These are the kinds of things dreams are made of, a 14 year old hacker on Call of Duty was just recruited by Microsoft. You heard me right, Microsoft.

This is exactly what Sony should have done with George Hotz – given him a job as a security specialist, instead of suing him in court and getting its PlayStation Network and other Sony websites hacked day in and out.

Microsoft is reported to be working with the 14-year-old Irish hacker who managed to stir up a little trouble with his Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 phishing scam alert. According to the managing director of Microsoft of Ireland, the company is helping the hacker “develop his talent for legitimate purposes.”

Congrats to that young hacker, whose name was not disclosed. While the new prospect for the Dublin kid is not meant to be an example for other hackers to follow, companies do have to realize that there are many talented people among hackers.

Why make an enemy when you can have them on your side?

During a speech on Wednesday, Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt said that proposals from both the U.S. and British governments to block access to file-sharing websites would threaten freedom of speech. Google, he said, is opposed to such measures and will fight them, presumably in court, if necessary.

There can be little doubt that when it comes to hot tools for dealing with sites allegedly infringing the copyrights of the music and movie industries, site blocking and web filtering is absolutely in fashion this year.

The United States (with its PROTECT IP bill) and the United Kingdom (with its Digital Economy Act), are both preparing what they believe could be their best chance at a silver bullet approach to piracy – the complete blocking of ‘infringing’ domains.
Yesterday though, they discovered that apart from the usual legislative stumbling blocks, an Internet giant intends to hinder their progress.

Google is set to come out in opposition of cumbersome DNS-style blocking, perhaps giving a boost to embattled sites like The Pirate Bay and Newzbin2. These sites are at the very top of the domain-blocking wishlists of both the U.S. and UK, but neither of them are in ideal positions to mount legal challenges of their own.

Speaking after this keynote speech at Google’s Big Tent conference in London, The Guardian reports Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt as voicing clear opposition to web censorship.

“If there is a law that requires DNSs [domain name systems, the protocol that allows users to connect to websites] to do X and it’s passed by both houses of congress and signed by the president of the United States and we disagree with it then we would still fight it,” Schmidt said.

“If it’s a request the answer is we wouldn’t do it, if it’s a discussion we wouldn’t do it,” he added.

Schimdt went on to compare the notion of website blocking with methods used by the Chinese to censor the Internet, cautioning that when those further east see that the west aren’t opposed to censorship when it comes to achieving their particular aims, it might only encourage further crackdowns.

“I would be very, very careful if I were a government about arbitrarily [implementing] simple solutions to complex problems,” Schmidt said. “So, ‘let’s whack off the DNS’. Okay, that seems like an appealing solution but it sets a very bad precedent because now another country will say ‘I don’t like free speech so I’ll whack off all those DNSs’ – that country would be China.”

Google has a very much push-pull relationship with the content industries when it comes to infringement and potential ways of stopping it.

On the one hand Google has been helping to stop its Adsense platform being utilized by ‘pirate’ sites and has helped to partially filter some of its search features to remove ‘infringing’ suggestions. On the other it has been both help and hindrance to Hollywood by getting involved in their ongoing dispute with BitTorrent indexer isoHunt.

Yet when Google, a massively powerful organization which seems to be able to make most things turn to gold on the web, tried to reach licensing agreements with the music labels for its music locker service, it came away frustrated.

The message here is that Google is not on the side of the entertainment industries, nor on the side of the pirates. Like all companies with that all-important bottom line, it will do whatever suits its best interests. Time will tell what they are.

It was announced unofficially though staff working on the project that they were working on auto generated content but it wasn’t in that major update but was due soon. Well that update is now live and a lot of sites have being affected.

Basically what loads of sites used to do was save the keywords that people searched for on their site. You could click on them and it would show a page usually with links to cash sites. What most scripts by default or at least should do is send out a 404 header meaning the page doesn’t exist. This tells the search engines it’s an error page and their’s no need to index the content.

By removing the 404 header and sending out a 200 header your telling Google and other search engines the page or what ever you were looking for was found and so Google will index it.

This allows you to have not just hundreds but MILLIONS of pages to be indexed and can bring huge traffic. The reason it brings in such good traffic is your being indexed for things that don’t exist and therefore have no competition for those keywords.

So Google has finally copped onto these soft 404 pages as they are known and is now penalizing sites who have them. You can check if a site is penalized by using tools such as Google Penalty Checker.

Examples of big sites which gets affected

Site: FreshWap.net (note it now redirects to .com)
Google: Search Google
ScreenShot:  http://funky.freakingkid.com/images/googlepena.png

Site: Heroturko.org (note it now redirects to .com)
Google: Search Google
ScreenShot: http://funky.freakingkid.com/images/heroturka.png

Site: TorrentDownloads.net
Google: Search Google
ScreenShot: http://funky.freakingkid.com/images/torrentdow.png

Site: LatestDown.com
Google: Search Google
ScreenShot: http://funky.freakingkid.com/images/lastestdow.png

Site: PassionDownload.com
Google: Search Google
ScreenShot: http://funky.freakingkid.com/images/pass.png

The list goes on and on and on. It’s pretty much every major indexing site and I expect more to follow over the next few weeks. At the moment it’s mostly major sites that are being affected with smaller sites slowly being affected.

So what can you do and what does this mean for the future of not only warez but of Search in general?
Well for starters it’s the begining of the end of most DDL sites. Most DDL Sites get traffic to their sites with this method. PhazeDDL will be slightly less affected but it will be affected. This of course affects smaller sites who rely heavily on DDL sites for traffic.

This isn’t just affecting warez or download sites but these were in general the sites that used the technique the most.

I’ve about 20 small under the radar sites that currently use this technique and have lots of different tests running in an attempt to find out how Google detects this. Out of about 20 sites two have being got a penalty in the last 24 hours so I’m still researching and it will be some time.
If you have real websites who don’t use this technique you will probably find your organic traffic increase ever so slightly due to the removal of others. It will also be better for people as they search for items in Google as lots of insignificant pages won’t be returned.

The peanalty received by most sites is -30 which from my research reduces organic traffic to about 30% of what it used to be but what’s critical is most of these pages which used to bring traffic are removed so the drop in traffic is far greater to as low as 10%.

The bad news is their is no quick way to reverse this. Sites will have to modify their code to re-add the 404 header and the method of allowing searches to be indexed. Once you have this done you can fill out a reconsideration form in Google Webmaster Area. You pretty much have to beg Google for forgiveness, say your sorry, that you’ve fixed your site and you’ll never do it again. If your lucky your get the Penalty removed but your traffic will never return to what it once was.

FreshWap and Heroturko have tried a different approach and are now redirecting to the .com instead of the .net and .org respectively.
I don’t think this will work in the long run as the penalty will simply transfer to the new domain if they don’t fix the issue.

Sending a Reconsideration Email to Google to get the Penalty Removed

First your strongly advised to read the Google Webmaster Guidelines

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769

If you want the easiest thing is to just watch this video

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G959-2RlPyA[/youtube]

Once you have had a look through them you can send them an email:

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35843

Finally a great day arrived and it was neither April Fool nor any easy day when India beats Pakistan or Australia. It was a day when India won THE World Cup. 1.2 Billion people supporting India and giving Indian team a pressure no other team would have been able to handle on the planet. Indian team handled the pressure and half the battle was won already. Then awesome performances by whole team, YES WHOLE team, because every single person contributed to this world cup equally and man of the match or series doesn’t matter anymore. We have the world cup now, THE World Cup we were waiting for 28 years and Sachin finally got his dream completed.

Wanna know what is a team spirit? Look at today’s game? Sachin wanted world cup, he brought India to the finals, but couldn’t manage to do great innings, but Indian team, his fellow teammates never let him down, just for the man, just to see him smiling and I finally saw that smile when he came to the field with that smile…….. heaven, magic… all those words started to make sense and then unbeaten Indian team gave the little master, GOD what he deserved…. What a match, what a moment, what a sportsmanship, what a day and what a World Cup!

Always been proud of being INDIAN and will always be till the last breath of the life!!! Will never hear a world against it and will always be a true supporter!

What a slap to all those idiots who were underestimating Indian team and it’s players. We beat Australia and Sri Lanka, and especially so-called best team of the World Cup, Pakistan, destroyed them in the game and proved once again, better team wins.

Simple equation of game. Winning Side = Better Team at the Day!

Over the past several years many BitTorrent search engines have claimed in court that they’re “just like Google”, another search engine that allows users to find information scattered around the web. All this time Google itself remained silent on the issue, until now. The search giant has involved itself in the MPAA vs. isoHunt case recently, but not completely to the delight of isoHunt’s owner.

In May last year the U.S. District Court of California issued a permanent injunction against BitTorrent search engine isoHunt. The Court ordered the owner of isoHunt to start censoring the site’s search engine based on a list of thousands of keywords provided by the MPAA, or cease its operations entirely in the U.S. The injunction was the result of isoHunt’s protracted court battle with the MPAA that started half a decade ago, in 2006.

IsoHunt owner Gary Fung decided to implement the filter, and is now up for an appeal at the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. There, he hopes to get the law on his side and quash the previous District Court ruling. IsoHunt argues that they’re just like Google – a neutral search engine – and hopes the court will decide that the keyword filter is needless censorship.
The appeal is currently ongoing. Two months ago isoHunt filed its opening appellate brief to the Court, requesting better protection from such mass copyright lawsuits for both isoHunt and other search engines alike. Even Google may face similar censorship threats if the injunction holds up, isoHunt lawyer Ira Rothken argued.

Google has been keeping an eye on the legal battle between the MPAA and isoHunt as last week, out of nowhere, the company unexpectedly got involved in the motion for summary judgment appeal. The search giant, which has always stayed far away from these types of cases, filed an amicus cuiae brief (third party testimony) at the Appeal Court.
“This cases raises issues about the interpretation and application of the safe-harbor provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. § 512 et seq. (“DMCA”) and common-law rules governing claims for secondary copyright infringement. Google has a strong interest in both issues,” Google’s counsel writes.

Google asked both isoHunt and the MPAA studios for their consent in filing the amicus curiae brief. Interestingly enough, the movie studios didn’t want Google to take part, while isoHunt was more permissive. That doesn’t mean, however, that the brief is in support of isoHunt’s case, not at all.
In fact, Google specifically states that it agrees with the District Court’s conclusion that the isoHunt search engine induced copyright infringement. According to Google isoHunt can be seen as a true “pirate” service and no objections are made against the Court’s final decision.
What Google is worried about is the reasoning the District Court used to reach its conclusion.

“While in agreement with the result reached in this case, Google is concerned that some of the reasoning offered by the district court goes too far and would upset the careful balance between copyright protection and technological innovation struck by the Supreme Court and Congress. Particularly because this case is not a hard one, it should be decided narrowly,” Google writes.
Google argues that there is plenty of evidence that isoHunt encouraged its users to download copyright infringing content. However, in the discussion on the relation between inducement and liability the Grokster standard is ignored, especially the question of whether the inducement led to direct infringements or not.

Google wants to address this because they fear it may otherwise lead to a negative outcome for themselves.
Another major issue Google addresses is the District Court’s analysis of the DMCA’s safe harbor and the inducement of copyright infringement. According to Google this discussion can severely impact ‘legit’ businesses like YouTube.
“As with its treatment of inducement, the district court’s discussion of the DMCA reached the right result but in a problematic way. The court complicated a straightforward DMCA case by wading into an unnecessary discussion of the relationship between the statutory safe harbor and judge-made principles of secondary liability, including inducement,” Google writes.

Google states that it is apparent that isoHunt doesn’t fall under DMCA safe harbor protection, since it failed to meet several of the requirements, so a detailed discussion and conclusions with regard to liability and the DMCA are not needed.
“In short, the question whether a defendant is eligible for DMCA protection is distinct from whether the defendant is liable for inducement under Grokster. Those two questions should not be conflated, as the district court appears to have done,” Google writes.

Google further addresses various issues that they feel are not needed to arrive at the verdict, but can negatively impact other services on the Internet. Several of these conclusions are the result of suggestions made by the MPAA movie studios, which Google claims are misplaced and incorrect.
Although isoHunt’s owner was initially happy to see that Google got involved in the lawsuit, the end result is a huge disappointment. Google clearly doesn’t agree with the assessment of isoHunt that they are ‘just like Google’.

Google taking part in the MPAA vs. isoHunt appeal is mainly done in their own interest, but in doing this they make some valid points which are important for torrent sites also.
Google notes that the DMCA comes before any secondary infringement liability, such as inducement for example. In its ruling the District Court said that inducement disqualified isoHunt from DMCA safe harbors, which is strange as that completely defeats the purpose and definition of “safe harbour” for online service providers.

TorrentFreak contacted isoHunt owner Gary Fung for a response. Fung appeared to be disappointed, but couldn’t comment on the implications the Google brief could have. His lawyer Ira rothken was asked for a comment as well, but didn’t respond. It is now up to the Appeal Court to decide whether Google’s suggestions and comments will be taken into consideration.

SOURCE : TorrentFreak

The only way is to make the phone backups on regular basis. But most of us usually ignore this fact and rarely make phone data’s backup. But with McAfee Wavesecure we can make our lives a lot easier by eliminating the chances of losing the precious data of a cellphone in any case.

McAfee Wavesecure not only helps you to protect your data but also helps you to get your cell phone back in the situation when your cell phone is stolen or lost. It’s actually a paid service that takes the automatic backups of your phone on regular basis and keeps the data online – securely and password protected.

Once installed, you can set a PIN for your phone, add the numbers which will help you in the situation when your cell is either stolen or lost.

You can lock your cell by just one message from the added numbers.  After McAfee WaveSecure installed, if your cell phone is lost or stolen and you can easily lock it so no one can get access to it.

All you need is to type a message “wslite lock XXXXXX” and send it to the to your own number. (The SIM card installed in your phone when it was lost or stolen)

For example ” wslite lock 741852 ( I used here the pin code 741852 you have to put your pin instead of 741852)

Note: XXXXXX is your passcode set by you while creating WaveSecure Account.

McAfee WaveSecure immediately locks your mobile phone when another SIM card (other than yours) is inserted. This limits unauthorized access and makes the phone useless to the thief.

A message on the device prompts the thief to return the device and an alarm can be triggered to warn the thief. All these security features help increase the chances of recovering your mobile phone.

Once McAfee WaveSecure detects the insertion of a new SIM card, your buddy will get a SMS alert so you can contact the person who has found or stolen your device.

In addition, McAfee WaveSecure lets you track the current location of your phone and even plot them out on a map.

McAfee WaveSecure is indeed a very essential and useful app for your mobile phone if you’re really concerned about the data and it’s privacy. With an extremely low cost ($19.90 per year) you can secure your cell phone and it’s data for the whole year.

You can also use a trial version for a limited time period so that you can know how it works and how useful it might be for your cell phone.

Visit McAfee WaveSecure Official Site

Download Trial Version | Buy Full 1 Year License

But still viruses have created a huge buzz in computing world since day one, costing huge amount of money and data loss for enterprises that is still uncountable.

Keeping this in mind, I decided to share some knowledge of those top 5 viruses that seriously created huge mess over internet in last 5 years or so.

Hope you’ll find it informative and get to learn something out of it.

1. Alureon (Year 2010)

Let’s start with the “Virus of 2010” named as “Alureon” , This cunning Trojan and  toolkit was designed to capture usernames, passwords and credit card data by intercepting data traffic over any network.This virus also affected Microsoft Windows through BSoD (Blue Screen of Death).Systems are usually infected through any software download or visiting any posting related site.

2. Daprosy Worm (Year 2009)

This worm was discovered in 2009 and was named “Daprosy Worm” by Symantec. It is a malicious program that spreads through LAN connections, spammed e-mails and USB mass storage devices. Infection comes from a single read1st.exe file where numerous clones are created at once bearing the names of compromised folders. The most obvious symptom of Daprosy infection is the presence of Classified.exe or Do not open – secrets!.exe in the folders.

The deadly worm is renowned to deteriorate, corrupt and even freeze the operating system due to programming bugs.

3. Conficker (Year 2008)

Also Known as:Downup, Downadup, Kido

Well here is another worm who loves to chew Microsoft Windows. The “Conficker” was designed to attack Windows and was discovered in 2008 caused Microsoft a real grumble. This worm attacked in 2 steps first, worm attacks the Microsoft vulnerability MS08-067 in Server Service which allows remote code execution. This vulnerability allows a remote attacker to run arbitrary code on the machine without authentication and take full control of the computer. Second, Conficker Worm uses the infected machine computing power to execute password brute force attacks to crack administrator passwords in the local network. This will allow the worm to spread through network shares as well.

You can visualize it’s appetite by the fact that in 2008 this virus affected over seven million government, business and home computers in over 200 countries causing a damage of over 9.1 billion, mostly in Asia, South America and Europe. After eating this much this worm should have turned into Anaconda.

Wait, if you are thinking that this was the end of the Conficker story think again, as this anaconda has unleashed some eggs as well. The upgraded version of this virus provided more threat to Window users as now it can:

-Blocks DNS lookups.
-Disables Auto Update.
-Kills anti-malware.
-Scans for and terminates processes with names of anti-malware, patch or diagnostic utilities at one-second intervals.

4. Storm Worm (Year 2007)

Also Known as: Small.dam, Trojan.Peacomm, Trojan.Peed, Trojan.Tibs, W32/Zhelatin

The worm who attacked through the news of a storm, that` right!, The king of viruses in 2007 known as “Storm Worm” attached itself in e-mail having title “230 dead as storm batters Europe” and infected every one who opened the mail and after infecting this virus created million of spam’s to be launched through the infected computers.

Apart from this feature it was also very helpful for hackers in identity theft & bank fraud. As per FBI America many cyber crimes were reported due to this particular virus.

5. Nyxem (Year 2006)

Also Known as: Mywife, Hunchi, I-Worm.Nyxem, Blackmal, Blueworm, Blackworm

Nyxem worm was seen in March, 2006. The worm spreads in e-mails using an external SMTP engine. It sends itself with different subjects, body text and attachment names. The worm also copies itself multiple times to an infected hard drive. The most dangerous part of this worm was that it deletes your antivirus programs, if they are installed in the same directories as the ones specified in the worm’s code. It can also delete the entries in the Windows Registry belonging to these antivirus programs, so these applications will not be run automatically the next time windows is started. The worm also contains one GIF file which is used to make a recipient of infected e-mails think that the message was scanned by Norton Anti-Virus and no infection was found.

]]> http://www.freakingkid.com/2011/02/top-5-deadliest-computer-viruses-of-last-five-years/feed/ 0 http://www.freakingkid.com/2011/02/check-ratings-of-any-website-automatically-while-visiting/ http://www.freakingkid.com/2011/02/check-ratings-of-any-website-automatically-while-visiting/#comments Mon, 21 Feb 2011 14:28:30 +0000 Sandy http://www.freakingkid.com/?p=930 Would you like to know how safe is the website which you’re visiting?

Is it trustable, free of virus or not a scam?

To answer these questions, there are so many ways to check the rank of a website, but WOT (web of trust) is the best way to check the reputation and rank of any website automatically. WOT has been liked my millions of web users and currently is the most trusted source to know the ranks of any website on internet.

WOT is a community powered by millions of web users who share their experience with the website they visit. WOT team collects those user reviews and comments and ranks the sites. WOT actually offers tools to check websites ranks. One way it to check reputation manually by visiting WOT’s website and entering the site’s URL which you want to check. But the browser addon feature makes our lives a lot easier.

With the WOT browser addon installed, you never have to worry about checking the sites rankings manually. WOT automatically scans the sites and notifies you whether it is safe, scam or phishing site as soon as you open the site. So the good thing is you never have to click any single button to check the site’s rankings.

WOT’s traffic-light style rating system can be understood by the smallest of web surfers. WOT add-on shows you the reputation of a site with a simple green/yellow/red icon and scan’s websites against virus and bad user feedback. Green means safe, yellow means caution and red means stop.

Download WOT addon for your browser

Using it is simple. Here’s what it looks like in your browser:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BuhjlOBzu8[/youtube]