Computer Tips -Tech Info

Tag: ads

  • Kindle With Special Offers Debuts at $114

    So, today there is an advertising supported kindle that sells for $25 less than its cheapest cousin which is the kindle wifi. What will it look like? The screensavers are one place that ads will show up. Also at the bottom of the home page. (It appears that you won’t have ads in the middle of your book.) I’m wondering if a $25 discount is enough to encourage someone to go for this version over the wifi?

    It’s hard for me to say since I went ahead and sprung for the 3g version at $189. From their descriptions the advertising support seems relatively unobtrusive. (Much less so than google ads…. I could see them setting aside a part of EACH page of a text to put ads which would be annoying.)

    So what do you think – will the $25 discount make for more sales?

    Is any kind of advertising too much on this kind of device?

  • Filtering out Ads with a Proxy using SafeSquid Proxy Server

    I just ran across this good how-to on replacing ads using a proxy server (in this case safesquid). A proxy server is a piece of software that requests web pages for other machines and then passes the pages along to the other computers. When the server requests a page it’s possible to make alterations and this is exactly what the how to details. In this case they construct a rule to identify ad blocks in the page (by the text that they use to call the ad from the adserver). After the block is identified it’s replaced with a custom bit of html.

    Good how-to and I wanted to make note of it for future reference.

  • Voiceshot – Easy Way to Get a Message Out – Automated Message Calling

    We’ve all received them…. “robocalls”. Usually they fall into a couple categories…. 1) doctors appointment reminders and 2) political campaign ads and 3) telemarketers. Items 2 and three annoy me to no end. In hotly contested elections we have easily received several robocalls a day from each side for a decent stretch. These types of things do have their use though. Recently I had a bit of a dilemma, I needed to cancel about 20 appointments in a short period of time with short notice. Wouldn’t it be nice if I could send out one phone message and not have to call each one individually (in some cases at multiple numbers…)

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  • Secrets of Making money online – bux.to

    I know, you’ve seen the ads – make $6000 a week in your spare time!! Make money doing the things you do ANYWAY, like reading email, browsing the web. The last week or so as things have been slow (and technically I was still “on vacation” until the 3rd of January). I had plenty of time to test out a few of these ideas. It seems that entrepreneurial-ism is a progressive disease – you find yourself many times thinking, hmmmm…. it seems like there should be a way to make a small profit by….. Anyway, many of these ideas are MORE trouble than they’re worth. REALLY. But one, that I signed up for just last night is actually looking very promising…. bux.to….

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  • Privacy concerns abound…

    Well, the weekend saw news stories of Google planning to eavesdrop over pc microphones to hear what you’re watching on tv to target ads….. (I’m not holding my breath on that one, but… I do know how to disconnect the microphone.) Also, there was the story of Browzar which was supposedly THE solution for private web browsing…. well, it turns out it set’s it’s own search engine as the default and uses your search information to give sponsored links. Sans also mentions that the last visited url may be saved to disk as well. Really, we have several places where information is kept on us anyway (ISP/etc.) But, if you’re really concerned about private browsing you might try out the vmware browser virtual machine (or a portable web browser on a usb-key.)

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  • Bleeding Snort caution

    For those of you that aren’t aware…. Bleeding Snort is a collection of “bleeding edge” snort signatures. Snort is an intrusion detection framework. This note is by way of SARC that the bleedingsnort.org domain is now no longer under their control. bleedingsnort.com is and continues to be their official domain. Unfortunately it appears as though the .org address may now be used as a host for malware. (It’s at least currently serving up ads to leech off the mistaken traffic.) SOOOO…. bottom line – bleedingsnort.com is the official site for the Bleeding Edge Snort project. More details here.

  • Google search for malware accessible to all…

    The metasploit project is now hosting a malware search that uses Google. It essentially uses a binary google search technique that was referenced last week to find malicious files hosted on the web. Of course, this will be partly limited by Google’s indexing which recently has not been quite as thorough as before, but… all you have to do is search by a virus name and find matches. I can see where this is useful for research. What I DON’T understand is why Google doesn’t integrate scanning of content into the googlebot indexing. It would take a lot of processor power. Well…. I think Google would come close to having enough to take a stab at this. I think they should AT LEAST…

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  • The Google Problem Part 2

    If you know me…. you know I have a HARD time putting down a problem that’s unsolved. Even if it’s a problem that really doesn’t have a solution (in my control at least)… I have a tendency to look and analyze, turn it over and try and find out as much as I can about it. Maybe it’s because I’m so used to being able to find solutions to problems, or at least workarounds by gathering enough information… Anyway, after saying I was tired of trying to figure out why google doesn’t like a site and tired of trying to fix things “for google”….. well, I’ve spent more time “investigating”… or should I say “wasted” more time… I’m not sure which, but I did discover a couple interesting things.

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  • Clickbot – new bot tactic…

    There is a new twist on the bot networks that have been the plague of computing in recent years. This one is called ClickBot. The story is from Incidents.org Many sites, (like this one) use adsense to “monetize their content”. The idea is that advertisers bid on “clicks”. So, if I wanted to advertise on the keywords “asheville computer repair” I might bid 5 cents for every click on one of my ads. The problem is many content owners are less than scrupulous.

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