All Posts by Paul

MPAA hacker interview

Paul

Wired has an interview with Robert Anderson, a hacker-for-hire who went to work for the MPAA, illegally breaking into BitTorrent trackers and snooping on their email:


According to Anderson, the MPAA told him: “We would need somebody like you. We would give you a nice paying job, a house, a car, anything you needed…. if you save Hollywood for us you can become rich and powerful…”

But once Anderson turned over the data and cashed the MPAA’s check, he quickly realized that Garfield had no further use for him. “He lost interest in me,” he says. Anderson felt abandoned: During negotiations with Garfield, the hacker had become convinced he was starting a long-term, lucrative relationship with the motion picture industry. “He was stringing me along personally.”

Hollywood’s cold shoulder put Anderson’s allegiance back up for grabs, and about a year later he came clean with TorrentSpy’s Bunnell in an online chat. “‘I sold you out to the MPAA,'” Anderson says he told Bunnell. “I felt guilty (for) what happened and I kinda also thought at that point the MPAA wasn’t going to do anything.”

Link

I thought people would like to read the interview also!! Enjoy

Meebo Has Ads

Paul

Two years after launching (in my living room at a TechCrunch event), web chat startup Meebo has begun to monetize their service.

Normal ad units don’t work on Meebo. While users stay on most sites for just a minute or two before leaving or creating a new page view by clicking on an internal link, the average user session at Meebo is 2.5 hours without any page refreshes. And 20% of Meebo user have sessions of 10+ hours – they basically never close the application. Selling ads based on page view doesn’t make sense at Meebo; instead, they had to invent a new kind of ad.

What they’ve done is create a persistent ad unit combination that allows users to click and add new buddy icons and background themes, watch videos, listen to music, etc. Or simply get rid of the ads. See the screen shot for a visual, and click for a larger view. Ads are charged a negotiated rate, at around a $10 “CPM.” In this case, Meebo will occasionally change the ads during a user session, up to five times per session. Each session is an impression, and a thousand of them are $10. If a user clicks to close an ad, no new one shows up in that session.

So far so good. The ads have only been up a short time and Meebo has just one sales person. Yet they’ve closed “tens of thousands of dollars” in business.

If the ads work, look for other sites to begin to look for ways to copy the idea. VideoEgg recently ported their popular Flash video advertising solution to make it

work on widgets in general, and Facebook widgets specifically. Stuff that works persists.

Hmm, I wonder how long it will take before people move to some other widget.

In millions of Windows, the perfect Storm is gathering

Paul

A spectre is haunting the net but, outside of techie circles, nobody seems to be talking about it. The threat it represents to our security and wellbeing may be less dramatic than anything posed by global terrorism, but it has the potential to wreak much more havoc. And so far, nobody has come up with a good idea on how to counter it.

It’s called the Storm worm. It first appeared at the beginning of the year, hidden in email attachments with the subject line: ‘230 dead as storm batters Europe’. The PC of anyone who opened the attachment became infected and was secretly enrolled in an ever-growing network of compromised machines called a ‘botnet’. The term ‘bot’ is a derivation of ‘software robot’, which is another way of saying that an infected machine effectively becomes the obedient slave of its – illicit – owner. If your PC is compromised in this way then, while you may own the machine, someone else controls it. And they can use it to send spam, to participate in distributed denial-of-service attacks on banks, e-commerce or government websites, or for other even more sinister purposes.

This is for computers who are not legal computers. They aren’t being updated by Microsoft. Some hackers are using several Zero Day exploits.

How the AP busted Comcast for blocking BitTorrent

Paul

In the wake of yesterday’s revelation that AP had discovered secret, anti-BitTorrent software running on Comcast’s network, a followup story explaining the clever detective work the AP did in rooting out this little shenanigan:

An AP reporter attempted to download, using file-sharing program BitTorrent, a copy of the King James Bible from two computers in the Philadelphia and San Francisco areas, both of which were connected to the Internet through Comcast cable modems.

We picked the Bible for the test because it’s not protected by copyright and the file is a convenient size.

In two out of three tries, the transfer was blocked. In the third, the transfer started only after a 10-minute delay. When we tried to upload files that were in demand by a wider number of BitTorrent users, those connections were also blocked.

Not all Comcast-connected computers appear to be affected, however. In a test with a third Comcast-connected computer in the Boston area, we were unable to test with the Bible, apparently due to an unrelated error. When we attempted to upload a more widely disseminated file, there was no evidence of blocking.

Link (via Isen)

Update: And check out thehilarious stupid lies that Comcast Interactive’s president told Information Week!

Hmm, I am betting they are having a Public Relation field day with this story. Hand it to Comcast to try new stuff.

Dumbledore is gay — Rowling

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JK Rowling has taken Albus Dumbledore — the wizard father-figure of her Harry Potter books — out of the (broom) closet, stating that she always thought of him as gay:

Speaking at Carnegie Hall on Friday night in her first U.S. tour in seven years, Rowling confirmed what some fans had always suspected — that she “always thought Dumbledore was gay,” reported entertainment Web site E! Online.

Rowling said Dumbledore fell in love with the charming wizard Gellert Grindelwald but when Grindelwald turned out to be more interested in the dark arts than good, Dumbledore was “terribly let down” and went on to destroy his rival.

That love, she said, was Dumbledore’s “great tragedy.”

“Falling in love can blind us to an extent,” she said.

The audience reportedly fell silent after the admission — then erupted into applause.

Link (via Making Light)

I think everyone was expecting this. His one adventure was with Grindelwald. I thought this was such an interesting story, Even though it isn’t tech it is however one of my favorite books.