I searched around and found blogs with debates about it being “legit” or not.

It’s legit

The Yanga gang do actually have a search engine interface where you can search among the pages they crawl. A few searches on things like my own name did produce results. The evidence suggests that this is in fact a useful crawler which is used to provide a public service.

..and misbehaved

It must be mentioned that this crawler ate more than four thousand pages off one website during the last 24 hours. That really is a whole lot of pages. The logs further indicate that their crawler is very stupid and unpolite.

I’ll allow Yanga for now, and I recommend allowing it since it does appear to be useful – if your server can handle the immense load it puts on it when eating pages. Supporting alternatives to the heavily-censored Google search-engine is a good thing. I do, however, recommend that those who host sites with heavy PHP/MySQL usage on weak servers just -j DROP their IPs as it does strain servers  to the point where users may notice a slowdown.

I like that they’ve got support for Groups. That’s nice.

Kevin Krumwiede wrote:
> I might try that, but I can live with the spam. The
> problem is that I used to get 5000 real hits on a
> search and 50 spam. Now I just get 50 spam.

Updating to current SVN is always a good idea. Your other option is
switching to Ultrapeer mode. It’s quite possible that you are connected
to Ultrapeers which are just bad or over-worked due to the high amount
of spamming. Also make sure your search phrases don’t exceed 30 characters.

Regarding Comcast, that’s nothing recent. It is well-known that they’ve
been messing with Gnutella since, at least, 2006. It is not specific to
Comcast anyway. At least Cox, Adelphia and Cablevision have been doing
exactly the same. Never trust a news that you have not written yourself.

–
1000 octets = 1 ko = 1 kilooctet; 1024 octets = 1 Kio = 1 kibioctet
1000^2 octets = 1 Mo = 1 megaoctet; 1024^2 octets = 1 Mio = 1 mebioctet
1000^3 octets = 1 Go = 1 gigaoctet; 1024^3 octets = 1 Gio = 1 gibioctet

“Never trust a news that you have not written yourself.”. I could not have said it better myself even if my life depended on it.

moneycentral.msn.com/community/message/board.asp?board=fedwatch&BoardID=494

No website for you!

I was amazed to find that the criminal Microsoft Corporation (yes, they really are convinced numerous times and there are ongoing cases) are still engaging in outrageous business behavior.

This was what showed up when I visited their website using a uncommon webbrowser based on the Gecko rendering engine:

MSN’s Moneycentral falsely claims that “This feature requires a more recent version of Microsoft Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox” and goes on to say that I should “download the latest version of Microsoft Internet Explorer” by visiting that web browsers website.

Now I’m back and I’ve installed Internet Explorer. Honestly.

Gecko is a commonly used rendering engine which is the basis of numerous web browsers, including Mozilla Firefox, Mozilla Seamonkey, Galeon, Epiphany and Kazehakase – to name a few. These browsers all use the same basic rendering engine and share a common set of basic features.

You can, for example, type in about:config in the address bar to get a simple list of all the browsers settings and change them. You can even add new and mostly undocumented configuration strings using this basic config “page”. You can Right-click and select New -> String, type in general.useragent.override and give this key any value you see fit.

A quick grep for MSIE in this blogging service’s logs came up with a bunch of different MSIE user-agent strings such as this one:

“Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.0.3705; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; Media Center PC 4.0)”

Let’s refresh that web page and see what happens now that I’m “using” Microsoft Internet Explorer on Microsoft’s Windows NT Operating system, shall we?

It is clear that their story about

“This feature requires a more recent version of Microsoft Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox”

is clearly a big lie which is put there to sucker anyone not using Microsoft’s browser or one of the many free software browsers into switching to their product.

The truth is that their website doesn’t require a recent version of, or even any version of, IE or FF. No. It’s this simple:

Microsoft only requires you to say you are using their browser. You can use any Gecko-based webbrowser as long as you pretend you’re using Microsoft’s product.

Opera-user? Guess you’re just screwed, then.

But you can’t use Opera or Konqueror (which is based on the KHTML rendering engine, meaning that the site probably also don’t work with Mac’s Safari) . Perhaps these browser technologies actually lack the proper Javascript support, perhaps not. If true then we can only speculate why Microsoft designed their website they way they did, it strikes me as likely that they did it intentionally in order to keep these browsers out. They probably wanted to lock Firefox-users out too, I guess they decided to allow one variant of one competing rendering engine to view their website to avoid legal trouble..

The Real Solution: Don’t use Microsoft

That’s the only one good long-term solution to the problem of Microsoft abusing it’s dominant position in every way: don’t use them. Switch to a variant of the GNU operating system if you’re a Windows user. And don’t buy their hardware or use their web services if you’re already a GNU user. The world doesn’t need them and would surely be a better place without Microsoft. And their power is, regardless of their size and position, limited to the amount we, the people, give them by supporting them.

George W. Bush on Blackwater USA

George W. Bush, the grandchild of Prescott Bush – a well-documented nazi who through Union Bank of New York financed Adolf Hitler – was asked about Blackwater USAs terrorist activities in April 2007. The nazi George W. Bush laughted at the question and tried to turn terrorism and mass-murderer done by this US corporation into a joke.

bush_on_blackwater_usa_april_2007.flv

It is interesting that SVT in the same announcement yet again repeat that Sweden is merely a provincein the completely undemocratic fascist-state EU and that they decide what is what is Sweden and that the local province leadership (“government”) are powerless and have no say in any decision of major importance. Actual (untranslated) quote:

“Regeringen tillmötesgår även EU-kraven på likvärdig beskattning av öl och vin och föreslår höjd skatt på öl och sänkt vinskatt. En burk 5,2-procentig starköl blir i så fall 62 öre dyrare.” -SVT

Here is a video featuring a hot blond Norwegian chick talking about how she loves to ride a motorcycle and how it’s good that she is allowed to do so:

hot_blond_norwegian_mc_babe_video.flv

I sometimes take a look at a blog called Le blog du kraken even though I’m not even sure what language it’s in (I guess French?). But it sometimes links to highly interesting information, which is why I look at it from time to time. Like the post “Comment se servir de Google pour télécharger illégalement“.

HOWTO Search wisely

Sites who just list files, such as ftp directories, webserver directories, etc, frequently have “index of” in the title. You can use this to limit Google searches to directories. You can further just search for files who contain a string like “mp3″ or “mpg”.

So if you type this into Google:

-inurl:(htm|html|php) intitle:”index of” +”last modified” +”parent directory” +description +size +(wma|mp3|mp4|mpg|avi|mp4) “some.song”

..then you likely get a whole lot of sites where you can download that song. Note that a dot in the search string means that the field can be blank or _ or a dot.

I like David Bowie. Let’s downoad “Space Oddity”

-inurl:(htm|html|php) intitle:”index of” +”last modified” +”parent directory” +description +size +(wma|mp3|mp4|mpg|avi|mp4) “Space.Oddity”

This search result turns up some spam, but it also turns up quite a few places you can download this song. And at high speeds, too.

You can even make a “smart” search bookmark in many browsers where you specify that -inurl:(htm|html|php) intitle:”index of” +”last modified” +”parent directory” +description +size +(wma|mp3|mp4|mpg|avi|mp4) should be always added when you submit search-text to Google using that bookmark…

Filesharing-networks really aren’t needed to download music from the internet. Google’s index is just as good as the indexes filesharing networks provide for finding mp3’s – just just have to know how to use it.

Out the door

I was humming a song and in a good mood when I went out the door, went down three stairs and out this buildings front door. There, outside, stood the bike. Everything looked normal. But there was something more. Something bad in the air. Something was amiss.

Then I realized it.

There was no air in the rear tire

It was flat. Like a pancake. No air, no possibility to go anywhere, no nothing, totally flat.

Fix it?

This sad revelation has put me in a tight spot. Now I have to stay home and cry about it forever or go outside and take for the fire and fix it and re-mount it on the bike. The thought of having to walk around does not appeal to me. So I guess I have to fix it. Now.

This is it.

Welcome.