Google's bin.clearspring.com Warning Explained
Several web sites I've visited today, including Time Magazine and Planet 107.3, are triggering a malware warning in Google Chrome:
The website at www.planet93.com contains elements from the site bin.clearspring.com, which appears to host malware -- software that can hurt your computer or otherwise operate without your consent. Just visiting a site that contains malware can infect your computer. For detailed information about the problems with these elements, visit the Google Safe Browsing diagnostic page for bin.clearspring.com. Learn more about how to protect yourself from harmful software online.
Twitter users report the same problem on Fast Company and the Chicago Tribune, so it's presumably hitting a lot of media sites. I've encountered these warnings before when a third-party advertising service was hit with a malware attack. Every site using widgets or ads from the domain bin.clearspring.com is probably triggering Google's warning.
A blog post on Clearspring states that their widget delivery network was hit Saturday with a malware attack detected by Google:
We noticed early this morning via Twitter that a large number of folks using Chrome were being warned of malware when visiting sites with Clearspring Launchpad widgets. To summarize the event, our portion of the Content Delivery Network (CDN), the service we use to efficiently host all Clearspring widget internals, was compromised with files that redirected users to a certain malware domain (which we won’t link here). We quickly fixed the issue and are now back to normal operation as far as the CDN is concerned. Because of Google's aggressive malware prevention policy, users may continue to see warnings until Google completes its re-review process. ...
Note that this issue had no affect on the AddThis sharing platform, only on widgets served via the earlier-generation Clearspring Launchpad platform.
When Google thinks a web site may be serving malware, it displays a warning in place of the site. Although it's possible to ignore the warning and continue to the site anyway, that's a monumentally bad idea. Within 24-48 hours, the bin.clearspring.com warning will likely go away if Clearspring has cleared up the problem.
I've never heard of Clearspring before, but letting its servers become infected with malware files and delivering those files on third-party sites is a massive PR disaster. The company also was criticized in a Wall Street Journal piece Saturday for putting 55 different Flash-based tracking cookies on the computers of people who visited Comcast's web site:
Clearspring, based in McLean, Va., says the 55 Flash cookies were a mistake. The company says it no longer uses Flash cookies for tracking.
CEO Hooman Radfar says Clearspring provides software and services to websites at no charge. In exchange, Clearspring collects data on consumers. It plans eventually to sell the data it collects to advertisers, he says, so that site users can be shown "ads that don't suck." Comcast's data won't be used, Clearspring says.
Laura Linney Puts the Comedy in Cancer
There's an interesting cover story on the actress Laura Linney by Frank Bruni in the current New York Times Magazine. Linney's had a remarkable career in movies, television and Broadway, but it didn't begin taking off until she was 35. Now she's one of the small number of actresses over 40 getting meaty roles.
After losing close friend Natasha Richardson last year in a fluke accident that occurred on a ski trip, Linney's taken the lead role in the mortality-themed The Big C, a Showtime comedy about a woman with terminal cancer that premieres Aug. 16.
Linney was approached about The Big C in the summer of 2009. The first episode -- the pilot, really -- was shot in November, long before all the others, and Condon remembers that when she asked him to direct it, "she talked about how she felt almost this kind of compulsion to do this, because Natasha’s death had really, really brought so much into focus for her about the fragility of life, and figuring out what to do with it."
What her character on The Big C does with expressly numbered days is eat more desserts. Sneak cigarettes. Dig the backyard pool she has always wanted. Insist that her son spend time with her. And hammer certain life lessons into him before she loses the opportunity to.
I hope the show is funnier than Bruni makes it sound -- the Times has a tendency to make everything sound like an AP English homework assignment. Apparently, laughs are going to be mined from the life changes Linney makes, going from being a sensible wife and mother to someone who lets "her freak flag fly."
Showtime's example of the depths of her unleashed freakiness: "Who says you can't eat dessert as an appetizer?"
That still doesn't sound remotely entertaining. Linney has a tough job ahead of her.
A Mulatto, An Albino, A Mosquito, My Libido
Ladies and gentlemen, the Ukelele Orchestra of Great Britain.
They also rock Shaft, Psycho Killer and Teenage Dirtbag. When they played London's Royal Albert Hall in 2009, the sold-out crowd of 6,000 included 1,000 people who brought ukeleles to accompany them on Beethoven's "Ode to Joy."
The Destruction of Andrew Breitbart
We here at Studio B did not run the video and did not reference the story in any way for many reasons, among them: we didn't know who shot it, we didn't know when it was shot, we didn't know the context of the statement, and because of the history of the videos on the site where it was posted, in short we do not and did not trust the source.
-- Fox News anchor Shepard Smith on Andrew Breitbart
By virtue of publishing the Drudge Retort, I've been following the career of Andrew Breitbart for more than a decade. His rise to prominence from Matt Drudge's uncredited collaborator to liberal-hating firebrand has been quite remarkable, given the fact that he's just a self-made web publisher who never held a job of any importance in media, politics or academia.
By his own admission, he was an aimless and frustrated college graduate in the mid-'90s when he discovered the Internet and decided to reinvent himself on it:
"I said to myself, 'O.K., you are going on a date tonight, and you are not going to bed until you have gone all the way.' And I remember hooking up to the World Wide Web that night, and it was a revelation. It was just like shooting yourself into outer space, and trying to latch onto anyone else who was out there. I remember finding weather sites and earthquake sites, and being able to monitor earthquakes in real time, and that was weirdly invigorating."
I did not expect that Breitbart would rise as far as he has, but now that he's obliterated his reputation with an ugly racial smear against a decent woman in government service, I think the seeds of his destruction have been in place for years.
A little over a year ago, I wrote about how enraged he is all the time:
All external indicators would suggest that Breitbart has a lot to be happy about, but I've followed his work for years and he operates in a constant state of anger at the perceived mistreatment of conservatives, particularly in Hollywood. Since he's around my age, he's lived during an era in which the right wing was ascendant in American politics. I'm not sure he could have survived the '60s and '70s, back when conservatism was the marginalized ideology of Barry Goldwater and washed-up B-movie actors.
Four months ago, I documented how Breitbart has been lying to the media for years:
... Breitbart [has] the good fortune to work in online agenda-driven journalism, where no one is ever held accountable for being wrong. Breitbart lied back then, lied about the ACORN sting and will probably lie in furtherance of the next scoop he peddles to the mainstream media.
He can't be trusted.
I wonder how long it will take the Times and the rest of the major media to figure that out.
There are political points I could score here, since Breitbart's hatred of liberals makes it satisfying to enjoy his fall from grace. But as a self-made web publisher myself, I find it disappointing that he won't simply apologize to Shirley Sherrod and admit a mistake.
He managed to turn his association with Drudge into a huge media platform and doesn't have to answer to anyone. There's no reason he has to be as nakedly self-preservational as the major media, the way the New York Times and USA Today acted when caught publishing Jayson Blair and Jack Kelley's fictional news stories, as if the entire reputation of the papers would collapse like a house of cards if they engaged in open self-criticism.
Breitbart is his own boss. He appears to be rolling in dough. He has Founding Father hair. What good is being a self-employed media mogul if you can't admit you screwed up and try to make it right?
Related:
- Scott Rosenberg: "The problem with Breitbart is not that he is an activist in journalist clothes, but rather that he is a serial purveyor of deceptions who is somehow still viewed as a legitimate source by some of his colleagues in the media."
Hey! You! Get Off of RssCloud
Clinton Gallagher recently posted a blistering tirade against me in the comments of Workbench. He thinks that I'm part of a dishonest campaign against Dave Winer and the RssCloud element:
Cadenhead you are being a jerk putting words in the mouth of Dave Winer --again-- as those of us who used to read the RSS mailing lists can attest; so herein I speak for myself in this regard. Secondly, if you were as professional as you imply Cadenhead --and-- if you were an all-around decent kind of fair play fella (which you are having a problem with) you would use your ill-deserved name recognition to expose the fact that the feed validator at feedvalidator.org has been coded by the sleazy-weasel(s) Sam Ruby et al. to undermine RSS. ...
It is only your dishonesty, the lack of information, the lack of coding skills of the typical web developer and the bully pulpit that causes the rssCloud element to now appear as if must be relegated to the back seat.
I'd like to see rssCloud have a fair chance, the developers of WordPress agree and support rssCloud too so gfy Roger.
Normally I'd have some fun with his over-the-top personal attack and Winer psychodrama, but I'm completely bored with that stuff. RSS is eleven years old. Winer and his BFFs have their view and the RSS Advisory Board has ours. We endorsed the Feed Validator and wrote an RSS Profile to help publishers and developers adopt the format with a minimum of aggravation.
For people like Gallagher who think we suck rocks, the validator is open source and the profile is licensed under Creative Commons. If you hate Sam Ruby, hate me or hate the RSS board, you can use our own work to put us in our place. Though I must warn you there's no money in it and the RSS community is painfully short on groupies, if you don't mind that, knock yourself out.
As for RssCloud, it is now a year since Winer tried to revive it and he's never bothered to write a specification for all the changes he was making. Life is too short to waste time implementing his half-assed ideas. I use PubSubHubbub for real-time RSS support in my software. It's well-specified and it works great.
Modern Journalism is a Serious Pickle
The recent firings of Dave Weigel by the Washington Post and Octavia Nasr by CNN show that mainstream journalists, who are expected to display some personality and attitude on social media to better connect to the audience, will be fired the minute they make an important group mad. I don't envy the job of a reporter at a major media outlet pressed into blogging or tweeting for the company.
Conservative journalist James Poulos sums up the predicament well:
Writers now have competing pressures -- to be witty, quick, ironic, noticeable, flip, to dispatch every clay pigeon tossed up by a culture pandemic with pigeons; but also to self-edit, to self-moderate, to be reticent at the right time, to pussyfoot expertly, to pick battles, to avoid perils, to besmirch rarely, to duck blame, to satisfy spectral overseers. This is a serious pickle, is it not? And yet it now appears to be the cost of doing business. Possibly, this is the internet imitating life.
I found this great quote in a funny fake media orientation video.
Woot Mocks AP's DMCA Copyright Bullying
The DMCA copyright battle between the Associated Press and the Drudge Retort took place two years ago, but Woot CEO Matt Rutledge remembered it in a blog post this week.
Rutledge noticed that when AP covered the sale of his company to Amazon.Com, it quoted from his blog.
The AP, we can't thank you enough for looking our way. You see, when we showed off our good news on Wednesday afternoon, we expected we'd get a little bit of attention. But when we found your little newsy thing you do, we couldn't help but notice something important. And that something is this: you printed our web content in your article! The web content that came from our blog! Why, isn't that the very thing you've previously told nu-media bloggers they’re not supposed to do?
So, The AP, here we are. Just to be fair about this, we’ve used your very own pricing scheme to calculate how much you owe us. By looking through the link above, and comparing your post with our original letter, we've figured you owe us roughly $17.50 for the content you borrowed from our blog post, which, by the way, we worked very very hard to create. ...
We're major digital players now. Don't force us to pass this matter to a collection agency.
In response to Rutledge's mockery, I can only say woot!
Two years ago, when the AP was taking a massive barrage of criticism over using the DMCA to squash the free speech rights of blogs and social news sites, the wire service told Saul Hansell of the New York Times that it was going to produce fair use guidelines for bloggers.
The Associated Press, one of the nation's largest news organizations, said that it will, for the first time, attempt to define clear standards as to how much of its articles and broadcasts bloggers and Web sites can excerpt without infringing on The A.P.'s copyright.
AP never produced those guidelines. My gut feeling at the time was that AP would wait for the issue to blow over and forget it made that promise, because the company sells headline-and-lead syndication packages around the world. Telling people they might possibly be able to quote its stories without getting sued undercuts its business.
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