August 24, 2023

Hacker Underground Erupts in Virtual Turf Wars

An interesting analysis from Newsfactor regarding the changing hacker culture that produced Zotob and other recent worms. It says there is a kind of competitiveness among hackers that’s driving each of them to be more conservative in their experimentation. They’re starting to draw less and less attention while at the same time starting to see the more strategic side of hacking.

In today’s murky world of digital viruses, worms, and Trojan horses, the idea is to stay quiet and use hijacked computers to flood the Internet with spam, spread destructive viruses, or disgorge e-mail to choke corporate systems. Not only can networks of these compromised computers be leased or sold, experts say, they are becoming more valuable as the number of vulnerable computers slowly shrinks. The viruses of yesteryear, “where something would get on your system and blow away your boot sector just doesn’t happen that much anymore.”

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Yahoo launching an ISP service

In the mad dash for GIM, one story got overlooked on Tuesday. Yahoo is launching a DSL cable service. And apparently it was an accidental leak. I got it from an AP story posted to Yahoo News.

For $14.95, subscribers will be able to download Web pages via a digital subscriber line at speeds of up to 768 kilobits and upload data at 128 kilobits. The cheaper service, which requires a one-year contract, offers Yahoo premium services, such as antivirus protection, on-demand music videos and unlimited photo storage, according to an advertisement on Yahoo’s site.

Sunnyvale-based Yahoo was expected to announce formally the Verizon launch Tuesday, but an advertisement found on the company’s Web site Monday night detailed the DSL offering. John Reseburg, a Yahoo representative, confirmed the accuracy of the ad.

I can’t find the ad that the article was talking about and I can’t find the link to the registration page. Has anyone else seen it?

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FeedBlitz: Import your Bloglet email subscribers for more control

To understand why I think Feedblitz.com is so great, you need to know a bit of history. Both Feedblitz and Bloglet.com are services for bloggers to offer email subscriptions to their blog posts. Bloglet has the distinction of being the oldest blog-to-email service — it goes so far back that when it started, RSS wasn’t invented yet and it catered exclusive for the Blogger.com crowd. But Bloglet development stalled years ago. Till this day, it doesn’t have email address validation of subscribers and subscription admins don’t have any control over their subscriber base. You can’t delete badly-typed email addresses and you can’t export your subscriber list. Bloglet subscription admins are basically trapped with Bloglet.

Which is where Feedblitz comes in. Feedblitz gives me the chance to finally dump Bloglet and move all my subscribers out to a service that does have email validation and gives me some control over the subscription feed. You can tell Feedblitz to login to Bloglet and grab all the information out of your account, including the list of all the subscribers. I just managed to rescue all my Bloglet subscribers! Given the size of the userbase of Bloglet, I don’t know why no one had thought to do this before. It’s long overdue.

So I am now offering blog-to-email subscriptions again — but this time using Feedblitz’s email form:




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