Feedburner are asking everyone to move their feeds over to Google. i hope Google are more professional than Feedburner; but I’m going to wait to see about that before I open an RSS account with Google. I have a gripe with Feedburner; and I very much doubt anything will be any different in terms of the standard of service with Google, at least not initially.

I’ve closed my RSS account with Feedburner; and somehow they managed to sabotage my normal RSS feed when I did that: I’m now locked into a 30-day redirect loop that seems to go nowhere; and nobody can parse my feeds from that URL.

To remedy the situation to a certain extent I’ve set up a second RSS feed, which connects to a lot of the apps and services that the original feed did; such as the newsletter, Facebook, etc. I use a Twitter app with my blog to inform Twitter via xml.RPC. I don’t know if the Ping FM notification system is still working; I can’t remember whether it’s notified via my old feed or xml.RPC. I think probably the latter. My traffic has not been affected in any way anyway, so I’m not too bothered about that right now.

I have to manually update my current feed; which has its drawbacks but also has advantages: It means that I’m totally in control of the feed and can put what I like on it without having to be a php, xml, and RSS expert.

Why did I close my account with Feedburner?

This blog has been up and running for almost 7 months. It’s not long in the scheme of things; it’s not even very long in blogosphere terms. – Yet during those 7 months Feedburner have shut down my RSS feed three times simply because its size limit was larger than they like.

OK but they do let you know that they’ve shut it down don’t they? NO they don’t: they just terminate sending any new entries and expect the customer to notice immediately. They shut off my feed on the 17th January 2009 last time. I noticed on the 21st January that my feed had stopped incrementing. I checked everything. There appeared at first to be nothing coming out of my blog in the way of RSS; but then I remembered Feedburner had taken control of it. On the 22nd I found out that Feedburner had stopped the feed without telling me; so at least 5 articles had escaped notification in certain sectors, and some of my audience who relied on the feed might have been under the impression that I’d stopped publishing.

But surely Feedburner send you an email warning that your feed’s about to run out of space and get too big for them to handle? No, they don’t: Not even that courtesy. In my view they are extremely discourteous, unprofessional, and to all intents and purposes; they suck.

Yes I am aware that their service is free, and yes I am aware that there is a limit on the amount of data that they can store for free: Although I don’t understand why that amount is gigabytes in the case of Microsoft and Gmail; yet only a few kilobytes in the case of Feedburner.

Anyway I made the decision based upon the evidence available that they suck and that I was going to close my account. I went to their website to do so where, in addition to being told that they’d stopped my feed for the first time, (Anyone would think that they’d never heard of email!) I was reminded to transfer my feed to Google which I did without problem. I think I was on Google’s site when I had a last minute change of mind, as my feed remained blocked on Google too, and the GUI was almost the same but with the name Google instead of Feedburner. I searched a while for how to do it and than cancelled my account. there was a box underneath the unsubscribe paraphernalia that was something to do with redirects which was already ticked – I noticed after I’d clicked “submit” but before the page disappeared – Then the page disappeared.

Now when I look for my feed on that GUI it tells me that “This feed is almost toast…” and something about redirection. When I look for my feed I get a blank page, and other feed readers are unable to parse it: they just go round in a redirect-loop and give up after a number of attempts.

But there must be a simple way in the GUI to get the redirect cancelled? No there isn’t: the only way to do it is to post in the Feedburner forums begging the Feedburner staff to do it for you and wait for a reply. I saw a couple of people had waited seven days for someone from Feedburner to reply and rather condescendingly agree to do it: In the meantime the forum chimpanzees, who’d probably wandered over from You-Tube, had posted messages of abuse to the person who’d made the request.

I decided that this was all too much, and that I wasn’t going to fall on my face before the great Feedburner, humbly begging for them to release MY feed whilst subjecting myself to possible abuse from retards. I simply walked away. My feed is toast anyway. – Until they release it; which should be late February. Until then my current feed that I manually update at http://kkomp.com/kkompRSS.xml is all there is. Please subscribe to it. If your feed-reader won’t parse it then get a better reader. Most readers have no problem with it; but one or two are too fussy. I’m not a computer, neither am I an xml expert; so they’ll just have to like it or lump it: At least I know that it won’t be secretly stopped at the whim of some tight-fisted unprofessional company anymore.

I’m not going to use Google instead just yet. ‘Sorry Google, but you appear exactly the same on first impressions; so until you can properly take up where Feedburner left off and provide a better service, I’ll be handling my feeds myself.

For your edification I included this video. Enjoy: -

Feedburner hacked! from Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten on Vimeo

Just after writing this article I realised that I had Feedburner Feedsmith plugin installed; so I’ve deactivated it: Possibly my old feed might just spring back to life having done this – ?

Have you ever visited a site and been redirected straight to a page saying something like:

“WARNING! Your computer is infected! Our initial scans have detected a possible malware infestation on your computer. Click here for a free full scan.”

So this advertiser is claiming to have scanned my files without my permission and found malware? Alarm-bells sound straight away. Whether I click “Scan Now” or “Cancel” their alleged malware scanner begins working: Clever that, as there’s no internet communication as such during this “scan”; and the only thing that’s been loaded onto my computer is a Flash animation.

Before I can think clearly the “in-depth scan” is over and reports that I have X amount of trojans and Y amount of other malicious programs on my PC! Wow: The only way that they could have got on there is if the advertiser had just put them there. I cancel the page and run a malware scan using XoftSpySE. The scan reveals 10 low-risk spyware cookies; at least 6 of which were put there by this advert. The Ad goes on to tell me that I should pay for their software which can find malware that other programs can’t…

Years ago I once downloaded a program called “Spyware Nuker” which used advertising tactics just like this, onto a clean install of Windows 98SE on a new hard-drive which I’d formatted in FAT32 that day. This HD had never been exposed to the internet before then but Spyware Nuker found oodles of malware and claimed it had fixed all of the problems. I uninstalled Spyware Nuker and ran Ad-Aware free edition – It found a trojan and loads of spyware that Spyware Nuker had planted on my system.

My guess is that the program you’re now considering downloading will do much the same. Here’s what actually happened:-

The URL that you typed redirected your browser to the advertiser’s URL, where the ad including a small flash animation and a few spyware cookies were loaded up to your HD. The “Scan Now/Cancel” panel was overall linked to a single link, which told the flash animation to run. After it had run, feigning a scanner GUI, the window uploaded a few names of various malware components at random from a database on the server and displayed them as infections on your computer.

The intention was for you to say

“OMG I have these infections that my current antispyware missed – What a clever piece of software! I must buy it now.”

Probably when you purchase it it’ll upload all those infections to your computer along with some others, it’ll then eradicate the infections it says it found, leaving you with the others it wasn’t supposed to find: Now you have a compromised system that is at the mercy of whoever has paid the highest price for use of your new bot – And worst of all if you’re not that computer-savvy, you’ll never know anything about it unless your ISP contacts you with a complaint.

Advice: If you ever see an Ad appear telling you that your computer is infected; close the page or ignore it – Don’t even bother with it. You might try telling the webmaster of the site that you intended to visit about this; as the webmaster may be unaware that their new advertising that they’ve just signed up for is run by unethical enterprise.

Remember, on the internet; if it sounds too good to be true then it is: 999 out of 1000 times there’s no “probably” about it.  If several reputable programs find no spyware, then one that you’ve never heard of informs you that your computer is infested; it’s fairly safe to assume that you’re being conned; especially if that program is over-hasty to grab your business at all costs.

Some advertising does have a funny side though:

————————–

Seriously now:

*Shazza recommends*

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