Too many people on the Internet view a free blog service as somewhere they can spam huge amounts of totally worthless advertisements. This Livelyblog blog is a good example of this, it is basically advertisements and random cut-and-pasted content:

People sign up and create a blog like this every week, so this is nothing strange. What is strange si that the advertisements in the spam-blog pictured above is spamming links to a “search-engine” service named “cooooogle.com”. This “search engine” looks exactly like Google, and it’s results “results” are limited to a handfull of websites with little or no content and huge amounts of advertisements.

It is vey interesting that the “results” from this “search-engine” all give results who link to pages with advertisements from Google’s Adsense advertisement program.

This is kind of .. a strange scam.

Someone has created a clone of Google’s web-page, which looks exactly like Google, and is spamming the links to it everywhere.. to make money using Google’s own Adsense advertisement program.

Perhapts it will work for a while. Perhaps now. How can Google accept that someone is using a “fake” version of their search-engine and spams link to it to make money from Google’s own advertisement service? Perhaps they have no idea that Cooooogle exists. Who knows. Regardless, I do think that their scam is very.. bold.

The main harddrive in one of our servers died a week before Christmas. It was a total crisis, and also a test of backup-routines. The crisis was that the server was unavailable until the datacenter where it is co-located could replace the harddrive, and also that the backups where stored in a place with high bandwidth in (so backups could be transferred to it quickly) and almost no bandwidth out (which means that it took quite a while to restore the backups). This - all in all - caused quite a bit of downtime because the backups had to be slowly transferred to other servers who temporarily did the job of the server with the defective harddrive, and it also put a larger load on these serves because they suddenly got a unforseen load-increase.

And by unforseen load-increase I mean that doing backups regularly is something that, luckily, was covered, but what to do with them, what server to restore them to and how was not even considered before the crisis was there.

So. If you are a CEO or just a normal IT guy in a corporation, you may want to consider:

• Do you have backup-routines who cover all important data on all servers (all data that is not programs who are included in the OS, etc)?
• Do you have routines for where this data should be restored to in order to bring backed-up services up immediately using alternative server(s)?
• Do you have alternative servers ready to run affected services if one or more servers go down?

The reason these questions come to light today is this:

“Date : 01/11/2007

Reboot is failing, BIOS is not detecting your disk but is waiting forever.

At this point I can only offer a reinstall on a new drive of the linux of your choice (I recommend CentOS 4.4 as it’s the quickest install) and slaving your old drive in hopes of some data recovery. This assumes the drive can even be hooked to the IDE bus as a slave without preventing system boot.

Please update this ticket to tell us how you wish to proceed.”

Yes. Another server stopped responding. The datacenter were asked to reboot it. They did and this is what they had to say about it. Great. Another dead harddrive. The more servers you have, the more trouble you have.

Luckily, it did not really matter much that the server died.It was one of the servers used to run the YacySearch search-engine. A index of about a million URLs and their keywords were “lost”. Well, “lost” as in it does not matter enough to make backups of or attempt to restore the data from the previous harddrive - since it is only a matter of re-crawling and re-indexing them, but still, data was lost because of no backup routines for it.

The result, in this cause, was that YacySearch is temporarily slightly slower and temporarily shows a few less search-results for a few keywords. But service downtime and losses could have been greater. So a word of advice: Check your backup-routines, and the routines for keeping your services running if a server fails..

This also applies to personal computers. Imagine this: The computer you  are currently using to read this just died. It’s harddrive is defective. Everything on it is gone forever. Does it bother you? If it does then that means you that your backup-routines are not good enough.

I’ve signed up at a huge amount of various affiliate programs over the years, most of them ranging form pure scammers to less serious, the minority being those rare well-managed well-paying programs like Nasty Dollars.

Some of the less well-managed programs insist on sending out e-mails every time they’ve changed something, added a new free-hosted gallery, upgraded or done anything else they find is so important that they need to mail every webmaster who signed up about it.

This is probably not a problem if you never signed up at a adult affiliate program or just signed up at one or two, but in my case the amount of such e-mails received in a week would, if printed, amount to a very huge stack.

Today I got yet another pile of this kind of e-mails. Having recently red a thing or two about e-mail security and how easy it is to get your hands on e-mails as they travel through the various routers on the net, one e-mail in particular made me slightly amazed. It was from MadeInPorn and contained yet another batch of new free-hosted galleries. And my user-name and password at the end:

“Have you forgot your login information to check stats or get your link codes?

Your login is:
Username: xiando
Password: (censured)”

I looked in my mail-archive, and love and behold: All their e-mails contains this information - just to make sure it’s re-becomes readily available to every black-hat on the Internet on a regular basis?

Oh btw, just one more little detail. MadeInPorn payouts are an average of $3 pr. 10.000 unique visitors referred to them. That’s just.. sad.

Technorati Tags: Affiliate Programs, Affiliate Marketing, Adult Affiliate Programs

I love them!

I’ve tried litterally hundreds of those adult affiliate programs over the years. Nasty Dollars was one of the first programs I tried after a friend recommended it and claims “That’s the only one which works”, and that turned out to be true. And it’s still my best working affiliate program today, years later.  I’ve come to like many other good partners, but honestly: ND is still the best.