If you see the Google Street View van drive by, whip out your Googles. Just like this girl in Chicago.

From the Reg here:

we suspect that as the Street View motorised tentacles extend across the globe, the sport of “Flash your Googles” will become increasingly popular.

Yeah, let’s hope so. I want to see topless girls in a convertible chasing the Google van down the street.

There is an interesting story from Reuters today (Reuters is owned by the Saudis) that talks about gays in Islamic countries in the middle east and Africa who are coming out online. In countries where Muslims are the majority, the penalty of being gay is death. Where Muslims are the minority, they will still try to kill the gays if they can. Check out the video below. Apologies for the music, you may just want to mute your speakers.

From the article here:

KHARTOUM (Reuters) - When Ali started blogging that he was Sudanese and gay, he did not realize he was joining a band of African and Middle Eastern gays and lesbians who, in the face of hostility and repression, have come out online.

Ali, who lists his home town as Khartoum but lives in Qatar, had plugged into a small, self-supporting network of people who have launched Web sites about their sexuality, while keeping their full identity secret. Caution is crucial - homosexual acts are illegal in most countries in Africa and the Middle East, with penalties ranging from long-term imprisonment to execution.

If they are blogging from within a Middle Eastern country such as Saudi Arabia or even Egypt, the government will be able to find them. Most Middle Eastern countries that are Muslim dominated enforce strict content filtering for their citizens. This means that all outbound web connections flow through a government controlled and operated internet gateway. Which means, that if the government wants to stop gay men from posting anything related to being gay, and even arrest them for illegal content, they can do so easily by tracing the IP address of the offender.

And Google, the owner of the Blogspot hosting site, has a corporate policy of cooperating with countries and their content enforcement police. They remove all images of the Tiananmen Square massacre for China and turn over security information on dissident bloggers there. Why not do the same upon request for gay bloggers?

Gays living in one of the countries where the lifestyle is illegal, should use protection online like an SSH tunnel through open proxies in foreign countries if possible. Otherwise coming out online will be deadly.

There are lots of websites out there taking advantage of the Bhutto Bombing to spread malware and trojan horse attacks. According to McAfee, some are posing as video codecs hosted on Blogspot sites.

From McAfee here:

Within hours after the assassination of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, malware authors have started capitalizing on this news to spread a new fake codec. This time it is purported to be an assassination video of the former PM.

Claiming to be a New HD Codec, these malware authors attempt to social engineer users into believing they are downloading a legitimate codec for playing the video. At least 10 Blogger websites are observed to be hosting this fake video.

Google should be able to do so much more to prevent their servers from hosting malware. Its real easy to tie a search engine to a cross reference database of known malware links or AV signatures. They don’t have to do it for all websites they index, but they certainly should do it for their own domain.

I have a new article posted over at Geeks Are Sexy here. Its about using search engines to search for yourself, commonly called “Ego Surfing.” If you are worried about your online privacy, this is a great technique to discover what others can find out about you. Like say, a potential employer, stalker, friend or foe.

Go there and check it out and then “Go Google Yourself.”

There have been multiple reports recently about botnets flooding Google with bogus search requests intended to steer its users toward false hits that are riddled with malware. And once Google straightened it up, the botnets changed keywords.

Now Google is fighting back with a Turing challenge. It seems that Google is able to sense when keyword searches are likely caused by botnets and is stopping the bots from completing their searches by asking for a captcha feedback.

See an example below for a common search I had submitted.

Had the bot completed the google search, he would have then clicked on his own malware site hosting his keyword in order to drive it upwards in Google’s results rankings. As such, unsuspecting real users, making a similar request, may have ended up clicking on the bogus website and becoming infected with a drive-by download.

I wonder if they will be doing this to fight click fraud too? By doing that, they would put a serious dent in the wallets of bot herders.

My furnace went out yesterday morning. Its a gas furnace and it would ignite the gas, but it wouldn’t stay lit. I know nothing about furnaces except how to change the filter, and I was certain that wouldn’t help this problem.

So I used local.google.com and found a nearby furnace repair company. It wasn’t a big name company like Carrier or anything- I like to give my money to local businesses, not a national chain. Usually the little guys work harder, have fair prices, and provide a personal level of service that I like. I have had great experiences with local plumbers, for instance.

So this company told me that it would be 139 bucks just to show up and run the diagnostics, which seemed somewhat reasonable to me. They showed up promptly, ran the diagnostics, and then told me that a part was bad. To replace it would be a “level 5″ task, and the price of that task was 932 bucks.

Furnace guy was going to charge me 1,071 bucks to replace this.

I told him it was simply too much money to replace an electronic part, and he reluctantly offered me a 200 dollar discount, but that was still too high. I pointed out that a whole new furnace would only be a few thousand dollars more than the price of the part and he gladly tried to sell me a new furnace!

I told him that I would fix it myself. I googled the bad part number, found a supplier that had overnight shipping and ordered the part. With shipping, it was under 240 dollars. So even with the diagnostics I had to pay for, I saved 692 dollars from the price the furnace guy quoted me.

It got down to 60 degrees in the house last night, but it was much warmer in the basement so the family bunked there. The part arrived this morning before I went to work, and it was plug and play. I had to read some really old schematics and troubleshoot some settings, but I had the furnace operating again in under 30 minutes. And my wife thinks I’m a hero.

So screw you, furnace guy. I hope your company chokes on the horrible review of your company and services I posted online.

With the advent of Google, why do people still think they can get away with ripping people off?

When I first saw this, I thought, cool! No more running into the store to thumb through those ADC maps when I get lost. Because I don’t have a GPS. (shocker, I know!) So I can get my gas and take my time while I wait for my google map to print along with my receipt from the gas I just got- while people are parked in lines of cars glaring at me impatiently because I am taking too long.

Maybe its not such a great idea to have Google Maps at the pumps after all.

From NewsFactorNetwork here:

On Wednesday, gas-pump provider Gilbarco Veeder-Root announced that it would be offering Google Maps on color screens at selected gas pumps.

drivers will be able to get a quick fill-up of information along with their gas. The service initially will be offered on about 3,500 pumps.

Users will be able to select predetermined destinations and print driving directions from the pump’s receipt printer. Eventually, Gilbarco expects to provide the ability for users to enter an address and get directions.

According to news reports, Google is making its money by getting a cut of each gas pump, not from advertising or sales. The convenience store or gas station can add local ads, destinations, or coupons to the pump. Gilbarco is reportedly planning to add weather reports and even the ability to order a sandwich from the convenience store, to be picked up after you finish pumping gas.

You also just know that every geek will try to hack the system to read their Gmail or check their myspace page. Gah, pumping gas is about to get more annoying isn’t it?

Last week, China was furious that President Bush met with the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan Buddhist leader. In fact, they were so furious and so fearful that the Chinese citizenry would find out about it, that the Chinese Government poisoned the Chinese DNS entries for popular search engines and news sites. As the story faded from the world headlines, the Chinese government allowed the poisoned DNS entries to expire.

From the AFP here:

US Internet search engines in China were being hijacked and directed to Chinese-owned Baidu, analysts said Wednesday, speculating that the move was in retaliation for Washington’s award to Tibet’s exiled spiritual leader the Dalai Lama.

Analysts at Search Engine Roundtable, a website focusing on Internet search, said Chinese users trying to search on Google, Yahoo and Microsoft websites were being directed to the Chinese search engine.

The authors said it was not clear exactly how or why the searches were being redirected, but China is known for tightly controlling the Internet and using a variety of filters to screen out search results for issues relating to dissidents or the 72-year-old Tibetan spiritual leader.

This was not about revenge, but suppression of the news. China is capable of delivering a total internet news blackout, and they could sustain it if they wanted to. Should an uprising ever happen somewhere in China, you can be sure that the people in China will be the last to know about it.

And you can see the Dalai Lama’s homepage here. Baidu.Com is the Chinese search engine. I did a search for BelchSpeak, my blog name and it came up almost blank. I guess the commie bastards don’t like what I have to say about their government and culture.

Google in China also eliminates my site because of my criticism. Check out the search results.

I have already wasted several hours looking at the Apollo Lunar Missions as they are documented on moon.google.com. Google has taken a map of the moon’s surface and have overlaid it with each of the six lunar landings, and have documented each of the mission’s exploratory points on the lunar surface with information and photos.

I found myself looking at some of the panorama photos and imagining what it must have been like to stand there on a different world so far from home. I think I would have panicked from the fear and sense of isolation I would have felt.

Apollo 14 seismic experiment.

Congrats to Google on a great feature.

Belch.Com has been online for over ten years now.  Because the site is so old, many things I have on the site, even old content from years ago, ranks near the top when someone does a google search. 

So it doesn’t surprise me when someone contacts me occasionally to ask that I remove their name from something I have posted-  usually an old recorded belch that they did when they were 16 and messing around with the family computer.  But now they are 26, out of college and are worried that their name ranks so high on a Google search.  You see, they don’t want a prospective employer googling them and seeing something foolish about them on the internet. 

This recently happened with a Vice President of a major computer manufacturer.  His name was very unique, and he was rather well known at the company and on the lecture circuit.  But when you did a Google search of his name that was on his business cards and stationary, you didn’t get his bio at the major computer company-   you got his disgusting wet belch that he submitted with glee when he was in college.  His bio page was number two.  Obviously, this was embarrassing to him, so when I was asked, I changed the name on the page.

One of the first things employers do today when they consider hiring someone is an internet search.  If you did something stupid, or went to jail in a spectacular fashion, your name and your deeds will show up, unless of course, your name is so common that it would be difficult to distinguish from everyone else.  Like John Moore or Jill Brown.

That’s why managing your reputation is so important.  And not just on a personal level, but as a corporate entity, it is important to manage your reputation too.  CNET has a great article on do’s and don’t of managing your reputation here.

This is just dripping with irony, but it also shows why its just better to have your own domain rather than a blogger site.

From InfoWorld here:

Readers of Google’s Custom Search Blog were handed a bit of a surprise Tuesday when the Web site was temporarily removed from the blogosphere and hijacked by someone unaffiliated with the company.
 
The problem? Google had mistakenly identified its own blog as a spammer’s site and handed it over to another person.

Typically Google notifies blog owners when it has spotted content associated with spam on their Web sites to give them a chance to clear up any misunderstandings.

However, that didn’t work out in this case. “The Custom Search Blog bloggers overlooked their notification, and after a period of time passed, the blog was disabled.”

When blogs are disabled like this, their URL becomes available to the general public.

Google guys don’t read their own email.  Content written about search engines are labeled by a Search Engine as spam.  Luckily Blogger keeps a pretty good backup of the content to restore it in such cases as this.

I was in kindergarten the last time man walked on the moon.  And it looks like I will have waited 47 years before it happened again.  NASA says that we will go back there around 2020 or so.

And when we go, we will be going in a spacecraft that looks much like the capsules used during the Apollo series, called the Orion.  Great photos of the Orion and the Constellation program is here, and worth checking out. 

From CNET here:

NASA officials said Wednesday that the space agency is on track to launch its first flight test in September 2008 of the Orion spacecraft, the successor to the space shuttle that’s expected to take astronauts back to the moon by 2020.

NASA is halfway through the key portion of its contract with Lockheed Martin, which is building the spacecraft, before it begins tests at the White Sands Missile Range next fall, according to Skip Hatfield, Orion manager at NASA’s Johnson Space Center.

“We’re making great progress,” Hatfield said during a press conference here at NASA Ames Research Center. The conference was organized to provide an update on the progress of NASA’s development of the Orion spacecraft, as part of the Constellation Program.

And have you seen Google Moon?  Its like Google Earth, but its the Moon.  I suggest you zoom in closely to look at the surface contents.

I’m a pretty big fan of the SiteAdvisor application.  It warns me about the risk posed by certain websites regarding malware, spyware, popups and even spammy websites.  They came out with a new report warning about the most risky search keywords.  Unsurprisingly, they are music and tech related.

From the AP here:

Search terms related to music and technology are most likely to return sites with spyware and other malicious code, a new study finds.
 
Some 42 percent of the results using the term “screensavers,” for example, led to sites flagged with a “red” warning or a cautionary “yellow” by McAfee Inc.’s SiteAdvisor service. Other keywords McAfee deemed risky include names of file-sharing software — “BearShare,” “LimeWire” and “Kazaa.”

In many cases, the programs come bundled with adware and toolbars McAfee considers unwanted, according to McAfee’s “The State of Search Engine Safety” report, scheduled for release Monday.

Risks are greater when clicking on keyword ads that make up much of search companies’ revenues: According to McAfee, 7 percent of such links produce risky sites, down from 8.5 percent a year ago.

I ran into this problem when I went searching for DVD drivers for a system I was rebuilding.  I encountered dozens of pages full of search results to malware hosting sites.  I eventually chose one that I thought was not malware related and installed it.  It turned out that malware piggybacked my installation and the system was botted.  Ooops.  Then I tried to find a malware disinfector using a web search.  The results?  Yeah, more malware!

I love bad clowns. I love dead clowns more, but bad ones make me laugh. A stupid clown from Suffolk, VA tried to visit some sad sack in the state lockup. To smuggle in some fine cannabis. No word on whether or not it was in an animal balloon.

The drug sniffing dogs at the jail alerted authorities to this evil creature smuggling the dope. Word has it that when clowns go to prison they have to paint their faces from happy clowns to sad clowns.

Spunky the Pot Junky Clown

From the Daily Press here:

A Suffolk woman who works as a clown at children’s parties was arrested last month and charged with trying to smuggle marijuana to a prison inmate.

Manuela Markham, who operates Bubblehead Entertainment and performs as Spunky the Clown, was arrested on May 6 when police say she tried to sneak marijuana to an unnamed inmate at the Greensville Correctional Center.

Prison security guards suspected Markham was carrying drugs because of “previous information received through recorded telephone conversations” between Markham and the inmate. When she arrived to visit the inmate around noon on May 6, Rose said, the guards’ drug-sniffing dogs detected marijuana.

She is charged with possession of drugs with intent to distribute to an inmate, a Class 4 felony.

I think they were really concerned about people going to their website over this. They deleted all of their pictures. I guess they didn’t count on Google cache! Hey boys and girls, hiring dope smoking clowns is bad.

If the United States government took a picture of your home, your car, and your neighborhood and put it up on the internet for anyone to locate and exploit, you would be pissed.  Well, Google is providing this service for free.

Drudge said that Google was putting peoples’ faces on the streets of Google Maps, and while they are, what I think is worse is that Google is putting license plates online too.  This is Filbert St. in San Francisco.  Nice neighborhood.

So how can an attacker use this info for malice and fun?  Look up the name of someone you really don’t like in a city where the streets have been photo’d.  Look around the the cars out in front of their house.

All your Civics belong to Google!

Note the license plate numbers of all of the cars.  Then type in “towing” into the google search bar to locate the nearest towing company.  Call them up and complain about a car parked in front of the house and have it towed away.  Or if you are really bold, report it stolen.

Have the cars towed to a nearby grocery store.  Have all the cars on the street towed there.  Make it look like a sudden town meeting at a local church.  Or have all the cars towed to Google’s nearest office.

The game of harvesting bank accounts and online identities continues to develop, and new methods are now appearing on the horizon.  Typically, phishers and malware distributors have relied heavily on spamming email lists with links to their phishing sites or websites that install malware via drive-by-download.  But there is a problem with this method-  First, you advertise your evil intentions to the world with a broadcast email, and the good guys, like the Antiphishing Working Group, will call the webhosting companies and get the phishing webserver or malware distro server yanked off of the internet.  Nowadays a phishing site has an average of an 8 hour shelflife thanks to the great work of antiphishing teams in the cyber community.

From the phisher’s point of view, he paid for a domain registration, shared space on a webserver, and probably a list of valid email addresses so he could send his spam.  While his phishing site is online, he may be able to harvest a dozen good working accounts or ID’s, and these will only work for a single targeted financial institution.

But now there is passive phishing, where no initial email is sent.  And it may take weeks or even months before a security professional notices the site.  Passive Phishing’s newest partner is Google and their adwords program.  Here’s how it works, from NewsFactor Network here:

Google has removed paid advertisements that link to 20 search terms online criminals hijacked to steal the personal identities of people searching the Internet.
 
Exploit Prevention Labs discovered the scheme on April 10 when a user of the company’s link-scanning software ran a Google search on the phrase “how to start a business.” The top-ranked sponsored search listing appeared to be from AllBusiness.com, a legitimate business, yet the hyperlink actually led to a site that attempted to install a password-stealing keylogger on the user’s PC.

“The post-logger is specifically targeting about 100 banks from around the world, by injecting extra HTML into those banks’ response pages, to try to coax extra information out of the victim,” Roger Thompson, CTO for Exploit Prevention Labs, wrote in his blog. Thompson added that this “equal-opportunity logger” happily logs all user IDs and passwords for any Web page.

Michael Sutton said an alternate and likely more effective approach involves leveraging a Web site that already receives high volumes of traffic. By using Google AdWords to generate traffic, he explained, the attackers leveraged one of the most powerful traffic generators on the Internet.

The moral of the Google AdWords hack story: “Attackers are realizing that in business, you need to spend money to make money,” Sutton concluded. “Assuming that a paid service will deter criminals is simply not enough.”

In this type of attack, the phisher only pays for his domain registration and his shared hosting.  And he pays out of pocket, or more likely, uses stolen credentials, to pay for Google’s Adwords.  And the server stays up much longer, capable of harvesting identities and account information for hundreds of online banks, not just a single targeted bank. 

Google has been under quite a bit of criticism in the past for click fraud and their inability to effectively combat it.  Now it comes out that you may not be able to trust the advertisers on popular webpages?  Google needs to authenticate their ad sponsors and certify that they are malware-free.  Want to see the exploit work?  Click here for a video by Exploit Prevention Labs.

PS:  My own ad banners are exploit-free, so feel free to click away.

The world’s crappiest laptops, designed to punish the already poverty-stricken children of the world, will now rise past the $150 mark reported here, all the way up to $175.

And it seems that if the governments of these poor countries do not pony up over half a billion dollars to get the first 3 Million of these beasts manufactured, the whole project may collapse. Somehow, Citibank has been swindled into fronting the money for these impoverished countries to buy these laptops, on the hopes that Citibank gets paid back some day.

From the AP here:

The founder of the ambitious “$100 laptop” project, which plans to give inexpensive computers to schoolchildren in developing countries, revealed Thursday that the machine for now costs $175, and it will be able to run Windows in addition to its homegrown, open-source interface.

Nicholas Negroponte, head of the One Laptop Per Child project, updated analysts and journalists on where the effort stands, saying “we are perhaps at the most critical stage of OLPC’s life.”

That’s partly because at least seven nations have expressed interest in being in the initial wave to buy the little green-and-white “XO” computers — Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil, Pakistan, Thailand, Nigeria and Libya — but it remains unclear which ones will be first to pony up the cash. The project needs orders for 3 million machines so its manufacturing and distribution effort can get rolling. (That’s 525,000,000 Dollars!)

The ever-optimistic Negroponte didn’t sound worried, however: He expects mass production to begin by October, and he said many other countries, including Peru and Russia, have been inquiring about taking part.

Even so, the machine — which boasts extremely low electricity consumption, a pulley for hand-generated power, built-in wireless networking and a screen with indoor and outdoor reading modes — now costs $175. The One Laptop project takes an additional $1 to fund its distribution efforts.

XO’s software is highly original, in hopes of making the computer useful as a collaborative tool and intuitive for children who have never before encountered a computer. There are no windows or folders, but rather an interface heavily reliant on pictographic icons.

What happened to Google funding this project? Or was that just the development? And notice how the story’s author uses words like “optimistic” and describes the software as “highly original?” I think its code for “doomed project” and “unusable software.”

Melanie McGuire was found guilty for murdering her husband and stuffing his dismembered body in suitcases, which she threw into the Chesapeake Bay.  Instead of having the chance to run off with her boss to a happy life, she will run off to a prison to wear an orange jumpsuit.

From the AP here:

A jury convicted a nurse Monday of killing her husband, hacking up his body and stuffing the parts into three suitcases she tossed into Chesapeake Bay.
 
Melanie McGuire, who sobbed as she heard the verdict, was convicted of murder, desecration of a corpse, perjury and a weapons offense.

During the six-week trial, prosecutors said McGuire, 34, organized William McGuire’s 2004 murder using her expertise as a nurse so she could begin a new life with her lover, her boss at a fertility clinic.

The jury was told that two days before her husband was last seen alive, McGuire bought a gun and bullets that matched those found in her husband’s body.

The body parts of William McGuire, 39, a computer programmer, were found in matching Kenneth Cole luggage that washed ashore in May 2004 near Norfolk, Va., nearly 300 miles from the couple’s Woodbridge, N.J., apartment.

Prosecutors also highlighted Internet searches made from the couple’s apartment on topics such as “undetectable poisons” and “ways to kill people.”

Google searches will nab you every time.

Its a funny easter egg in Google Maps.  If you go to maps.google.com, and click on get directions, and input any US city, followed by any European city, Google will give you detailed driving directions.  To Boston, MA and to the pier next to the New England Acquarium. 

At that point Google’s directions say:  Swim across the Atlantic Ocean 3,462 mi in 29 days 0 hours.

I don’t know what’s funnier, that it says to swim, or it estimates that a human should be able to swim 5 miles per hour, 24 hours per day, to make it there in 29 days.

One enterprising Digg.com reader posted a route from Dutch Harbor, Alaska to Moscow, Russia. 

I don’t know why it doesn’t work going to Tokyo Japan from Los Angeles.

Criminals are generally pretty stupid, but this one sounds like he would have gotten away with it-  if it werent for the clues he left in his google search history.

From the AP here:

A bank robbery suspect was arrested after leaving a trail of cyberclues, including an online search for “how not to rob a bank,” police said.

Kevin Fitzpatrick, 32, was arraigned Thursday on charges of robbery and larceny for a Sept. 28, 2005, robbery. He was held on unrelated charges in New York at the time of his arrest.

Police said Fitzpatrick was staying with a woman at the time of the Norwich robbery and spent a great deal of time on her computer. They had met on the Internet and had never met in person when he asked to stay for several days, borrowing her car the day of the robbery and returning with a lot of cash, claiming he won it at the Mohegan Sun casino, police said.

Police say Fitzpatrick walked into a Liberty Bank branch and handed a teller a note demanding money. A week later, a tip led police to the friend, who said she recognized Fitzpatrick from a surveillance photo posted on a newspaper Web site.

Police said when the friend checked the log of her computer, she noticed a search had been conducted for “Norwich bank robbery.”  A police search of the computer revealed numerous searches concerning bank robberies.

His Google search for “How not to rob a bank” reveals this humorous list of common mistakes made in bank robberies.  Also, the FBI describes bank robbers as:

“most modern-day bank robberies are “unsophisticated and unprofessional crimes,” committed by young male repeat offenders who apparently don’t know the first thing about their business.”