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Whether you're a product manager, marketer, or business owner, you'll definitely want to see this presentation, "Happiness as Your Business Model", by Tara Hunt from the 2008 Think Digital conference in NewcastleGateshead, UK.

"Happiness as Your Business Model" tells us that people or consumers are:

• inefficient
• upredictable
• motivated by what makes him/her happy
• ignores marketing messages where possible and rails against marketing messages that annoy
• will sometimes cut off his/her nose off to spite his/her face
• buys crap that makes no sense whatsoever, like those big foam fingers for $10 at sports games

Also known as Command and Control Servers (C&C), botnets are an interesting phenomenon that involves a group of compromised host machines that are controlled by a smaller number of command hosts, which sometimes are controlled by a "bot herder", the botnet's originator.

A recent article about detecting email spamming botnets was published by a series of Microsoft Researchers where they developed an innovative system called AutoRE. Naturally they tested the framework against MSN Hotmail, and their findings were pretty compelling.