The end of 2007 marks the begining

Posted by multippt

This year went by real fast, and there were quite a bit of nice stuff going on in it. As a nice momento, I’ll like to list the best of Tevine in 2007, judging from its activity (based from traffic and other stuff).

The most popular posts (2007)

Google Toolbar Review #2
If 1 review was not enough, 2 reviews should do the trick. By far this review takes a bit of scrutinizing of the new Google toolbar. There were some nice titbits that probably most people who have tinkled with the toolbar would have found, but for those who have not tried the new toolbar yet, you can read this nice review.

Google, Yahoo,… what about Windows Live?
Nothing like discussing Microsoft’s remodeled search engine in comparison to the super-titans - Google and Yahoo.

Why Microsoft *could* have taken over the Internet
A poke at Microsoft’s monopoly and its capability of ruling over our sheltered haven.

Web standards see increasing adoption
Well, just a nice tip that more people are becoming more aware of web standards that have been around for the past decade. Sounds like good progress don’t you think?

Technorati is flawed
Ah, the ranking system we grew to love. Technorati may be accurate, but not accurate enough, well, because the votes/responses can be “manipulated” as well - accidental or intentional.

—

Have a nice year ahead.

Wordpress 2.3.2

Posted by multippt

Wordpress 2.3.2 has been released and patches a security hole in Wordpress that may expose drafts and future posts in your site. Private posts are not affected. No biggy unless you do not want people to peep at what you are going to write tomorrow.

The second one might be a little bit more of concern, as it can expose your database structure (not much of a problem since almost all Wordpress installs use the same structure), and show some not-so-nice error messages on your blog.

While patching up this problem, the developers decided to give a nice little thing that you can customize Wordpress in: Error messages. The error message will show a customized page (taken from wp-content/db-error.php) if there is one, rather than a messy one which PHP generates.

Few read TOSes, not even Paypal’s

Posted by multippt

It’s been a known fact that almost nobody bothers with the manual, until something actually goes wrong. Same with the Terms of Service. A devastating surprise is that only a small amount of PayPal users actually read the TOS before registering a PayPal account. The rest of the users read the TOS after having some problems with PayPal.

A TOS comes with almost every site

When you register an account (or for that matter visit a site), you get entered into a agreement/contract/etc. TOSes are cleverly disguised in several forms, their alternate names come in the form as:
-Terms of Use (okay, maybe not that cleverly disguised)
-EULA
-Policy
-Rules
-Copyright

And, the most favorited place where the TOS would be linked to is usually at the bottom, or even worse - completely inaccessible from the main page unless you click through several pages.

The problem with TOSes

Currently, TOSes are simply words, well hundreds of words. No one wants to read a legal essay whenever they sign up for something, even for something as important as PayPal. No matter how the TOS is decorated (on average, most TOSes use line-breaks, bolding/italics, ALL-CAPS and lists, but that’s only to improve pleasure for reading the TOS), it is still ignored.

A sweet test over at O’Flaherty found that almost no one actually viewed the Terms despite the site being mildly popular. Want another example? PayPal is popular amongst teens, but there’s one problem - PayPal doesn’t permit the “underaged” to register an account in the first place. 2 examples not enough? Google AdSense is another unfortunate target (though that has changed when users found Google to be incredibly compliant with such terms).

In addition, using some nice stats on this site, the amount of page-views on the policy page is about 4% of that of the front page, and that was even with advertising that throuhout the site (not just at the footer).

Should TOSes be different?

The problem with a long TOS is that no one is going to read it. However, the problem with a short piece of legal text means that you will not have all the “protection” you need. A solution to both? Have a summary. Or, even better, spruce them up with colors to draw attention to some important places (do formal stuff need to be always black and white?).

The most read TOSes?

A search on “terms of service” across several search engines yields some interesting results. Why search for such a thing on search engines? You see, terms are likely to rank up higher if they are more linked to, are highly accessible and relevant right? Right. So by this theory plus a little background diging on who has the “best” TOSes (they have to read it to know it is the best anyway…), the following would be the more read and exposed TOSes, sorted by alphabetical order:
-AIM/AOL [well, maybe not on registration anyway]
-Google [don't forget that Google's privacy policy went under news spotlight as well]
-Paypal and EBay [Most read doesn't mean many users read it]
-SecondLife
-Yahoo

How to get your stolen domain back? Get it on the news

Posted by multippt

David Airey is a classic example of an unfortunate person who got hit by unscruptous hackers crackers hoping to profiteer from his hard-earned site. David blames his stolen domain on a GMail security flaw (now patched of course), but that’s only half the problem. It has shown that there is not enough done to curb domains being stolen.

Lost your domain? Go public

That’s what David did. He posted it on his alternate blog address. Fortunately his blog is popular enough that that story ended up on Digg and Sphinn. That’s not all folks. These articles were so popular that it ended up on numerous places (talk about link bait). Things have a way of coming around. Want to know where did his famous post ended up on?
-New York Times
-Digg
-Reddit
-Lifehacker
-StumbleUpon
-Tons of others

So, what happens to the domain? David gets back his rightfully owned domain. While Godaddy (where the domain was transfered to) was unwilling to return the domain at first, some loyal visitors had a talk with the founder and co., getting them into returning the domain. So, who wins? The people, and some pretty awesome linkbait.

You may be wondering what happens to that cracker. After having him “exposed” to the public about his deeds, he may not attempt to steal another domain anytime soon.

The added bonus

If you managed to pull all of that off, you get… thousands of links and visitors. Kind of a nice “compensation” for your time and worry of your precious domain being stolen ain’t it?

Why mass-burials ain’t against Digg’s TOS

Posted by multippt

While Digg’s terms of use/service certainly is lengthy and covers almost all aspects of digging, they didn’t mention much about “burying”. It’s against Digg’s TOS to band up together and Digg articles. It’s against the TOS to “spam” Digg. Burying? You can bury articles all you like without Digg saying anything, or for that matter band up to form a “brigade” to bury articles.

The Bury frenzy

What’s better than voting against articles? Burying them. A bury not only constitutes the same weight as 3-5 negative Diggs (technically it doesn’t do that, but it decreases the Digg velocity such that the effect is similar to several negative diggs), but it adds a probability of the article in question to never come to the front again. As an added “bonus”, Digg will prevent sites hit by a certain number of buries from being submitted.

While the original intent of burying is aimed for moderation, it seems that users have decided to make use of burying as an opportunity to eradicate those that they like. Fancy knowing why “make-money” articles never made it to the front page? Burying does that. Well, that’s despite Digg being a general site that isn’t constrained to any topic.

What are some things that people bury? There are mainly:
1. Multiple articles coming from the same place over a period of 10 days, particularly those that are not well-known
2. Articles submitted by the same person owning the sites involved
3. Articles talking about certain “taboo” subjects on Digg

Why isn’t Digg doing anything about burying 

The terms of use/service says nothing

Digg doesn’t say anything about bury manipulation. As burying articles is technically not manipulating the “Digg count” (i.e. Digg count remains largely the same) neither a “service” provided by Digg, Digg didn’t bother restricting burying because it is not really explicitly breaking the TOS.

Burying is a (perfect) moderation tool

Killing burying is a bad move, so that’s why Digg will never remove burying. In fact, implementing burying is one of the greatest moves Digg made: Most of the buried articles are actually really spam, and none of Digg’s spam made it to the front page for more than 10 minutes. Pretty neat filtering right?

In addition, having users to moderate content is much efficient than having small groups of staff filtering out content (like they do in SlashDot). Given that Digg receives billions of submissions, it’s impossible to moderate that much without the help of… the submitters themselves.

It’s not wrong to bury something you don’t like

Burying is often a tool used to bury spam and stuff like that. Because spam has such a wide meaning, different people perceive spam as different things. Some classify bulk messages as spam, while others classify things they don’t like as spam. Because there is no harm involved in marking anything as spam, users don’t mind burying stuff.

A bury brigade? What brigade?

While Digg does not take too kindly to Digg brigades, Digg doesn’t do much about the converse. Rather, because of the open nature of burying, Digg will not bother tracking user buries. Thus, mass-buryings against particular topics are “untraceable” for public eyes. Besides, no one has solid proof that bury brigades exist, because there is no means to view such information as of yet (Digg records it, but do they look at it?).

The implications

What are the symptoms of Digg not restricting burying? Users are now making use of Digg’s bury feature.  Sadly, burying is like giving a lot of moderation abilities to the ordinary person - so much so that even small groups of active users can choose to ban certain topics from appearing to the masses. Fancy an article that praises Microsoft to appear on the front page of Digg? Almost never.

Burying also bans information that is otherwise useful and insightful to most people. So, why do people bury stuff like that? Competition of course! Because burying is in many ways more powerful than digging itself, some users may actively submit rival articles only to get them buried afterwards. (Remember the side-effects of burying?)

Of course, mass burial is a widely unpopular action, and hence is highly discouraged. After all, no one wants their articles to be buried.

What if spam were to disappear?

Posted by multippt

Email spam is just as annoying as it is important. It’s just plain interesting that some spammers are incredible at making “services” to irritate the hell out of people. Yet, spam is here despite it being a thorn to everyone’s (except the spammer’s) side.

Spam may disappear one day

The day we hope that will probably never come…, well, there is still hope.

Falling click-through

It’s no longer 1995, it’s 2007/8 - I mean, who would open spam messages for more than 10 seconds, if at all? The click-through rate (CTR) has fallen beyond recovery for spam. To compensate for this, spammers now send over 5 times the amount of spam, hoping that some person will click on that piece of junk. Sure, click-through rate was high way back a decade ago, but today it’s downright less than 0.5%.

If click-through rate were to decrease even more than the rate spam increases, spam will one day be a non-profitable subject - especially if spam were to negate the reputation of the promoted site. People rather report spam than read them, I mean, isn’t it a nice idea that you can get back at something that irritates you? The problem with spam is spam itself. In a bid to increase impressions, they send more, which ironically irritates people into not even bothering with spam.

Perfecting spam detection

What does a basic email account 10 years ago come with? Space and a trash bin. What does a basic email account today come with? Space and spam protection. With spam protection comes millions placed in funding to get rid of spam from everyone’s mail boxes. Sadly, because spam filtering is not perfected, false positives have a habit of appearing which gives spammers a light of hope, well, maybe that light only lasted for 5 seconds.

Dangerous spam

Sounds like spammers decided to go more creative, deciding to steal personal information aside from email addresses. The side-effect is that thanks to phishing, no one will now even dare touch “spam”, who knows? A carefully-crafted virus might just pop out. A big boo-boo against spam advertising products, caused by spammers themselves.

CAN-SPAM

According to this act, not all spam are spam. Great? We still receive spam, but at least it is legalized spam. Glad to see that “opt-out” link… who knows? Maybe if we click it we may just get less spam, not! Well, hopefully CAN-SPAM may be able to spur illegal spamming into legalized ones, offering an opportunity to opt out of spamming lists.

What if spam really disappear?

Spammers will have to look for new jobs, anti-spam companies need to look for new niches. Spam and its prevention is a multi-billion dollar industry. Well, actually the prevention part costs a little more, partly because spam is relentless in nature and utilizes black-hat ways, while anti-spam is generally powered by commercialism (let’s not forget that not many people will not want to study spam for free) and generally bounded by rules . Let’s hope that anti-spammers themselves won’t be spamming people just to stay in business. Then again, the definition of spam may change, so spam today may not be spam later. Commercial companies are already taking advantage of legal spamming, so what about the future?

Then again, it would be a nice feeling if there were to be no spam at all. No more spam checking. No more irrelevant emails. But, if we have grown used to spam, would we be able to deal with the absence of it? (Of course!)

Who’s celebrating Christmas?

Posted by multippt

It’s nice to see that Yahoo and Google are putting on the Christmas spirit. As usual, Google has plans to create nice doodles for the days before Chirstmas. This is the 4th of the 5 for this year:

While Yahoo decided to go animated with some nice flash effects. A screenshot is shown below:

You can find the 3 here, here and here. Expect one more to come after though.

Even Ask has something to say about Christmas, with a nice template dedicated to Christmas.

There are many other sites celebrating Christmas as well, maybe at least mentioning it. Glad to see Christmas being celebrated online. Sadly, Microsoft (Live and MSN) didn’t really mention much about Christmas, aside from the ads.