blogiarizers out of business.

I'm just amazed how dumb some Web authors are. Today I caught a Wikipedia editor, cut-and-pasting content from one of my blogs into Wikipedia. Guess which entry he did that for? He did it in creating the content for the Wikipedia page on Blogiarism, which is a copy-paste with minor edits from my entry where I defined Blogiarism. Since Wikipedia tracks there content, it wasn't hard to find the author. Unbelievable. This makes me wonder how much content on Wikipedia comes from that same mold.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blogiarism

Notes: There was a hit on my Website a few minute before the Wikipedia entry was create from this IP address [24.29.141.11], which originates from New York City. Guess were the author of the Wikipedia entry lives?

Many months ago, I wrote an article title State of the Splogosphere. It was generally a knock on the Blogosphere search engines which have had a hard time dealing with splogs; spam blogs. In the meanwhile, I started writing more in-depth articles on the Blogosphere Search, with a minor in the Splogosphere. What I notice this month was an overall improvement in the quality of blogosphere search results. I think I might of JINXed the blogosphere. I woke up this morning to a classic splogosphere attack with a big bulls-eye on Blogspot. My refers at Technorati, mostly Blogspot splogs and lots of them. Where is all the progress? This is what we were seeing in October 2005. I really have to wonder what the engineers at Blogspot and Technorati have been doing for the last six months. Not that the problem only lies with them, I got some horrible porn splog referrer SPAM from PubSub too.

And I'm not obviating Bloglines either. You see, Bloglines is complete borked. When I looked for citations using Bloglines, I get referrers to someone else's domain, not mine. It makes me wonder, what is better, porn referrers, splogs or complete irrelevance. In my State of Blogosphere Search article, I gave Technorati a grade of B. Let me deprecate that for a C-. And I gave PubSub a D. Turn that into a D-. Bloglines already had an F- and believe it or not, it's actually worse.

Thank god for IceRocket. And Mark Cuban and Blake Rhodes too. That's assuming that Mark and Blake aren't gods ;-)

cross-posted

Wow, yesterday, I got my most hits ever. Half of them came from Yahoo! search result referrers for various queries on the term Jenn Sterger. You see, yesterday, I was #2 for that search term and variations there-of. I quickly took myself out of the results for one obvious reason. This is the first instance of SERP referrer SPAM I've seen. The thousands of hits coming from this referrer generated very few pageviews and never one goal click. What could that mean? It was a bot script that navigates to Yahoo! search, queries Jenn Sterger, then navigates forward to one of the top results. The spike in activity started at 9AM and ended at 5PM PST. Like it was programmed. I assume this is a marketing campaign to elevate the stature of Jenn Sterger. Since I was getting zero goal hits for thousands of referrers, I simply modified to the page to reduce my presence in the results, thus removing a resource consumer that doesn't pay.

cross-posted

Anyone notice that Blogspot.com is no longer splog infested? Sounds like Google's been doing some excellent work cleaning up the mess. I think I'm gonna drop blogspot from my kill file. Currently, if you try to link in my comments to blogspot, I'll reject the post outright (no explanation). That's because blogspot is in my kill file. Once I remove it, then linking glee will return and I'll find out if blogspot referrer comment spam is still the problem it use to be.

Update: Funny, within minutes of posting this, a new Blogsplog attack started. Oh, well, not gonna happen. Yet.

Declan McCullagh: Annoying someone via the Internet is now a federal crime. It's no joke. Last Thursday, President Bush signed into law a prohibition on posting annoying Web messages or sending annoying e-mail messages without disclosing your true identity.

Whoever...utilizes any device or software that can be used to originate telecommunications or other types of communications that are transmitted, in whole or in part, by the Internet... without disclosing his identity and with intent to annoy, abuse, threaten, or harass any person...who receives the communications...shall be fined under title 18 or imprisoned not more than two years, or both.

http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d109:h.r.03402:

Randy: Now what do I do with the 2 hours I spent daily leaving annoying anonymous blog comments across the blogosphere? Maybe I'll take up spamming. I heard that's legal :-)

cross-posted

Today, I stumbed across a very blatant blogiarism. The author is copying posts word-for-word without even a link-back. I've even found (with the help of a friend) comments where the victimized authors complained to him. The complaints went unanswered. The blog is hosted on blogspot and the 3-level domain is ambiraj. He also has a FeedBurner feed. I've forwarded emails to Google and FeedBurner to shut him down. Check it out if you want and don't forget to flag him while you are there. BTW, the best way to defeat blogiarism is to talk about it. If you find any others, then feel free to send me an email and I'll try to get them kicked out of the blogosphere.

cross-posted

Microsoft will release the update today on Thursday, January 5, 2006, earlier than planned.

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/advance.mspx

Randy: A security bulletin with instructions and downloads was create. I also copy/pasted the download links below.

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/ms06-001.mspx

• Microsoft Windows 2000 Service Pack 4 – Download the update
• Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 1 and Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2 – Download the update
• Microsoft Windows XP Professional x64 Edition – Download the update
• Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1 – Download the update
• Microsoft Windows Server 2003 for Itanium-based Systems and Microsoft Windows Server 2003 with SP1 for Itanium-based Systems – Download the update
• Microsoft Windows Server 2003 x64 Edition – Download the update

Randy: You can also just go to Windows Update and get the critical updates. Of course, my computers are set to auto-update, so I got the patches without even knowing. You can Review your update history and check if you've download KB912919 (a.k.a. the patch) in the last day.

http://update.microsoft.com/

Robin Arnfield: CIS Internet Services, a Clinton, Iowa-based Internet service provider, has been awarded $11.2 billion in a court judgment against a Florida man who sent millions of unsolicited pieces of commercial e-mail. Robert W. Kramer, III, the owner and operator of CIS Internet Services... [cut] Last year, another lawsuit by Kramer resulted in a judgment imposing a fine of $1 billion against three other spammers.

Graham Cluley: The size of the fine was determined on the basis of $10 per spam e-mail.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nf/20060105/tc_nf/40673

Randy: Finally some action on the legal front. This could be a severe dent in the email spam marketplace and serve as a big discouraging wall waiting for all existing and new spammers.

eWeek: Microsoft Corp. has slapped a 'buyer beware' tag on a third-party patch for the zero-day Windows Metafile flaw and promised that its own properly tested update will almost certainly ship Jan. 10. The company's latest guidance comes days after an unofficial hotfix from reverse-engineering guru Ilfak Guilfanov got rare blessings from experts at the SANS ISC (Internet Storm Center) and anti-virus vendor F-Secure Corp. Guilfanov, author of the IDA (Interactive Disassembler Pro), released an executable that revokes the "SETABORT" escape sequence that is the crux of the problem. The hotfix was tested and approved for use by many security experts, but Microsoft says it cannot vouch for the quality of the fix.

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1907562,00.asp

Randy: It's good to hear a fix is coming and I don't blame Microsoft for their buyer beware policy regarding 3rd party patches. There is one obvious patch. Download Firefox, install it and avoid Internet Explorer and Outlook.

Since the WMF vulnerability remains unpatched, I'm now using Firefox instead of Internet Explorer a lot more than before (Firefox is an Web Browser similar to Internet Explorer). Why?

Via F-Secure:

In our tests (under XP SP2) older versions of Firefox (1.0.4) defaulted to open WMF files with "Windows Picture and Fax Viewer", which is vulnerable. Newer versions (1.5) defaulted to open them with Windows Media Player, which is not vulnerable...but then again, Windows Media Player is not able to show WMF files at all so this might be a bug in Firefox. Opera 8.51 defaults to open WMF files with "Windows Picture and Fax Viewer" too. However, all versions of Firefox and Opera prompt the user first.

http://www.f-secure.com/weblog/archives/archive-122005.html

This is the level of protection that is necessary at the moment. If you don't have Firefox, then I suggest you download it now.

Mark Russinovich: The most innocuous of malware-like antimalwarebehaviors is to advertise with web site banners and popups that mislead average users into thinking that they have a malware problem. Most of the advertisements look like Windows error dialogs complete with Yes and No buttons, and although the word “advertisement” sometimes appears on the dialog background, the notice is usually small, faded and far from the area where users focus their attention. Even more unlike Windows dialogs, however, is the fact that clicking anywhere on the image, even the part that looks like a No button, results in the browser following the underlying link to the target page.

http://www.sysinternals.com/blog/2006/01/antispyware-consipiracy_03.html

Randy: Mark does a great job of explaining these malware advertisement which seem to be infesting all sorts of legitimate sites. If you find one of these, then clicking the close button in the top right of the window is your best bet.

F-Secure: Turns out this is not really a bug, it's just bad design. Design from another era.

http://www.f-secure.com/weblog/archives/archive-012006.html#00000761

Randy: You have to wonder how many more skeletons are in Microsoft's closet. It's beyond me why Microsoft doesn't have a full-time autiditing staff looking for this stuff and fixing it before it becomes a problem. It's not that hard. Remember Y2K?