In order to keep AdWords users more informed about click fraud and other forms of invalid clicks, Google has now made invalid click data available in their AdWords reports.

https://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=44008
http://adwords.blogspot.com/2006/07/estimating-invalid-clicks.html

A friend of mine discussed a couple weeks ago with me how he tried to make a fortune off of AdSense via clickfraud. He coded a botnet that would click on AdSense ads on his site. He built up $40,000 in 24 hours and his account was quickly terminated by Google. I had two thoughts going thru my head.

First, obviously this guy needs ethical guidance. This is stealing. There's no black and white here. It's fraud. You can go to jail for clickfraud, although I hardly doubt Google would go after many clickfraudsters, but surely Google is pressing charges against the big fish. Regardless of whether Google presses charges, I couldn't believe this friend of mine was intent on making riches unethically. Greed. I guess I'll never respect him again.

Second, this guy lacks intelligence in the extreme. Did this guy really think Google wasn't capable of detecting his clickfraud? Make $10+k per day from a Website with an Alexa ranking in the millions? Awesome stupidity! Not only do I doubt this guys ethics, but I also doubt his intelligence. He's now banned for life and he has a semi-popular blog that he could be monetizing. Idiot! 

The worst kind of captchas is a broken one. A few days ago, I tried posting on Matt Cutts' blog and I couldn't figure out the captcha for the life of me. I got some friends to throw some more eyeballs on the captcha and we simply couldn't figure it out. This is why I hate captchas; it's just another opportunity for a bug to scare off your readers.

AP: Microsoft Corp. has filed 26 lawsuits accusing U.S. companies of selling pirated software, the latest move in its ramped-up efforts to boost sales by cracking down on illegal copies.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/13908118/

Randy: I'm sure most of the blogosphere will point at this article and call Microsoft evil. But I'm a software developer and piracy means software is devalued. If software is devalued, software developers are devalued, that is, I make less money. Go get'em Micro$oft.

A pleasant surprise this morning. Last night before leaving work, I started downloading and extracting the OPML archive of Dave's ScriptingNews blog. I left before the extraction was complete. This morning, I found a virus alert pointing to one of Dave's OPML files. The truth revealed, turns out Dave Winer is spreading viruses using OPML packages.

Yes, this is a joke! This is a false positive on the behalf of our friends at McAfee. In fact, by simply navigating IE to ScriptingNews archive from 2003/12/12, I get the same reported error. Anybody know why?

The amount of quality social networking spam that I'm starting to receive is becoming an issue. In fact, the other day, I actually fell for one such ploy and responded to the email. Stupid me. Another such case is 88slide which is sending everyone messages via YouTube in order to acquire new viewers. A big problem is that the social networks, YouTube in this case, don't have facilities to stop this spam. I've tried specifically blocking 88slide, but this feature doesn't actually work in YouTube. And even if I block them, I'm sure they are still successfully spamming YouTube users for new viewers.

http://www.88slide.com/

Mark Cuban:  The generic response [to click-fraud] seems to be that its “self correcting”. The logic goes that if advertisers using CPC services arent getting the return on investment they expected or need, they will bid lower for the clicks to reflect the reduced success rate.  Sounds right. Except its wrong.

http://www.blogmaverick.com/entry/1234000470073786/

Randy: Read all of Mark's blog entry.  Basically he's saying that clickfraud is not self-correcting because not everybody is tracking their ROI. This is entirely true. Many people don't track their ROI, lose money on AdWords and then blame Google for the clickfraud. It's like when you buy an big fat ass SUV, forget to look at the mileage chart and blame the oil companies. There are plenty of stupid people. So, in a way, Mark is correct. But, for intelligent people who track their ROI, clickfraud is irrelevant.

Dawn Kawamoto: Microsoft has been named in a second lawsuit over its antipiracy Windows Genuine Advantage program, which plaintiffs allege acts as "spyware" on their systems.

http://news.com.com/Microsoft+faces+second+WGA+lawsuit/2100-1014_3-6090651.html

Randy: Certainly it is spyware. It's spying for pirated copies of Windows.

The two researchers used an open-source 802.11 hacking tool called LORCON (Loss of Radio Connectivity) to throw an extremely large number of wireless packets at different wireless cards. Hackers use this technique, called fuzzing, to see if they can cause programs to fail, or perhaps even run unauthorized software when they are bombarded with unexpected data. Using tools like LORCON, Maynor and Ellch were able to discover many examples of wireless device driver flaws, including one that allowed them to take over a laptop by exploiting a bug in an 802.11 wireless driver.

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/07/wifi_driver_att.html

Did you think WiFi was safe? Not anymore.

I'm currently experiencing a massive denial of service attack. The attack is very similar to comment spam, except that I've already specifically blocked this type of comment spam. Yet, the spammer is persisting and virulently, which has been causing performance problems all day long. The attack is distributed, so I've got little protection possibilities unless I start denying all comment requests. If you have problems reading this blog, then you know why. I can only suspect that it was created by one of the recent spammers that I've exposed.