monster Archives - Stay N Alive

Meet My Baby

This is my Baby, no, not that baby. My Ford F-150 is my other baby, and my brother shot this for @MarinaMartin’s Elastic Labs. They hire amateur and professional videographers to shoot clips like this, and pay them for the clips they shoot, which then get used as advertisement on sites like Vehix (if I understand the deal correctly). My brother is a great videographer and if you need someone to shoot video for your event or party he’s the guy to do it – he currently lives in Las Vegas, but I’m sure could travel anywhere if you need his services.

In the video, I talk about my favorite accessory, the Monster iCruze
. It’s a fully integrated device, that sells for about $100, which allows you to control your iPod through the controls on your Factory stereo dashboard controls. Unfortunately, it only supports older iPod models and doesn’t support the iPhone, but if you can afford a cheap 40-60Gb older iPod model it works great, and makes a great alternative for a CD changer, which you can sync with iTunes on your computer. In case you don’t know, I’m the second guy in the video. Ironically, my truck isn’t white – they edited that in, I guess because my baby doesn’t look good enough for them. I see how it is, Vehix. Here’s the video:

[swfobj src=”http://widgets.vehix.com/_video/EmbeddedVideoPlayer.swf?vid=13F0000000027C1&cid=115″ salign=”lt” menu=”true” wmode=”transparent” scale=”showall” quality=”high”]

The License plate of my truck? “SOCIAL”

You can hire my brother through his website, Tripod Productions.

MonsterCable.com Oblivious to SEO

I’ve been searching for a good mobile solution for my iPhone for close to a year now to no avail, and now that I’ve got the new phone I thought I’d do another search. For my old iPod, I own a Monster Cable iCruze, which integrates with your car stereo to attach directly to your iPod and you can then control the playlists on your iPod via your car stereo’s controls. Currently, it is serving as a great car charger for my iPhone, and that’s about it.

So I decided to do a search for an iPhone compatible version of the iCruze today, and was surprised to find that the king of all cables, Monster Cables itself’s, own website is completely inaccessible from Google, or any Firefox 3 user because of supposed “malware”. Currently, if you do a search for “Monster Cable” via Google, you’re presented with a link like below, warning you that the site “may harm your computer”.

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Click on that link, and you’ll go to a page like this, completely preventing access to Monster Cable’s website without explicitly copying and pasting Monster cable’s URL in your browser:

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Explicitly entering the URL, if you are in Firefox 3, takes you to the following page, which gives you the option to continue, but throughout the site this page appears again and again, making it extremely difficult to navigate. Firefox 3 seems to rely on Google’s own malware reporting, which is the reason for Firefox’s error.

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The Google “Safe Browsing Diagnostic Page” for MonsterCable.com seems to indicate that the error is most likely being generated by third party scripts that are “hosted on 9 domain(s), including hdrcom.com, gbradw.com, bkpadd.mobi”. Google seems to indicate that this has been happening over the past 90 days.

It goes without wonder why such a large profile cable company as Monster Cable could not notice such a decrease in traffic from pretty much all of Google, and why if they have noticed, they have not taken action. We clearly know that no one at Monster Cable seems to be a Firefox 3 user, and if they do, they definitely don’t visit their own site, because you think that it would be fixed by now.

Can anyone figure out what the scripts are that Google claims to be malicious?