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By Paul Hartsock
technewsworld.com
February 26, 2010
Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) did its best Woody Harrelson impression this week and set out to bag some zombies. The zombies we're talking about here are PCs infected with malware. The bad guys spread the malware around and then remotely control victims' computers as part of a botnet that can do stuff like send out spam email or carry out DDoS attacks.
In the real world, of course, you have to aim for the head to kill zombies, and that's basically the new strategy Download Free eBook - The Edge of Success: 9 Building Blocks to Double Your Sales Microsoft used. In order to take down Waledac, which was one really bad botnet, it was granted a temporary restraining order from a federal judge that allowed it to cut off 277 Internet domains believed to be run by Waledac's controllers. That severed traffic to Waledac at the ".com" or domain registry level -- essentially decapitating it.
Waledac's main job was spam. It had hundreds of thousands of infected computers ready to do its dirty work, and it could send 1.5 billion pieces of junk email per day -- fraudulent offers for counterfeit goods, BS jobs, worthless stock-pumping scams, questionable pharmaceuticals, all the usual stuff.
Microsoft's strategy seemed to work, but it may not be so easy to take down all botnets this way. It was a long and expensive process to get the necessary wheels turning at the courthouse to get it done, and it's very easy for spammers to just set up a bunch of new domains that haven't been smashed by Microsoft's banhammer.
Also, a lot of spammers operate outside of U.S. borders, where getting the legal permission to do this kind of thing could be difficult. So, as nice as it is to see somebody giving these guys hell, the big spam whack-a-mole game just keeps on whacking.
An inquisition at the hands of European commissioners sounds like a pretty scary ordeal, like it might well involve several implements of torture, all of them rusty. For Google (Nasdaq: GOOG), though, it may be more of a coming of age story -- what kind of technology giant can you be, really, unless you've been investigated by the EC antitrust officials?
The commission says it's received complaints from three companies about Google's search engine ranking practices. One of those companies happens to be associated with Microsoft's Bing engine, and another one also has ties to Redmond. Basically, all three companies say Google gives their Web sites unfair positions in its search rankings. All three offer services that compete in some way with Google -- one's a legal search engine, one's a price comparison site, and then there's the Bing associate. At this point, the European Commission has only opened a preliminary inquiry -- it might go formal with the investigation, or it may choose to forget about it.
It wouldn't surprise Ryan Radia at the Competitive Enterprise Institute to see the EC move forward on this, and he thinks that doing so would prove that the commission's antitrust policies are driven by forces other than concern over competition policies. Said Radia, "I can't think of any other industry where consumers can go to competitors with just one click."
Do the complaints have any merit? First Page Sage's Evan Bailyn doesn't think so -- not from an SEO perspective, anyway. Google may not always be fair in its algorithm calibration, he said, but it doesn't have to be. Every time Google tweaks its system, some sites are winners and some sites are losers, but as long as Google's not manually penalizing specific, individual companies, there's really no foul play.
Google has said it would never, ever do that. That would just be evil, wouldn't it?
http://www.technewsworld.com/story/Microsoft-vs-the-Zombie-Hordes-69436.html
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