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Brian Krebs at the Washington Post’s Security Fix blog is reporting something that I’ve been suspecting for some time. Virus writers and other ne’er-do-wells are gaming the Google AdWords system to infect computer users searching for items on Google.

I am always a little leery of clicking on the paid links that pop up whenever you do a query on Google. They are often segregated on the right hand side of the screen and I know that they are advertisements and that anyone can put a link there if they bid high enough. Now,  Brian is reporting that searches for the Better Business Bureau website served up links that did go to the BBBOnline site, but passed through a server that installed all sorts of nasty bits on your computer. Google doesn’t show the target of the link in the window for sponsored links like it does for regular links.

Luckily, if you kept your computer up to date you were okay. The exploit used in the attack was fixed last June by Microsoft. But it could portend zero-day attacks that are spread via sponsored links.

This isn’t the first time advertisements have been used to spray malware. Banner ads have been rigged with spyware in the past and managed to get on high volume websites by tricking ad placement companies to run the ads (Brian mentions Webshots and MySpace specifically as previous targets).

I’m not really shocked that Google AdWords is now being used to do the same thing. One of the benefits of AdWords is that it is generally cheaper to run an AdWords campaign than one through Doubleclick or other banner ad agencies.

I run AdSense on my site to generate income to offset the cost of running the website, but I’m definitely looking at Text Link Ads more and more because I can control the links that are served up. I want to know that my website isn’t spewing malware to the masses.

Be careful of the sponsored links (really of any link) because you just never know who put it there and why.

Engadget has a post today about a new HP Color Laserjet printer that is so revolutionary that no one can buy it. The printer is the first output (pun intended) of a $1.4 billion bet on next generation printer technology. The problem that HP has found is that the print technology is too good.

So how can a technology be held back because it is too good? The Engadget articles says that HP can’t figure out how to make money on the printer because it completely throws off the economics of the printing industry. The printer industry follows the old razor blade theory of pricing, whereby they give the printer away and make all their money back on the ink that you have to buy to run the printer.

HP’s new printer is so frugal on the ink that HP can’t mark it up enough to get a decent return on investment. So, they are simply renting the machines and providing the ink to high volume customers. HP’s basically restricting a revolutionary product in order to preserve their business model.

The business model may be under attack anyway. In February, Kodak announced that it was introducing a line of printers whose whole selling point was cheap refills. Walgreens has begun refilling ink cartridges en masse attempting to take over an industry that has been threatened a number of times by the printer companies backhanded tactics.

It’s funny that a technology company is fighting so hard to preserve a pre-digital age business model. We’ve seen HP fight with media firms that attempt to restrict their content to protect their business models despite customers telling them over and over again that the business model is dead and they need to adapt. Hopefully, HP will listen to customers and allow a technology that saves customers money to thrive. It would be a huge competitive advantage for HP to tell customers that they can get inkjet quality prints with laser quickness and cost.

But right now they can’t see the forest from the trees and they want to protect the business model that they are comfortable with rather than do something to rock the boat. The boat is going to be rocked and HP needs to be the one rocking rather than trying to hold on. They are the 800 lb. gorilla of the industry and they have the most to lose (it’s what is keeping HP afloat at this point). But first they have to recognize no industry leader stays that way forever without working for it.

Netvibes, the French company that is trying to be your home page, launched a new service this week called “Universe“. Basically, the Universe pages currently consist of home pages branded by various companies including eMusic, TechCrunch, and Time Warner. You can add the Universe pages to your own home page, but I’m not sure what that means quite yet. Netvibes plans to roll the service out to everyone soon which will allow anyone to create a branded homepage, complete with customizable CSS.

This appears to be an invasion of the MySpace/Facebook crowd where people can add their favorite websites to a branded webpage. It won’t be as flexible as those sites as I don’t believe you can put profiles, and any earthly thing that you imagine, on an ugly page with flashing fonts and backgrounds that make it impossible to read the text. Oh, and embedded music. Can’t forget the embedded music.

I’ve begun using Netvibes as a replacement for the Google Homepage. It’s a nice service to include a few items on my homepage, but it’s definitely not a replacement for a feed reader. It will probably be a lot like what happened with Google Reader where I tried all sorts of replacements before Google did a massive upgrade to the service and it became a clear “best of class”. But for now, I like Netvibes a lot more than YourMinis or simply using something like del.icio.us as a general homepage even though I do use it to bookmark pages.

Intuit’s TurboTax software experienced a major failure last night as slackers who waited until the last minute to complete and file their returns overwhelmed the service and took down the whole eFile process. The TurboTax message boards are lit up with irate customers demanding the heads of various Intuit executives (and the poor lacky that has to communicate with the customers, who takes the name TurboTaxPatsy).

I think the moral of the story is to not procrastinate and then hope for the best. If you leave no room for error you are hoping for perfection and that rarely happens; especially when it is a process that is completely out of your control.

Intuit is working with the IRS to try and get them to waive penalties for customers who tried to file last night but were not able to. Personally, I hope the IRS doesn’t waive the penalty but Congress would jump down their throats if they did that; so I am expecting that the penalties will be waived for any customer that can prove they attempted to file their returns on time.

Today, I just have two quick, fun links.

• An interview with Bill Watterson (Calvin and Hobbes) where he answers 10 questions from fans about the strip.
• Engadget’s (annual?) cake baking contest where geeks show off their mad baking skills for prizes.

As I’ve stated before, I [heart] podcasts. The problem is that I don’t have my computer at home on every day to download new ones. This leaves me to listen to a week’s worth of American Public Media’s Marketplace a week after they air. That’s not very timely for a news program and would be even worse if I subscribed to the Morning Report.

I began looking at my web enabled cell phone as the answer. It has a speakerphone, so it can send out sound. It has Windows Media Player, so it must be able to play music. It has a web connection, so I can download podcasts on the go. I began playing around with Opera Mini and trying to use the RSS feed reader built in to subscribe to the Marketplace podcasts. No dice. I then looked around Handango InHand on my phone for a cheap podcatcher.

I found the AudioBay Podcast Player for $5.99. Even though Handango InHand thinks it does fit my phone, the Handango website doesn’t so I had to search by O/S instead of by phone. It does what I want it to do. I had to type in the feed manually off the Marketplace website, but then it instantly connected and downloaded the latest show.

Going through the little speakerphone speaker isn’t great, but it’s enough for a talk radio program. The EDGE connection could be faster (it’s about double dial-up speed), but I can simply set it to download when I get in the shower or start driving to work. I can connect via my wifi at home, so I’m going to attempt that as well. I’m still going to be using my iPod for all of my non-time sensitive podcasts, but my phone is certainly good enough to handle Marketplace and a couple of other news shows that go stale quickly.

Overall, I’d rate the experience exactly what I’d hoped for and that’s good enough for me.

I thought the R2D2 trashcan was cool. This leaves me speechless.

GigaOm has the goods on a company that hopes to release the next generation of online word processors sometime in the second half of this year.

I’m really excited about this. I’ve used OpenOffice, I’ve used Google Docs (Writely), I used Lotus back in the day, but nothing beats good ol’ Microsoft Word for most projects. Yes, it has some annoyances but the functionality built into the program cannot be beat. It’s not terribly convenient for collaboration, but I’ve found the other products lacking in this feature as well. Google/Writely gives you access to your documents on the road, but it is still a stripped down word processor.

I am fully aware of the tendency for “revolutionary” software to become vaporware, but I am excited at the possibility of getting a fully functioning online word processor. It appears from the GigaOm article that the team behind Virtual Ubiquity includes veterans of the word processor wars in the 80s and 90s, so they know how to build a word processor.

They are also hoping to get a downloaded application available, but I have Word at home so I’m not too excited about that. I would rather it simply have Word compatibility so that I could work on it at home via Word and then on the road with a web browser. (Mobile access would be nice as well).

I have it on my radar and will certainly keep an eye on it. Google often responds well to a shot across the bow, so maybe they will add more functionality to Google Docs (or maybe they are already planning). Either way, it’s a win for the consumer.

See other reviews here and here.

(Un?)Fortunately for me, I have a wife that would never let this in the house. And it costs $150.

Product Page via CrunchGear

This isn’t something that I particularly care about, but if you are interested in valuing your blog Raj Dash over at Performancing has a long writeup on how to value blogs for purchase.

There are a lot of ideas that bloggers can use even if they are not interested in selling. Basically, he goes through a total Search Engine Optimization (SEO) profile of your blog.

But why is SEO important? There is a whole industry on optimizing content for search engines. Basically, the more you are seen on search engines the more visitors you get. The more visitors you get, there are more ads you can sell. More ads equals more money.

I don’t sell ads on this site currently. I have dabbled in the past, but I have never found a way to make them unobtrusive with Adsense. I haven’t tried Text Link Ads or any of their competitors out of sheer laziness. But before I do, I will certainly run through Raj’s steps to make sure that the site is fully SEO compliant.