Phishing is a major problem on MySpace because of the ability to style pages with CSS. Spammers set up account pages disguised to look like the standard MySpace login page and then capture login info for users. Shortly after they capture your info, a bunch of spam bulletins get posted under your name and all your friends realize you’re not very smart. It doesn’t seem to be happening as much now, probably because users are looking out for it, but it still happens. Sometimes to people that should reallllly know better.

Yesterday Tom Anderson got phished. Tom’s the co-founder of MySpace and is the default friend for new sign ups. With 148 million friends, posting a bulletin on Tom’s account can generate a LOT of traffic. While the bulletin was still live (it was deleted pretty quickly) I couldn’t get to the attacker’s website. I got to it later on and it’s disguised to look like a MySpace sign-in page. I’m guessing they got info on a lot of user accounts. The page has now been deleted and I can’t find much anywhere on the site. It’s hosted out of Singapore and registered to Marc Olano. For his sake I hope his site was hacked. Most likely that’s the case, that is how these people operate. If you want to check out the empty apache listing, be my guest: http://www.marcolano.com/login/.

Note: Though the link in the screenshot appears to be a link to a MySpace profile (which doesn’t actually exist), it’s HTML and actually links to the aforementioned website. The funny part was whoever was smart enough to be able to post a bulletin on the most popular MySpace profile was not smart enough to actually make it look legit, KTHX!

It’s no secret that I’m a fan of package tracking. Even Google knows. My post about USPS and their terrible “tracking” service hit a chord and attracted a bunch of other haters.

What I’ve wanted lately is a reverse tracking service of sort. View all of the incoming packages from a given carrier coming to me (based on the address the carrier has on record for me). This is more complicated than the simple tracking options today because there would need to be address authentication, but it would be such a time saver. You could subscribe to one feed and see everything that’s coming. Right now I have like 4-5 different packages somewhere in the queue and it’s a pain to find the number and track any of them individually.

Bloglines has been down all morning. According to their site it’s a multiple database outage which sounds bad. I thought the painless transition to the new data center was too good to be true.

Technorati tags: bloglines rss

I bought a PC with Windows on it today… Yes, you read that right. It’s to test out websites and such, so I haven’t converted. I was able to configure Synergy well enough that I can use my white Apple keyboard and regular Logitech mouse which makes things pretty easy.

Both my laptop and (new) desktop connect into my flat panel since it has both DVI and VGA. With the flick of a wrist to switch Synergy and a touch of a button on the screen I can switch platforms. Very cool and no need to buy a KVM.

As for the machine itself, it’s nothing special. Good deal for the money though.

Plus, now I’ll be able to try out that Google IM client :P.

I finally got the 24″ Dell display that I ordered last month and it was well worth the wait. This thing is hot. My PowerBook is able to power both its 15″ display and the new one, leaving me with an amazing 39″ of pixely goodness.

Why I chose to go Dell over Apple:

• Cheaper, but both Dell and Apple use similar screens since they both just repackage OEM equipment.
• Dell offers a three year warranty versus just one year from Apple.
• The Dell screen has so many inputs its silly, I’ll be able to hook a Windows box up to it for testing purposes (there is a button on the front to switch inputs).

I haven’t figured out how to get the memory ports on the side to work (Compact Flash, SD, etc). That may be a Windows-only feature. Other than that, it’s perfect.

It looks like Bloglines has started pulling this site’s RSS feed again. For some reason it wasn’t updating.

Bloglines has been my default RSS reader since September 2004.

According to Wired, BitTorrent will launch a commercial search engine in two weeks. This will be huge. First off, Bram Cohen (founder of BitTorrent) is a smart guy and surely has a slick search engine ready to go. But the real interesting part will be if he’s got smart lawyers also ready to go when Hollywood and the RIAA get a look at the search engine. Both have shown a zeal for attacking the weak (that’s why Google doesn’t get sued for being able to search Torrents).

I was hoping that Bram would first launch some sort of anonymity controls built into BitTorrent, but I’m sure that will come at some point.

Until big media catches on to the fact that consumers want to download content on demand, protocols like BitTorrent will flourish with "illegal" activity. The only media torrents I download are TV shows, material that has recently flown freely into my home. It’s equivalent to TiVo, but without the service fees. The old paradigm that networks set when viewers watch programs is so out dated its not even funny. I would happily pay a small fee ($1-2 maybe) in exchange for a broadcast quality program. If they stuck in ads, there wouldn’t need to be a fee and the networks would get extremely valuable data about their viewers.

Tomorrow Verizon will finish installing a 15 megabit fiber optic internet connection into the house, that’s a big enough pipe to do some damage with BitTorrent.

I’ve started using del.icio.us again (I have before, but it’s been a while and the service has improved). Links from each day will be automagically dumped to this page. Don’t be scared.

I have been really good with backing up my data lately… I would say that I’m on my longest streak of being all the way protected that I have ever had. My webserver automagically pushes compressed backups to another server from another host in a whole other part of the country. All data on my laptop is most-nightly put onto a FireWire drive via Data Backup. This drive is normally kept in a fire proof locked box, but I’ve had some recent trouble with said box (namely the lock breaking).

Why does it feel like such a chore doing regular backups? Having a current backup after a disaster is the most comforting feeling possible. Even with paying for another server and buying a tiny FireWire drive, keeping current backups is a cheap insurance policy. The downtime I would have from losing either my server or laptop would be enormous.

It looks like Amazon is testing a new design–I see it from only FireFox, likely there is a cookie set for the new design. The big deal with the design is that is pretty much does away with tabs (see screenshots below). I think it works well because there were just too many tabs before. Amazon popularized the use of tabs which makes this change ironic.

Amazon’s A9 websearch is also shown right at the top.

Between screen caps 1 and 2 all I did was move my mouse to the second tab, "See all 31 product categories." I did not click–it’s on the mouse over state.