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Our New Favotite Connection Speed Testing Site - Speedchecker Limited

Millions of users trust Speedchecker Limited results and so do we.

The speed test is located here : http://www.broadbandspeedchecker.co.uk

They have servers around the world and it's all Geo-location enabled so you should test against the server in your closest location.

Bing 1.0 | Microsoft Search Engine 2.0

Bing Search Engine Initial Analysis

Microsoft Search Engine 2.0
Version 2 of any program is usually skipped for marketing purposes and to build consumer confidence.
It's about the impression, Bing looks good but isn't it about whether it can find anything?

• Search results show 10 listings.
• No way to change to 100 results
  • Pushes the Top 10 Listing Value
  • Leads users to give up and settle for a top 10
• 10 results perpetrates the keyword hamster wheel of SEO alimony.

Image search was better than Google's
Surprised us, a search for 'Fox Mask' actually showed some good examples using Bing.
Google uses user labels and fails to provide 1 in 100 of our expected results; you know, pictures of fox faces on masks...

When will phone info factor into search results?
Microsoft hates phones...
Sales closed by phone are important and so is the AAA naming convention that gets calls by being the 1st name listed in the phone book. Examples; Pizza, taxi and lock services. As phone books transition to the web, AAA naming conventions have been one-upped by Crossover Business names as domain names.

Why isn't dating info important?
Yahoo answers are so out of date the info is useless:

• Try a Yahoo Search for 'Does Cricket offer 3G'
  
  • answer has not been updated to show that Cricket has 3G
  • The 9 month old answer isn't good enough... Cricket does offer 3G
  • Where's the flag to let them know the answer needs updating?

Bing.

Live Search is evolving. Welcome to Bing.

Twitter "Best Video" Scam Attacks PCs

Twitter "Best Video" Scam Attacks PCs & Users
Apparently, visitors to juste.ru  (a website with the Russian country domain extension dotru) will see an embedded YouTube video. Behind the scenes, the page launches an exploit-laden PDF attack that, if successful, will install a fake antivirus program called "System Security."

Isn't it time to 'kill' a domain extension?

Skip the diplomatic channels, how about a dotru tea party?
Most PC users don't want anything from Russia...
...Not even a mail order bride.

Companies that provide Email and browser programs need to step up.

Microsoft!
Outlook - A one button kill for email originating from Russia? ...Make that a 'kill button' we can find and not named something stupid from that Microsoft Naming convention from hell...

Internet Explorer - A one button kill for websites using the Russian dotru domain extension?

Google - Chrome & Gmail
FireFox
Opera
Safari

In defense of Adobe
...Like drinking from Niagra Falls with a dixie cup trying to defend against hacker exploits. 

DotRU
The dotru is a Russian Domain Extension. DotRU is a Country Code Top Level Domain designated for Russia .ru

Through the years tons of SPAM, malware and exploits have originated from websites with .ru domain extensions. 

How about a Twitter Tea Party?

It's time to stop these attacks at the border or at least give PC users the ability to do it themselves. Maybe a Twitter Tea Party can get some attention brewing for the companies listed.

PC World

Twitter "Best Video" Scam Attacks PCs

Erik Larkin  Jun 1, 2009 11:44 am

Crooks are going after Twitter users once again, this time with a "Best Video" tweet that attempts to lure victims into visiting a site that will launch PDF-based attacks.

According to an analysis from Kaspersky, visitors to the juste.ru site (which you of course shouldn't visit) will see an embedded YouTube video. But behind the scenes, the page will launch and exploit-laden PDF attack that, if successful, will install a fake antivirus program called "System Security."

The Kaspersky researcher didn't find any evidence of a self-spreading worm, and instead theorizes that the scammers behind this attack used stolen logins from a recent "TwitterCut" phishing attack against the service to send the poisoned tweets.

Twitter says it is aware of the problem and is working on it. To stay safe, in addition to avoiding any "Best Video" tweets, be sure that any Adobe software is up-to-date. Flaws in Reader and Acrobat are a huge target for online crooks right now.

Provacative Titles
Isn't it time to 'kill' a domain extension?
Skip the diplomatic channels, how about a Twitter 'dotru' tea party?

Social media, Call to action. How about a Twitter Tea Party?

Dear Adobe, can we please have a 64-bit Flash player?

The 32 bit version of Adobe Flash is screwed up and has been since day one of our Vista installation a year and a half ago. Adobe should jump on the 64 bit wagon just so they have a believable excuse for not fixing the 32 bit version of Flash.

If you are listening Adobe feel free to use this;

We no longer support any of our old software because we can barely hold off the support load of the new mistakes we make. It's a full time job juggling Apple loyalties and you pesky PC users demands that stuff works...

Link: Ed Bott’s Microsoft Report | ZDNet.com

July 30th, 2008 

Dear Adobe, can we please have a 64-bit Flash player?

Posted by Ed Bott @ 9:21 am

In the TalkBack section of my earlier post on the sudden popularity of x64 Vista, a commenter makes a good point:

Flash is not yet 64 bit (at least not the last time I looked). We got a new PC last summer running Vista 64 bit and when you use IE and go to a site that uses Flash it will not work.

That’s true, and it’s the source of one of the minor annoyances in using 64-bit Vista. As I note in my reply, 32-bit IE is the default in Vista x64, presumably for this very reason:

Although there’s a 64-bit IE, you have to go through some special steps to enable it as a default. Virtually everything opens in the 32-bit IE, which you can tell if you look in Task Manager.

Google Counts 1 Trillion+ Unique Web URLs

The information age will squish us if it isn't managed properly. The issue will be to weed out the bloat with better and better search capabilities. Google has always led the pack (much to Microsoft's chagrin) What isn't spoken about:

• How much info will vanish as content is lost through website abandonment. Many point out that the web is free, but it costs real money to keep sites hosted and pay the annual domain name registration fees.
• Digital Noise overwhelms us...

Blog popularity fed much of the information bloat and advertising revenue will help keep many informative sites alive. But we notice many forums are dying and disappearing. Google has social responsibilities...

Link: Google Counts More Than 1 Trillion Unique Web URLs

From: www.cio.com

Juan Carlos Perez | IDG News Service
July 25, 2008

In a discovery that would probably send the Dr. Evil character of the "Austin Powers" movies into cardiac arrest, Google recently detected more than a trillion unique URLs on the Web.

This milestone awed Google search engineers, who are seeing the Web growing by several billion individual pages every day, company officials wrote in a blog post Friday.

Feeling the pain at the pump?

Need a Pizza 2 for 1 Discount Finder?

Diary of a deliberately spammed housewife

Presidential Politics; No one addresses this... The candidate that eliminates SPAM gets my vote. Fix it. Harsh penalties and opt-in would be a good start.

Link: Networkworld

What happened when 'Penelope Retch' answered her spam e-mail            

By Ellen Messmer, Network World, 07/01/2008

           

For Tracy Mooney (pictured), a married mother of three in Naperville, Ill., the decision to abandon cyber-sense and invite e-mail spam into her life for a month by participating in a McAfee experiment was a bit of a lark.

The idea of the Spammed Persistently All Month (S.P.A.M.) experiment — which fittingly started on April Fool's Day — was to    have 50 volunteers from around the world answer every spam message and pop-up ad on their PC.

What would be the experience in 10 countries when everyday people, armed with a PC and e-mail account McAfee provided for the Global S.P.A.M. Diaries project, clicked through the spam and chronicled the results?

Mooney — who had observed the family's PC crippled just before Christmas by a virus — was game, especially because  McAfee    was giving a free PC to all participants. She was selected to be among the 50 volunteers picked by McAfee out of 2,000 people    who applied to be part of the adventure.

Pirate Bay to Hollywood: Open your Own Torrent Site

A bold move for sure but Hollywood won't get it. Torrent technology would revolutionize downloading video on demand and give the likes of Netflix a wake-up call.

Link: TorrentFreak

Written by Ernesto on March 12, 2008

Peter Sunde and Fredrik Neij from The Pirate Bay recently did a video interview which resulted in some great quotes. One such quote comes from Fredrik, he suggests that the movie and music industry should set up their own torrent site, and monetize it through advertisements. “We would be out of business.” he added.

Dayrobber, the site that did the interview, is a new web-tv site that publishes 5 minute short shows. The initial plan was to release the second and the third part of the
interview on Thursday and Friday, but especially for TorrentFreak they
decided to release all three parts today.

It's Official: HD DVD Is Dead

It was painful but at least it's over.

Link: Extreme Tech - It's Official: HD DVD Is Dead.

February 19, 2008   By Reuters

TOKYO (Reuters) - Japan's Toshiba Corp surrendered in the high-definition home movie war on Tuesday, giving up on its HD DVD format after losing the support of key studios and retailers to the Blu-ray technology backed by Sony Corp.

The decision by the electronics maker ends the battle with a consortium led by Sony over who would set the standard for the next generation of discs, a fight that confused shoppers and stalled a move to the new technology in the $24 billion home DVD market.

The Blu-ray win means consumers no longer have to choose between rival incompatible formats and run the risk of being stuck with a 21st century equivalent of Betamax, Sony's videotape format that lost out to VHS in the 1980s.

Toshiba, which had hoped HD DVD would drive growth in its consumer electronics business said it would aim to end its HD DVD business by the end of next month.

"This was a very difficult decision to make ... but when we thought about the trouble we would cause to consumers and our partners, we decided it was not right for us to keep going with such a small presence," Toshiba Chief Executive Atsutoshi Nishida told a news conference.

The company said it would continue to service existing HD DVD products, and added it expected bigger profits over the next year as it will cut spending earmarked to promote HD DVD.

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The ultimate secret to faster and reliable Windows

A voice of reason at ZDNet!! Using Acronis to image PCs in a stable state is recommended for quick recovery when Windows System Restore doesn't work. A hard drive swap takes about 20 minutes and production is restored quickly to an employee.  No one speaks of this...

Link: ZDNet.com

Posted by Adrian Kingsley-Hughes - ZDNet

The other day Ed Bott posted five secrets to faster Windows starts. It’s a good listing, but Ed misses what I think is the ultimate tip for achieving a faster, more reliable Windows installation.

What is this marvelous tip?  Read on …

The problem with the modern PC is that no matter how good it is when it’s new, eventually it’ll get kludged up with junk and reach a point where it’s hard to separate out whether the OS has become flaky or whether the problem is with some other bit of code loaded onto the system.  All problems (whether they be stability or speed issues) become bundled under the category of “Windows problems” and  once you have a couple of problems on a system the system stops being a workhorse and starts being a project (the same thing happens to classic car owners who don’t fix things - even minor stuff - as soon as it goes wrong).