I finaly made some progress with this merge I’ve been doing. I’ve actually got everything to compile and the code up an running. Some of the stuff even works! 🙂
But some of it doesn’t 🙁 Null pointers galore!
Still it’s only three days late already!
Ho humm, I guess I’ll be putting in some overtime this weekend.
I’ve just posted an updated version of GamerZ b2 stats hack at the forums.
My post is here.
I think I’ve made it more useful. I’m going to use bits of it on my site soon.
Damn, I lost my broadband connection last night! 🙁
So the next couple of entries will be pre-dated. That is I’ll post them with the aproximate times I thought of them.
It came back on sometime in the early hours of the morning. 🙂
I’m still working from home on on this mega merge I have to do.
It got really hard yesterday trying to get the stuff to compile. As an indication of the size of the task, I pulled some stats out of CVS:
Since the two code streams were one some time in May (?), on the first branch there have been more than 10,000 lines of changes in 286 files, and on the other branch there have been more than 42,000 lines of changes in 1209 files.
And I’m trying to bring the two together!
Thanks to TS for the link.
OK, I’m back on page one again in a google search for ‘earthquake in england’, but still not the original ‘Earthquake in England’ story.
However if you search for the phrase “earthquake in england” I’m still number one! But, again, not for the original story.
“OK, Mike… Put the whip down. Step away from the dead horse…” 😉
Prompted by comment left by Chris. I’ve looked into this story some more.
The story at Lockergnome points to a story on The New York Times (free registration required). Which goes into more (non-technical) detail. Software involved in this scam include Morpheus, Kazaa and LimeWire.
Last week, Amazon cut off affiliate payments to Morpheus, one site that employs the shopping software, said an online executive. Coldwater Creek, an online clothing store, has also blocked Morpheus….
A successful affiliate Web site can make $60,000 a month from referrals alone, said Haiko De Poel Jr., chief executive of Abestweb.
That’s a lot of money to be stealing!
At least two of the companies involved, have recently made changes to their software to stop this happening, but that of course won’t affect the millions of copies already downloaded.
Note that this redirection continues even after you have uninstalled the software!
Here’s another article about software, including KaZaa, using Microsoft’s ‘Smart Tags’ to steal visitors from web sites.
I can’t seem to find anything on the technology used, but I image it is simply that the software installs a local proxy on your machine (or hooks into one that’s already their) and parses either the incoming html to re-write the tags or the outgoing requests to substitute the affiliate number part of the well known query strings.
If you have the full spyware/sleazeware version of Kazaa on your machine and click on an affiliates link on someones website; for example a link to a book on Amazon, and subsequently purchase the book, then Kazaa will steal (that is the correct word) the small commission the refering site should have received.
These people are unbelievable in the things they think they can get away with. I really hope they don’t get away with this one.
If you must have Kazaa on your PC use the stripped down KaZaa Lite or at least run one of the spyware removal programs
Thanks to EVHEAD for pointing me to the story on Lockergnome.
