PixelStreamed Networking Blog

Have you been using different tools to check your backlinks, PR, and number of pages indexed? You can save alot of time by using Xinu at http://www.xinureturns.com. Xinu is an excellent website to check a wide range of information about your site and your competitors sites. By getting a snapshot of both your site and your competitors you can see what you need to do to outrank your competitor in the SERPs. Get information such as Alexa ranking, backlink and index information for all the major search engines, social bookmark numbers, and more.

Many webmasters have been asking the question when the next Google PageRank Update will take place, and if Google follows the usual 3 month schedule for it’s PageRank updates then the new PageRank should be available on the Toolbar sometime in January. One thing to remember though is that the last PageRank update didn’t follow the usual schedule, it actually took two to three times as long for Google to update the Toolbar. The best thing for webmasters to do is just keep building and promoting their websites, and not to be overly concerned about the PageRank displaying on the Toolbar because Google is actually updating PageRank on an ongoing basis without updating what is displayed on the Toolbar (according to Google). We hope everyone has great results with this next update! Keep on promoting your sites!

German police have expressed frustration about their inability to decipher the encryption used by Skype in order to tap into the VoIP calls of suspected terrorists.

Lawful interception (or wiretapping) of telephone calls has happened since before the time of rotary phones. In many countries, telecos must promise to allow wiretapping to be granted a license. VoIP services provided by software firms independent of ISPs complicate this picture.

“The encryption with Skype telephone software… creates grave difficulties for us,” said Joerg Ziercke, president of Germany’s Federal Police Office (BKA) at an annual gathering of security and law enforcement officials. “We can’t decipher it. That’s why we’re talking about source telecommunication surveillance - that is, getting to the source before encryption or after it’s been decrypted.”

Ziercke’s comments are an attempt to justify controversial German plans, yet to be legally approved, to develop “remote forensic software” (AKA a law enforcement Trojan). Proposals to give explicit permission for law enforcement officials to plant malware stem from a Federal Court ruling earlier this year declaring clandestine searches of suspects’ computers to be inadmissible as evidence, pending a law regulating the practice.

The idea of a law enforcement Trojan has sparked a fierce civil liberties debate, as well as objections from the IT security community. German police are reportedly looking to hire two “specialists” to develop “white hat” malware. Ziercke’s comments provide an insight into the sort of capabilities, such as capturing the raw output of microphones on compromised PCs, that these law enforcement Trojans ought to have.

Ziercke told reporters that it was not asking Skype to divulge its encryption keys or leave “back doors open” for law enforcement authorities, arguing that such requests would leave the eBay-owned VoIP firm at a competitive disadvantage to other services. “There are no discussions with Skype. I don’t think that would help. I don’t think that any provider would go for that,” he said.

Uncrackable Skype?

Skype provides end to end encryption for connections between users, which is not to say that calls are guaranteed to be absolutely confidential.

Security chiefs at the firm talk about providing a “safe communications experience” rather than the rather more robust claims of the likes of, for example, Phil Zimmermann’s Zfone project.

Skype uses widely trusted encryption techniques, such as Advanced Encryption Standard to encrypt conversations and RSA for key negotiation. But unlike Zfone, its source code has not been publically released.

In a presentation (pdf) at Black Hat Europe 2006 Philippe Biondi and Fabrice Desclaux argued that without access to the source code we can’t be sure if Skype is secure. The researchers also expressed concerns that Skype has the keys to decrypt calls or sessions, a contention the firm itself denies.

Often law enforcement agencies are just as interested in who someone is talking to and for how long. Skype offers confidentiality, but not anonymity.

Last year, however, a fugitive chief exec was tracked down to Sri Lanka after a Skype call. Quite how he was tracked down remains unclear, beyond the availability of papers on tracking anonymous peer-to-peer VoIP traffic.
Spys ‘R Us

Ziercke argued that the ability to plant “Trojan horse” spyware on the PCs of suspected terrorists would be an important tool in the armoury of law enforcement officials.

The former East Germany, and the country as a whole before the war, has a dark history of official surveillance. Ziercke said civil rights concerns about the law enforcement Trojan plan were overblown because online searches would be needed only on rare occasions.

“We currently have 230 proceedings related to suspected Islamists. I can imagine that in two or three of those we would like to do this,” he said.

Ziercke suggested the ability to conduct online searches of computer hard drives of suspected terrorists are especially important in cases where suspects suspect they are monitored and leave dodgy material on their hard drives. These comments bug the question, not answered by Ziercke, of how effective a tactic emailing custom-built Trojan to paranoid suspects might be in these circumstances.

Would-be terrorists need only use Ubuntu Linux to avoid the ploy. And even if they stuck with Windows their anti-virus software might detect the malware. Anti-virus firms that accede to law enforcement demands to turn a blind eye to state-sanctioned malware risk undermining trust in their software, as evidenced by the fuss created when similar plans for a “Magic Lantern” Trojan for law enforcement surfaced some years ago.

-From www.theregister.co.uk

A few years back while taking a computer networking class my college professor turned me on to the website “DNS Stuff” which I still use to this very day because it has some extremely useful tools if your job has something to do with the Internet. I thought I’d share it with my readers: http://www.dnsstuff.com

I’ll also be adding the link to the Blogroll so it will be visible in the future.

by Gregg Keizer, Computerworld

The Russian Business Network (RBN), a notorious hacker and malware hosting organization that operates out of St. Petersburg, Russia, has gone off the air, security researchers said today.

According to a pair of Trend Micro Inc. researchers, RBN went dark around 10 p.m. EST Tuesday. “The routing information for their IP addresses has been withdrawn,” said Paul Ferguson, a network architect at Trend Micro. “That’s significant because while RBN has had connectivity issues in the past, then the routing [to its IP addresses] was still being advertised. This time, they’ve been voluntarily withdrawn.

“This is not the result of someone, such as their ISP, blackholing their traffic,” Ferguson continued. “This was done voluntarily.” Another report, however, on The Washington Post’s Web site, claimed that while RBN has severed links to the Internet, its upstream connectivity providers had begun to refuse to route RBN traffic as early as mid-October.

By relinquishing control of the IP blocks it had been allocated, RBN essentially cut ties to the Internet and made it impossible for its domains — which number in the thousands — to access the Web or for users to reach those domains. “Where once there might have been 22 feasible paths for data to take to their IP blocks, now there are none,” Ferguson said.

He speculated that RBN is simply shifting to new digs, diversifying its considerable back-end infrastructure, trying to lay low or all of the above. “No one knows why they’ve done this, but I think they’re down, not out,” he said.

Jamz Yaneza, a Trend Micro research project manager, agreed. “We’re seeing signs of RBN-like activity elsewhere, in Turkey, Taiwan and China. RBN may be moving to places even more inaccessible to the law [than Russia]. Everyone knows they were in St. Petersburg, but now they’re changing houses, changing addresses.”

The Spamhaus Project antispam group has posted information that indicates RBN may have already laid claim to IP blocks located in China, Shanghai in particular.

RBN has been fingered as the source of a multitude of attacks, including last month’s rigged-PDF blitz that used a vulnerability in Windows to drop malware on unsuspecting users who opened specially-crafted PDF-formatted documents. In September, security researchers blamed the gang for infecting customers of the Bank of India with a wide variety of malicious code when they visited the bank’s hacked site.

But while RBN may be diversifying its assets — “piecemealing,” Ferguson called it — it’s unlikely to be gone long. “I can’t believe they’d walk away from the money. Thinking that they’re shutting shop is just naive.”

Many people believe it is extremely easy for inbound links too hurt your SERP rankings and even get a site penalized in Google. While this may be true in extreme cases, we believe that for the most part Google will not penalize a site in it’s SERPs automatically through it’s algorithm. Most site penalizations relating to inbound links occur through some sort of manual penalization after someone has reported link spamming or you are caught by someone in Google’s spam department.
The reason we believe Google can’t do automatic inbound link penalizations through it’s algorithm is because it would be too easy for people to “inbound link spam” their competitor’s website out of top SERP rankings. In addition, the internet is such a big place and there are so many factors involved that the algorithm may incorrectly consider inbound links as “link spamming” on an innocent site.
Of course there are some case in which Google can catch sites link spamming, for example, when a new site is brought online and the next day it has thousands of inbound link, this of course would raise a red flag and can be detected in the algorithm. Any semi-competent SEO person should know this already and stay away from this sort of tactic which of course doesn’t make sense in today’s SEO industry.
If you have a website that has been online for at least one PageRank update (based on our recommendation) it becomes nearly impossible for Google to penalize you for “inbound links” automatically through some sort of algorithm calculation. So for the most part you shouldn’t be too concerned about inbound links hurting your website rankings.

I made a short post on the Digital Point forums about my thoughts on why Google’s latest attempt to stop the buying and selling of text links will fail and decided to write a post about it here on my blog for those of you who read it.

The reason behind me writing this post is because the industry of “Buying and Selling Links” does not just flourish on the idea of PageRank alone. Two other main factors that contribute to the successful and expanding “Links Market” are the importance of the number of inbound links and second, the importance of anchor text for SERP rankings. You can see that in actuality these two factors are without a doubt more important than the PageRank factor, well at least in my experience and opinion.

Google basically just opened up the industry to other websites who now have the higher PageRank to buy and sell their links, and in my opinion they are driving the “Link Market” industry underground - similar to a black market. Like with any other industry, as long as their is a demand for text links (not just for PageRank, but for the “incoming links” factor and anchor text) websites will always be willing to sell placement of text links on their websites and just be more subtle about it. As long as Google’s algorithm relies on off-page optimization factors there is no way they will ever be able to stop the buying and selling of text links unless they decide to remove these variables in their algorithm for ranking websites in the SERPs.

In reality, I don’t really understand why Google is so concerned about the buying and selling of text links. If they left the “players” alone, and people were allowed to buy and sell text links it would actually stop alot of the spamming of the search engines for a number of reasons I think:

1. No black hat SEO site would spend money to pay for all those quality backlinks on a black hat site because of fear they would be throwing away money because the site would just be banned when they get caught. The life of black hat SEO sites usually don’t last too long.

2) The fact that buying and selling text links is forbidden according to Google’s TOS prohibits the bigger companies and more well-established sites from buying links for fear of getting banned by Google. For this reason, the larger websites and companies that actually have the cash and capital to buy text links if it weren’t seen as “bad” in Google’s eyes don’t participate in the buying and selling of links. On the other hand, the smaller mom and pop websites who know they can’t compete with these larger well-known sites for rankings if they don’t buy text links to gain authority have no choice but to risk buying text links. Let’s face it, we all know that getting high rankings in the search engines is a major key in being successful in the online business world.
If Google would just let it be a free for all in the “Link Market” I still feel that the important and relevant websites will become the victor in the SERPs because they have the money and cash to invest in purchasing links, they just don’t do it in right now in fear of getting penalized if caught.
Actually, now that I think about it, Google might be doing a good thing right now for the smaller mom and pop type websites with their current TOS because their TOS has more influence on the well-established sites than any other website (meaning well-established sites are more inclined to following their TOS because they don’t want to lose their authority). They sort of level the playing field for the smaller sites to gain in the SERPs by buying text links until, of course, they get caught and slapped with a penalty.
If Google decided to allow buying and selling of text links the smaller websites would have no chance in ranking because they don’t have the large budget like the bigger corporations who may have an unlimited amount of capital to buy links. Then we would see all the smaller sites crying that it is now impossible to rank in Google because they can’t keep up with larger corporations in buying links.

I guess either way you look at it there is no black and white here, but an extremely huge grey area, and the ones that know how to play the game will be the most successful.