I had this mail in my inbox since last 6 days and I was very eager to follow the link but not getting time. Yes! it is an invitation for Google Wave preview!!! Am I one of 100000 early adopters or Google have extended it to more people and I am one of them?

Clicking on the link created a Google wave account for me. The screen that opened looks more like an email interface (you get a @googlewave.com email id too) but a mail sent from gmail to my googlewave id did not reach this new inbox… So this account does not send or receive emails… it sends and receives “Waves”… Looks like it would be fun riding the waves.

There is only one person in my contact list who already have a Google wave account to interact with! But wait there is an email, I mean Wave, waiting for me that says I can invite 20 people to Google Wave. Want to get invited? I am offering 10 of the available invitations to those who request by commenting on this post. Don’t mention email address in the comment body, for there is an email address field for it and which is not publicly displayed

Will write more on Google Wave later. Bye for now.

How do ‘They’ make money from Google adsense? Well there are a lot of people who genuinely work hard to make money from Google Adsense in a fair way. What they earn is what they really deserve.

This post is regarding ‘them’ who work the other way. They work hard but the other way. They work hard to turn a movie lover visitor to a potential customer for Motor Insurance companies (not really, as the customer turns back after clicking the ad) .

This post is a case study of a particular site (group of site in reality) using Black Hat Adsense searning techniques.

So here we start. Check the pic on the right. A Google user searches for a site providing Bollywood movies download. And he don’t need to search more as it seems to him that the first result titled ‘Bollywood Movies Download Center’ would be sufficient for him. He follows the link.

Hey that’s the movie I would like to watch, he thinks and so he clicks on the download link.

Hey but that’s a forum. Never mind let’s check for the link in forum posts. And… hey found that and there are the links. (note from editor: pardon me for my laziness, for I am changing the movie title for I don’t want to waste time searching the forum)

Wasn’t I trying to download a movie? I am now at a Auto Car Insurance site!! There is yet another link in there.

On my God!! The link led me to a Global Financial site!! Amazing!!! Anyways there’s the link.

Hey what’s that? Clicking on the link shows ‘Authentication required’. Did I miss something?

Oh! Yes!! There was a Username & Password link in one of the pages I viewed earlier!!! Never mind Let’s get back to the username/ password.

God! another link and this time on an image. “click”

Hey again to Global Financial site! and again a link!!

What’s this? This page tells that you need to go to two different pages and click on Advertisements there. More work. “Film ke liye saala kuchh bhi karega” (will do anything for the movie).

First link opens a page with Autocar insurance advertisement. Though there is no mention that the ad is served by Google Adsense, IT IS. “click” and back.

Now that’s getting frustrating. The other site again! Similar advertisement. anyways “click” and back.

Now that the required two clicks have been made let’s click the buttom that leads to user/password. No man! again the site changes and still no info but just a link.

Wow! there’s the username but alas no password and link instead. let move ahead as can’t do without it!

Again the site changed! and at last the password is there. It’s showtime!!

Well now that they guy must be watching the movie, I am falling asleep having taken so many screenshots of so many boring pages. But before I retire let me summarize.

The prime object of this group of sites was to earn money through Adsense and that required clicks by visitors. While the visitors could have straight away clicked the links without having been taken to so many pages, this was a precautionary measure to keep the click-through-ratio low, as high ratio can raise an alarm making Google and advertiser probe into this affair.

That’s where we end.

Google delivers Context sensitive and relevant Ads on web sites using Adsense. This works fine in most of case but sometimes it gives out unexpected ads. Take for example the link ads below showing “Mosquito Repellent”, “Natural Repellent”, “Homemade insecticide” etc. Can you guess on which page these are showing up?

I am sure you have already guessed what could be the page content on which the ads are being shown. Take a little more time and see the bigger ad on the side, which too is from the same screen.

Now I think you have gone too sure on what could be on the page. Right? Time is right for revelation!

The ads are on a page that relates to Jolie Madame Perfumes

Who would you blame for the wrong matching ads? Google?? Take a look on the screen shot below and think again.

The page above is from mouthshut.com which is a product review site. This particular page is supposed to be review page for “Jolie Madame” (no mention of perfumes). Thankfully there is a pic that elaborates that it is related to perfume otherwise most readers would have tired themselves up thinking Who is Jolie Madame (instead of what is!). Other than that there is a breadcrumb on the top of page that goes like “Home  > Health & Beauty > Bath, Body & Skin  > Fragrances > Fragrance [Women] > I – J > Jolie Madame” and one other mention of “fragrance”.

There is no other content, no reviews on the page… then why is that page existing? Not only existing but showing up on first result page for term “Jolie Madame”!! No marks for guessing that, well, Google Adsense. Ever heard of “Made for Adsense” sites. They work somewhat in a similar way, contains pages that rank high on search results driving people to the page and when they find no content there, sometimes click on one of the ads to find what they were actually searching for.

Q: What’s the similarity between a NGO and IT Industry?
A: Everyone knows they exist but why… no one knows!

This is one of the few Q&As that generate a smile on your face. I received this in a forwarded mail. The mail contained some jokes on a aesthetic image and was titled “TakeITlite – A daily dose of refreshment”. If you have been reading this blog for a long time you might already know how seriously I take forwarded mails. But this mail containing IT related jokes was little different as I grew interested in getting this dose of refreshment daily and opened Google to search for its origin. Did I forget to point that while the mail had all copyright notices and branding, there was no site address on it.

I checked Google for all combinations of TakeITlite and Daily Dose of Refreshment but failed. The blogs on Blogspot and Rediffland were not the source. From the fifth result this term even seemed to have gone into Google Hot Trends somewhere  in February. I checked that page too but still got no clue of the source. Like most of people I believe that “if it’s not on Google, it doesn’t exist” and stopped searching…

Now a few weeks later I received another forwarded mail (too bad! I thought I could get it daily) and this time I kept my belief aside and on again failing to locate the source of mail from Google, decided to search on other search engines. I used Yahoo and found that search result was polluted by multiple sub-domains of a single domain.

Lastly I searched in Live.com and it returned only 4 results for term takeitlite and to my surprise, the site on first result did not occur in any of the other engines, the reason is visible if you visit the site. It is the official site but under construction containing a single big image and a few words “Magazine: Web Experience: Events & Advertisements” with no links. But at least I found out what I was looking for!

At last I realized that Google is not enough. If you are not receiving required results better go ahead and give other search engines a chance. May be it can help you.

By the way, how many of you used live.com in last week or last month or last year? I did not for months, but now will check it once in a while. And did you hear that Live Search is soon going to give way to Kumo.com, Microsoft’s new search engine with improved design and results. I will write more about it later.

After getting Ubuntu CDs I did not have to wait to see Ubuntu in Action as you do not need to install it to have a preview. Just insert the CD, boot from CD and select ‘Live Run’ when option for installations is asked for. Once I had checked that I could not keep  myself from performing the full installation.

Since I did not want to risk loosing existing content on my system, and added to it the fact I was installing Ubuntu as a secondary OS, I choose to go safe by Installing it on existing Windows Partition. There is a decrease in performance associated with it but was ok with me.

To install on existing Windows Partition, start a Windows session and insert the CD and execute it (if autorun fails). You get option to check the demo (by booting from CD) and performing the installation from within demo or “Install inside Windows”. Choose the latter.

First you need to choose the drive where you want to install, Interface Language, and a username and password. (Don’t choose admin as it’s a reserved username)

The above screen has an “Accessibility” button that allows you to install accessibility features as Screen Reader, Magnifier, Braille terminal etc. You can choose to skip this step by keeping ‘None’ selected and return to above screen by pressing “Next”. Click on install.

Done with above steps? Now the installation proceeds at its own till completion. It first checks the installation files.

It then creates images. The ‘’home’, ‘root’, ‘usr’ folders as seen from within Linux all exist as single files within windows partition.

Done! Remove the CD, Reboot, and choose Ubuntu in boot loader menu.

Yahoo pipes is the friendliest site when it comes to mashing up contents as RSS, CSV etc, but the URLs are not! For example if you what to check all pipes developed by me the url would be

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/person.info?eyuid=5liC_Uw5uGl4hZ0ufA–

Similarly the most popular pipes among the ones that I publicly released the ‘Google Trends Tokenizer’ has a url as below.

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=OtSAI5r83BGLeywRG8evXg

How I wish there were more friendly urls in Yahoo Pipes! Well there is a way, though not well documented in Yahoo Pipes Docs or Blog, except for a post mentioning the short friendly urls but not teaching how to create them. Let’s see how to create short and friendly URLs.

Log on to Yahoo Pipes and click on “My Pipes” link. That will open your pipes page listing all the pipes that you created including the unpublished ones. Click on the “edit” link besides your url.

Clicking on “Edit” will create a textbox where you can give a unique identifier and click on ‘Save’.

Now the url that looked like http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/person.info?eyuid=5liC_Uw5uGl4hZ0ufA— changes to a friendly short url like http://pipes.yahoo.com/jalaj (This is the url where you can find all my published pipes).

Now let’s take the individual pipes. Open the pipe and you will notice that the pipe address have shortened itself. We will shorten it further by defining identifiers for each pipe. Click on “edit”, put an identifier in the textbox that opens up and your pipe address is further shortened.

This way you can give short url to each pipe you developed. The four pipes that I released publicly (Published) have short urls as below

• http://pipes.yahoo.com/jalaj/whoslinking (Who’s linking me? – Lists all blog posts that link to your blog)
• http://pipes.yahoo.com/jalaj/pipeshield (Private Yahoo Pipes – Demonstrate how you can create Private Yahoo Pipes)
• http://pipes.yahoo.com/jalaj/trendsscraper (Google Trends Scraper – Scraps a Google Trends page for a given date to extract all hot keywords)
• http://pipes.yahoo.com/jalaj/trendstokenizer (Google Trends Tokenizer – breaks keywords in Google Trends RSS into 100 individual RSS entries)

To check all pipes that I release in future, do remember the friendly url http://pipes.yahoo.com/jalaj

Microsoft recently announced a reward of $250000 to anyone who helps in locating the brain behind the worm Conficker aka Downadup. Millions of PCs got infected with this worm since October 2008 and there is no stopping even after Microsoft released the patch that removes the vulnerability exploited by this worm.

Microsoft Security Bulletin MS08-067 on 23rd October 2008 reported a vulnerability where a specially crafted RPC request to the system could allow a remote code execution.

Conficker exploits this vulnerability to execute itself. Once executed on a machine it copies itself with a random filename under system directory. It then creates a new service “netsvcs”. It checks its IP using various public websites, downloads a malware from a remote site. Then it searches for other vulnerable machines on the subnet to spread itself, also starting an http server on this machine to facilitate malware download. Variant B adds other methods of propagation as adding AutoRun.inf in network shares so systems accessing those shares also get infected.

How to remove it? That’s simple… uninstall Windows and use Linux instead… just joking. Keep your antivirus always updated. Most of the new viruses will get detected and removed as soon as it’s updated in the virus database. If you don’t have an antivirus installed or have a trial version that expired long ago, at least go for Avast Antivirus its home version is free and just requires you to register online once a year to keep it running. You can use Malicious Software Removal Tool (MSRT) by Microsoft. Read more about Conficker here.

Just a few thoughts : Why are there no or very few viruses on Linux? Is it because Linux is very strong in Security aspect or because we believe that Linux is very strong in Security aspect?