Today April 1 — is D-Day for Conficker, as whatever nasty payload it’s packing is currently set to activate. What happens come midnight is a mystery: Will it turn the millions of infected computers into spam-sending zombie robots? Or will it start capturing everything you type — passwords, credit card numbers, etc. — and send that information back to its masters?

No one knows, but we’ll probably find out soon.

Or not. As Slate notes, Conficker is scheduled to go “live” on April 1, but whoever’s controlling it could choose not to wreak havoc but instead do absolutely nothing, waiting for a time when there’s less heat. They can do this because the way Conficker is designed is extremely clever: Rather than containing a list of specific, static instructions, Conficker reaches out to the web to receive updated marching orders via a huge list of websites it creates. Conficker.C — the latest bad boy — will start checking 50,000 different semi-randomly-generated sites a day looking for instructions, so there’s no way to shut down all of them. If just one of those sites goes live with legitimate instructions, Conficker keeps on trucking.

Conficker’s a nasty little worm that takes serious efforts to bypass your security defenses, but you aren’t without some tools in your arsenal to protect yourself.

Your first step should be the tools you already have: Windows Update, to make sure your computer is fully patched, and your current antivirus software, to make sure anything that slips through the cracks is caught.

But if Conficker’s already on your machine, it may bypass certain subsystems and updating Windows and your antivirus at this point may not work. If you are worried about anything being amiss — try booting into Safe Mode, which Conficker prevents, to check — you should run a specialized tool to get rid of Conficker.

Microsoft offers a web-based scanner (note that some users have reported it crashed their machines; I had no trouble with it), so you might try one of these downloadable options instead: Symantec’s Conficker (aka Downadup) tool, Trend Micro’s Cleanup Engine, or Malwarebytes. Conficker may prevent your machine from accessing any of these websites, so you may have to download these tools from a known non-infected computer if you need them. Follow the instructions given on each site to run them successfully. (Also note: None of these tools should harm your computer if you don’t have Conficker.)

As a final safety note, all users — whether they’re worried about an infection or know for sure they’re clean — are also wise to make a full data backup today.

What won’t work? Turning your PC off tonight and back on on April 2 will not protect you from the worm (sorry to the dozens of people who wrote me asking if this would do the trick). Temporarily disconnecting your computer from the web won’t help if the malware is already on your machine — it will simply activate once you connect again. Changing the date on your PC will likely have no helpful effect, either. And yes, Macs are immune this time out. Follow the above instructions to detect and remove the worm.

Thanks in part to a quarter-million-dollar bounty on the head of the writer of the worm, offered by Microsoft, security researchers are aggressively digging into the worm’s code as they attempt to engineer a cure or find the writer before the deadline.

Well, one thing Twitter’s good for: a little celebrity drama. According to a British tabloid quoting an American tabloid, singer John Mayer tweeted his way to a break up with Jennifer Aniston about the same time Ashton Kutcher posted a photo of Demi Moore’s heiney to TwitPics.

Give me a break; when you cover all things Twitter this is news. It’s also pretty funny.

Anyway, anonymous sources close to Jennifer Aniston, so says the tabloid quoting a tabloid, say Aniston broke up with Mayer because his constant tweeting proved him to be a liar. Interesting way to frame it. The same sources say Mayer stopped calling her or returning emails, and when Aniston finally caught up with him, he told her he’d been swamped with work.

His Twitter account, though, showed he sure had time to tweet, and if you got time to tweet, you got time to talk to your hot megastar girlfriend. Maybe it’s a good time to recommend the film “He’s Just Not That Into You.”

Demi’s Backside
Ashton Kutcher via twitpic.com

Demi Moore can skip that one, though. Boy-toy hubby Ashton Kutcher is into her enough that he “secretly” snapped a pic of her bent over in her swimsuit and put it on the Internet.

Ooh, ooh. Let me try a different clever transition. While Mayer’s busy making an ass of himself, Ashton Kutcher…on second thought, let’s just move on with what we’ve got.

Demi called him “a sneak” and noted the picture was taken while she was steaming his suit for attending her ex-husband Bruce Willis’s wedding.

Ah, celebrity love. Ah, weird, alternate universes.

So put that on your list of things one can do with Twitter. If everybody knowing what’s going on your life at all times is good for your career, then Twitter is a perfect tool for TMI.

I suppose the best way to look at a list of popular search queries is from a kind of Taoist it-is-what-it-is perspective. Trying to find meaning in the collective conscience could drive one batty, especially if you’re the judge and despair type.

But in communication scholarship, we like textual analysis and pulling out overarching lessons from what’s on people’s minds and what motivates them. Often in the process we are disappointed in just how simple and predictable humans really are though. Then we’re just in it for the surprises or learning something new.

For example, “nahá” is apparently a Slavic (Czech?) word for naked. In this instance, according Search Engine Guide’s top 300 surging keyword report, which lists the top keywords across search engines in the past 48 hours, people in that part of the world have been pairing nahá with “frosslova,” which is not a word, you may have already guessed, but a name. Likely, they mean an actress named Marketa Frosslova.

They’re searching for a naked actress. How novel.

The businessperson trying to leverage a web presence and take advantage of search traffic to build business looks at a keyword list in a much more pragmatic way. A popular keyword list is not much different from an inventory list. The current volume of a widget is usually an indicator of that widget’s volume of sales. People like it. No need to get all philosophical about it. It just means you need more of that one.

Communication/marketing/creative guys like me tend to look at keyword lists to extract what those words—what people are searching for—can tell us about humans as a collective. This is often as disappointing as it is enlightening. But it is also useful when directing a brainstorming session about the next big thing. Whatever that next big thing is, it will fill very basic (and very old) human needs in a neat new way.

To make it easier, I just looked at the top 30, not the top 300:

1 5048 google
2 3714 yahoo
3 3278 myspace
4 3266 youtube
5 3034 movie trailers
6 2976 craigslist
7 2902 ebay
8 2454 frosslova nahá
9 2260 red tube
10 2208 yahoo.com
11 1938 tube8
12 1821 hotmail
13 1668 mapquest
14 1572 you tube
15 1433 gmail
16 1430 yahoo mail
17 1421 redtube.com
18 1372 myspace.com
19 1357 youporn.com
20 1354 cancer
21 1332 scorpio
22 1322 hotmail.com
23 1304 virgo
24 1285 taurus
25 1259 msn
26 1241 craigs list
27 1239 leo
28 1233 aquarius
29 1211 aries
30 1197 pisces

The four-digit number is the number of times that query was entered in the past 48 hours. In other words, they searched for Google over 5000 times, 72 percent of them probably with Google. In fairness, they may have been looking for information about Google, not to find the search engine itself. Then again, people are 98 percent chimp. But there’s any number of reasons to search for Google, one supposes.

The abundance of .com searches also suggests people either still aren’t as technically savvy as we might expect them to be or, and I think this is closer to it, people would rather enter a URL into the search bar knowing the search engine will correct them if they mistype, rather than risk the frustration of a 404 or the wrong website.

What does that tell you about the average user? It says the browser navigation bar isn’t really serving the purpose of the end user. It says Google has it right in Chrome by making the navigation bar double as a search bar.

The list also shows there’s not a lot of variance in desire among the masses. They generally seem to want and need the same things, which is how something that fulfills an important need reaches critical mass. It’s not so much about radical creativity and variety—when it comes to creating the next Google or Facebook or YouTube—it’s about fulfilling an important need exceedingly well. As for taste, we already know there’s no accounting for it.

I did a quick (human) textual analysis of the top 30 times using a simple synonym/word association substitution method. This method isn’t rigorously scientific, just a quick and dirty way to get the bottom of what people may want. I started by changing the layout of the keywords:

Google yahoo myspace youtube movie trailers craigslist ebay forsslova naha red tube yahoo.com tube8 hotmail mapquest you tube gmail yahoo mail redtube.com myspace.com youporn.com cancer scorpio hotmail.com virgo Taurus msn craigs list leo aquarius aries pisces

Then I substituted general words describing what those things are:

Search engine search engine social network video movies classifieds auctions naked Czech girl celebrity porn site search engine porn site email map service video email search engine porn site social network porn site zodiac zodiac email zodiac zodiac search engine classifeds zodiac zodiac zodiac zodiac

After that, I made them more general by reducing them down to basics:

Hunting gathering socializing watching buying selling sex hunting sex coveting communication hunting watching hunting buying selling superstition superstition superstition

And finally, I reduced those to needs:

Physical need, information need, socialization need, entertainment need, economic need, sex need, communication need, spiritual need

Like I said, this is just a rough sketch, but if you’re busy brainstorming about what the next type of web presence is to capture the collective imagination, it can’t hurt to consider the idea that whatever you come up with, it should fill some burning need.