Botnets installing BitTorrent??

surprising discovery talks about finding rootkitted machines having BitTorrent installed, and used to download movie files (Mr. Bean for some strange reason). One angle of the story that the author doesn’t discuss is the possibility that the hackers are attempting to ‘muddy’ the waters regarding the RIAA’s power to slap lawsuits on anyone who’s IP address is found connecting to a tracker. If these types of infected botnets become popular, then one could suppose that the defense of ‘My machine was infected and did it itself’ would be a plausable defense.

NyQuil No Longer Effective?

I ran across this blog entry today. This certainly explains a lot. I’ve spent the last week suffering through a particularly bad cold – probably the worst I’ve had in several years. I’ve been taking NyQuil and DayQuil, but I’ve still been all plugged up. I’m certainly going to spend more time looking at product labels in the future.

Moving Time at the Office

Our office is doing some major re-arranging, with walls being torn down, and new ones going up. We had a moving company in today to assist us with moving some desks. When I came back from lunch, I found the door conveniently propped open by the movers. Then I took a closer look at what they’d used to prop the door open with…

Blogging Hacks

There’s a story over at JackOfAllBlogs that I found both funny and disturbing. It’s a list of supposedly sure-fire ways to promote your blog. At first, it came across as a funny read, but after a little while, I started to actually think about some of the techniques listed. The guy’s right. Unethical, but right.

The Web Stats Program Formerly Known As ‘Urchin’

Earlier this year, Google went ahead and purchased Urchin, a web site analysis service. A few days ago, they decided to roll out the service (now re-christened as ‘Google Analytics‘) for free. I’m sure glad I didn’t advise my employer to purchase the software a few months ago!

I had the pleasure of test-driving the package when it was still Urchin. It’s put together very well, and ties in to Adwords campaigns. When I saw that Google had released the service for free, I immediately signed on and created some tracking for a few web sites that I own. This was over 48 hours ago. It’s still not working! I wrote to Google asking for some help. This is what I got back:

From: "Analytics Support" <analytics-support@google.com>
To: ian@platinum.net 
Subject: Re: [#38618476] Not tracking after 48 hours

Hello,

Thank you for your email.

We understand that you aren't seeing data in your reports,
even though you your tracking code has been set up for over 
six hours. We apologize for any inconvenience.  We have 
collected your data since you installed the tracking code on 
your site, and are continuing to collect this data throughout 
the day.

We are currently in the process of creating reports from 
your data. You should be able to see your reports populated 
with data later today. Please note that this reporting delay is 
associated with unexpected demand for Google Analytics. 
Under normal circumstances, the data in your reports will 
be at most six hours old. 

For additional questions, please visit the Analytics Help 
Center at http://www.google.com/support/analytics. If you're 
unable to find an answer to your question on our site, please 
feel free to reply to this email.

Sincerely,

Analytics Support

Well, it’s now ‘later today’ and it’s still not working. The reply I got from them sure felt like a canned answer. It looks like I’m not the only one with a problem. I hope they get it fixed soon!