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If you have a WordPress blog and you still scraping your head trying to find out why you’ve been attacked by the Penguin although you did nothing wrong, it just might relate to your blog’s theme or plugins.

I recently revealed that there are much more than a few WordPress plugins, widgets and themes that injects hidden links into the page! Google clearly stating on its content guidelines for webmasters that hidden links are a violation of its guidelines which may even result a complete removal from Google index!

Some plugins’ developers insert the hidden links so they...
Commentary:

Omri Shabat has put together a great article identifying one of the sources of pain stemming from the recent Google Penguin updates.  He lists a number of plugins and themes that you should definitely review to insure that your website isn’t being targeted by Google.  He also mentions a great plugin the Theme Authenticity Checker (TAC) plugin on WordPress that helps insure that whomever you received your theme from didn’t load it up with hidden/invisible text and links, which is a big foul in Google’s book.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tac/

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We may be at the dawn of a new, private era in space.

Wired: How do you think this will this impact NASA?

Horkachuck: It provides a benefit and fills a gap that retiring the Space Shuttle left. It’s a good cooperative effort between us and industry, and both sides are learning new ways.

Plus, it frees up some of our budget to be able to develop deeper space missions. Hopefully changing the cost to low-Earth orbit will allow NASA to go further and deeper into space than we’ve gone before. So it’s a win-win for everybody....
Commentary:

It’s difficult not to root for SpaceX right now.  There are simply to few other games in town, but this space venture fueled by the funds of internet startup success in an age where 50 years of government backed space travel is dying out is in deed an interesting time, a changing of the guard.  Hopefully the new guard will be able to take us to a whole new level, literally!

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Beastie Boys rapper, musician and video director Adam Yauch, known as MCA in the groundbreaking hip hop trio, has died after a lengthy illness, Billboard has confirmed. He was 47.

It was announced in 2009 that Yauch had a cancerous parotic gland and underwent surgery and radiation therapy.

In January of 2011, Mike D told the BBC that the group was "really happy" about Yauch's improved health, a statement that led to reports that Yauch was cancer-free. A spokesperson for the group told Billboard at the time that "Mike did not say that" and Yauch released a statement...
Commentary:

Rest in Peace Adam Yauch and best wishes to your family and friends.  It is a sad day for the Beastie Boys and for fans, but your music continues to put smiles on faces around the world.

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More than a year ago, some bad guys on the Internet wrote a piece of malware inartfully dubbed DNSChanger. About a year ago, law enforcement tracked down the bad guys behind the malware, arrested them, and took over the servers they were using to cause Internet mayhem.

... the servers are scheduled to be shut down on July 9, 2012. When that happens, nearly half a million Internet users who are still infected could lose access to the web, email, and anything else that depends on DNS.

The DNSChanger Working Group has been working to get the word...
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About a year and a half ago, I had a client whose website would get hacked every few months.  We took security step after step to protect the site built on WordPress but it kept getting hacked.  Simple passwords was one of the original problems, but it seemed that once the hackers realized the site was there, it became a huge target even after the password security was boosted.  We needed something to make the site a hard target.

Hackers often deploy scripts or software code to search out sites that are easier to hack than others.  This script in the...

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James Farmer at WPMU.org wrote a very interesting Penguin-related article, which doesn’t make the update look too great, despite its apparently honorable intentions.

The update hit WPMU.org, sending it from 8,580 visits from Google on one day pre-Penguin to 1,527 a week later.

According to Farmer, the Sydney Morning Herald spoke with Matt Cutts about the issue (which may or may not appear in an article), and he provided them with three problem links pointing to WPMU.org: a site pirating their software, and two links from one spam blog (splog) using an old version of one of...
Commentary:

As webmasters continue to investigate how Panda works (or doesn’t) some new evidence indicates two things:

  1. Before Panda, Google must have given extra spammy sites more link juice than seems practical to anyone
  2. Theme Creators (such as WPMU.org) who have links in the footers of the themes they sell or give away may have been hit hard after the Panda update

 

The conclusion for theme designers is to remove those footers links or put a nofollow on them and hope that Google gets their act together with Panda 2.0 soon.

...

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NASA's Spitzer space telescope has detected a light source coming from a large earth-like planet.

This artist's concept shows the super-Earth planet 55 Cancri e. It's a toasty world 41 light-years from Earth that rushes around its star every 18 hours.
Commentary:

This alien planet at twice the size, 8 times the density with an 18 hour year (uninhabitable by us) was spotted via infrared light.  We are quickly, very quickly zeroing in on the ability to find planets close to the size of our own and actually view them!

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A loophole in US tax law will allow Facebook to claim a bumper tax credit when its staff - including 28-year-old founder Mark Zuckerberg - and early investors cash in hundreds of millions of share options following its listing on the Nasdaq.

The revelation comes as the social networking giant this week kicks off a series of meetings to woo potential investors for a listing that could value the business at around $96bn.
Commentary:

Why would Facebook want to pay taxes?  It’s not like they do business in the US or have a large number of users/customers in the US.  They obviously don’t have a lot of US advertisers or US partners or even US employees.

Oh wait, do they?

I’m sure people will be more offended over the latest privacy scandal to erupt out of the terms of service as opposed to shortchanging America.

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More than 1,000 WordPress blogs have been modified to redirect visitors to sites serving malware, affiliate and pay-per-click redirectors, and low quality PPC search result aggregators, through the WordPress' automatic update feature.

The individuals behind the attack have discovered how to add the malicious code to the update.php file, which prompts WordPress to update. This code then injects other code in the wp-settings.PHP file, and effects the redirects.

The update.php file contains the "wp_update_core" function, which is used by the WordPress Automatic Update feature, says Sinegubko.
Commentary:

For years web developers and WordPress developers will told the world and their clients if you want to keep your site secure, you need to keep it updated.  The best (easiest) way to do that  is simply to run auto updates (within reason) when they come available.

The most common WordPress updates, WordPress theme updates and WordPress plugin updates are security updates.  Someone finds a weakness, reports it and the developer or community jumps in and fixes it.

Ergo if you auto updated a plugin you were putting in a security patch typically.

Hackers however figured that out too and also discovered that...

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Target, with almost 1,800 stores, is one of the bigger carriers of Kindles in the offline world, though most of the devices are sold at Amazon’s Web site.

Like other big retailers, Target has been trying to figure out how to stop Amazon shoppers from visiting Target stores to check out products, and then buy them online from Amazon. It is a practice encouraged by Amazon; over the Christmas holiday, for example, the company offered a promotion on its Price Check app that gave shoppers 5 percent off any item scanned at a store.
Commentary:

More details have come out signalling loud and clear why Target is dropping Amazon’s Kindle and related items from Target stores.  Seems this brick and mortar retailer is fed up with Amazon openly touting their competitive advantage to Target’s shoppers while in Target’s stores!

The Amazon Mobile App allows shoppers to scan a product in a retailer and quickly check and see if it is cheaper at Amazon.  Target hints that Amazon should carry different inventory or something, which is not likely to happen unless Target starts demanding different products from its vendors, a practice...

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