A Couple of Pests

While perusing the news, I ran across two articles about invaders. One is an invader of the blood stream and the other of trees. Both are connected to me oddly enough, so they caught my interest.

Lyme Disease’s bacterium has been found to be far more unusual than thought. It is the first living organism to be discovered that doesn’t live by consuming iron! Instead it apparently uses maganese as a substitute and that explains why it is so hard for the immune system to fight. Tricky things, the microscopic.

Let’s hope that the research is correct and leads to a better treatment of the disease. I did not enjoy my bout of it last year.

Meanwhile, slightly less close to home, the emerald ash borer has entered Houston County with finds in La Crescent. Worry about the insects has been around for years, but they took their time in arriving. I used to carry a card for identifying the insect that got got thrown out during a fit of wallet cleaning. Time to get another one, I suppose.

Just recently I’d been talking to a friend who will be doing a summer internship mapping out the problem in Winona, which is north of La Crescent. The focus of that won’t just be detection, but advising on substitution of different trees to replace the ones being cut down. Interesting stuff, that.

I find myself disliking bugs of all kinds after reading the news today. I wonder why?

Back to working on my next review.

Ill Tidings

Spring has officially arrived though I can’t tell it looking out my window. It is currently seven degrees Farenheit with snow outside and frost on the inner windows of my room. It could be worse.

North Korea cyberattacked South Korea this morning our time and the afternoon their time. Bank and television computer networks were taken down for many hours and some still aren’t operational. What did this mean for the South Korean people? They had to deal with no debit or credit cards working and that includes ATMs. I suspect business to business transactions were also impossible.

Imagine if that happened in the United States.

Of more local concern and by local I mean household, the Subaru started having serious problems overheating Saturday night and Sunday. It is currently in the shop having its engine torn apart for head gasket replacement plus timing and other belts. So financial pain has arrived with spring.

I suppose Saturday was close enough to the Ides of March to qualify, come to think of it.

SWATting Hits a Bigger Name

One of the nastier things being done by people out to harass bloggers and now reporters is making false phone calls that cause a SWAT raid on innocent people. The latest victim is Brian Krebs who is something of a crusader in the Internet security field. More can be found at Ars Technica.

The tactic has moved out of the political arena to the organized crime category if what I’m reading is correct. If the militarization of local police forces didn’t concern me in the past, this sort of thing has me questioning it. In decades past, the image of heavily armed men kicking in doors and hauling people out was something you associated with communist countries and other dictatorships.

If that isn’t a sign of decline, I don’t know what is.

The only thing that can be done about the rise of SWATting is find some kind of way to have local police informed about the potential for false calls for specific people. That only helps those who know they might be SWATted, but I don’t any other thing that can be done other than to introduce training about the practice to local police forces.

Maybe Krebs experience will finally get the irresponsible mainstream media to start talking about the problem. One can only hope.

Ending the Ad Experiment

With the traffic only recovering to around half of what it used to be before December there is no point in continuing to have ads on the blog. I never expected to make any money with them, but the steep decline in page views killed any accumulation of data on ad effectiveness for small sites in my eyes. It had looked like it would be eight years before I'd collect my first payment from AdSense back when the traffic was higher.

Suffice it to say I'm not really impressed with the service and view it as something only for the highest trafficked blogs. The real ad money is in affiliate ads and that would be more work to implement than I care to do for just experimenting. In the end, it turned out to be a very boring experiment that didn't even rise to the level of disappointing.

I did learn more about things such as SERP plus the terrifying creatures Panda and Penguin involved in Google indexing. So it hasn't been a total loss.

There are some on the Net who think that adding ads to their blogs at Blogger decreased their traffic. That seems strange and implausible. If my traffic from Google starts shooting up a month from now I might believe it. It isn't something to hold one's breath over though.

So the blog will be a lot cleaner looking now.

How Many Referral Spammers Are There?

That’s the question on my mind. Yet again faked referral links have shown up in my Blogger stats and yet again it is one I haven’t seen before.

afslotat . net16 . net is the newest one to hit the blog with a tempting link:
afslotat . net16 . net / info / my blog address

It appears to be out of Latvia, but that could be faked too. An attempt was made to load the site in a VM, but failed so I’m very suspicious and advise not clicking the link for any reason.

UPDATED

Another address like it showed up this evening:
radepaha . hs8 . ru / de  /info / my blog address . de

I'm not even going to try to investigate it since it is likely from the same people behind the other.

UPDATED again...

Now I've gotten referral spam from one of the biggest weirdos on the net. escapefrommasachusetts . org is on the loose again after being around as escapefromma . com and this site is dangerous to click on. The latest incarnation of pseudo anarchic drivel is salacious statements about Mitt Romney. A little out of date, that.  DO NOT CLICK!

Yet another UPDATE:

A new variation of the first two spams has shown up and racked up a ridiculous number of hits in one day. It uses the same fake "info" then your blog address in the referral. The new culprit is:

tkdot . com

Kimi ni Todoke Ep. 6: Friends

In one of the most emotional episodes of the series, Sawako takes on the rumor mongers and finds herself in physical danger. Unable to help her, Kazehaya can only wait in frustration for things to come to a resolution. Nothing is more vicious than a pack of teenage girls…

Life is filled with happiness and sadness for you cannot know one without the other. Kimi ni Todoke is at its best showing the ups and downs of trying to grow up through the turbulent years of high school while dealing with the amplified emotions of adolescence. Everything is more intense when you are young with nothing more intense than the hostility of others.

 

A brief flashback to Sawako’s childhood reveals the identity of the girl who gave her the nickname of Sadako. It was the result of an innocent slip of the tongue that often happens to little kids and no malice was meant. Back in the present, malice is clearly intended when our heroine finds herself backed against a wall.

Japan's Tsunami and Earthquake Remembrance Video

For the anniversary of the devastating tsunami that did so much damage to Japan in 2011 a couple of videos have been put up. One of them is utterly beautiful, Blossom. It got to me far more than I expected. Go watch it.