Typhoid Mary (aka Mary Mallon) was was the first identified healthy carrier of typhoid in the US. While she did not die from typhoid, she passed the disease to others who then became infected and died. Throughout most of her life, she denied her role in the deaths of those infected by her. Today the term ‘Typhoid Mary’ has come to mean a carrier of a dangerous disease who is a danger to the public because they refuse to take appropriate precautions.

Kanga.nu is a typhoid mary. This Plone site has a major security vulnerability which allows malicious users to create URL’s on the site that then forward visitors to a new page. Here is how it works:

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Introduction: Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery

The total number of blogs out there passed 50 million a month ago. 175,000 new blogs are created every day. There about 5.3 million blog postings per day, seventy percent of which are actually ’spam’ from a splog. In other words, seventy percent of all blog postings are spam (State of The Blogosphere, 2006). This plugin helps blog owners stay vigilant against unauthorized content use by the overwhelming majority of blogs that are splogs.
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The only thing more frustrating that searching for a plagiarist is finding one — PT

This post was written in support of Digital FingerPrint, a plugin for WordPress

Sooner or later, popular or not, your blog content (words, ideas, and images) will get stolen. After the shock wears off, a subtle feeling of pride might come over you — don’t feel flattered. Whoever it was that took your work, probably did so because they thought you wouldn’t notice and more importantly, it was easily available allowing them to profit with minimal effort.

Jonathan Bailey of Plagiarism Today has written extensively on the subject of content theft and plagiarism. His insight and thoughts on the matter are top notch and I strongly recommend you start reading at his site should you discover your content has been stolen (Plagiarism Today is also a great resource to look to in order to prevent content theft and plagiarism). Plagiarism Today recommends the following course of action when dealing with plagiarism (see Plagiarism Today for the expanded version).: » Read the rest of the entry..

A digital fingerprint can be thought of as your own personal googlewhack, or a search query that generates only one result. Consider the following example, one of the worst possible digital fingerprint choices would probably be the end with over 400 000 000 million results indexed in Google. It would not be possible to distinguish your own the end’s from other the hundreds of millions of other web pages that contain that phrase.

However, if we add a single word to the end we can create a unique and personal fingerprint, » Read the rest of the entry..

Most people don’t celebrate a first birthday at the two and three quarters year mark, but I thought that since we’ve already missed two real birthdays, any excuse to eat cake is a good one. I would hope that we could celebrate this tremendous achievement of keeping a website alive and healthy for nearly three years. Come and introduce yourself, say hi, share a story, a joke, birthday wishes, whatever. The beer is cold and the tunes are good.

How It Started

MaxPower started from the idea that MaxPower was a great name, and that there were only so many great names out there. MaxPower was borne partly out of the idea of having such a great name, and partly out of learning about the web. You may be familiar with an episode of the Simpsons which featured Max Power, an alter ego of Homer Simpson.

Max Power was dynamic, decisive, uncompromising, and most importantly, stupid. See youtube.

Max Power: Kids, there’s three ways to do things. The right way, the wrong way, and the Max Power way!
Bart: Isn’t that the wrong way?
Max Power: Yeah, but faster!

MaxPower the website was started with the same spirit of dynamic, decisive, and stupidity. One of the very first things published on MaxPower was pictures of the Worlds Biggest Special K, which I owned. It sure wasn’t dynamic, but it was a bold decisive claim about something stupid. I found it in my cereal one morning, it was about five square inches big. I kept it in its own special Pelican case but it broke when I moved across the continent. Sadly any pictures I had of it have disapeared into the web ether. And I learned a valuable lesson, backup your photos of over-sized breakfast particles.

Next up, MaxPower hosted the definitive list of the Top 10 Dirtiest ACDC Songs. Clearly, if ACDC doesn’t embody the ideals of dynamic, decisive, uncompromising, and stupid than nothing does. MaxPower continued to publish the absurdly stupid and inane. Consider the approach we have taken on the deep and complex issue of sphincter bleaching. To this day MaxPower ranks very highly for the term sphincter bleaching and sphincter bleaching pictures. I always take pleasure in seeing creeps arrive at MaxPower looking for pictures of bleached white bums. Fools.

Maturity: Like Fine Wine and Century Eggs

Perhaps with maturity comes a relinquishment of childish and stupid thoughts and posts. Sad really, but writing strange sendups about people who get their bums bleached (and the people who look for information on it) or simply posting the humorous nature of ACDC lyrics has been left behind as MaxPower turned 2.

Since then, MaxPower has published a series of WordPress Plugins that are more popular than ever could be hoped for. These plugins have been downloaded over 5000 times. Not bad for a guy with ZERO programming education.

MaxPower has also recently started to explore issues of SEO, Adsense, and splogging. As well, my post on Free Icons was such a success that it now covers all the costs associated with running a website — that is all I could have ever hoped for.

The Future

People like yourself keep me blogging on a regular basis. I wholeheartedly enjoy reaching out and making challenging someone to laugh, think, or helping them solve a problem. Perhaps this is why MaxPower has recently seen a big surge in the numbers of RSS subscribers, welcome RSSers!

I will always provide full feeds without ads. However, while having subscribers and visitors is nice, I would really like to see more interaction with people on a regular basis. I would encourage you to, every once and awhile, minimize your RSS aggregator and leave a comment, idea, suggestion or criticism. MaxPower does not believe in nofollow, so your comments at MaxPower actually do count for something.

Come and introduce yourself, say hi, share a story, a joke, birthday wishes, whatever. This is a birthday celebration, and all my birthdays have music. This is what I’ll be listening to. Thanks for a great 2.75 years, and here is to 2.75 more. Damn few like us, and they’re all dead.

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I love mashups — they blow my mind. Imagine two or more of your favourite songs smushed together to form a new song that challenges your brain. Imagine the beatles jamming with Guns and Roses or ACDC hammering it out with Smokey Robinson, clearly these are unholy alliances. Yet, mashups are so right. What follows is some great musical mashups done by amazingly talented artists. In no particular order, here is what would be on the MaxPower Birthday Mashup Album » Read the rest of the entry..

Observe the best of today’s splog spam my filters caught. Somewhere between step 1 and step 1 + n, this guy screwed up. I’m thinking it was on step 2, but it could have been steps 3 or 4. Care to guess?

Nice blog. If you are interested in other ##KEYWORD## related blogs visit ##LINK##
Interesting Post. If you find ##KEYWORD## interesting, I invite you to check out my ##LINK## website.

I really liked your post. You would probably enjoy the articles I have compiled at my ##LINK## site. I invite you to check it out.
As always, you have compiled a very interesting blog here. I think you would enjoy my ##LINK## blog. You should check it out if you are interested in all things related to ##KEYWORD##

Very well written! Based on the content of your blog, I think you might enjoy some of the articles at my ##LINK## site and hope you will give it a peek.

Here is my reply: » Read the rest of the entry..

I’ve written about methods of alerting contextual advertising networks to abuse before [see Abusing Yahoo!’s Contextual Advertising (YPN) — not clickfraud] and have been pleased to see some action on the front. But things are still too complicated and time consuming. Spammers continue to prosper at the expense of us all (see why everyone loses).

The following guide explains two ways of fighting back and alerting the Adsense program of abuse that you stumble across when browsing the web (skip the preamble and head right to the two methods). A typical scenario involves the following: » Read the rest of the entry..