Chuck's Blog

I recently had to play with LogMeIn.com’s services for a class, and began thinking about the service’s security. Yes, they state they use encryption. Yes, they provide the ability to use one time passwords. But are they really secure? I guess I am reluctant to trust third parties with access to my computers, but hey, better safe than sorry.

If anyone does have any experiences with them I wouldn’t mind hearing them. Curiosity may have killed the cat, but the cat had nine lives anyway.

Alright, I’ll confess. I do have a Facebook account, even though I am a bit of a privacy nut. However, unlike most users I have employed the privacy settings to protect me from the average data mining theif.

Although it looks like it’s about to get a bit harder for these folks to get the data they want easily. Facebook just popped up a wizard today for me as I logged in, one that allowed me to change my privacy settings. Naturally I really didn’t change anything, because I already had my settings perfected, but this looks like it will help with eliminating most users privacy issues. Sure, the more hidden options like preventing your account from being indexed by search engines isn’t there, but maybe this wizard will help people realize it does exist.

Props to Facebook for making an effort, even if it is very small.

ab (apache bench) is a command line program that comes with apache by default in most distributions. It allows one to run a quick and efficient test of how a server can handle a heavy load of clients.

To use it simply run (as root)

ab -n number_of_requests_to_try http://www.websiteyouwanttobenchmark.com/

Note that the trailing / is necessary for ab to function. Once run it will produce a easy to read status report showing how fast your server responded to the requests. From there you can optimize your webserver to handle the requests more efficiently, all without having to resort to changing variables in the dark.

Us bloggers pretty much have it made. We write our opinion about something and don’t really have to worry about the cost of the medium used to distribute it. Sure, 30$ USD per month is still a little bit of a bill for hosting services, but most bloggers have a solution to this: Advertising.

Back in June I wrote a post about how the FTC was starting to pay attention to blogger freebies. (Basically compensation for posts) Well, their threat wasn’t idle. According to this article, bloggers (in the U.S.) now must abide by one simple guideline for sponsored/compensated posts: Disclosure. And not a simple note in the middle of the article, but as stated by a official in the FTC “clear and conspicuous.”

The problem I still see with this is how one would define “clear and conspicuous,” because if no one has a solid definition for it than bloggers could be at risk. Lets hope the FTC clarifies this a bit soon before things possibly go bad.

According to this analysis, Bing users are 50% more likely to click on advertisements. That’s cool and all, but how significant are these numbers?

Currently my search engine traffic is split as follows this month (note: numbers are rounded to the nearest multiple of five)

• Google – 80%
• Yahoo – 5%
• Bing – 5%
• AOL <5%
• Ask Jeeves <5%
• All others use the remaining percentage

So as you can see, Google refers far more traffic than Bing. Now, according to this article Bing users click on ads 1.5% of the time they visit a page, while Google users click 0.97% of the time.

Thus, Bing users may click more, but you get fewer of them than Google users. If you work it out, you’ll find that Google actually provides many more clicks than Bing. Pretty simple math, but the search engine percentages could be different if you write about something that Bing likes to direct more traffic to (eg, shopping websites).