This little gem come by way of Softpedia. Apparently a zero-day Windows Animated Cursor Handling vulnerability affects a number of Windows editions including Vista. Microsoft says it’s not a big problem, but this video shows how simple it “appears” to be to put the next modern marvel of computing in a perpetual “crash restart”. The unfortunate thing is, I think I’m going to be forced into having to deal with this animal, much to my displeasure.

However, despite these mitigations, Windows Vista is very much vulnerable to attacks. In the video embedded at the bottom, you will be able to see Craig Schmugar, virus research manager with McAfee, send Windows Vista into a perpetual “crash-restart” loop by simply dragging a malformed .ani file to the operating system’s desktop.

Enjoy the video after the jump.
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I guess the number one thing I’ve learned over the past few months is it’s hard as hell to do. Honestly I’ve only been at the whole blog thing for about six months but I’m no stranger to using the internet to make money. Forums that I run are several years old and I’ve been involved in other marketing initiatives that were internet based and did very well. This blog thing though, it’s a little different because it’s pretty socially driven. That’s an attraction as well because in a lot of ways it’s like running a forum, the primary difference being many people aren’t usually creating the topics of discussion, but the premise is the same.

Over the years I’ve seen some really good forum topics get posted that have spawned some pretty neat and interesting conversations on various subjects. The immediate disadvantage I usually see with a forum post is keeping it hot or in a view where everyone can see it. On a busy forum that can be a challenge, with a blog it’s a bit easier to manage.

I’ve also learned it takes more work than running the forum. On my forums I have a staff (that’s kind of neat to say) they are all volunteer but they are there because they believe in the community and wanted a hand in shaping it. Over time they’ve become loyal to it so a great deal of the day to day management is handled and unless your part of a blogging network that management falls back to the blog owner. Also lost is the varied creativity, and this I think is a reason why large blog networks prosper. For an individual blogger it’s a constant challenge to come up with new and interesting content that’s relevant to the community as it grows, whereas with a forum there are multiple voices adding to the creative pool. So why not just stick to running forums?

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Yesterday the Google webmaster blog talked a bit about spam reporting and different things we can do to help the big G clean up the indexes. One of the best things they suggest is by using spam reports. Google says they’re always working to improve their algorithms but they also take action on individual spam reports and say while actions might not be immediately apparent there are repercussions. One of those repercussions is what they call “Yellow Carding”.

A complete exclusion from Google´s SERPs is only one possible consequence of a spam report. Google might also choose to give a site a “yellow card” so that the site can not be found in the index for a short time. However, if a webmaster ignores this signal, then a “red card” with a longer-lasting effect might follow. So it’s possible that Google is already aware of an issue and communicating with the webmaster about that issue, or that we have taken action other than a removal on a spam report.

I can vouch for the effectiveness of this because I got hit by it mid last year. I don’t know if the flag came via a spam report but somehow the almighty found me out. Basically I have a site, a PR5 site that was really good for getting new domains indexed quickly, about 3 days. So I’d drop a hidden link on the frontpage because I didn’t want to clutter it up with irrelevant links. Call me lazy, shady or whatever. I get an email one day from Google stating this problem existed and it violated the Webmaster Guidelines and because of that the site was being removed from the index if it wasn’t corrected. Yikes!

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While surfing through my fairly routine list of blogs to see what’s happening this morning I ran across this post John Chow made about an article that appeared on Digg regarding AGLOCO. I’m not all that familiar with AGLOCO but the jist I get is it’s a MLM scheme that pays you to surf the web and there seems to be some good and bad feelings about them. Not being familiar with them I can’t say but John’s article did get me thinking about attitude and how it relates to ones ability to make money in this web environment.

John makes it a point numerous times saying “It’s all about attitude” and he couldn’t be more right. After playing around at this whole making money online thing for a couple years now I’ve learned something. That while it’s difficult to do, so is my normal job and it too is what I make of it. I continuously see people, especially new publishers to the Adsense game saying the same things over and over or making the same complaints over and over. I’ve also been approached by people wanting to get into the game that say things like “what’s the point, that niche is full” or something else? To those I say, please don’t bother.

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