Welcome to the new Tim Yang’s Geek Blog

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.”

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?

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:

I wrote an article in two parts about taking an active role in spammer rejection by bouncing spam back at them. It’s published at tipmonkies.com.

Hey, spammer, back at ya! Bouncing spam, part 1 and Hey, spammer, back at ya! Bouncing spam, part 2.

Ah finally, Google rolls out section targeting for Adsense. Just because I’ve got the word ‘blog’ in my title and in my first header, Google always seems to think that it should deliver ads on blogs, even though not much of my content is about blogs or blogging (well ok, except for this post).

Now with section targeting, with a couple of comment tags, I can tell Google to read the content of this or of that to determine what context of ads it should deliver. I can also tell it not to read the blogroll, the menu and the header and the footer so the text in those sections are not taken into context.

Mark at weblogtoolscollection.com is asking if there are any Wordpress themes out there that are optimised for Adsense. Well, there’s going to be one soon. Ozh and I have been working on something for a couple weeks. It grew from an Adsense-optimised design to a full-featured theme with built-in utilities (no plug-ins required).

It does not make sense for themes to come without optimised Adsense positions and colours for two reasons. First, making money from blogs is now more prevalent than not. It is no longer a point of differentiation, it is a point of parity (or at least it should be). Second, there are so many blog advertising services for publishers vying for real estate that designs are starting to look like a cross between women’s fashion magazines (more ads than editorial) and Dr Frankenstein’s pet project.

Theme designers need to take ad-space into consideration and take charge of ad-placement before their theme users get their grubby amateur hands on them. Designing themes with ad space built in will stem the trend of poorly-optimised and ugly ad-placement and re-direct it toward more measured and more aesthetic layouts.

The theme we’re working on is taking a bit longer because now there are so many features (we keep getting ideas for more every day). We’ve even got a single admin control panel to simplify the configuration of everything from the feed url to Adsense IDs. No need to open the theme editor any more. Geez, whoever heard of a theme with a config panel? Bizarre! Ozh will probably release the whole thing as a standardised themekit for theme-developers to add the same features to their themes, along with the theme config panel.

Watch this space.

Written using Ruby on Rails, Tagifieds.com could quite possibly be a work of genius. I haven’t decided yet. It’s still too new and I haven’t seen the full potential of it yet. In the “About” section, the creator insists that “It’s great for online classifieds, recipes, reviews, rants, scrapbooks, and useful information of all kinds.” Yes, it can be used for all those things, but I’m not sure whether this is the perfect format for any of them. It is a bulletin board, but more in the sense of the corkboard kind with all its chaos, not like the online kind which is often known as a forum. All the posts appear on the front page. And without categories, it may be hard to browse for things — you have to use the search function instead.

Randy has published a list of the most popular feeds that are being subscribed to via his RSS-to-email service. I chuckled when I saw that an RSS blog (Randy’s) is one of the top ten for email subscription. Apart from that rather obvious observation, I can’t contribute much else, except that I noticed significant numbers were subscribed to Chinese-only blogs. This got me to thinking: how many of the popular online RSS feed readers support multi-language interfaces? Bloglines.com is one. Yahoo and MSN of course do (they’ve supported Chinese interfaces long before they had RSS feed readers). But Newsgator.com, Pluck.com and Rojo.com do not.

I’m subscribed to Godaddy.com’s RSS feeds for their domain auctions. Great stuff. I just learned that Portugal.com is up for sale for USD4.5million. And on the other hand the owner of Michaeljacksonisdead.com wants USD175,000 for that. I’m going to keep these RSS feeds subscribed just for their amusement value. As an added bonus, I learned from the sale of thechokinggame.com (USD$500) of a strange new trend that American kids are getting into - choking each other to see who passes out first.

Akamai is tracking the number of people who are consuming news from news sites like CNN and BBC around the world. And its providing the numbers on its news usage zeitgeist page. In the last 24 hours six out of seven news site visitors get their news from American sites.