2005 | h4x3d.com

The euro debate: pros and cons

By: jez

28-11-2006

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Pro- euro:
George Eustice, Director of the No Campaign:
“This is the right decision for Britain – the time is not right to join. The euro isn’t working for those countries already inside the currency, with Germany on the brink of recession, unemployment rising and eurozone growth half the level in Britain.”
- Trade with the UK’s euro partners could grow between 5% and 50% over 30 years if the UK joins the euro

- The UK could be between 5% and 9% richer if it joins the euro (and trade grows at the upper end of expectations)

- Maybe consumers will benefit from increased competition in the UK service sector

- Prices should come down, leading to greater transparency and competitiveness

- Both large and small companies would benefit from diminished exchange rate volatility, especially in the manufacturing sector

- Holidaymakers and travelers would no longer incur the costs of currency conversion when traveling between Britain and other euro countries.

Anti-euro:
Sir Richard Branson, chairman, Virgin Group
“Having a separate currency from the consumers and competitors of our largest market is a big barrier to success.”

- A common European interest rate could lead to instability in the UK housing market

- Evidence shows that London has participated fully in euro financial markets, since the introduction of the single currency

- The UK financial services sector will remain competitive in or out of the euro? Uk doesn’t “need” the euro

- Some retailers would use the introduction of the euro to round-up prices

- The Bank of England will lose its power to the European Central Bank in Frankfurt

- The strength of the euro was supposed to be guaranteed by ensuring that the economies of all the participating countries were in a healthy state and had significantly converged at the time of joining by insisting that they met strict entrance criteria. In reality some members don’t meet the required budget deficit figure of 3% of GDP

Summary: Act II of The Melting Pot

By: jez

04-02-2006

english lk, oberstufe

2 comments

In the second act of the drama “The Melting Pot” Mr. Mendel tries to prepare David for the visit of Vera and her company.
Vera brings along Quincy Davenport, a friend of the Revendal family.
He is a famous music producer. Later on Mr. Pappelmeister, he is Quincy’s private music conductor- joins them.
They are interested in David’s music and they want to send him to Germany in order to study composition. Pappelmeister is interested in music, Quincy on the other hand is only eager to produce David?s symphony.
Due to David?s shyness he is not able to present his work and Mr. Pappelmeister has to look at his symphony manuscript. He is highly enthusiastic.
Quincy has an anti-Jewish attitude and generally bad character.
David realizes that the already wealthy Mr. Davenport wants to exploit him and his work in order to become even richer.
They are having an argument and the reader gets to know that David got antipathy towards Quincy. Therefore he refuses to work for him.
Mr. Mendel and Vera try to settle the dispute but have no success.
At the end of the second act it furthermore becomes clear that Vera and David are in love with each other.

CNN.com – 'Dr. Chaos' goes to prison for hacking – Dec 1, 2005

By: jez

09-12-2005

asides

0 comments

CNN.com – ‘Dr. Chaos’ goes to prison for hacking – Dec 1, 2005

CNN.com – FBI: Internet terror attack unlikely – Dec 8, 2005

By: jez

09-12-2005

Uncategorized

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CNN.com – FBI: Internet terror attack unlikely – Dec 8, 2005

december mix 2005 [uplifting progressive trance mp3]

By: jez

02-12-2005

mp3s

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recently published mix:
Download december mix 2005 (67.0mb)
/ TRANCE AND PROGRESSIVE MP3

promo copy.

june mix [trance mp3]

By: jez

11-11-2005

mp3s

0 comments

Here is a list of my recently published mixes:

Download june_mix (43.4mb) / TRANCE / TECHNO MP3

promo copy. forgot to release this (but in irc), so enjoy this HARD mix. 4 more sets to be uploaded. feel free to comment!

Contemporary world situation as by november 2005

By: jez

01-11-2005

essays

2 comments

israel

What has our world come to nowerdays?
It is now, that I begin to understand the complexity of world.
What the hack is Iran’s leader trying to accomplish by statements such as “We seriously need to wipe out Israel from maps”?
Not as if I’d personally care, but hey wait, isn’t that a bit offensive towards those Jews and whoever lives there?
From my point of view it is rather harsh.
Other countries object. Of course. I bed it is America (again) that will take action in order to protect the zionist country #1.
In other words: Iran is next, but only if the Bush administration and the right wing of conservative republicans get hold of the current affairs.
Affairs such as the CIA leak case. Why would a government or someone working for one of the mightiest countries ever give information about one of their agents to press? Doesn’t make sense on the first glimpse, but when digging deeper it does: The CIA agent’s husband, an ambassador stood up against the Bush administration sometime before the IRAQ war by saying that IRAQ did not attempt to obtain nuclear material in Niger (one of Africa?s states, hope I didn’t spell that wrong). Thus he objected to what America?s conquest of ruining Iraq?s reputation was trying to accomplish. In return, the US government leaked his wife?s agent status and thus ‘ruining her life’ (sort of I guess, seeing as she cannot work as a ‘secret’ agent anymore).

Some thousand miles to the east, back in Germany the political situation is still a mess. There is no stable coalition and therefore no stable government. Even weeks after the election it is still not sure who will fill which department slot. Now, at the end of october 2005, some politicians fully gave up on their work causing a national domino effect. From one day to another several high ranking personalities gave up. One of Germany?s major party, the social democrats substain a big loss as their head of affairs stepped down. What will happen now? Noone knows, but what we, the people, know is clear. It cannot continue like this. The gap between poor and rich is dramatically widening. The amount of poor people increases heavily. There are more and more intellectually challenged children and students. Anyhow, again lateshift has finished and I return back home to post this.

Harvard, Stanford, Duke computers hacked

By: jez

07-10-2005

asides

0 comments

A computer hacker helped applicants break into records at some of the most prestigious U.S. business schools to see if they were accepted weeks before official offers were sent out, officials said Friday. A person who applied to Harvard Business School posted instructions on how to check the application status at several business schools, including Stanford, Duke and Dartmouth, on Business Week’s online technology forum this week. Roughly 100 people who applied to Harvard followed the directions, but many did not learn their fate since decisions had not been entered into the computer yet. Harvard’s next batch of acceptances will be sent out later this month. “The school views this as electronic breaking and entering, and regards this as a very serious breach,” Harvard Business School spokesman Jim Aisner said. The school has identified all people who tried to check their status, Aisner said. He did not say whether those applicants were accepted or rejected. The schools all use ApplyYourself, a Fairfax, Virginia-based company that manages Web pages used by students to apply to roughly 300 universities. The schools also use the company to tell applicants if they got in.

Source: the net / google

Design Your Site for Traffic

By: jez

07-10-2005

essays

0 comments

What better way to start the new year than with more Traffic to your web site. Web Traffic is a critical part of your internet business and it is imperative that you design it to bring you the most amount of Traffic possible.

Designing your site for Traffic includes offering good content, easy navigation and a logical flow. Additionally you must also build your site to draw Traffic from the search engines because if you can obtain high search engine ranking, you can enjoy free Traffic.

It’s important to note, however that good ranking won’t do you much good without a well designed site and a well designed site can’t bring you visitors if no one knows it’s there. Both high ranking and good design need to work together.

How do we pull all this together? Let’s take a look.

-A Word About Design-

A huge mistake I see many website owners make is that they get caught up in making their site cute. They love the little animations, buttons and dramatic backgrounds. What they fail to consider is that these things are worthless if you don’t offer good content, easy navigation and a logical flow.

First of all don’t try to be everything to everyone. Design your site around a theme, preferably a niche theme. Don’t confuse your readers with links all over the page. Design a logical flow. Lead your viewers to where you would like them to go. Leave plenty of white space and keep your pages organized. Clearly state at the top of your pages what you are about and what you would like your viewers to do.

Secondly, I don’t recommend pop-ups. I find that the majority of internet users find them annoying. The demand for pop-up blockers is a good indication that viewers don’t want to see them.

Thirdly, offer good content. Provide information on your site that will help viewers solve a problem. Offer information that they might not get elsewhere. Write reviews regarding your products. Write newsletters and articles and most importantly offer something of value for fr?e. Give your viewers a reason to come back. It will also build trust in you.

-Traffic Builders-

Good search engine ranking can bring lots of visitors to your site. It often takes a few months to rank well but the payoff is lots of qualified Traffic. While it’s not practical to depend solely on search engines for Traffic it can complement your other advertising campaigns nicely. Aiming for high search engine placement is always a plus.

Keep these in mind when developing your site for the search engines:

- Domain Names
Choose a domain name that has your site keywords in it. For example, if you’re a site about pet care, try to include the words “pet care” or words related to pet care in your domain name if you can.

- Keywords
Keywords require research and there are several tools to help you out in this area. These are my favorites:

http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/

http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/

I suggest focusing on only one keyword or keyword phrase per page of your website. This may not seem like a lot but if your site has 20 pages you can focus on 20 keywords. Each page should be considered a landing page for your site. If you have proper navigation on your pages, it will easily allow viewers to see everything you have to offer.

Include your keyword or keyword phrase at the top of your page as well as in at least one header phrase. Also work the keywords into the body of your text as often as you can without sounding redundant.

Your keywords should be in the Title tag as well as in your page description tag. Many search engines no longer look at the keyword tags, but I recommend using them and including the plural forms as well.

- Alt Tags
Search engines don’t index images, therefore any text on your site that is presented in image format won’t get indexed. To solve this problem, you can enter the image description in the ALT tag. To be sure that the search engines recognize all the content on your site, fill in your ALT tags with your keywords. This will boost your keyword frequency and help your site achieve better ranking.

- Linking
Search engines will rate your site by who is linking to your site, so it’s important to establish quality, related links. This can be accomplished in a few ways. One way is to establish reciprocal links with other like sites. When exchanging links be sure to include your keywords in your site title.

Review the page you are exchanging links with. Be sure it is a site that you find easy to navigate and informative. I also recommend that the site’s index page have a Google PR rating of at least one. This ensures that the site is not being penalized by Google. If it is a penalized site then you could be penalized as well for linking to it.

- Include a ‘tell a friend’ and ‘bookmark’ scr?pt on your site.
This gives viewers an easy way to bookmark you and most of all return to your site.

- Include a Site Map
Site Maps let visitors know what information you have, how it’s organized, where it is located with respect to other information, and how to get to that information with the least amount of clicks possible.

Site maps also provide spider food for search engine robots. This can increase your chances of becoming indexed because a site map allows the search engines to easily visit every page of your site.

A site map works best if you include a link to your site map in the navigation of every page on your site.

Finally, don’t let your site become stale. I have found that my search engine rankings improve when I periodically add new pages to my site and keep the content new and fresh. Follow these tips and 2005 may be your year for Traffic.

About The Author
Elizabeth McGee has spent 20 years in the service and support industry. She has moved her expertise to the world wide web helping businesses find trusted tools, enhance customer service, build confidence and increase sal?s.

Is Alexa spyware?

By: jez

07-10-2005

essays

1 comment

Well, no … probably not. At least not if you haven’t deliberately installed some of their software.

But Lavasoft’s Ad-Aware identifies a standard registry key included with Internet Explorer as “Data Miner” spyware, with little or no further explanation, and offers to delete it. I hope this page offers a better explanation, and other alternatives to deletion. Spybot identifies it too, also without much explanation, though they have a smarter strategy to deal with it (more below).

The issue is the ‘Related Links’ feature of IE which appears as the ‘Tools’/'Show Related Links’ menu item (and a corresponding toolbar button if you added it from the ‘Customize…’ link on the toolbar). If you use that feature, IE will contact the Alexa servers to obtain information about other web pages which might be, er, related, open an Explorer Bar, and display those (plus adverts and whatnot). Go check the Alexa web site to see if you think that is a good idea (and, just to be clear, I think it’s a sucky idea), or just to double-check that you haven’t deliberately or unintentionally or absent-mindedly installed some of their software.

And due to a recently discovered bug in IE, you might even transmit (potentially sensitive) URL information if you reload pages long after you close the Explorer Bar, about (even secure HTTPS/SSL) pages for which you didn’t request Related Links.

But if you don’t use that menu or button, Alexa will not hear from you. No spying will take place. Wierd.
Just to be clear, this feature is still ‘spyware’, if you use it,. If you do so, you will be sending information to MSN and Alexa obtained by spying, and there is nowhere that Microsoft adequately discloses and documents that privacy ‘leak’. Sure, Alexa have some information on it, and a pretty clear privacy policy, but you don’t get to know of Alexa’s involvement until after you use the feature, and even then you have to hunt for it, and even then no mention is made of MSN’s interstitial involvement. Don’t blame Alexa though – it’s Microsoft’s responsibility to provide their users with complete and truthful disclosure – and they haven’t.

But if you don’t use it, it won’t be spying on you behind your back, and you may sleep soundly.
Here are some options:
- You can let Ad-Aware delete it, with no harm done (though if you later repair, or patch or upgrade IE, it may get re-established).

- You can ignore the alert and leave it be, with no harm done.

- You can fiddle with it so that it just doesn’t work (so that even if you, or someone else using your PC, accidentally tries it, it won’t contact Alexa).

- Or you can fiddle with it so that it uses Google to find related links, instead of Alexa. See the instructions below.

Here’s the skinny . . .
The existing Alexa/Show Related Links gubbins is just a registry key [#1], creating a menu item [#2], pointing to a local web page [#3], pointing to an MSN search page [#4], which uses the Alexa engine. All that is ‘installed’ on your PC is that HTML page [#3], which uses MSN and Alexa, only if you use it.
[#1] HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Extensions\{c95fe080-8f5d-11d2-a20b-00aa003c157a}
[#2] Within IE, see Tools / ‘Show Related Links’

[#3] C:\Windows\Web\related.htm (for Win9X and XP it’s here. Other O/S’s may be slightly different).

[#4] http://related.msn.com/related.asp?url=

Open ‘Related.htm’ in Notepad to see what it does, if you like. Or try, say, this link . . .

http://related.msn.com/related.asp?url=grc.com

If you don’t use the ‘Show Related Links’ menu links, and if you haven’t installed any extra Alexa stuff [#5] then you are NOT in danger of it spying on you.
[#5] Maybe from Microsoft Internet Explorer Web Accessories)
So, what to do about it?
If you don’t want ‘Related Links’, and/or don’t want anyone else using your PC from inadvertently contacting MSN/Alexa, you could just let Ad-aware delete it for you. Or you could fiddle with it so that it doesn’t work, by just editing the line in your own copy of ‘Related.htm’ (by opening it in Notepad) to one of these :-

from . . .

RelatedServiceURL=”http://related.msn.com/related.asp?url=”;

to . . .
RelatedServiceURL=”http://no_way_no_how.org/=”;

or simply . . .

RelatedServiceURL=”http://127.0.0.1″;
Or if you do want ‘Related Links’ (see Note 4 re security implications), you could . . .
- Install the Google toolbar which has that option (if you’re happy to interact with Google. I am).

- Or just do ‘related’ searches in this format . . . http://www.google.com/search?q=related:www.grc.com

- Or hit the “Similar pages” link shown on all Google search results.

- Or you could just edit the line in your own copy of ‘Related.htm’ . . .
from . . .

RelatedServiceURL=”http://related.msn.com/related.asp?url=”;

to . . .

RelatedServiceURL=”http://www.google.com/search?q=related:+”;

Notes
If you later repair, or patch, or upgrade IE, it may get overwritten by a new ‘Related.htm’. So far I think Service Patches and version upgrades tend to overwrite it, whilst normal or cumulative patches don’t – but it’s anyone’s guess next time. If so you’ll need to do this tweak again (or just save a tweaked copy, then put your version back after the upgrade).

You can choose any search engine or search function you like, of course. You might get some ideas from here (and you’ll find appropriate URLs by looking within the Bookmarklets with Notepad.

Spybot users. If you select their “Alexa Related: What’s related link (Replace file)” option from scan results window, Spybot will effectively overwrite the same line within ‘Related.htm’ with …
RelatedServiceURL=”http://www.google.de/search?q=”;

Well, that’s okay. But it asks Google only to search on the current URL, not for pages related to the current URL. You can manually change it as above if you prefer to keep the ‘what’s related’ functionality, and of course you can change it from the German Google page to the main one, or indeed any localisation of your choosing.

Secunia have recently discovered a bug in IE which means that if you use the “Related Items” menu/button, then any time in the same IE session you happen to press Ctrl+R to refresh a page (including ‘secure’ SSL-enabled pages), even if you’ve already closed the Explorer Bar, the current page’s URL will be transmitted (in plain text, even for SSL pages) to MSN/Alexa!

As Secunia point out: “The data transmitted to “msn.com” and “alexa.com” is the complete URL. In some cases this could contain sensitive information such as username, password, session id, search string, “secret paths”, and more.”

Secunia’s workaround (to block MSN and Alexa at your firewall or Hosts file etc) is good, if you don’t normally need access to those sites. But changing Related.htm (instead or as well) is even better, because it still covers you if MS/MSN/Alexa quietly change servers in the future.

So, until MS patch the bug, you may wish to subvert Related.htm to use an invalid or loopback address, rather than even Google.

Found on the net. Thought of it to be quite useful.

Previous Next

- h4x3d.com

The euro debate: pros and cons

Summary: Act II of The Melting Pot

CNN.com – 'Dr. Chaos' goes to prison for hacking – Dec 1, 2005

CNN.com – FBI: Internet terror attack unlikely – Dec 8, 2005

december mix 2005 [uplifting progressive trance mp3]

june mix [trance mp3]

Contemporary world situation as by november 2005

Harvard, Stanford, Duke computers hacked

Design Your Site for Traffic

Is Alexa spyware?

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