Blog Flak

A couple of not so smart MySpace hackers have been arrested and charged with extortion and illegal computer access last Friday in Los Angeles, Ca. The pair were trying to extort $150,000 from the popular social blogging service by way of threatening to release an “unbreakable” code that could be used to track visitors and collect email addresses. The hackers, Shaun Harrison, 18, and Saverio Mondelli, 19, from Suffolk County, New York met with agents of the U.S. Secret Service and the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Bureau of Investigation where they were captured in a sting operation. They’re facing up to 4 years in the slammer if convicted, incredibly though, they’ve pleaded not guilty to the charges. Sounds like they were caught red-handed! Let’s see if they’re smart enough to hack their way out of a jail sentence.

Yahoo news…

Technorati tags: MySpace, hackers, stupid, extortion

I held out writing about this topic again until they had the full search feature up and running. It’s rather interesting to see what other’s have stored in their public notebook on the topic of your choosing, you can browse thru tons of notebooks with a simple search term. Of course, you can set any or all of your notes as private, making them unsearchable. What sets this apart from Yahoo’s notebook is that it’s an extension of your browser and goes everywhere you go. It can be opened instantly from the toolbar icon and you can copy and paste anything from any webpage with just a couple of clicks, you can even paste HTML code snippets to save for closer inspection later. Even images go along for the ride if you copy paste them into a notebook file. Yahoo’s notebook on the other hand is attached directly to your Yahoo webmail account and must be used from that location only.

This is a truly handy innovation that so far I’ve enjoyed using but some people are decrying it as just one more method to track what users do on the web. I’m sure that people will come up with ways to count the most popular items in everyone’s notebooks, from popular pages, to favorite books, etc. If you can search it, so can everyone else, and most especially Google!

To get yours:
Google Notebook for IE

Google Notebook for Firefox

Technorati tags: Google Notebook, Yahoo Notebook, search, Web 2.0, Google

Finally some good news! Sometimes I like to think back to the good old days when the worst thing you got in your inbox was tons of spam with an occasional virus. Nowadays you have to worry about people trying to steal your personal information with phishing attempt emails coming from all directions almost every single day. If it’s not your bank account it’s your Paypal account or credit card data or social security number. And they just keep coming and coming and coming.

At least one guy got a taste of his own medicine though, the Microsoft Internet Safety Enforcement Team uncovered a scheme by Jayson Harris, age 23, of Davenport, Iowa and got a location on him which they promptly turned over to the FBI. He faced charges on two counts, with maximum sentences of 10 years and 20 years. Unfortunately the court only gave him 21 months for his crimes, although he is ordered to pay restitution of $57,000. I say hanging is too good for him and 21 months just isn’t enough!

“Today marks a new milestone in Microsoft’s global phishing enforcement initiative,” says Aaron Kornblum, Microsoft’s Internet Safety Enforcement Attorney. Microsoft’s hope, he explains, is that this case will serve as a deterent. In furtherance of that effort, Microsoft has filed 125 civil lawsuits against phishers to date, and secured takedowns of more than 2,000 phishing web sites targeting Microsoft, MSN and Hotmail users since January 2004. “It’s about taking the fight to the phishers,” Kornblum adds.

You gotta like hearing that!

Source: MSN Phisher Sentenced to 21 Months

Technorati tags: phishing, MSN, data theft, thief, crook, scam

The Tech Crunch has an article up about a new service that Google will be rolling out next week, called Google Notebook. It will be in direct competition with Yahoo owned Del.icio.us link tagging, a service that I like to use here at Blog Flak. I’ve also started using BlinkList for tagging my posts and tutorials as well. Blink List has a rating system that allows you to rank the tag according to it’s importance to you, the user, a feature that I like very much.

It sounds interesting, especially if it includes integration with Google search engine results, making it easier to tag items directly from your web searches. I’m sure I’ll be checking it out as soon as I can and of course I’ll do a write up on it!

Technorati tags: tagging, linking, del.icio.us, blinklist, bookmarking, blogging, google, google notebook, web search,

I’ve written up a review on the Blogsome free blogging services. This is a very good service that’s loaded with features and it runs on Wordpress! How cool is that? Here’s a short excerpt from the review itself:

“I have to say that I’m very much impressed with what they’ve done over at Blogsome with their version of the Wordpress platform. It’s a quick and easy sign up and you get your choice of about 30 different themes to change the look and feel of your blog.”

Read more…

You can also find it in the sidebar link listing, Blog Site Reviews

Technorati tags: blogsome, wordpress, blogging, themes, skins, reviews

The new management over at BE has put up a survey that they are asking their members to take so they can get to know you guys better. Check out the official BE Blog for more info on this if you want to add your voice to the crowd. They promise to read every single response to help them build a bigger and better Blog Explosion!

Technorati tags: BE, blog explosion, blogging, blog surfing, traffic exchange

Problogger has an excellent article up titled “The Cost of Comment Spam” that is a must read for anyone who’s blog is deluged with the scourge of comment spammers. We all know what a pain in the arse it is to deal with but giving up and giving in is not the answer, even if you’re feeling overwhelmed and tired of dealing with it. Taking an aggressive stance to delete, remove and prevent spamming on your blog is highly advisable to keep spammers from destroying your hard work, reputation and your search engine positioning.

Did you know that it’s possible for spammers to fill your database up with spam on future posts? Wordpress seems to be particularly vulnerable to this type of attack and the first sign is that spam comments show up immediately everytime you put up a new post. The reason why this is possible is because of the way posts are numbered and they can load your database up with comments on posts that you have yet to write, invisible until you login to your MySql database on your server and delete them. There’s some great stuff at Wordpress on “Combating Comment Spam” that you should read up on to help you get a handle on this nasty problem.

Technorati Tags : spam, blogs, blogging, comments, seo, search, engines, wordpress