Posts by happygeek

Anyone who uses Twitter, and has at some point posted a link to something interesting, will have almost certainly used a URL-shortening service such as bit.ly for example. Now the spammers are exploiting the popularity of such link-reduction services by establishing their own fake URL-shortening services in order to redirect users to their own spam and malware sites.

According to the latest Symantec MessageLabs Intelligence Report, this is the first time that spammers have been found to be using custom URL redirection (with domains registered many months before being used) as part of their efforts to evade detection by anti-spam filtering services and software. It seems that the spammers are using a double-dip technique whereby they are not linking directly to the target sites using these services. Instead, the spam emails contain a link using a genuine link reduction service which in turn points to the spam shortened link itself - a technique being used with great success. The figures suggest that during the month of May 2011, spam increased by 2.9 percent over the previous month and it is suggested that much of this is down to the newly uncovered evasion technique.

"MessageLabs Intelligence has been monitoring the way that spammers abuse URL-shortening services for a number of years using a variety of different techniques so it was only a matter of time before a new technique appeared," said Paul Wood, MessageLabs Intelligence Senior Analyst. "What is unique about the new URL-shortening sites …

Can I just point out, seeing as this is the community feedback forum, that members will not be punished just because English is not their first language, or indeed they are crap at spelling or grammar. The official line is that txt speak, leet speak and the like are not allowed, and if a posting makes absolutely no sense at all due to the poor use of language then that will get dealt with on a case by case basis as well - but we will absolutely not stop people from getting help just because their spelling is poor.

Good Karma comes around and kisses you when you need it. I needed it, it kissed me, and I'm pretty much back to the old Davey now - although not everyone might think that's a good thing. Spammers watch out... :)

I'm back...

I didn't watch it, I did something more enjoyable instead such as pulling my toenails out with pliers.

I'll be back in a couple of weeks :)

Thanks everyone for the support, and thanks to Narue for stepping up while I've had to step down for the time being.

I'm glad to say that my absence will only be temporary, I honestly couldn't stay away from DaniWeb for too long. As Eyal has said, DaniWeb is a big part of my life.

I've just got some personal things that need to get sorted out before I can give DaniWeb the 100% it deserves, but as soon as they are resolved I will be right back.

I am hopeful that I can resume my community admin duties next month, although it may well be nearer the end than the beginning...

Once again, thanks everyone for the words of support it really does mean a lot.

Davey

He's been banned already...

The golden rule should be that you contribute when you have something worth contributing, not just for the sake of it, to be honest...

You identify a DaniWeb admin by doing what you've just stated, hovering your mouse over the avatar.

Sponsors are people who make a financial contribution towards their membership of DaniWeb and get certain extra benefits as a result. See here.

Team colleagues are generally ex-moderators, or people who were amongst the elite group of folk who helped get DaniWeb off the ground in the first place.

A staff writer is someone who provides commissioned editorial content (news/reviews) for DaniWeb, and is an appointed position.

A moderator is a member whose expertise and enthusiasm has been rewarded by a promotion that allows them to spend untold hours helping folk, clearing out spam and dealing with troublemakers - all out of the goodness of their own hearts.

A super moderator is like a moderator, only more super :) Actually, it's the most senior moderator of all.

An admin is at the top of the DaniWeb management tree, tasked with the smooth running of DaniWeb behind the scenes as well as resolving community issues.

A Queen of DaniWeb is Dani, she started the whole thing...

Hope that helps a bit.

Blimey, sorry for being passionate about DaniWeb and getting excited about something :(

They are certainly not idiots, just caring people who want to help.

Everyone involved in the DaniWeb community, from the membership right through to the management, would like to offer sympathy and support to those suffering as a consequence of unfolding events in Japan. Unfortunately, some despicable types just see such tragedy as an opportunity to scam the kind-hearted majority out of cash that should be heading to those who need help.

As if the 8.9 magnitude earthquake which struck Japan, just north of Tokyo, last Friday wasn't bad enough, that was quickly followed by a devastating tsunami which has literally washed away some coastal towns and caused an unthinkable loss of human life. Amidst all this chaos, the lack of power and backup power, along with structural damage suffered by the Fukushima nuclear plant amongst others has led to explosions at three of the four reactor buildings and consequential radiation leak.

US-CERT has warned members of the public to be on the alert for email scams, fake antivirus and phishing attacks based around the earthquake and tsunami disaster. In that warning, first issued immediately after the tsunami struck and the scale of the tragedy became clear, CERT predicted that it would act as a magnet for the kind of online low-life that sends spam with malicious links, or puts out fake appeals for charitable donations. It would appear that CERT was, sadly, correct.

Security vendor Sophos has reported one such scam which is circulating and claims to originate from the British Red Cross. …

You guys did see the date on that thread, didn't you? :)

News reports suggest that March has been a good month for lovers of, and developers for, the Android operating system in pretty much every regard. That good news comes at the expense of the Apple iPhone and iOS we are led to believe, which appears to be losing the fight against Android in a number of areas. But looking behind the headlines, just how accurate is this notion of Android beats Apple in everything?

Tesco, the second largest retailer in the world by profit after Walmart, has revealed that it is now selling more Android-powered handsets than iPhones for the first time. The revelation, relating to sales of handsets through the Tesco Mobile service (a joint venture between Tesco and the O2 carrier) in the UK, is a total reversal of the market a year ago. In the run up to Christmas, iPhones were outselling Android handsets by two to one at Tesco Mobile, but by the end of January 2011 those numbers had levelled out and during February Android had surged past the iPhone.

That should not come as too much of a surprise, to be fair. After all, Tesco Mobile currently only offers the iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4 compared to dozens and dozens of various Android powered handset options. So that one metric alone just suggests that if you keep a tight proprietary hold on your mobile OS then it will ultimately stand no chance, in terms of …

If I click on 'Web Development' main menu item, then I get redirected to 'Community Center'

Confirmed. Arrives at Community Center with URL of http://www.daniweb.com/web-development/3

Rep/Voting working for me now (could be another intermittent thing I guess) but other bits appear busted - cannot double-click folders to mark forums as read for example.

I can confirm that I have no working vote function here either (after lushing/refreshing, using Chrome)

Really? What about the 'hewn from an aluminium block' form and the Thunderbolt I/O (on a current rather than forthcoming PC laptop) to name but one bit of tech mentioned?

And believe me, I've been a PC/Windows guy for close on twenty years so there's absolutely nothing pseudo about my loyalties :)

I am something of a Windows fanboy I guess, and will make no bones about the fact that I have always thought of the 13" Apple MacBook Pro in the same way that I have about Military Intelligence, European Community and Advanced BASIC: it's an oxymoron. Given that the smallest of the MacBook Pro range has often been outperformed by non-Pro labelled Macs, not to mention the non-Apple competition, I was almost expecting Apple to see the folly of its ways and scrap the damn thing altogether. And I was half right.

With the launch of the 2011 MacBook Pro range, Apple has indeed seen just how stupid it was to have an underpowered, underspecced and underwhelming machine in the line up. But rather than scrap the 13" model, Apple has done the intelligent thing and brought it up to speed, literally.

I managed to get some time with the Sandy Bridge powered, Core i7 version of the 13" MacBook Pro although there is a much cheaper, and much less impressive, Core i5 version available for techno-masochists and people who just cannot let the oxymorons go. Sure, this Core i7 powered pocket rocket of a machine is not cheap at an eye watering base configuration of $1,499 but you sure do get a lot of bang for your buck packed into that to die for, hewn from a lump of aluminium, 325x227x24mm chassis weighing in at just 2kg. There's the 500GB (5,400rpm) hard drive, 4GB …

Last year saw the overall volume of email delivered spam drop for the first, which has to be good news. Or it would be were it not for the fact that spammers have not gone away, they have merely moved with the times and adapted their business so as to exploit the best marketing opportunities for their unsolicited and unwanted, erm, marketing opportunities. Because spam filtering at both the client and server ends of the market has improved to the point where, for many people at least, emailed spam has become all but invisible the bad guys are turning to social spamming.

Those of us involved in the day to day management of forums such as DaniWeb are all too well aware of the amount of spam that heads this way in the form of bogus forum postings for example, and social networks have not escaped the spam flood either. Indeed, it is the social networks that have become the target of choice for the spammer it would seem. Whereas forum spam tends to consist mainly of straightforward advertising of the 'cheap iPhone here' accompanied by a link (or twenty) variety, social network spam, more often than not, carries some kind of malicious payload.

Marek Polesensky, a malware researcher with security vendor ESET, recently identified a whole host of worms attacking Facebook users. These included the likes of the Yimfoca worm which targeted Facebook and Fbphotofake which took the more traditional …

On the evening of 24th February, Google Principal Engineer Matt Cutts promised that a newly tweaked search algorithm that impacted on 11.8% of search queries (an absolutely massive change to the way that search works, in other words) would "reduce rankings for low-quality sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful" while at the same time producing "better rankings for high-quality sites with original content and information". Nobody would argue that these are good things, exactly what most of would want our favorite search engine to do, in fact. So what went wrong?

Well the main thing would appear to be that neither Cutts nor Google has delivered upon the promise that the Farmer Update, as it has become known, would reward high-quality sites. I appreciate that everyone will have a different definition of 'high-quality' content which depends entirely on what it happens to be that they are searching for, and what their expectations are of the resulting hits. However, most people would be more likely to reach a consensus concerning low-quality content, much of it produced by the so-called 'content farms' that churn out huge quantities of poorly put together advertorial driven by whatever keywords happen to be hot at the moment. Yet early analysis of the impact of the Google Farmer Update by search marketing number crunchers at Sistrix would seem to suggest that many of …

As a freelance journalist working for both print and web, I would be absolutely lost without HyperSnap which does all that you want.

I'd worry about the layers of skin somewhere else, considering where that steam is blowing...

(just thinking out loud here)

It certainly appears that Google is rewarding those sites which are 'narrow and deep' while penalising those which might be better described as 'broad and shallow' in terms of content.

Nick may well be onto something, in that the Internet Marketing and Business Exchange forums are the ones which attract the most cut and pasted content, the most 'me too' content, the most spam content and the least in-depth content. Perhaps if we cut back on the breadth and focussed on the core (narrow) community strength, which is the programming/development/geek expertise, it could turn things back around in our favour with Google?

I appreciate it's a very tough call, especially as the marketing and business forums pull in a lot of traffic. However, in the light of the Google turnaround perhaps it is time to seriously consider whether it is the right type of traffic.

So much for Google claiming that the change would simply filter out the content farms and give more visibility to genuine content creators such as DaniWeb.

:(

Let's hope that as the brown stuff hits the fan, and the media starts displaying how the change is impacting upon the wrong people, Google might tweak the algorithm again.

Which of the following answers is true?

A. Try doing your own homework rather than expecting others to do it for you

B. With a little bit of effort, Google might provide the answer

C. You probably could have found out in the same amount of time it took to post this same thing across various Internet forums

D. Nobody at DaniWeb is going to tell you

British software developer Conseal Security has just launched a rather clever solution to the problem of securing the data on your portable media such as USB thumb drives and portable hard drives while at the same time maintaining fully centralized control of the management of those devices without breaking the bank.

Conseal USB is pretty cool in that it is, for a start, totally hardware agnostic: forget about being locked-in to particular hardware or a specific vendor, this solution will work with all your USB drives. A five license pack will allow you to manage the security of five devices from different manufacturers, mixing and matching different hardware without impacting upon the control you have.

The real beauty of this solution is how simple it is to implement though. Gone are the days of complex setup routines and configuration options capable of turning Stephen Fry into a mumbling wreck. At the heart of the Conseal solution is a triple whammy promise of encryption, management and control.

Encryption comes by way of a 'dual lock' AES-256 bit system to ensure your data is secured while on the move.

Management is provided courtesy of a simple cloud based management console accessible via your standard web browser or smartphone if you are on the move. This includes a complete audit trail of all access attempts against your devices, showing IP addresses, MAC addresses, drive serial numbers, system and login names etc.

Control is absolute: access rules can …

There is no magic bullet for reputation points, they are awarded by members if and when they feel rep is deserved (and often not given even when it is deserved).

All I can suggest is that you keep helping people out and your rep will slowly build, it's not an instant gratification thing. As your profile rises on DaniWeb so your reputation as someone who is helpful will grow and your rep alongside it.

Good luck!

It's taken a while, but computing has finally gotten the green message. Many of the biggest IT vendors now ensure that they are being environmentally friendly in terms of the recyclablity of both components and packaging of the products they sell. But are you doing your bit once you get that kit home and plug it in? Perhaps more to the point, as well as wasting precious energy are you paying more than you need to when it comes to powering your tech?

The chances are that, like most of us, you could do more to help the environment and save money at the same time simply by driving a stake through the heart of vampire power. Vampire what now, I hear you asking? Vampire power is the new term being applied to the energy drain caused by electronics which remain plugged in when not in use, wasting precious electricity and dripping money down the drain when in standby mode. Research suggests that the average home something like 10% of the electricity bill pays for such vampire power.

The answer should be pretty simply, namely switching everything off instead of putting into standby mode when you are not using it. Unfortunately, with the amount of technology that the average home has and the fact that power sockets are often hidden behind furniture or other awkward to get at places, most of us find this far too much trouble to bother with.

Which is …

The only way you can try to prevent kids under 12 viewing the site is to introduce some form of registration during which the age restriction is made clear. If they lie, then there's not a lot you can do about it.

There is no central registry for submitting age requirements to parental control software systems, of which there are many of course. The methods they use to determine suitability are pretty varied, and ultimately it comes down to a combination of algorithms and user feedback as a rule as to whether your site is deemed kid friendly or not.

Daft as it may seem, there is no method (other than the registration approach) for a content provider/web publisher to determine who can or cannot visit their sites.

Flag the posts as bad, they will appear in the reported posts forum and the mods/myself will then investigate and take any appropriate action.

<later>

Ah, looks like you did that and he has, indeed, now been banned after having received warnings about his behavior initially.

As Ezzaral has stated, your signature is only visible to other logged in members of DaniWeb. Furthermore, signatures are also invisible to Google so do not get indexed for search purposes.

This way, genuine members who contribute to DaniWeb get the benefit of displaying their signature (complete with links) to other genuine DaniWeb members but those who are just here to post rubbish and spam DaniWeb get no SEO benefit out of having a signature (which is removed from their posts when the account inevitably ends up getting banned anyway).

Having just written a glowing review of the new Microsoft Arc Touch mouse in which I was struck by the sheer beauty of the thing, I thought it only right to take a look at what is quite possibly the ugliest mouse in the world to get my reviewing karma balanced. In that Arc Touch review I happened to mention that it was pretty useless to hardcore gamers, which inevitably led to my getting emailed by gamers asking what I recommend they should be looking at when it comes to the cutting edge of gaming mice. This review is my response, and my recommendation is go forgo form and embrace the functional beauty of the robot pig ugly Cyborg R.A.T 9.

If you've ever sat back and worried that your mouse just doesn't come with enough in the way of interchangeable palm rests and 'pinkie' grips, then the R.A.T is the answer to your prayers as it comes with no less than three of each. Yes, you read that right, three pinkie grips and three palm rests for you to choose from. The palm rests include one with a soft-touch finish that matches the body of the mouse, one with an enhanced grip rubber inlay and another which adds 4mm to the height of the R.A.T should you require it. The pinkie grips, meanwhile, offer the same soft touch and rubber inlay options plus one with a unique wing-shaped design to allow for …

This six year old thread now closed to prevent further spammage

I want to delete my account

As per the Acceptable Use Policy:

"To comply with federal anti-spam guidelines, DaniWeb stores the registration email address, current email address, all IP addresses used to register with and post, date of registration, and date last visited of all members as confirmation and proof of opt-in status. DaniWeb's policy is to permanently maintain all registration records."

340 undecillion, 282 decillion, 366 nonillion, 920 octillion, 938 septillion, 463 sextillion, 463 quintillion, 374 quadrillion, 607 trillion, 431 billion, 770 million

Actualy, it's 340 undecillion, 282 decillion, 366 nonillion, 920 octillion, 938 septillion, 463 sextillion, 463 quintillion, 374 quadrillion, 607 trillion, 431 billion, 770 million and 1.

I bet they have a spare in order to avoid the IPv4 thing all over again... :)

Looks, I am often told, can be deceptive. This is certainly the case as far as the Microsoft Arc mouse and the new Arc Touch mouse are concerned. Sure, at first glance there is not much different about the two in terms of that innovative arcing design; but look closer, and more importantly pick the Arc Touch up and start using it, for the differences to become clear. In other words, the form may be broadly the same but the function has moved on. There's the transformational function for a start, which no longer folds up into a mouse-sized clamshell but rather simply snaps totally flat. This 'curve for comfort, flatten to pack' concept is a great one for the Microsoft marketing and design people and I would argue for anyone who travels a lot with a laptop. Sure, there are those who would argue with some conviction that the average 'mini-mouse' designed for portable use is hardly difficult to pack away. Indeed, some of these such as the SwiftPoint which I reviewed last year http://www.daniweb.com/reviews/review330639.html is so small that you can comfortably carry it in your pocket or purse.

However, most traditional portable mice simply remain too 'thick' to pack comfortably in a fashionable laptop bag, a problem that is getting bigger as laptops and netbooks are getting smaller. The flattened Arc Touch overcomes this by having a very 'thin' profile: from 7mm to just 15mm at the battery end. So it …

I would like a date with Avril, but my wife seems as set against the idea as Avril herself (if the restraining order is anything to go by at any rate...)

I knows a search engine called GOOGLE which works quite well.

Can I just add that what I'd like to achieve is a night of passion with Avril Lavigne.

What's stopping me is the wife...

If the schools that my kids attend are anything to go by, it seems that high on Santa's list this Xmas just gone was an iTouch, iPhone or iPad depending how well off the parents were. That's understandable, they are just as attractive as gadgets for kids as they are to adults. But along with the never ending supply of free games, educational apps and the like comes the small problem of unfettered access to the Internet and all that brings with it. While adults may well have the family PC protected by parental control software to filter unsuitable content from their kids screens, the same is unlikely to be the case with a smartphone or tablet device. So how can parents keep porn, and other unsuitable online content, off the iPhone and iPad? One solution is provided by the same company, Blue Coat, that has been supplying a free and hugely popular desktop parental control solution for some years now in the form of K9 Web Protection.

Blue Coat tells me that the app utilises the same cloud-based WebPulse service that provides desktop users with up-to-the-moment protection from objectionable content and threats by continually categorizing new and evolving content driven by the real-time online experiences of more than 70 million users. On a typical day the WebPulse service identifies over 110,000 pages of new or previously uncategorized pornography and adult content.

I installed the K9 browser app and immediately tried to access some porn sites, …

Or he could mean the CSS-5 medium-range ballistic missile, although that's a bit hard to send via email... >;-)

As Dani will refer you to myself, being the Community Admin, I may as well break the bad news here: DaniWeb cannot delete/edit your posts for the reasons that Sanjay has already stated.

We get many requests to delete posts after someone has asked for, and usually received, help from the DaniWeb membership. To delete these posts would negate all the effort put into helping you by other members, and dilute the DaniWeb forums by removing a problem/solution which may be of help to others in the future.

As Sanjay has pointed out, your posts have been on the public Internet for 8 months now and the information you are concerned about appears at other forums as well. Indeed, it seems that you had little concern about posting all this stuff across the Internet while you were seeking help.

The public Internet is just that, public. Information that you freely post cannot simply be deleted, it doesn't work like that.

So, to conclude, I have to state once again that DaniWeb will not deleting your posts I am afraid.

Solid State Disks are ideally suited to laptop use, being small and thin but rugged as well. The lack of moving parts is pretty much a win-win for mobile usage, making these units much less prone to the knocks and drops of daily life than your average mechanical hard drive. The only real downside has been, and to be honest remains, the higher cost; which is why you still tend to find SSD storage restricted to specification for higher end machines. Actually 'only' is a bit of an exaggeration as SSD is becoming a popular choice amongst fans of external hard drive units, with the rugged workings all wrapped up in a slim casing being rather appealing to the pocket in terms of portability if not price.

Being a USB3 device, you would expect the Iomega SSD Flash to be pretty speedy and when compared to a bog standard USB2 drive it certainly was. Iomega claims a maximum read speed of up to 191MB/s and up to 130MB/s write speed, but my real world tests here were just a tad less impressive. Connected to a suitably USB3 equipped PC running Windows 7, I clocked large files averaging a read speed of 120MB/s while smaller ones hit 70MB/s. Writing speeds averaged out at less impressive 65MB/s and 40MB/s respectively.

Those are decent enough read numbers for a USB3 portable drive, and eclipse anything you'll get from a portable USB2 device. But, and it's a …

So you think you qualify for the epithet 'Number One Fan' when it comes to Angry Birds, do you? OK, you've completed the entire main game as well as the seasonal variations and done so with a full compliment of three star ratings. You've even unlocked all the hidden golden eggs from around the various levels, and deserve praise for your dedication. But to be awarded the ultimate fan accolade you really need to go a little bit further; you need to think outside the box, be it iPhone or Android powered.

The Mighty Eagle

Having said think outside of the box, we are heading straight back inside it and the game itself for the first of our Angry Birds fanboy essentials: the heroic Mighty Eagle. It's an in-game purchase that costs just $0.99 for iPhone users and brings an additional bird into play. Actually, that's not really an adequate enough description as the Mighty Eagle is not just another bird to throw at the evil egg stealing pigs: it's the ultimate bird of mass destruction.

The Mighty Eagle let's you skip a level if you are having trouble completing it (call yourself a fanboy, you sound more like a lightweight) by simply barrelling through whatever you point it at. You can only use the big bird once every hour in this mode though. So why would a real Angry Birds fanboy want such a thing? easy, you can …

What do you want to change it to?

I would die, probably literally, if someone took away my copy of NoteTab Pro (best text editor bar none IMHO) and be quite gravely ill if HyperSnap went as well (screen capture and editing) to be honest.

I could probably survive the loss of any other tool, with the possible exception of the Google Chrome browser client.

Depends upon the industry that those IT decision makers of whom you speak are in though, I guess, as to what are the most valuable IT tools. I imagine that common across most industries would be the usual heavy hitters such as the MS Office Pro suite for example.

I imagine it's a little late, seeing as he was asking over three years ago now...

Done

And...

Please do not post a link to your blog in every post, this is considered spamming here at DaniWeb. You can use the signature facility from your control panel to add a proper signature which will appear underneath your posts automatically.