I thought this was clever. The grandaddy of all genealogy sites, Ancestry.com has a crawler which searches for biographical information on the Web. Here’s the bot information page.

Host: 66.43.16.184
/
Http Code: 200 Date: Oct 09 17:28:47 Http Version: HTTP/1.1 Size in Bytes: 50133
Referer: -
Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MyFamilyBot/1.0; http://www.ancestry.com/learn/bot.aspx)

A special bonus, my genealogy course notes from my days as a computer instructor.

For the incoming search engine visitors, if you want to get into the genealogy blogosphere, start with the well written and sharp witted genealogue.blogspot.com.

Technorati Tags: genealogy, ancestry.com, robots, bots, crawlers

This is the “Friday afternoon and I am going to crawl into bed after a late night last night update”.

I can say that I am currently fat and happy at the moment.

Last week consisted of running to the hospital to visit and be outspoken to nurses. Burst appendixes with a touch of infected wound (not mine, but a lapsed blogger) are very painful. And it can take down a healthy person who has hobbies such as, oh, participating in triathalons.

Fantasy Football - week 6 saw me win my matchup and wind up in second place for the league. Santana Moss actually played well. The Eagles Saints game was painful since I had Carney as my kicker but I was hoping the Eagles would win. As it turns out, the Eagles lost to a Carney field goal. Pittsburgh’s Hines Ward played his best game so far this season. Suffice it to say, I had dropped him last week.

I’m going into week 7 without a kicker though (no drop/add this week).

Rutgers is 6-0 and this week they play Pittsburgh.

Fantasy Football week 5 - if I dump that player, of course they go on to do well for someone else. Between last week and this week I have drop/add the following. I’ve been using this season’s stats to determine who I want.

-QB drop T. Brady for C. Frye
-K. drop S. Graham for J. Carney
-TE drop J. Witten for H. Miller
-Def drop Broncos for Rams

Westbrook is questionable again because of his knee, and from what I’m seeing he may not play. The Eagles have been very unreliable wrt their injury reports. I may get a change of heart, but I don’t know.

Update: Green was declared inactive by Green Bay just before the game…and I didn’t catch that (!!!). Oh, and reportedly, Westbrook is facing surgery.

Start
-QB Charlie Frye CLE @CAR
-RB LaDainian Tomlinson SD PIT
-RB A. Green GB STL
-WR Laveranues Coles NYJ @JAC
-WR Santana Moss WAS @NYG
-TE Heath Miller PIT @SD
-PK John Carney NO TB
-Def Rams, Team Defense STL @GB

Bench
-QB C. Pennington, NYJ @JAC
-RB M. Bell, DEN BAL
-RB T. Jones, CHI BUF
-RB B. Westbrook, PHI DAL
-WR A. Johnson, HOU bye
-WR H. Ward, PIT @SD
-TE A. Crumpler, ATL bye
-Def Seahawks bye

Technorati Tags: fantasy football

A few months ago I wrote up a post about how I found some very shifty results on Google search engine result pages. At the time, I found some pages that were essentially mockups of Google SERPs. These pages were all on a .info TLD, had an iframe linking to a website called cleansearch.info and had numerous of links at the bottom of each mocked up page linking to other mocked up .info pages. I couldn’t figure out why someone would go through all of that trouble.

Well, as it turns out, Didier Stevens found out why.

Didier examined Google SERPs on Google.be and found the Google mockup .info pages were infecting folks with spyware, adware, dialers and other badware. As of this writing, most virus scanners can’t find these infected files. Here’s video of the infection and cleanup.

Didier has also tried to determine the probability of seeing one of these drive by download sites on a Google search query, and the figure is roughly 1 out of 1000.

Of note, these mocked up sites are rife with misspelled words, so if you’re a chronic misspeller I dare say your chances would be higher.

Technorati Tags: SERPS, Google, search engines, traffic, spyware, adware, badware, viruses, trojan, dialers

An all around busy week (again) nothing too bad, though. Of note:

• Rutgers Football has a bye this week
• I will regain my glory in fantasy football.
• T.O. and the rest of the Dallas team will be playing the Eagles at home. I’m hearing talk of prescription bottles and nickles.
• I am receiving requests to do another podcast, I shall look into it.
• This blog has been on the Talk Digger Most Active Conversations List.

Technorati Tags: cleverhack, fantasy football, talkdigger

Remember the earlier speculation about a bot called MSRBOT and whether it was Microsoft related?

As it turns out, MSRBOT does belong to Microsoft Research in San Jose. The researchers at Microsoft finally put an identifying url in the user agent string.

Host: 209.133.64.213
/blog/archives/001251.html
Http Code: 200 Date: Oct 05 05:22:51 Http Version: HTTP/1.1 Size in Bytes: 7743
Referer: -
Agent: MSRBOT (http://research.microsoft.com/research/sv/msrbot/)

Technorati Tags: Web, robot, crawler, Microsoft

Ok, ok, I’m down by…30 points… If I had played Santana Moss, I would have been at least closer. And had the foreknowledge that Thomas Jones would have had a great day yesterday…well, I would have had a much better week.

LaDainian only clocked in with 9pts. The Seahawks defense was stomped. And of course, Westbrook’s injury wasn’t announced until just before the game and my other productive running back, Ahman Green was announced as injured late last week.

Ah well.

Technorati Tags: fantasy football

Sleipnir is a Web browser based on Internet Explorer and designed for Japanese users. There is an unofficial Yahoo group for Sleipnir users.

Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322) Sleipnir/2.47

Technorati Tags: Sleipnir, Web browser, Japanese language Web browser