Joel Spolsky has an interesting explanation of how fraudsters use fake blogs and zombie PCs to scame AdSense adverstisers. This problem isn’t specific to AdSense, it works for any cost-per-click advertising system that allows small Web sites to host advertising.
Update: Niall Kennedy also has a post about how spammers and fraudsters are abusing Google’s services.
Dean Baker, whose argument on drug patents I linked to last week, has published a specific proposal. In last week’s post, I mistakenly reported that he wanted to do away with drug patents. His actual proposal, which he fleshed out this weekend, is more nuanced and is based on an actual piece of legislation proposed [...]
Since the election last year, I resolved to avoid spewing armchair political strategy here. I don’t know what Democrats need to do to win, and telling them what to do isn’t my problem anyway. I do still like to read political analysis, though, and for any liberal, George Packer’s analysis of what Democrats need to [...]
The other day I saw a link to Bryan Caplan’s description of what he calls the idea trap, which seeks to explain why failing countries have a hard time enacting the policies that can lead them to success. I’ll let him explain:
Good ideas lead to good policy, good policy leads to good growth, [...]
My Ning developer account is enabled. Time to play.
Everybody is talking about the general lack of preparedness for a major outbreak of the avian flu among humans. The only drug that’s known to help people fight off the disease is Tamiflu. It’s developed by Swiss company Roche and we don’t have nearly enough of it on hand to deal with a major flu [...]
Read Mr. Jalopy’s plea for Apple to build computers for hackers:
Woz got it. Thirty seconds after unwrapping an Apple II, you were opening the lid and connecting ribbon cables. It was respect. Apple extended respect. And Apple was respected by my rocket scientist buddies and myself. Apple extended the respect through meaningful manuals, [...]
It’s impossible to overemphasize the need to sanitize user input that will be displayed to users in a Web application. Just ask MySpace.
As discouraged as I am by nationwide politics, local politics here in Raleigh, NC are actually pretty gratifying these days. We had a municipal election on Tuesday, and we reelected our progressive mayor Charles Meeker by a wide margin, and also elected two progressive candidates to at-large seats on the city council. In one of [...]
So, when are we going to be able to get videos from a Tivo to the new video iPod via TiVoToGo?
Update: L M Orchard has a post on the economics of buying video from the iTunes Music Store.