TinyURL.com spammers abuse solution

Following my previous post about spammers using TinyURL.com service to spread their spam ads, I’ve received an e-mail reply from Kevin Gilbertson.

He recommends people to forward the spam emails to abuse@tinyurl.com , complete with header so that they can investigate abuse and terminate TinyURLs that are used in spam.

Personally, I think that TinyURL.com registration procedure is too lenient, encouraging spammers to use their services to spread spams. Until TinyURL.com impose a strict registration procedure (like putting captcha, discourage robot/automated registration ) I guess we could flood abuse@tinyurl.com with spammers url that abuses TinyURL service, just to send them a clear message.

Track Amazon Product with RSStalker.com


I found this site after surfing aimlessly for an hour straight. At first I thought the site is about typical social bookmarking or just another RSS aggregator, but after close inspection I found out that this Web 2.0 website offer a free service to track various Amazon products via news feeds.

Users can track Amazon products wishlist, latest Amazon products and top 25 Amazon products price changes by category, these services are provided free without registration by RSStalker.com.

RSStalker.com provides XML based RSS feeds to track price changes of Amazon products. Generate a feed for a single product or for an entire wishlist. Add it to your favorite aggregator and you will be automatically notified when the price changes. Simply unsubscribe to the feed when you are done.

Price watching is also great for stuff you’ve already bought. Amazon.com doesn’t advertise it, but they have a 30 day price drop policy. If you bought something from them and they lower the price within 30 days, just fill out a form and they’ll refund you the difference. See the FAQ for details.

RSStalker.com (pronounced RSS Stalker), provide these services for free and without any advertisement on it’s website. However there’s one catch, they provide you with these service in hopes that you will click their affiliate link in the feed when you want to make your purchase, thus earning them a fraction of the sales.

Nice strategy indeed :)

Anyway, I praise the guy behind RSStalker.com for going to this length to provide us with a good service and a nice Web 2.0 website.

Spammers are using TinyURL.com to escape spam filters

I recently found out that besides the new breed of spam bots which emulate human surfing behavior and sporting javascript support. Spammers now developed a new tactic by concealing their url behind TinyURL.com redirection service.

I hope TinyURL administrators will take note of these service abuse, and devise a plan to reduce spammers from using their service to spread their spammy URL around.

For the time being, I’ll be more watchful and configure my anti-spam software to filter out urls that uses TinyURL service. I personally don’t use TinyURL service, and only occasionally surfed to tinyurl addresses when I’m certain it was given by a reputable source (and it must be from a human!)

Dangers of Free Trade Agreement to Malaysian ICT Industry

FTA includes certain clause that will drive our local software company out of business, please don’t let this happen! Do not let what has happened to Australia happen to our ICT industry.

FTA will indirectly let US impose their laws (like DMCA) in our country by letting foreign companies to sue our government, this is clearly unacceptable for a sovereign country like Malaysia. Our ICT industry is endangered by (software) patents infringement lawsuit by US mega-corporations, effectively driving our local ICT companies out of business.

Forget about e-commerce or e-niaga, as a typical e-commerce website are covered in a shitload of patents (See: Patented Webshop). Our local entrepreneur websites will risk patent lawsuits from some faceless foreign companies right in our own soil!

Read more at Free Trade Agreements and ICT Industry

p/s: There’s no doubt that FTA with US will work great for our country, but there are certain clauses which are unacceptable to our local ICT businesses, this is because softwares themselves are unique in nature than other tangible products, and certain terms such Intellectual Property has blurry meaning concerning this issue.

Please read this too
What other people say about FTA with US and ICT industry in Malaysia

win-get : Install applications in Windows with apt-get look-alike

Ever got used to package manager such as apt-get, yum, pkg_add or something like it? Wonder if Microsoft Windows has something similiar? Then wonder no more, introducing win-get, an apt-get package manager look-alike for Microsoft Windows.

Download the application from http://windows-get.sourceforge.net/, and put wget.exe and win-get in c:\windows, or anywhere you prefer.

Using win-get is simple, you can query win-get database with a simple “search” directice. Let’s say you want to query about which browser available from win-get repository.

H:\>win-get search browser
Using Repository: http://windows-get.sourceforge.net/winget.php


Name                         Version
----                         -------
avant                            10.1 Build 32
firefox                           1.5.0.1
flash_player                 8,0,22,0
links                               0.98
mysql_querybrowser 1.1.17
netscape                        8.0
opera                             8.51
spybot                           1.4
zinf                                 2.2.1

and if you want to install Mozilla Firefox, you just need to execute :

H:\>win-get install firefox
Checking for mirrors...
No alternative mirrors found...

11% [===>                    ] 577,440   29.77K/s

Which after that will execute the installer and display the installation process in your computer screen.

You can also acquire information about a particular software package by using the “info” directive, like this

H:\>win-get info ad-aware

Application Name: ad-aware
Version: SE
Developer: Lavasoft
Location: http://tucows.tierra.net/files2/aawsepersonal.exe
Type: freeware
Supports Silent: Yes

Description:
This is a spyware removal utility that scans your memory, 
registry and hard drives for known spyware components 
and lets you remove them.

You can browse for more applications currently in win-get repository at http://windows-get.sourceforge.net/listapps.php

Well, I guess that is all about it. Go and try it out guys

p/s: I haven’t been successful running “win-get uninstall” command, can anybody tells me if it works in their computer? Thanks.

btw, thanks to linuxlah for the CSS terminal hack.

Yahoo! was incorporated today

Yahoo blog mypapit
Today is a historical day as it is the day Yahoo! was incorporated in 1995. The company started by two Stanford graduate David Filo and Jerry Yang as “Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web” , but later changed its name to Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle or simply Yahoo.

Early Yahoo servers resided on Jerry and David workstation named Akebono and Konishiki. Since then, Yahoo popularity grew as more people started using the internet. Soon after that, Yahoo had its initial public offering on April 12, 1996, selling 2.6 million shares at $13 each.

As Yahoo’s popularity has increased, so has the range of features it offers, making it a kind of one-stop shop for all the popular activities of the Internet. These now include: Yahoo! Mail, an instant messaging client, Yahoo! Groups) online gaming and chat, various news and information portals, online shopping and auction facilities, blog portal (blo.gs), social bookmarking service (del.icio.us) .

Many of these are based at least in part on previously independent services, which Yahoo has acquired – such as the popular GeoCities free Web-hosting service, Rocketmail, and various competing mailing list providers such as eGroups.

[Source]