What’s the solution? Ars Technica suggests there might not be a good one, in part because malware distributors can go so far as to hire real people to do their dirty work:

Instead of trying to build better CAPTCHA-cracking programs, the malware industry went out and got itself some humans of its own. This effectively bypasses the primary security strength of the CAPTCHA system and leaves it entirely dependent on what we’ll call secondary security characteristics. CAPTCHAs are often complex (particularly these days), which does increase the chance that they’ll be misread (and returned incorrectly), while the font and display of the characters themselves are at least somewhat unfamiliar to the CAPTCHA crackers sitting on the other side of the world.

Sometimes those captcha phrases are pretty incoherent to me too. When I post over at Craigslist sometimes it says I’ve gotten its Captcha wrong, and I end up wondering if secretly I’m a bot?? Apparently not a very smart one either.

The two CEP/ESP related Water’s categories were, Best Streaming Data Management Solution and Best Complex Event Processing Solution.    Water’s awards Best Streaming Data Management Solution to data/event stream processing company StreamBase; and then awards Best Complex Event Processing Solution to Oracle’s BEA product, which is built on top of another data/event stream processing engine.  Confused?   

Alexander Alves,  currently employed by Oracle, previously having worked for BEA Systems, in Best Complex Event Processing Solution, observes:

“Regardless, I find it intriguing that Waters not only does not state the differences between the categories, but also uses the term CEP several times in the SDMS category.

I guess the verdict is that there is still confusion amongst the experts regarding event and stream processing… And that both products must be very good.”

Of course, Alex must be politically correct, and rightly so, since he works for Oracle/BEA and Water’s gave them an award.  But on what tangible, objective basis for Best Complex Event Processing Solution?

According to our 2007 survey, CEP/EP Reference Customers 2005-2007, BEA was in last place based on public CEP/EP reference clients.  

Waters’ award  for Best Streaming Data Management Solution to StreamBase is a much more credible.   Congratulations StreamBase.   Most would agree that StreamBase is a streaming data management solution (SDMS), but so are Apama and Coral8 (and BEA etc etc).   

Waters simply muddies the water, unfortunately.  

Well, it makes sense once you realize that the ranking is done by the company that sells the software that runs many tournaments. The software “phones home” the results so that there is a steady data stream of teams and scores. They’ve put together an algorithm and whereas there may be logical holes, it is a baseline and therefore you can measure.

Anyway, I saw the ASC Knights FC’s page and that they had 637 points from the algorithm. When I viewed the source of the page I could see the point total in plain text, so it was a good target. I needed to be sure that the page wasn’t redirecting or SSL or any other such thing, in other words, the URL that you use on the Content Verification policy needs to be the URL that will provide the string that you are looking for. EM7 can deal with SSL and proxies, but it takes more careful configuration.

I built the CV policy on a virtual device (didn’t want a production machine going red for a personal CV check):

And sure enough, just this morning, a couple of days after our heartbreaking loss in the semi-finals of the State Cup the CV check was red…the point value had changed. The team had gone up to 757 points and dropped from 2^nd to 3^rd in Virginia, but risen to 54^th in the country.

But there is a dark side to CV policies on public websites! Recently many machines in a development environment were checking the same site every five minutes, and those eagle eyes admins at Slashdot noticed. Suddenly no one at ScienceLogic could reach Slashdot, our source of snarky geek news had been cut off!

Naturally, we stopped the CV checks and explained the situation to CmndrTaco and all is well once again.

That’s all for now, thanks for reading.

ShareThis

Well, it makes sense once you realize that the ranking is done by the company that sells the software that runs many tournaments. The software “phones home” the results so that there is a steady data stream of teams and scores. They’ve put together an algorithm and whereas there may be logical holes, it is a baseline and therefore you can measure.

Anyway, I saw the ASC Knights FC’s page and that they had 637 points from the algorithm. When I viewed the source of the page I could see the point total in plain text, so it was a good target. I needed to be sure that the page wasn’t redirecting or SSL or any other such thing, in other words, the URL that you use on the Content Verification policy needs to be the URL that will provide the string that you are looking for. EM7 can deal with SSL and proxies, but it takes more careful configuration.

I built the CV policy on a virtual device (didn’t want a production machine going red for a personal CV check):

And sure enough, just this morning, a couple of days after our heartbreaking loss in the semi-finals of the State Cup the CV check was red…the point value had changed. The team had gone up to 757 points and dropped from 2^nd to 3^rd in Virginia, but risen to 54^th in the country.

But there is a dark side to CV policies on public websites! Recently many machines in a development environment were checking the same site every five minutes, and those eagle eyes admins at Slashdot noticed. Suddenly no one at ScienceLogic could reach Slashdot, our source of snarky geek news had been cut off!

Naturally, we stopped the CV checks and explained the situation to CmndrTaco and all is well once again.

That’s all for now, thanks for reading.

ShareThis

This change would appear to harm Privila’s search rankings — the articles, carefully optimized to include desirable keywords, would no longer be indexed. However, when Google download at the page, the articles re-appear and the adverts are gone. The web server appears to be configured to give different pages, depending on the user-agent.

For example, here’s how soccerlove.com appears in Firefox (Netscape, Opera and Internet Explorer look similar) lots of adverts, and no article:

In contrast, by setting the browser’s user-agent to match that of Google’s spider, the page looks very different: a prominent article and no adverts:

Curiously, the Windows Live Search, and Yahoo! spiders are presented with an almost empty page: just a header but neither adverts nor articles. You can try this yourself, by using the User Agent Switcher Firefox extension and a list of user-agent strings.

I expect the interns who wrote these articles will be displeased that their articles are hidden from view. Google will doubtlessly be interested too, since their webmaster guidelines recommend against such behavior. BMW and Ricoh were delisted for similar reasons. Fortunately for Google, I’ve already shown how to build a complete list of Privila’s sites.

This change would appear to harm Privila’s search rankings — the articles, carefully optimized to include desirable keywords, would no longer be indexed. However, when Google download at the page, the articles re-appear and the adverts are gone. The web server appears to be configured to give different pages, depending on the “User-Agent” header in the HTTP request.

For example, here’s how soccerlove.com appears in Firefox, Netscape, Opera and Internet Explorer — lots of adverts, and no article:

In contrast, by setting the browser’s user-agent to match that of Google’s spider, the page looks very different — a prominent article and no adverts:

Curiously, the Windows Live Search, and Yahoo! spiders are presented with an almost empty page: just a header but neither adverts nor articles. You can try this yourself, by using the User Agent Switcher Firefox extension and a list of user-agent strings.

I expect the interns who wrote these articles will be displeased that their articles are hidden from view. Google will doubtlessly be interested too, since their webmaster guidelines recommend against such behavior. BMW and Ricoh were delisted for similar reasons. Fortunately for Google, I’ve already shown how to build a complete list of Privila’s sites.

I have been thinking more about the RSA Bloggers Meet up that I wrote about yesterday. That got me thinking about how bloggers are so socially interactive and probably explains why we are such suckers for things like Twitter, Facebook, etc. Than I started thinking (I know a lot of thinking going on here, where it goes I don't know) about how blogging has changed in the years I have been at it. While blogging is bigger than ever, alot of the social network around has changed. For the most part, for the better I would add. However, one thing that has changed for me anyway, is Technorati.

When I first started blogging Technorati was the Google of blogs. In fact on the not too rare times that it took for ever to search on Technorati I would think it was being overrun with queries. Putting Technorati tags into my articles was elementary and mandatory. I used to check my Technorati rankings everyday and judged my blogs popularity by its "authority". I would eagerly comb the rankings to see who linked to my site. Then a funny thing happened. Technorati started making so many changes, when I would log in I couldn't find what I was looking for anymore. Than it would seem that no matter what I did, unless I went in and manually pinged my site, it would not update. After a while I got tired of manually pinging from Technorati and my authority started going down.  Frankly, I didn't even care. Then after a while, I couldn't even figure out where to go to ping my site manually on Technorati anymore. It has just lost all relevance for me as a blogger. The shame is I think the blogger community was what Technorati was about.

Instead, I think Technorati has gone after the blog reader community. I can see the wisdom there. There are a lot more readers than their are writers. However, I am not sure they do a great job on that count either. Both Google and Yahoo and even MSN do a good job of blog coverage now. So do blog readers have any allegiance or affinity for Technorati? Does it do anything for them? I don't know. What I do know if they would have done a better job of keeping me abreast of the changes to their site and showing me how to use it and get value out of the service, I would spend more time there and not find it so irrelvant as I do now.

This is something I am going to discuss with my blogger buddies at the RSA bloggers meet up. With a "who's who" of security bloggers in attendance, what would you talk to them about?