AOL Triton Active Update Fix

Note: Everyone should check the later comments below out, as people are always leaving different ways to remove the AOL popup from this and later versions.

If anyone has been getting the damn active update popup from AOL Instant Messenger, Triton version, here is the way to get rid of it.

Anotify.exe is the program that controls all of those annoying popups you get asking you to upgrade this, upgrade that, the only reason I have ever upgraded to a newer version of AOL is because I’m using a different computer and can’t find the last version of the software, so I have to download the latest version. Triton is really a resource hog and those popups suck. So, here is easiest way to get rid of them.

Search for anotify.exe on your system, when you find it, rename it or delete it. Bamm, right there AOL, hehe. Now gotta reboot and make sure it doesn’t reinstall the software. Nope.

Allright, no more AOL Triton popups, woohoo. I was so tired of hearing my kid complain about it, I had already moved to Trillian, so I still had to figure out how to stop it for AOL IM users.

Added: I had a friend who was having the same problem, yet her system did not contain anotify.exe, it ended up being aolsoftware.exe, so I renamed it and it quit working. If you cannot find anotify or aolsaoftware, when you get the popup, hit ctrl-alt-del and click on applications on the box that pops up, then find the active update program, right click it and click on Go to Process. This will give you the name it is currently using, so you can search for the file and rename it or delete it. No more popups.

This is why I hate to update AIM at all, everytime I have upgraded, it’s gotten slower, hogs more resources and is more intrusive.

Added: Don noted in the comments that it has been a few months and I might want to clarify a few things. It’s entirely possible a user might find BOTH anotify.exe and aolsoftware.exe, you should be able to delete both with no problems. In order to find them via Windows Explorer, you have to include system folders in the search, and possibly also hidden files and folders. If you go into Windows Explorer, click on tools, then on folder options, if will bring up the properties screen, click on the view tab at the top and select show hidden files and folders, and it should include those the next time you search.

This is some stuff I probably should’ve included to start with, I always include the hidden stuff in mine etc, so, if some of these instructions have been confusing I apologize. I will rewrite this page one day to make sure it is a lot better.

Posted by Jimmy Daniels Posted in: AOL, Instant Messaging, Research 152 Comments » November 2006

Deceptive Pay Per Click Ads

Ben Edelman has once again done some research, but this time he is talking about deceptive pay per click marketing. He takes search engines to tak in their practice of allowing deceptive pay per click advertising, how they profit from it, and gives examples on how much they could profit from it.

Read Google’s voluminous Adwords Content Policy, and you’d think Google is awfully tough on bad ads. If your company sells illegal drugs or helps customers cheat drug tests, you can’t advertise at Google. Faking documents is no good either. Google also prohibits ads for fireworks, gambling, miracle cures, prostitution, radar detectors, and weapons. What kind of scam could get through rules like these?

As it turns out, lots of pay-per-click advertisers push and exceed the limits of ethical and legal advertising — like selling products that are actually free, or promising their services are “completely free” when they actually carry substantial recurring charges. I begin this piece by presenting example ads from more than two dozen distinct advertisers. (All ads were observed on September 15 or later.) I then explain why this problem is substantially Google’s responsibility along with the evidence suggesting Google’s profits from these scams, and I offer a mechanism for interested users to submit other false or deceptive ads. Source: False and Deceptive Pay-Per-Click Ads

He gives users a way to submit deceptive ads they find on search engines and a complete list of such ads.

Posted by Jimmy Daniels Posted in: Contextual Advertising, Google, Research No Comments » October 2006

Alexa is Useful and Accurate, for the most part

While checking Techmeme I noticed this article called Why Alexa Is Worthless by John Chow. He says the usual things about how easy it is to manipulate the rankings be you and your friends installing the toolbar and surfing their own sites. He says,

You can even do it all by yourself by refreshing your site over and over again. Get a dozen friends to do it and you’re break into top 20,000 easily.

EEEHHHHHHHHH! Wrong. It says on their site they only count one page view per day per page, so you’ll have to actually surf around the site. Now, I’m sure its possible to use bots running on computers, making your employees install the toolbar, yadda, yadda, yadda, but anyone who has had a website for awhile can check their stats to see their traffic dip or rise in the charts at the exact time it drops, or raises in real life. He mentions that his site is 1,421 now, the 3 months number is 27,840, the one week number is 3,533, can you say traffic spike? He has apparently had a lot of digg traffic, so that would explain that, Hello? Who wants to bet this will be a spike in his charts in three months.

My main site that I have watched forever has had traffic patterns exactly the way it is on Alexa, it should my site getting dumped by Google update after Google update until it was gone completely and then its subsequent return. The numbers aren’t dead on but they are definitely close and are certainly close enough to make me believe the rankings of other sites, but I don’t just watch one day traffic numbers.

John, I just wanted to metion how dumb it looks for anyone to call themselves a mogul, didn’t you feel funny when you wrote this headlie?

John Chow dot Com The Miscellaneous Ramblings of a Dot Com Mogul, because that is what I am - a Dot Com Mogul - and that is what I’ll be doing - rambling.

A mogul is a person who controls a large portion of a particular industry and whose wealth derives primarily from said control, now you may have a top 25,000 site, but that definitely does not qualify you to be a mogul. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, those are moguls, you are a webmaster of a tech site. Get over it.

Posted by Jimmy Daniels Posted in: Research, Search Engines, Traffic Rankings No Comments » September 2006

AOL User No. 4417749 Found Easily

Just finished reading this article from the New York Times about how one reporter easily found search user No. 4417749, a user found because AOL Released the Searches of 650,000 users.

Thelma Arnold, a 62-year-old widow who lives in Lilburn, Ga., frequently searches for her friends’ medical ailments, problems, or researches issues just to help, and she loves her three dogs. Over the three months of data that AOL released “by mistake” she conducted hundreds of searches on topics ranging from “numb fingers” to “60 single men” to “dog that urinates on everything”, or “termites,” then “tea for good health” then “mature living,” all of these searches and the others she conducted lead to a reporter finding her and asking if these were her searches.

“Those are my searches,” she said, after a reporter read part of the list to her. Ms. Arnold, who agreed to discuss her searches with a reporter, said she was shocked to hear that AOL had saved and published three months’ worth of them. “My goodness, it’s my whole personal life,” she said. “I had no idea somebody was looking over my shoulder.”

That’s one of the troubles with the Internet, it is way to easy to figure out who someone is, where they live and lord knows what else. This is one example of what can go wrong online, and how one company can help ruin your life. Not saying that AOL did this intentionally, but when you keep data like this, you have to have strong policies on keeping this information safe from people who will use it for their own profit and or other motivations. Either someone bypassed the chain of command at AOL, they didn’t give ANY thought to releasing such data or someone seriously dropped the ball, none of which is good for surfers using the AOL site.

Asked about Ms. Arnold, an AOL spokesman, Andrew Weinstein, reiterated the company’s position that the data release was a mistake. “We apologize specifically to her,” he said. “There is not a whole lot we can do.”

Mr. Weinstein said he knew of no other cases thus far where users had been identified as a result of the search data, but he was not surprised. “We acknowledged that there was information that could potentially lead to people being identified, which is why we were so angry.”

We know, we already saw the lame apologies, and they aren’t going to be as angry as some of these searchers are going to be, I would imagine, this reporter tracking down Ms. Arnold is just one example, and certainly one of the most public, so far. And, as this story notes, it would be easy for these searches to look like one thing, but be something completely different. Ms. Arnold frequently searched for all kinds of ailments, like numb fingers, hand tremors, nicotine effects on the body, dry mouth and bipolar, leading one to think she might have some medical problems, which, in this case was completely wrong, as she frequently searched for friends ailments to assuage their anxieties. But, what about the more extreme examples, as noted on The Paradigm Shift and this blog entry AOL Search Data Shows Users Planning to commit Murder, where users were searching for “how to kill your wife”, “how to kill a wife”, “wife killers” and many more. What if that user was trying to help a friend, say a friend who is abused and in fear for his or her life? I know by looking at the searches it would seem like they were researching for themselves, but without context, what does it really show? BTW, that site has received 207 comments, definitely some interesting reading. As an example,

If you were an author of thriller/horror fiction, you might commonly enter “how to kill my wife” into Google…
Search is an extension of our inner thoughts. Doesn’t mean we’re going to do anything about it (recent case in Sweden aside).
Perhaps Google will be the real-world incarnation of the Minority Report law-enforcement model? I hope not.

Another interesting possibility, and another reason no one should have access to this data, user 17556639 could already be marked by police as a potential wrong doer, and it could be for the wrong reasons. My friend Wayne Porter is a security researcher for Facetime Communications, and in a recent post talked about how he had researched a case of UA pornography, if he was one AOL at the time, he could already be marked by someone as a pedophile.

It reminds me of my reaction to some of the chat transcripts from Perverted-Justice.com. After investigating a case of UA pornography during my job as a security researcher I realized how little I knew about the subject. I went to the site and began reading one of the transcripts and became physically ill. I simply stopped and cried and could not even finish the first transcript. Was it ugly? Yes. Was it terrible? Yes. Did I need to read it? Yes. I am a security researcher- it is my job to understand the criminal and how they operate and not assume I know what is really going on. I didn’t know as much as I thought- I was naive.

Wayne is most definitely not a pedophile, he is a scholar and a gentleman, even if he is hated by many people.

Ms. Arnold says she loves online research, but the disclosure of her searches has left her disillusioned. In response, she plans to drop her AOL subscription. “We all have a right to privacy,” she said. “Nobody should have found this all out.”

Exactly right Ms. Arnold, but AOL has let the “cat” out of the bag, so to speak, so what do we do now? Should companies like AOL, Google, MSN, and other search engines keep this kind of data, or should they purge it frequently, or not even save it at all? Using it internally for improving search is one thing, but this kind of data should not be saved for very long, and it definitely should not be released in the “wild.”

As one commenter on Techcrunch noted, this is only the tip of the iceberg,

Anyways, search engines aren’t the only ones keeping logs, I find ISP logs thousands of times more scary…

And another,

I imagine anyone who isn’t a prude or bland tends to momentarily wonder about various topics with queries that, at face value, sound twisted or odd. Imagine being judged just for being curious about life (something as tame as medical conditions to the diverse range of literature and depths of dialogue). The ability to have curiosity and freely explore information is the greatest ability of a free culture. When people become afraid of seeking information — from fear of being viewed as a criminal — it will set society back into repression and darkness.

Posted by Jimmy Daniels Posted in: AOL, Google, Research, Search Engines, Security 4 Comments » August 2006

AOL Apologizes for Releasing User Data

From News.com, AOL is apologizing for releasing the user search data that was released yesterday.

The randomly selected data, which focused on 658,000 subscribers and posted 10 days ago, was among the tools intended for use on the recently launched AOL Research site, according to reports on various blog sites. But the Internet giant has since removed the search logs from public view.

“This was a screw up, and we’re angry and upset about it. It was an innocent enough attempt to reach out to the academic community with new research tools, but it was obviously not appropriately vetted, and if it had been, it would have been stopped in an instant,” AOL, a unit of Time Warner, said in a statement. “Although there was no personally-identifiable data linked to these accounts, we’re absolutely not defending this. It was a mistake, and we apologize. We’ve launched an internal investigation into what happened, and we are taking steps to ensure that this type of thing never happens again.”

Little too late now, but they mean well, right?

Added: Jason Calacanis just posted his response to the release of the user search data, here. His solution, to not even save it to start with. Great idea, but I somehow get the feeling the people in charge of AOL are more worried about making money from such data than they are about it getting out in the “wild”.

Also, Andrew Weinstein has been posting comments on blogs, like TechCrunch, apologizing for this, as referenced in this post by Michael Arrington.

Posted by Jimmy Daniels Posted in: AOL, Research, Search Engines 2 Comments » August 2006

AOL Releases Searches From 650,000 Users

Remember the big hubbub of the Government trying to get search data from Google and Microsoft last year? Well, apparently no one at AOL does, they just released search data from 650,000 users, they removed the AOL username, but just changed it to a random id number, so all the data is still collected by user, and apparently, it includes lots of stuff that lots of people would be embarrassed by, or jailed over. According to this blog, it includes user searches for terms like “how to kill your wife”, “how to kill a wife”, “wife killer”, “pictures of dead people”, “decapitated photos” and many more. I wonder what that guy is up to? Hopefully, someone can check him out.

So, what does this mean? It wont be good for those users, I’m sure. Even though AOL pulled the research page, and the data, thanks to this wonderful thing called the internet, the data is still available, and I’m downloading it now. This will certainly help some affiliate marketers out with some search term data they can use, but who else could benefit? Combine vanity searches, where people search for their own name to see what is out there, with social security info and you can have identity theft, combine it with some porn searches and you could end up with some big embarrassments for some people, combine it with drugs or other types of searches and people could end up in jail, maybe, I don’t know, but I can’t believe AOL would release this data like this without talking it over.

Michael Arrington from Techcrunch says,

The utter stupidity of this is staggering. AOL has released very private data about its users without their permission. While the AOL username has been changed to a random ID number, the ability to analyze all searches by a single user will often lead people to easily determine who the user is, and what they are up to. The data includes personal names, addresses, social security numbers and everything else someone might type into a search box.

The web page from Aol research, http://research.aol.com/pmwiki/pmwiki.php?n=Research.500kUserQueriesSampledOver3Months, that is being referenced by so many blogs is gone, but below is the text of the page from the Google cache.

500k User Queries Sampled Over 3 Months

This collection consists of ~20M web queries collected from ~500k users over three months. Where the data is sorted by an anonimized user id:

‘The data set includes {UserID, Query, QueryTime, ClickedRank, DestinationDomainUrl}.

The goal of this collection is to provide a real query log based on users. It could be used for personalization, query reformulation or other type of search research.

The graph below shows that not all users are equal in terms of usage.

Basic Collection Statistics
Dates:
01 March, 2006 - 31 May, 2006

Normalized queries:
19,076,613 queries total
10,865,119 unique (normalized) queries
658,086 unique user ID’s

Data View
Below we rank domains by the probability of click-through and ratio of unique queries. Pick a domain and see some of the top queries that users searched for to see that domain.

If you have other views or insights from the data add it to our U500k community.

We have slit the data into 10 randomly assigned groups of users. This will facilitate experimentation on smaller sets of data, as well as consistent training/testing splits across experiments. For example, in our own experiments we have used 8 groups of users’ data for training and 1 group for testing. We repeat our experiments 10 times for cross-validation with a “leave one out” approach. I suggest that if people are not interested in cross validation, they should train on 6 groups and test on 3, again leaving one out (e.g. train on groups 1-6, test on groups 8-10). The assignment of groups is truly random so any similar arrangement is valid. However, if we all use the same splits we can all compare data easily.

Please reference the following publication when using this collection:

G. Pass, A. Chowdhury, C. Torgeson, “A Picture of Search”, The First International Conference on Scalable Information Systems, Hong Kong, June, 2006.

This collection is distributed for non-commercial research use only. Any application of this collection for commercial purposes is STRICTLY PROHIBITED.

CAVEAT EMPTOR — SEXUALLY EXPLICIT DATA! Please be aware that these queries are not filtered to remove any content. Pornography is prevalent on the Web and unfiltered search engine logs contain queries by users who are looking for pornographic material. There are queries in this collection that use SEXUALLY EXPLICIT LANGUAGE. This collection of data is intended for use by mature adults who are not easily offended by the use of pornographic search terms. If you are offended by sexually explicit language you should not read through this data. Also be aware that in some states it may be illegal to expose a minor to this data. Please understand that the data represents REAL WORLD USERS, un-edited and randomly sampled, and that AOL is not the author of this data.

500k User Test Collection (tar gzipped) (79 downloads)
Please comment on this collection, add references to works using it or suggest improvements that will help other researchers. Tell us about your experiences on this collection at U500k or post shorter comments here.

What were they thinking? I bet the data is already in use in many places and people will be feeling the repercussions from this for a long time.

Zoli’s Blog is calling for a boycott of AOL.

Posted by Jimmy Daniels Posted in: AOL, Affiliate Marketing, Google, Research, Search Engines 9 Comments » August 2006