Merry Christmas! A Final 2014 Weekly Update from Bill Hartzer

Google’s CAPTCHA reCAPTCHA won’t stop spam bots, Best Buy Oops, ICANN hacked, Freebase is shutting down, and Apple’s mysterious domain names.

This will be my last weekly update in 2014, so I want to wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. I don’t plan on sending out any more updates this year. There were a few significant updates and blog posts since my last update, and a few other posts worth mentioning.

Google’s New CAPTCHA ReCAPTCHA Has Been Hacked
Google recently introduced a new way for websites to try to get rid of spammers and spam bots that automatically fill out forms on websites, such as comments on blog posts. Well, it didn’t take long and someone has already found a work-around, a way for the spam bots to get by Google’s new spam prevention tool.

https://www.billhartzer.com/pages/googles-captcha-recaptcha-flawed-wont-stop-bots/

Best Buy Mistakenly Exposes Their Exclusive Blogger List
Best Buy, in a recent internal communication to their Wolf Bloggers exclusive blogger list, sent out an email to their list of bloggers about an agreement with another affiliate organization. In the email, they CCd everyone. One of the bloggers subsequently Replied All to the list, which then exposed Best Buy’s entire exclusive blogger list. The list contains the email addresses of hundreds of bloggers who Best Buy pays to blog about products sold in Best Buy stores. Best Buy also send those bloggers certain products to test and review.

https://www.billhartzer.com/pages/best-buy-mistakenly-exposes-exclusive-blogger-list/

ICANN Hacked
ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers organization that oversees internet domain names, has been hacked. just goes to show you that just about any organization nowadays is vulnerable, even ICANN.

https://www.billhartzer.com/pages/icann-hacked/

Freebase Shutting Down
Freebase, one of the sites that Google uses to populate the Knowledge Base, is shutting down. It was a site where you can use to get your own personal data or company data into the Knowledge Base. But now it’s shutting down, it’s a Google-owned website. There may still be time to get your data in there, it’s shutting down officially in March 2015.

https://www.billhartzer.com/pages/freebase-shutting-march-2015/

Apple and Afilias Special Projects Register 1800 Nonsense Domain Names
Ever since I originally noticed that Apple was registering nonsense domain names, I have been intrigued about why they would be registering and then not renewing nonsense domain names. And it’s not just one or two domain names, or a dozen of them. Well, now Apple has registered 1800 nonsense domain names, again last week.

https://www.billhartzer.com/pages/apple-and-afilias-special-projects-register-1800-nonsense-domain-names/

That’s it for this week. I usually send an update weekly, unless there is some sort of “big news” or issue that comes up that warrants an update.

Enjoy the holidays, especially if you have kids like I do. They grow up too fast, and now is the time to create fond memories that you, and they, will cherish forever.