Foreword By The Editor

In this article by Louise Goldstein, a number of important security issues related to the modern Internet, or Web 2.0, as it is commonly known nowadays, are brought into focus. Modern technology is incredibly complex but is now in general use everywhere and its ubiquity is part of the problem. The bad guys are still out there and they are finding ever more ways to attack us. Vigilance has never been more important than now.
Mike Alexander
Author of ‘Internet Traps, Ripoffs And Pitfalls‘

The Modern Internet

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The Internet has given birth to a lot of new possibilities. It is a worldwide marketplace, a communication gateway, a networking venue, and a lot more. However, it has also opened us up to new dangers: viruses, trojans, and many other kinds of Internet malware are all over cyberspace, ready to launch an attack on whoever is vulnerable.

The first line of defense is knowing the enemy. So take a look at these latest Internet security threats. You just might meet one of them one of these days.

Scareware

Malware today are often disguised as anti-virus software and anti-spyware. Take, for instance, Vista Spyware 2011, Windows Restore, and Microsoft Security Center 2011. These software pretend to scan your computer then pretend to find viruses and registry problems and other stuff that should scare you into paying for the software to clean up your computer. (That’s why they are called scareware: because they scare you).

But in truth, the viruses and registry issues were never there in the first place, so you end up spending money to fix troubles your computer never really had.

LizaMoon

This is another scareware that is causing problems for millions of Internet users.

As of March 31, 2011, this malware has been found crawling on more than 500,000 web sites and has shown to be one of the most rapidly spread virus attacks in Internet history. What is worse, this virus not only tricks you into paying for basically useless software, it has also been reported to drain its victims’ credit cards.

Mobile Phones And Social Networks

Mobile phones and social networks are popular new targets for online attacks. Facebook and Twitter users are particularly vulnerable because the messages that contain malicious links come labeled with the names of people they know and trust, so they are more likely to click on these links.

URL Shorteners have also become common tools for driving people to malicious sites, as you never really know what you are clicking on until you reach the site in question.

Mobile phones are popular targets these days. After all, as Denis Maslennikov, a senior malware analyst at Kaspersky Lab, explains, “Any mobile device, be it a smartphone or a basic mobile phone, has a direct connection to its owner’s money via their mobile account”.

Router Attack

While you are worrying about the safety of your computer or your web site, by the way, you might want to worry about your router as well. Hackers who have become bored with taking down Web servers through traffic flooding are now shifting their attention to routers, taking advantage of the vulnerabilities of the Border Gateway Protocol to take servers down. Unfortunately, there is not as yet a quick-and-easy way to protect routers from hacking.

In addition to implementing tighter authentication processes, filtering direct traffic better, and getting tools to detect and trace attacks, ISPs and carriers need to band together and, as a group, implement a protocol that will tighten overall security. This will prevent hackers from infiltrating a secured ISP by tunneling through a trusted-but-less-secure ISP network.

Protecting Yourself

For most of us, the best and easiest way to protect ourselves online is by investing in good quality Internet protection software. If you are low risk, meaning you don’t download a lot of stuff and seldom click on links, you can survive on a free one and there are many good free anti-malware programs from reputable companies out there.

However, if you love to download files, be they movies, PDFs, and most especially, software, or if you like to click links on Twitter or Facebook, you should definitely invest in a good, paid Internet security software. Never trust pop-ups that claim to find more problems than your reputable antivirus has warned you about.

Malware may have grown more sophisticated these days, but anti-virus companies have likewise grown smarter. There is no reason why you should be out in the cold when it comes to online protection.

About The Author

To be sure you are always protected you should have antivirus software installed on your computer. Antivirus review sites will keep you updated with the latest information on viruses.

Foreword By The Editor

This article by Earnest Younge provides a number of excellent offline advertising suggestions that virtually any web business could implement to their advantage. If you find that some of them might prove useful in your situation, be sure to follow the links that can be found in About The Author at the end of the article.
Mike Alexander
Author of ‘Internet Traps, Ripoffs And Pitfalls‘

Promotional Strategies

There are many offline promotional strategies one can use to market a website. Success will depend on the how best one can implement those strategies and understand which promotional tools work best with certain niches or target markets. By carefully carrying out these promotional methods one can build an awareness of an online business by advertising to literally thousands of people.

Participate In Small Community Events

These small events are always looking for donations and sponsorships. In many cases sponsorship can begin from as little as $10.00. In exchange they will allow you to display your company’s banner at the event. This is a great way to advertise.

Print T Shirts With Your Website Address

Give to friends and family to wear as well as your customers and associates. Attend community events with your T shirt on. You become a walking billboard.

Add Bumper Stickers To Your Car

Vista Print sometimes gives free stickers and door magnets. Purchase a few and give to friends and family to add to their cars. Through this alone, thousands of people will be exposed to your website. Also, Vista Print sometimes have a free yard sign promotion. Get one and place it in your yard.

Cross Promote With Other Associates

Provide a percentage of every sale to associates who make a referral. This is a great way to provide incentives to others who are already in your network.

Attend Community Business Events

Attend seminars, workshops and conferences within your niche and related businesses. Bring business cards and brochures to further enhance networking opportunities.

Purchase Printed Pens

Give away pens printed with your website address and distribute them to associates, clients, friends, family members and acquaintances you meet through networking sessions and business events. Leave some at your favorite restaurant, bank, and doctors offices and so on.

Get Listed

Get listed in your community Chamber Of Commerce or business center. These organisations are in the business of promoting small local concerns and they would gladly tell other small businesses about your services. Also, spread the word about your website in your church or spiritual circles.

Write Meaningful And Relevant Articles

Try to get your local newspaper to publish these. The circulation of some local newspapers can be over 100,000 and could mean an introduction to a massive audience.

Create Workshops

these could be for aspiring people in your field. Tell others that you are available for free consultations and will give free business presentations upon request. This way you can build yourself up as an authority in your field.

Summary

These methods, if properly implemented, take your target market properly into consideration and could bear much fruit. The result? An ongoing presence, through word-of-mouth and personal interaction.

About The Author

Looking to learn about online marketing or about Huntsville Web Design services. We will be happy to show you offline website promotion tips and online seo techniques to boost your business.

Image by liewcf via Flickr

Foreword By The Editor

This article by Hornet Thomson is basically about considering a bluetooth wireless keyboard and covers all the pros and cons as well as ending with a specific recommendation. If you find the subject of interest, be sure to read About The Author (last paragraph) and follow his links.
Mike Alexander
Author of ‘Internet Traps, Ripoffs And Pitfalls‘

Security

Bluetooth wireless technology offers a highly secure link to your keyboard and mouse, much more so then the older wireless keyboards, anyway up to 28 feet away. It keeps you connected, saves you time, and simplifies your life in ways you’ve never thought possible. I use laptops exclusively and never a desktop, and even I love the flexibility a bluetooth keyboard can give you!

Battery Power

Bluetooth technology is able to pipe a signal over 10 meters in distance. Wireless keyboards in general work on battery power and are fairly heavy in their consumption because they are generally used a lot of the time. With this in mind its best to get the rechargeable type of batteries.

Because of technical progress in battery life and advances in networking via wireless technology, it is almost certain that very soon every single piece of  hardware that needs a communication pathway to your computer (and back again) will be wireless.

Why Bluetooth?

The advantage of bluetooth rather than infra-red wireless keyboards is that bluetooth makes connecting with your computer a piece of cake in comparison. That’s one reason why bluetooth has become the standard in most computers today.

The critical reason why bluetooth is so much better is that infra-red utilizes radio signals and consequently experiences a great deal of interference. It is also very limited in it’s range capacity.

Smaller Is Better

I know what the average working area is like: papers scattered everywhere, cables, mouse pads etc. With smaller keyboards, a lot more freedom is experienced and a tidier office results.

Hot Keys

Hot keys might be of significant importance to you and, if so, you should search for a keyboard with them installed as an extra. If you are unsure what a hot key is, it is a button on the keyboard that has the ability to run a program just by tapping that button one time. Examples of this may be your email program, or perhaps Internet Explorer, or something else you use repeatedly. A hot-key simply makes it faster and easier to get to where you want to go.

Check This Out

Rocketfish Bluetooth Keyboard RF-ABTKB (can be used for PC or Apple). Technical Details: you can use this bluetooth wireless keyboard anywhere up to 30 feet away. This amazing low profile keyboard with great bounce back that’s built for fast typing has ‘one-touch’ access to multimedia functions, 90 days battery life on 2 AA batteries included (not a long life really but get the rechargeable batteries and save yourself lots of visits to the local shop for new batteries). A recent buyer of the Rocketfish Bluetooth Keyboard RF-ABTKB had this to say about the purchase: “I had a few initial connection problems because it kept dropping out of sync. After a bit of research the problem was easily fixed. Other than this, it works fabulously well and is very smooth to the touch, which I adore. Its got keys suited to both the PC and to the Mac, so it has best of both worlds, you could say. Overall, an unbelievable buy and ten out of ten from me! After getting over the teething problems, I fell in love with this keyboard. It’s just so smooth and my fingers glide over the keys.”

About The Author

Where is the best place to buy Bluetooth wireless keyboards? I’ll show you now. For more info on other wireless products: wireless mouse and keyboards.

Foreword By The Author

The World Wide Web (WWW), unbeknown to many, was actually a European innovation. It was invented by an Englishman, Tim Berners-Lee, and was created in 1990 while he was working as a scientist for CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland. Some people, short on knowledge about how ‘cyberspace’ developed, think he invented the Internet itself, which of course, he definitely did not. The Internet was already in existence (and thriving) and had grown out of ARPAnet, a research network founded (and funded) by the U.S. military. But Internet protocols (the ‘rules’ governing how data is to be transmitted and received) were defined by obscure prefixes such as ‘gopher://’, ‘wais://’, ‘ftp://’, etc. These, and others, are still in use but, because of the WWW, no longer dominate as they once did. Usenet (‘news://’) is still popular though, as is SMTP, one of the original protocols for the most popular (and still fastest growing) of all information dissemination systems, the ever ubiquitous ‘email’.
Mike Alexander
For all your content needs go to ClipCopy Content Solutions

The Original Internet

Prior to the WWW, the Internet consisted mainly of thousands of sets of individual files and text-based messages transmitted by the various transport protocols mentioned above. Most were categorized and stored in databases on computers housed in universities across the USA and around the world. They were accessible only by those who understood the protocols and the intimidatory command systems necessary for their operation.

The Birth of the Web

What Tim Berners-Lee introduced to the Internet, and named the World Wide Web, was the ability to ‘link’ data together, whether that data was located in files on the same server or on servers half a world away. He did this by bringing together three main elements: HTTP—the WWW protocol; HTML—the ‘language’ of the web; and the URL system—for ‘addressing’ websites anywhere in the world (a website being simply an area of disk space on a computer). The use of these three elements would transform the Internet into what he called “a single, global information space”. It would allow, for the first time, transmission and retrieval of ‘pages’ that could each consist of many files. These might be graphics files, text files, sound files, or indeed any other type of file, since the only restriction would be in the application that could interpret the language and present the results as viewable pages (these applications came to be known as ‘browsers’). Thus rich, interactive, multimedia documents, each capable of being linked to any other file on the Internet, suddenly became accessible to everyone.

The Vision

His vision of the web was, in his own words, “about anything being potentially connected with anything. It is a vision that provides us with new freedom, and allows us to grow faster than we ever could when we were fettered by the hierarchical classification systems into which we (formerly) bound ourselves. It leaves the entirety of our previous ways of working as just one tool among many. It leaves our previous fears for the future as one set among many. And it brings the workings of society closer to the workings of our minds.” *

One of the analogies he used to explain what he meant was how a strong smell of coffee could trigger a response in his mind and instantly transport him back to a small room over a corner coffeehouse in Oxford, England, where he once studied. The brain, and therefore the human mind, works by using a web-like structure of connections, or links, he reasoned, and therefore the nearer his ‘global information space’ could come to using a similar structure, the more viable—and versatile—it would be. It would also, like the mind, be the ultimate expression of freedom, with no governing body or stultifying bureaucracy to restrict its development.

The Commercial Web

He foresaw the rise of commercialism on the Internet but welcomed it as inevitable anyway. The anti-commercial bias evident among some academics, particularly those who had used the Internet prior to the introduction of the World Wide Web, was not something he subscribed to.

He was nevertheless wary of the potential for predatory behavior by some parts of the business sector and his work as head of the WWW Consortium, the body set up to lead the web to its full potential, must inevitably have involved pressure being applied to his philosophy from time to time. But his vision was clear and incorruptible. He never considered using his ownership of such unique intellectual property for personal commercial gain. As it turned out though, even he was surprised by the speed and scope of entrepreneurial exploitation of the web. Its potential as a new marketing medium was taken up with almost evangelical fervor and it became firmly established almost overnight.

Newcomers immediately started to get exasperated by the seeming lack of structure they found as they tried to cope with this new non-hierarchical entity. “Who’s in charge of this thing?” marketers asked, and “Where’s the directory of participants?”. This led to the establishment of a whole new industry in its own right, as attempts were frantically made to categorize and map the web.

Search Engines and Portals

Search engines and directories (or portals, as they have come to be known) swiftly came into being and those that gained dominance soon started marketing their services as being indispensable to the ‘surfing’ public. (The irony is that the very term ‘surfing’ sprang from the fact that hopping from one site to another via their links was analogous to the way surfers hopped on a wave not knowing where it would take them but simply to enjoy the ride.) If they were even remotely as reliable as telephone directories, these claims to indispensability might have some justification. But they’re not, and never will be. Both large and small portals and search engines can sometimes be extremely useful tools, of course, but that’s basically all they are, helpful tools, among many other helpful tools. One reason is that the web is growing and evolving at such a phenomenal pace that it’s impossible to keep up with developments. The major search engines and search directories that most people use when trying to find things don’t even come close to categorizing and recording everything. Nor do they, as things are now, have a hope of ever doing so.

Which is one of the reasons why website developers who recognize these facts devote special pages of links to other sites. They understand the non-hierarchical structure of the web, where any data can be linked to any other. So they provide links to other information that their visitors might find useful, thereby enhancing the usefulness of their own site.

The Way Forward

The World Wide Web, precisely as its creator Tim Berners-Lee predicted, has become such a vast and rapidly growing network of sites that practically every topic and subject under the sun is represented on it somewhere.

The fact that there is no official map of what data is available and where it can be found, is sometimes a source of great frustration though, both for users of the Internet, and those who wish to present information for them to find. The surest way to improve the situation for everyone is for website authors and managers to recognize the validity of Tim Berners-Lee’s original vision and to respond to link exchange requests in as positive a way as possible. Even the big search engines and portals are at last beginning to recognize the wisdom of doing so. I predict that the number of incoming and outgoing links a site has will soon become a major factor that they will consider when ‘ranking’ it in their search results.

© Mike Alexander 2002

For all your content needs go to ClipCopy Content Solutions

* Weaving The Web by Tim Berners-Lee 1999. ISBN 0 75282 090 7

Foreword By The Editor

Wireless technology, especially in relation to computer networking and cellphones, is a hot topic right now so it should be no surprise to hear that we welcome the following excellent article on the subject by Ken Snow. As he quite rightly says, wireless technology, due to a number of recent developments, will most likely make tremendous advances over the next few years.
Mike Alexander
For all your content needs go to ClipCopy Content Solutions

Practical Applications

Wireless technology is gaining ground because of its low cost and ease-of-use. We all are familiar with radio and phones that use wireless technology. There are many more possible practical applications for wireless and the breakthrough developments happening in this field are set to revolutionize the future.

Wireless Networking

Wireless networking means less maintenance and less cost. The advent of radio has put a stop to the use of telephones that use wires to transmit signals. The new age cell phones based on wireless technology have made it possible for us to reach anyone anytime. Wireless technology translates into a lower cost since it obviates the laying down of cables and wires and regular maintenance. The other area where a significant impact has been felt is in the networking of computers. The usual scenario of having a wired Internet connection is all set to change. Wireless connections are soon going to be cheaper than the wired alternative and will also be easier to use. This will result in a lot of people shifting to the wireless option, when available.

Microwave Access

Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMAX) will be the next generation of wireless, an improvement over the existing wireless networking that uses a standard called 802.11. The good news is that you will not need to change your equipment, as it will run on the existing hardware. Though scientists are still working on it, it is poised to take the world by storm. The first WiMAX equipment was launched at the end of 2005.

Its biggest advantage will be that it will cover a wide area, which could be as much as up to 50 kilometers! The term Local Area Network (LAN) will be replaced by Metropolitan Area Network (MAN), which would cover the whole city! It will also offer higher speeds of up to an astounding 10MB per second, coupled with improved security. All you would need to do is buy a subscription, plug into a network and you are ready to go!

The Latest Technology

Bluetooth technology is becoming a part of our lives now. Apart from replacing your USB port, it has the potential of replacing all the wires in your equipment, except for the power cord! Imagine the convenience of staying in a house that does not have wires, where Bluetooth connects all the equipment. It would mean fewer hassles in cleaning the house coupled with freedom from the fear of tripping over wires!

It wouldn’t be surprising if by the end of the next decade wireless technology would becomes commonplace. It sounds convenient and should also be lesser in cost. Given its potential, we all seem to have a much easier life, with a faster and safer access to the world!

Article Source

Author – kensnow
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About the author

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