I just watched this hilarious music video “I Go Chop Your Dollar”, hosted on Youtube, featuring a song performed as though it was sung by one of those 419 Nigerian scammers.
The lyrics, deciphered by CrunchGear, are as follows. You’ll need it because in the manner of a typical Nigerian scam, the sentences are replete with grammatical errors so it’s hard to catch what they’re singing.
I Go Chop Your Dollar
I don’t suffer no be small
Upon say I get sense
Poverty no good at all, no
Na im make I join this business
419 no be thief, its just a game
Everybody dey play am
if anybody fall mugu, ha! my brother I go chop am
Chorus
National Airport na me get am
National Stadium na me build am
President na my sister brother
You be the mugu, I be the master
Oyinbo I go chop your dollar, I go take your money disappear
419 is just a game, you are the loser I am the winner
The refinery na me get am,
The contract, na you I go give am
But you go pay me small money make I bring am
you be the mugu, I be the master… na me be the master ooo!
When Oyinbo play wayo, them go say na new style
When country man do im own, them go de shout bring am, kill am, die!
Oyinbo people greedy, I say them greedy
I don see them tire thats why when them fall enter my trap o!
I dey show them fire
TechCrunch points to Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere report, reporting many interesting aspects about bloggers and their blogs.
Did you know, for example, that bloggers rate the success of their blogs primarily on the following, with the most important items listed first and the least important items listed last?
Personal satisfaction
Number of posts or comments on the blog
Number of unique visitors
Number of links to the blog from other sites
Number of RSS subscribers
Your Technical authority and/or rank number
Accolades from other media
Number of people who are ‘favoriting’ you
Revenue
Number and quality of new business leads
How did they read my mind? And are we all really so alike? The above more or less reflects how I feel about my blogs too. How could it be so accurate? I didn’t take any survey.
And like the other bloggers, revenue is low on my list. Of course, on wordpress.com, revenue is non-existent since we can’t put ads. But then, I didn’t start this blog to make money.
The report has other points too. Those who post more frequently are more likely to be top blogs. Or maybe it’s the other way around. The top blogs can afford to pay staff to blog. Bloggers like me blog for fun. There’s no way I’m going to bind myself to a schedule of posting 3-4 times a day.
There’s a report that Blu-Ray is in decline, and the Blu-Ray backers are trying to boost its market share by giving away free Blu-Ray discs.
I have my personal computer-centric theory about why Blu-Ray can’t take off the way DVDs do. The software for Blu-Ray drives only work on Vista and not on XP. Look at the web statistics from all the sites. 2 or more years after Vista’s release, XP is still going strong and Vista is still bumping along the bottom of the barrel. This is in spite of the fact that Vista is installed on all new machines.
I’m personally not going to buy a Blu-Ray disc because I can only play it in a special Blu-Ray player attached to my TV. I can’t play it on my computer where I’m logged in most of the time. I don’t use Vista. Maybe there’re a lot of people out there like me.
Maybe they should take away the DRM from Blu-Ray so that the drives can work on XP and Linux. Then all the geeks and new computer owners will start buying Blu-Ray. And when the geeks start using something, you know they’ll influence the people around them.
Look what happened to Vista. Do you think it’s the computer n00bs that pan Vista? They don’t know any better. It’s the geeks that pan Vista. And that has a tremendous effect. Vista now has a horrendously bad reputation that Microsoft is struggling to undo. The geeks are the information guardians and movers in the modern Internet world.
You need the geeks.
And geeks don’t like DRM. And if they can’t run their free software to play Blu-Ray discs on their free OS like Linux or favorite OS like XP, they aren’t going to be buying Blu-Ray discs. And neither are those whom they influence.
Most people following the questionable RIAA tactics will have heard of Ray Beckerman’s blog Recording Industry vs The People where he exposes the RIAA for what they really are. Ars Technica tells of a recent filing by RIAA accusing Ray of “vexatious litigation” saying that this is like the pot calling the kettle black. They quote EFF attorney Fred von Lohmann as saying “I find it a little perplexing that the recording industry would be complaining about Ray giving the other side of the story.”
But doesn’t that just show the flaws in RIAA’s case? If they were wholly operating aboveboard, they will have nothing to fear from other people given their side of the story. But when someone’s modus operandi is questionable, exposure is something they are afraid of. Their actions speak louder than words.
After my experience with StupidCensorship’s hacked site, in a fit of curiosity about how sites are hacked, I came across this funny comic from XKCD. It shows how important it is that a program checks its raw input and escape quotes found in it before committing the data to the SQL database.
The original Bob drop Tables joke can be found here. For non-SQL programmers: ‘drop table students’ means delete the ’students’ database table.
Has Stupid Censorship (WARNING: do not click), an anonymous proxy site, been hacked? When I visited it this morning and tried to get it to surf to another site, it redirected me to another form on another site: scarcup.com, which has a self-signed cert, and which asked me to re-submit the form from their site. Highly suspicious behavior. I didn’t dare proceed any further. I don’t want to risk opening my computer to viruses and spyware.
I then took a look at the WHOIS for the domain and found that, voila, scarcup.com uses a private registration, in contrast to stupidcensorship.com and peacefire.org. Also, thefreecountry’s anonymous proxy list, which was where I learned of the proxy before, seems to have delisted stupidcensorship.
So, have they been hacked? Or were they always like this?
There seems to be an awful number of hacked sites these days.
Yesterday, when I looked at the HTML code for my blog on WordPress.com, I noticed that WordPress.com put some Google Analytics tracking code into the blog. As a blogger, I have no access to that data. Instead, I have the smidgen of information WordPress deigns to reveal in its half-baked, brain-dead stats report. And I can’t even put my own Google Analytics code, because JavaScript is not allowed.
Come on, guys, since you have the data, make it available to us.
For example, after posting my review of Chrome, I’m curious to know what percentage of my readers use Chrome. Ars Technica wrote that Chrome has a 7% browser share on their site. I want to know the Chrome browser share for my blog too.
I also want other details. Mouth-watering details provided by other software. As it is, I can only drool.
So can we have better stats? Please? Pretty please?
As previously mentioned, the CERN Large Hadron Collider will start up today, Sep 10. The idea is to understand some of the conditions that were present at the start of the universe.
But not everyone believes the experiment is safe, including a commenter to my earlier post. There are concerns that microscopic black holes may be created that will ultimately lead to the end of the world.
Today’s start of the collider won’t do anything as yet. It will take months before the parts of the experiment that will allegedly cause black holes come to bear. And even then, as it is claimed, the black holes won’t immediately swallow the earth.
Actually I’m not too clear about both sides of the argument, not being a physicist and all. But it sounds both intriguing and potentially alarming.
WordPress 2.6.2 has been released. At this time, I can’t seem to find the release notes on the site, but judging from the proximity to the 2.6.1 release, my guess is that it fixes security problems.
Since there are no release notes yet, the quick way to upgrade WordPress referred to in my previous post can’t be used.
I don’t have to update this blog on WordPress.com, but I’ve got another one with a normal WP install to update. So much for getting a life. I’m a slave to technology.
Update: Yes It’s a Security Fix
I was right. It looks like 2.6.2 is a security fix. Here’s apparently what’s new in 2.6.2.
If you allow open registration on your blog, you should definitely upgrade. With open registration enabled, it is possible in WordPress versions 2.6.1 and earlier to craft a username such that it will allow resetting another user’s password to a randomly generated password. The randomly generated password is not disclosed to the attacker, so this problem by itself is annoying but not a security exploit. However, this attack coupled with a weakness in the random number seeding in mt_rand() could be used to predict the randomly generated password.
It’s only 2 days to the start up of CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) on Sep 10. The collider is the world’s largest particle accelerator, spanning some 27 kilometers under Europe. This is a big event in physics, since it may help us understand the Big Bang a bit better.
Some time ago, a number of people feared that black holes will be created by the collider and will cause the end of the world. The LHC Safety Assessment Group however assured everyone that it was impossible for microscopic black holes to be created by the collider.
As implied in my previous post, I was going to try Chrome when it was released. Well I just did.
Impressions
As a browser, it’s okay. I didn’t try many sites, but those I did rendered okay. I didn’t try to log into my account at Gmail or other AJAX intensive sites, but I guess Gmail should work fine, since it comes from the same company. But its JavaScript execution is supposed to be faster than the other browsers.
There’s nothing ground-breaking about Chrome. Its features have been in Opera for a long time, so I guess I don’t have much to say about it. It doesn’t seem as configurable as Opera. Its options dialog box are sort of limited. And some options are scattered all over the place. For example, the only way you can configure the search engine list is to right click the address bar. You can’t find it in the Options dialog. Not very organized.
I couldn’t test out the search box addition thing, mentioned in the Chrome tips for webmasters, on my blog, because (*sob*) I don’t have a search box on my blog. Now that I know about that, I’ll add the search widget to my blog when I have more time although I don’t even know if Chrome is going to be popular enough to warrant the effort.
Problems
What I find interesting is that Gmail installs into “c:\Documents and Settings\YOUR-USERNAME\Local Settings\Application Data”. Yeah. The program, data, and everything. Look into “Program Files” and you’ll see nothing. Weirdest place for the installation of a program I ever saw. I’m sure Windows administrators will have something to grumble about. Imagine a shared office machine with 100 users. You’ll have to install 100 copies of Chrome just for each of them to use. Not to mention that installing in that directory circumvents the “Deny write” policies that administrators have for the “Program Files” directory, to protect the machine and users from themselves.
Others have been saying that Chrome lends itself to the same carpet bombing security hole that plagues Safari. I’ve not tested it myself, but the basic idea is that websites can code their websites so as to make Chrome download any executable they want onto your system. Since the default download directory is the desktop, if they name an executable “My Computer” with the explorer icon, unsuspecting users may double-click it and install the virus on their system.
Do you know that the installer sets up a Windows schedule so that Google Updater runs every 10 minutes? It runs whether or not Chrome is running. Every 10 minutes! Don’t believe me? Check your Windows scheduler.
When I got tired of playing, I tried uninstalling it. Well, guess what. The Google Updater cannot be uninstalled. Or maybe it just got overlooked by the uninstaller. So even when Chrome is gone, the Updater still runs every 10 minutes.
Verdict
Chrome is good if all you’ve ever experienced is Internet Explorer and the default Firefox install. It probably won’t convert anyone using a Firefox with lots of extensions installed, or anyone using Opera. Those people are probably hard-core browser users with lots of customizations and depend heavily on the features of those browsers.
Chrome also has its flaws, but I guess Google is still new to the desktop application business, so I suppose the kinks will be worked out eventually.
Everybody’s talking about it. Google is about to launch their new open source web browser, called Google Chrome. The link doesn’t work yet, but it will when the browser is launched.
Since it hasn’t been launched, there isn’t very much information about it yet. There’s supposed to be a comic on it, but the server hosting it is down. All I know is that the browser will open a separate process for every tab, so that if a particular site crashes the browser, only that tab will close. And when the user closes the tab, the process will terminate and all the resources consumed by the browser for the site will be released. Apart from that, I don’t know anything.
This is a hilarious public domain joke that a friend just sent me. It’s about Windows:
Is Windows a Virus?
No, Windows is not a virus. Here are what viruses do:
They replicate quickly – okay, Windows does that.
Viruses use up valuable system resources, slowing down the system as they do so – okay, Windows does that.
Viruses will, from time to time, trash your hard disk – okay, Windows does that too.
Viruses are usually carried, unknown to the user, along with valuable programs and systems. Sigh… Windows does that, too.
Viruses will occasionally make the user suspect their system is too slow, causing the user to buy new hardware. Yup, that’s with Windows, too.
So far, it seems as if Windows is a virus. But I assure you there are fundamental differences. Viruses are well supported by their authors, are running on most systems, their program code is fast, compact and efficient and they tend to become more sophisticated as they mature.
Posted by florafaunarocks 
Posted by florafaunarocks 
Posted by florafaunarocks 
