As the web 2.0 hype continues to become ever more href="http://scobleizer.wordpress.com/2006/09/03/getting-outside-the-frothy-
bubble/">frothy, it becomes more and more obvious that abusing the
inherent ’social goodness’ is not really that difficult.

To take a step back, the big trust in social sites is that most users are
good, and the few that are bad, the good users can easily police them. Not
exactly the same, but even href="http://xooglers.blogspot.com/2005/12/just-do-it.html">Larry Page from
Google believed that most users are good. href="http://www.ibegin.com/philosophy/">iBegin’s philosophy (point #2)
clearly spells out that users are trusted to deal with the minority that
are spammers. And (getting to the point now), href="http://www.digg.com/">Digg operates under the premise that if a
story is spam/inaccurate/etc, users will mark it before it gets promoted.
And if it does get promoted and people report it, a little text message
will be added notifying users that the article may very well be wrong.

Now, the abuse of the beforementioned power has come to rear twice on Digg.

The first one was about the href="http://neothoughts.com/2006/08/20/introduction-to-socially-driven-poli
tical-news/">abuses in the political section. Nothing makes people
angry like politics do. So instead of forming mobs and torching heathens,
it was decided to bury all opposing views. Left wingers buried the right
wingers. Right wingers buried the left wingers. Both ganged up on the
libertarian and green party stories. Who had marked what lame? Were they
organized? No way of knowing.

The second incident is the one still being felt today – href="http://digg.com/tech_news/Top_100_Digg_Users_Control_56_of_Digg_s_Home
Page_Content">accusations that the Digg ‘elite’ effectively controlled the
site, followed by href="http://diggtheblog.blogspot.com/2006/09/digg-friends.html">Kevin’s
promise of change (but lets not forget his href="http://diggtheblog.blogspot.com/2006_04_01_diggtheblog_archive.html">e
arlier promise of making the burial process more transparent – still
waiting on that), and finally peaking with the href="http://digg.com/tech_news/Digg_s_Top_User_Says_Goodbye">top user on
Digg saying goodbye.

Digg is interesting because it is the largest of the ‘ranked’ users. Sites
like MySpace and Delicious are also very large (or larger) but do not have
the same problem – they do not rely on users to report ’spam’ (at least in
the same way). But a lot of the new-fangled ‘web 2.0′ sites do rely on
their users. And unfortunately, most of these sites trust the user
implicitly.

So where is this article headed?

Lets take a look at P9 (the top Digg user). While I unfortunately do not
have a link handy on me, once he was accused as ‘gaming’ the system, what
had happened to political stories happened to him. Instead of removing
stories that were at ideological ends with their beliefs, people simply
reported anything P9 submitted. It did not matter what the content of that
article was – as long as P9 was the submitter, it was marked off as
lame/inaccurate/etc, and the article ceased to exist. It got bad enough
that both href="http://diggtheblog.blogspot.com/2006/09/more-on-digg-friends.html">Kev
in and href="http://hemphill81.blogspot.com/2006/09/digg-ceo-jay-adelson-defends-di
gg.html">Jay (the two leaders at Digg) were forced to respond, asking
people not to do that (a tacit admission that they were unable to stop it).

So while P9 announced a public resignation, he was basically killed off by
his fellow diggers. He had an inverted Midas touch – anything he
dugg/submitted was instantly bombed with spam reports, and the story
dissolved and ceased to exist. Irony at its best – people who had accused
him of gaming the system were doing the exact same thing.

So this was ugly, but an isolated issue … right? But lets use our
imagination. Lets say Person X doesn’t like Digg. It may be because he has
a site like Digg (and no, I don’t mean href="http://www.calacanis.com/">Jason Calacanis). He may simply not
like Kevin. Or he may be demented, like href="http://seoblackhat.com/2006/09/08/sexbaiting/">Jason Fortuny. So
he thinks to himself – how can I mess up Digg? Pretty easy. Get 100
different IPs (not that hard, even if all 100 have different C classes).
Register them on Digg. Have them randomly digg 5 stories a day. Then scrape
the top 100 users on Digg, and add them randomly across the 100 fake users.
Simmer for a week or 3, and then *bam* – start reporting any story dugg by
the top 100 users as inaccurate.

KA-BOOM

Thats the sound of havoc. Instantly the biggest Digg addicts are neutered.
What was a reward in fame and recognition is now an exercise in
frustration. Anything they touch becomes tainted and useless. Repeat ad
nauseum for as many weeks and as many users as you want. After all, RSS
feeds make it easy :)

Now before I get accused of wanting to wreck Digg (why would I? They send
us great traffic), Digg is simply the easiest example. Imagine other web
2.0 sites once they reach enough users. Shopping sites? Would it be
surprising if suddenly the iPod gets knocked off as favorite MP3 player
only to be replaced with a Zen? Or a tourist site – whoops, forget about
the Empire State Building, check out the snazzy Chrysler Building (these
are of course only hypothetical situations).

This is a major issue that web 2.0 sites need to plan and look into.
Trusting users is a good thing. But implicitly trusting users is no good.
If Digg has moderators that approve a story before it goes live on the
front page, shouldn’t they have moderators checking spam reports? Social
sites give so much power and emphasis on users yet a handful still have the
power to wreck these sites. Until these issues are properly addressed,
social sites will continue to be gamed.

And yet while these massive valuations and VC investment numbers fly around, it seems like finding decent programmers is still a challenge.

I remember reading a gripe about this on the last page of Business 2.0 before, but it made sort of sense. It was extended to large corporations such as UPS and FedEx, so stuck in their corporate ways and accounting mannerisms that the obviousness of this would be lost on them. But the latest wizz-bang 2.0 sites? You should know better.

People are different. Color and colour, while spelled different, are the same. So when you ask for my bloody phone number, don’t just ask for it, have me input it, and then reject it because I didn’t put it in a certain format. Beyond the idiocy that such a site does not even warn me what format it should be in, the 5 minutes of usability/programming required to be able to extract the digits from a string are worth it.

It’s stunning how many sites suffer from this. You are already sanitizing all user input (or should be), extending that to sanitize unwanted characters from phone numbers, postal codes, and so forth is rather trivial.

What spurred me to write this was a job search site I ran across. It actually rejected the postal code with spaces, and demanded you re-enter it without spaces.

The first statistic that I wanted to take a gander at would be browser usage. For October 2005 FireFox had a 25% usage, as did it for June 2006. While it did ebb a bit (dropping as low as 23%), it seems to be relatively stable. Interesting is that IE6 seems to have lost 2%, Safari is stable at 4%, and that IE5 and Opera have been replaced as fringe browsers by IE7. NOTE: the browser #s are for each version. Opera 6, 7, 8, 9 are all tabulated separately, and thus why it does not appear on the list.

Search engine wise it seems like Google dominates by a mile. While in October AOL generated at least 1% of search engine traffic, last month it could not even muster that much. As AOL is powered by Google results, and Google’s share (of 83%) remained stable, AOL’s ability to generate traffic has definitely gone down. While MSN is stuck at 2%, Yahoo did gain a percentage point (at AOL’s expense).

Google also apparently dominated, which was to be expected.

I’d like to write the first entry in what may turn into a series, however I haven’t decided yet. My first victim is going to be GoDaddy. I’ve never liked GoDaddy. They suck…..hard. Anybody who uses them knows that there administration system is crappy, and the signup process for a domain name is ridiculous because of the amount of advertising that is done along the way. They do nothing but sell sell sell all the way during your purchase. It’s ridiculous. I decided to document the whole GoDaddy experience a little better so people can see what it’s like.

#1. HomePage

What a beautiful homepage(not!). Definitely built for the first time visitor to the site to show off all their wonderful features(because you won’t find about them at all through a domain purchase). It’s loaded with tons of blurbs about their various services and such. Let’s login to an account so we can see the wonderful new interface they present to their regular users.

#2. After Login

Wait a minute….I thought I logged in. Oh that’s right, I did. What do you know, I’m still bombarded with useless advertisements. The page is pretty much the exact same as before. No sight of anything remotely useful to someone who needs to modify their existing domain name information. Anyway, I came to register a domain, so that’s what I’m going to do. Let’s run a little search and see what we come up with.

#3. After Search

Good news for me, MYREGISTRARSUCKS.com is available, just what I wanted to hear. I can get the .net, .org and several other variations with just the click of a button. And oh goody, .info and .us are on sale! And just in case that wasn’t the domain I wanted, they came up with about 1,000 other variations of the domain name. Let’s buy this puppy, it should only take a couple of seconds.

#4. After Continue from Search

Wow, what a great offer they on this page, they will offer me the .biz, the .net, and the .info all for only an additional $16.00. That would save me 41%! There is nothing to this page other than to offer me this great deal. I think I’ll pass.

#5. After Continue from Crappy Sales Page

What a joy, options for me to choose from! What do you know, registration length is automatically set to 2 years, I get to change that to one. Also set to automatically renew and automatically bill me each year, set that to manual. It is set to standard registration instead of deluxe, so I don’t have to change anything there. Although, they care about me, so they want me to know that the standard registration leaves my information available to the public through a WHOIS search. This “exposes you to an untold number of potential problems – and yes, it can happen to YOU”. I’m glad they warned me, because I wanted to pay and extra $8.95 so no one could get my information and they could make an extra $8.94 in profit. On to the checkout preferences…..Automatically selected is the option to “Show me exclusive offers that will help me get the most from my domain. Gotta click over to the “Quick Checkout” option, then we can wrap this thing up in a page or 2, right? All that should be left is for me to enter the credit card info.

#6. Trying to Checkout

Another special limited time offer. I’m sure this special offer will be going away any day now because it’s so special. I can keep my personal information private for only $4.99 a year instead of the normal $8.99. I feel honored and blessed to have this option given to me, but once again, I’ll pass. Nothing to this page other than the special limited time offer. So let’s continue to the checkout….

#7. Still Trying to Checkout

Wonderful, I get to review my order. Let’s see, 1 year(I can change it to 2 or more very easily if I was mistaken). I can change it to private for only an extra $4.99 a year in case I changed my mind from the first 5 times they offered it to me. $8.95 for the domain, plus and extra $.25 for the ICANN fee. It would’ve taken out of their profit to just roll this into the domain name cost apparently. A nice fee of $9.20 for 1 year of domain registration. So let’s finally checkout now!

#8. Finally Entering Information

Hooray! A screen that’s actually useful to me. I can enter my personal and billing information with not a sales pitch in site(other than the standard ads on top). Let’s enter that info and get it done with.

#9. Security Check

Thank you, Bob Parsons for putting a security checkpoint here. “The access code you see an additional security process GoDaddy.com has developed to protect you” Thank goodness, I wouldn’t want a bot to come in and purchase a domain name, then I just wouldn’t feel safe shopping for domain names here anymore. Thank you again Bob Parsons for leaving this personal note here letting me know how much you care about me personally. I feel safe, I feel secure.

#10. And I’m Spent

We’re done, finally! It only took going through 10 pages and about 50 different pitches to get the domain name I wanted. I do need to hurry though, because the “clock is ticking” and they’ve got tons(in fact, a whole pageful) of special prices that expire in just 30 minutes. I better jump on these before they expire

Alternatives

The only registrar I use is NameCheap(this is not an affiliate link, I benefit in no way by you using them). Their administration system is simple and it doesn’t bombard you while trying to make a simple purchase. If anybody has any further suggestions, I’d love to hear them and I’m sure everyone else would too.

To sum it up, I Jacob Gower, think GoDaddy is a terrible registrar. They suck, hard. I highly do not recommend them. If you want to spread the word on this, link to this article with “GoDaddy” as the link text. That should get this page bumped up in Google when people search for their name. If you’d like to read more on GoDaddy’s terrible suckage, I’ve made a small list of the many articles out there:

• GoDaddy Sucks #1
• GoDaddy Sucks #2
• GoDaddy Sucks #3
• GoDaddy Sucks #4
• GoDaddy Sucks #5

Do you ever get bored while doing your business in the bathroom? Well, be bored no longer. There now is a stereo dock with speakers for the iPod that also doubles as a tissue holder. Enter the bathroom, place your iPod on the dock, and waste away hours upon hours listening to music and just having plain ol’ good fashioned fun.

via: bLavish

So while I was on the site today, I noticed two frontpage diggs for A List Apart. Also a wonderful site, it piqued my interest how both were submitted by
Spit1ire. So I did some digging of mine own (pun intended).

So opening the two pages in separate tabs, I scrolled down to the bottom. The first story looked like this:

The second story looked like this:

Lo and behold, the first sixteen diggs for each story were identical! If we remove bribera from one of them, the first nineteen diggs were identical for both stories. In fact, of the first 24 diggs, only 2 users varied for both stories. Hey, even Digg-founder Kevin Rose is seen there.

The one blog entry for each post was by the same person also, but we can chalk
that up to coincidence.

Interpret as you want.

Please link to us if you like our site to help spread the word. Thanks!

• Researchers Recover Typed Text
• Careful or they’ll hear
• Each Tap Divulges Secret
• Keyboard Click Now Security Threat

In addition to having your password heard, I also ran across an article from PCWorld from a couple of years ago that discusses security vulnerabilities using a wireless keyboard. From that March edition in 2003, Andrew Brandt states “Input devices that share a radio frequency can also share keystroke information across surprisingly long distances.” Anyway, who would’ve thought that there were a couple of ways like this to have your password picked up by simply typing.

Xbox 360 will cost £279.99 or EUR 399.99 in Europe, Microsoft has just told an audience at the Games Convention event in Leipzig. That is the main package, including 20GB hard disk, wireless controller, headset, Ethernet cable, high-definition television cable and wireless television-style remote control. The US price is $399.99.

A second package, called the Xbox 360 Core System, will be released at the same time, consisting of the bare bones console and a wired controller, for £209.99 or EUR 299.99. The US price for that is $299.99.

I’ll probably be going with the main package myself. I’d personally want to buy all that stuff it comes with anyway. Only a few more months!

Here is one article though that actually turned out to be fairly interesting. It goes over several fairly recent plots to get rich quick. It comes from the site the Crime Library which is actually a fairly interesting site to browse in and of itself. Anyway, go on over and check it out if this kind of stuff interests you.

In case you’re not quite sure what Ajax is, read this

.

The FinePix S9000 is an SLR model with a tilting LCD screen on the back. It comes with a 10.7x zoom lens. If the camera were a 35-millimeter film model, that would be the equivalent of a 28 mm to 300 mm zoom. It shoot photos in the RAW file format, and captures video at 30 frames per second in VGA resolution. The camera has two slots for xD-Picture memory cards. The other camera, the FinePix E900, is a more compact point-and-shoot model. It has a 4x zoom lens, and extra lenses can be added. It too can shoot photos in RAW format.

EA plans to develop The Lord of The Rings, The Battle for Middle-Earth II, a sequel to the company’s popular PC-based real-time strategy game. Also in the works is The Lord of the Rings Tactics for the PSP, a role-playing game designed for the Sony PlayStation Portable. The Battle for Middle-Earth II will enable players to battle armies of elves and dwarves, while Tactics for the PSP will let players lead either the fellowship of the ring or the evil forces of Mordor. Players can guard their favorite heroes, seize the high ground, and set ambushes for hobbits, wizards, and other annoyances.

Now that the movies are through being made(except for The Hobbit), it’s nice to have some games continuing to be made. EA usually does a good job, we can only hope that they’ll continue to release quality games.

Arfa Karim of Multan has officially become the youngest MCP in Pakistan, and one of the youngest in the world. Karim, now 10, met with Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates last week–an experience she later described as second only to visiting Disneyland. To attain the credential–at any age–a person has to display technical proficiency in areas such as .Net, Visual Studio 6.0 and Windows Server 2003.

Being proficient at the age of 9 just means you are a certifiable genius. I doubt I could pass those exams at the ripe old age of 23.

Date: Fri, 14 July 1995 12:29:49 +0200
Reference: Endings for Layer3: mp3
Hello,_according to the overwhelming opinion of all asking: the ending for ISO MPEG audio Layer 3 is mp3.
i.e. we should for coming www sides, Shareware,_Demos, etc. on it respect that no more bit endings rausgehen.
It has a reason, believes me : -)
Juergen Zeller

Happy Birthday!

Microsoft Corp. said on Thursday it won exclusive rights to develop and publish multiplayer online games starring Marvel Enterprises Inc.’s super heroes, including Spider-man, the X-men and the Hulk.

The deal covers massively multiplayer online (MMO) game titles developed for Microsoft’s upcoming Xbox 360 gaming console and published by the software giant’s game studio.

The deals Microsoft are racking up for the Xbox 360 are just getting more and more impressive as the weeks go by. It looks like they are becoming more and more of a threat to Sony.

Nintendo has recently revealed that they will be producing a special wireless router to allow users to connect to the Nintendo WiFi Network. The device will allow for gamers who currently do not have a wireless router to use the product in a standard USB slot.

They’ll need more good news like this to make up for the fact that they aren’t going to be releasing the old NES games for free any more.

Motorola is set to reveal the first product from its partnership with Apple next month with the launch of its iTunes mobile phone at the U.K. V Festival of music. Apple hopes the move will extend its lead in the digital music market. The phone will allow users to take the music stored in their personal computer files and download it onto the Motorola mobile phone using iTunes software.

The phenomenal PowerShot A95 lets you take your digital photography where it’s never gone before. The sophisticated 5.0 Megapixel CCD, gives you the awe-inspiring resolution to create larger prints and brilliant on-screen images with extraordinary detail. Its powerful array of advanced shooting and convenience features makes everything easy. While its gleaming high-end design has a standard of style and elegance that stands out.

• Review #1
• Review #2
• Review #3
• Review #4
• Review #5
• Review #6

Apple Computer Chief Executive Steve Jobs has a reputation for thinking different. But now he might be planning a move for Apple that will leave even his biggest fans surprised–becoming a phone company. It might sound far-fetched, but the pieces are in place for it to happen later this summer.

This rumor just might scpring from the fact that they have been in the works on an iPod cell phone.

The controversy surrounds a download available on the net which is said to unlock secret sex scenes.

Game makers Rockstar said they were complying with the inquiry, by the industry body that sets age ratings.

If the findings were to lead to an adult-only age rating, it could limit sales from major retail outlets.

Surely this is a rumor. I doubt that a major game maker like Rockstar would be stupid enough to include something adult rated like this in their game. This would severely limit the amount of people that GTA could actually be distributed to.

In case you never have heard of the Hitchhiker’s Guide, it was a book written by Douglas Adams quite a long time ago. It could possibly be one of the best Sci-Fi/Humor books ever written. I can say from personal experience that this is a unique story that any true geek will love.

It looks like it’s going to be a heck of a movie, so be sure and check it out when it’s released on April 29th of this year. After all, I’m sure the movie will be “mostly harmless”. I apologize in advance for the cheesy humor of that last line.

From what we understand, Bungie is hard at work on, not so surprisingly, Halo 3, which will be ready day and date with the launch of PlayStation 3……… The release of Halo 3 at the precise launch of PS3 is a pure, military tactical move, similar to the PS2’s greatest lineup ever launching simultaneously with the launch of the Xbox and GameCube.

And that folks, is the reason, that monopolies are no good. There’s nothing like some good competition between companies to get them on the ball creating your favorite products a little quicker, and a little better. It’s sort of ironic that a product for Microsoft’s Xbox helps to show why monopolies are bad.

If you haven’t seen the DVDs, I recommend you borrow them, rent them, or buy them. You’ll immediately be immersed for the next 20 or so hours. In case you don’t remember Macgyver, he can do anything, and I mean ANYTHING with a stick of bubble gum(including the foil wrapper), a credit card, matches, and some duct tape. He can build airplanes, bombs, and stop sulfuric acid leaks in their tracks with a simple Hershey’s chocolate bar. Check him out, if you don’t, you’re missing out.