Strangely Perfect

Yep!  You read it correctly! I’m shaking at the prospect of not having any cheese-rolling – said Diana Smart, a cheese-maker Apparently the annual suicidal, bone-cracking race down a huge precipitous grassy slope in Gloucestershire by a few hundred nutters has now ballooned into a 15,000 folk free-for-all due to modern instant news and communications. [...]

I had about half the usual quantity of spam this morning. Maybe this is a consequence of Microsoft’s action against a huge list of domains which have been thought to be controlling thousands of computers in a botnet?  Dubbed Waledac, the botnet is thought to have  chucked out 1.5 billion spams from ~90k computers controlled [...]

From The Dream Quest of the Unknown Kadath by H.P. Lovecraft Randolph Carter leaped shoutingly awake within his Boston room. Birds sang in hidden gardens and the perfume of trellised vines came wistful from arbours his grandfather had reared. Beauty and light glowed from classic mantel and carven cornice and walls grotesquely figured, while a [...]

There’s now an official UK Pirate Party. It’s founded on the guiding principles that all art & creativity should be free for people sat in their bedrooms and that those people in the bedrooms should have absolute privacy! True. They want the Swedish model of the convicted file-sharers in the UK.  Also, they want Google [...]

Introduction & History Recently, Microsoft has reworked it’s search engine (MSN Live Search) and renamed it Bing.  This was followed even more recently, with a joint venture between itself and former search king Yahoo! into a hazily explained search and advertising combination. Microsoft is well known for wheeling out the lawyers as backup to it’s [...]

Introduction I knew there was something really, really dodgy about that MyBookFace.net crap highlighted in this post the other day. Not only are they connected to some serious malware (as detailed in the posting), but they’ve an interesting line in popups!!! Google Treasure Chest Rises Yet Again! Here’s what to do… Go to http://mybookface.net making [...]

Atlantic Ocean Floor Profile Following the (as yet unresolved) crash of the Air France airbus on flight AF 447, much has been made about the ocean floor having huge cracks and being very uneven.  Most atlases, online and TV news reports say this and back the statement up with visual imagery of the bathymetry.  See [...]

News Items The only news item missing is that from a premiership football club at the wrong end of the league regarding the future employment status of it’s manager… There have been two news items in the UK today that must surely have everyone either rolling their eyes in the air, or laughing down their [...]

Pre-script Comments are now closed on this posting as Google Treasure Chest is dead. However, the problem has not gone away – the menace continues. For further information, all chat on this and subsequent scams is now here: Google Revolution, Different Name, Same Scam! and here: More on Google Profits and Pacific Webworks/ How Internet [...]

Last night I had a bit of a technical splurge on the Crawling Chaos website.  It’s got a new theme and stripped out a lot of extraneous plugin widgetty things.  I also redid the pages menus in a (hopefully) more logical construct.  I re-jigged page dependencies and set up some 301 redirects in .htacccess to [...]

Introduction While fishing around for some chords I came across azchords.com – as you do.  They’ve a shedload of Google ads and I accidentally hit the banner ad while trying to get rid of pesky popups (why do sites still do this now?)  I was taken to the website of someone called Kevin Hoeffer and [...]

One other side effect of the Google release into the wild UK of Street View, has been people checking up places they know – and I’m no exception. This is where the band Crawling Chaos played their first gig: View Larger Map ….and this is a dude in a farty twat car, debating whether to [...]

A Case of One Man’s Cake is Another Man’s Poison I first read the short story, “The Bureau d’Exchange de Maux” by Lord Dunsany, in the late seventies in a compilation, probably a Panther Books one.  It’s staggering simplicity is matched by the masterful telling. View Larger Map Later, in (a sort of) homage, Crawling [...]

a.k.a.   How Internet Sites strip out Content for Their Own Purposes These are called feed harvesters or content scrapers amongst other terms and exist solely to copy other people’s content for the purpose of serving adverts, charging folks for getting good hit rates, hosting malware… etc I came across one while checking a Google [...]