Bad Bad Teacher

01/31/09 – Google Goes Bonkers – Black Lists Entire Internet

A funny thing happened on the way out of January, 2009 which started with BadBadTeacher.com getting black listed by Google as the New Year was rung in.

We got blacklisted by Google!

Again…

Only this time we had a whole lotta’ company as Google black listed every site on the Internet as a “site that may harm your computer”.

Comically, Google also listed itself as a “malware attack site”.

Seems there was a “human error”, only Google refuses to admit where the error actually occurred, and instead continues to deflect blame onto Stopbadware.org which in turn lays the blame squarely on Google.

In any case, one might wish to exercise caution when access google.com as we have it only good authority that it is a malware attack site.

01/02/09 – Blacklisting By Google

Badbadteacher.com welcomed in the New Year by being blacklisted as a “possible attack site” by Google .

Less than 24 hours later, the blacklisting was cleared.

Here’s what happened and why it may happen again not only here but on many sites:

The blacklisting was the result of someone purchasing ad space on a third-party ad network and trying to lure potential victims to a malware injection site. The culprit purchased ad space on an ad network far removed from the ad networks used by badbadteacher.com, however in these economic hard times there’s a lot of reselling of ad placements between networks as the smaller less reputable ad networks purchase unused ad slots on the bigger and more reputable ad networks.

In this “ad slot reselling scenario” small ad networks purchase unfilled ad slots on the bigger and more prominent ad networks and use those ad slots for their clients, some of whom are “bad guys” distributing malware, such as virus, trojan and similar programs. The bad guys frequent the smaller/cheaper ad networks where they can pay a much smaller price for each “click” they generate via their ads.

Currently this is a problem facing not only the small sites such as this one, but even the big sites such as CNN, Weather.com and the NY Times, all of which are subject to the same issues and dangers. The only difference between us and them, is that the big guys get the blacklisting cleared quickly where us little guys have to wait out Google getting around to clearing us.

Less than 24 hours after spotting an ad for a supposed “bad site” on badbadteacher.com, Google cleared us from its blacklist.

This is a situation I only expect to get worse as the economy struggles.

12/23/08 – Holiday Schedule

ALL comments submitted after 4:00 pm EST Christmas Eve and throughout Christmas Day will be held in the moderation queue awaiting manual approval of the webmaster.

The plan is to review the moderation queue late on Christmas Eve and at least three times throughout the course of the day on Christmas Day.

We will return to a “normal routine” on December 26th.

Here’s wishing everyone a Merry Christmas!!!

08/11/08 – The New Look

After a weekend of testing the Mandigo theme with only minor issues, this new theme has become “the theme” for BBT and will remain so, unless issues unforeseen at this time surface.

Hopefully our regular readers find the “new look” to be to their liking.

08/09/08 – Testing New Look

We are currently testing the new look of the Mandigo theme.

Testing will continue off and on throughout the weekend and if test results are favorable we will switch to this new theme, if not we will revert to the old theme.

08/05/08 – Change Is Good

First of all, apologies to those that tried to visit badbadteacher.com last weekend and found the site off-line. We were in the process of moving to a different server and as is so often the case things did not go as smoothly as envisioned.

We are currently in the process of what are best described as “housekeeping” changes throughout the site. We are preparing for a whole new “look” for BBT. Of course we will not be changing focus, intensity or scope of our coverage. We are just going to try to look better doing it.

Over the course of implementing, testing and verifying the various “changes” we have in store, our regular readers may catching us doing some “real life testing” and on the next visit see BBT back to the original design. The need for “live testing” and of course a few failures along the way is that our test/development server can not duplicate the real-life conditions the actual site experiences. This means that some of our testing and tinkering has to take place on the “real thing”, so bear with us if you catch us in the midst of our testing and tinkering or picking up the pieces if things do not go exactly as planned…

07/01/08 – Expanding Coverage

We have expanded our coverage of events which we believe will be of interest to our readers.

First and foremost, we will now cover major cases occurring outside the United States in the same manner we cover domestic cases.

And second, we are adding what we expect will be a daily feature called “In the News” where we will be providing info and links to newsworthy items we spot throughout the day.

Hopefully our regular readers will find our expanded coverage a worthwhile addition to our efforts.

6/24/08 – Social Bookmarking Enabled

In response to requests from readers we have enabled social bookmarking for several of the more popular sites and systems.

If we left out your favorite please let us know and we will try to get it on-line as soon as possible.

There are many changes and vast improvements in store for badbadteacher.com in the very near future, so please watch for them as the vast majority of changes in the pipe are the result of requests from our loyal readers.