Domain giveaway marathon - 25 gTLDs at the top of every hour!
[tags]promotion, contest, giveaway[/tags]
Mydomain.com is having a domain name giveaway. 25 domain names (.com, .net, .org) will be given away at the top of every hour, on Tuesday, May 13, at 12pm-7pm EDT.
Mydomain is providing a number of domain services for free, even for domains registered elsewhere. If you like free services, you might find it is worth your while to register a free account with them. We have used their services in the past; however, for a period of about 1-2 years, their service was infected with a malware, serving it with every DNS call. The problem appears to be resolved in the meantime and was reported by Netcraft and Register. If you plan to try your chances, good luck!Sources
MyDomain.com – 20080513 Marathon – Free Domain Name Management tools
Fraud 101: Spam, spim, chain mail and other time-wasters
We recently learned that Canada's Competition Bureau (7) took the unusual step of warning the public about several hoaxes perpetrated on the Internet and not only (9). This is a good opportunity for this article, since after getting for the nth time a chain email from a friend, I had already decided it's about time I write this little ditty, in the hope that if I am to receive more junk / chain mail from friends, they will at least be more interesting / innovative.1. Chain letters
It's very tough to protect yourself from chain letters because the "enemy" is really a hapless friend. You cannot educate / lecture your friends, as that is the surest and simplest way to lose them. But when you've been using and abusing the Internet since the early 90's, like I did, you've seen the same chain letters several times, sometimes translated in the various languages you and your friends have in common.
It's hard to understand what and who invents these. Although we have a few theories, we will not indulge in this silly sport. Rather, we will try to explain why they are bad and how to deal with them.
Such chain emails are, fortunately, easy to spot. The tell-tale sign is usually a statement to the effect:
"for every email you send you (or I) will make $1000"
"if you don't forward this email Viracocha will kill ye"
Hoaxes are bad because they waste time and clutter our mailboxes. They are very frustrating especially when received for the 10th time. When a friend forwards you a hoax, the implicit message is "I could spend 1 minute verifying if this is a hoax, but I prefer to make you waste 1 minute for the 10th time today deleting my crap".2. Spam
This is something we all hate. Luckily, things are now far better than only a few years back. Statistical analysis - more specifically, Bayesian algorithm - helped improve spam filters dramatically. This works by analyzing what you (and possibly others) have marked as spam vs. what you consider to be legit. Each word gets a score based on how often ends up in the spam folders vs how many times occurs in the legit correspondence. Together with other words and clues it allows the program to guess whether any email message is good or not. If you are using Google Mail, you must have noticed the improvement. If you are using Outlook, chances are you are still fighting an organized military with a broom. That's because the filters Microsoft has included in Outlook are not based on "live" statistical analysis, but rather on what Microsoft decides is the top monthly spam. Luckily, you can easily correct this problem with SpamBayes (5). Still, GoogleMail is far better not only than Outlook, but even than any other service, so if you have a problem with Spam, get GoogleMail - it has free spam filters (hotmail was trying to charge for it earlier), free POP, free IMAP, all the storage you want, multiple labels, unlimited filters, etc. You can use it with Outlook easily, if you would rather not store your email off-site.
Google spam filters are so good that there are signs that the spammers are giving up (3).3. SpIM
SpIM is spam for instant messaging clients and is especially prevalent on Yahoo!'s network (at least that used to be my experience). How does it work? Well, you are happily feeding your Internet addiction, when every now and then a message from a "melita" or "larissa" or who knows what other name you've never heard of pops on your screen asking you to visit some porn website. You then have to close that window manually, which is a total PITA because it interrupts your work flow. To protect yourself, you could allow messages only from people already in your contact list, but that is not what you want to do. What if an old friend has just found you and tries to message you? What if your house is on fire and your spouse can only use someone else's IM account to let you know, but can't, because you won't allow it?
These are all good questions. The only solution that I know of that can intelligently allow legit messages while denying SPIM is a Trillian plugin. (Pidgin should have something like that too, but if it does, then I don't know about it.)
Trillian is, as you probably know, an instant messaging client that connects to all possible networks and allows you to access them from the same interface, grouping your contacts based on their relationship to you, rather than their network of choice. You no longer need to have Windows Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, AIM and ICQ all running at the same time, taking memory and screen real estate away from you and slowing down your computer. Trillian basic is free; if you want to your plugins, you need the Pro version, which is $10 or $20, can't remember. To deal with SPIM, you need to install Trillian SPAM challenge (6). This plugin will then issue a challenge/response check to anyone trying to contact you; this eliminates robots and SpIM. Other plugins allow for a multitude of other features, including shipment checker, incoming messages forwarding to any email address or cell phone, etc.4. Malware or phishing websites
These are websites that have been infected with some kind of virus, trojan or spyware. This malware is hidden somewhere in the webpage code and it infects you as you load the webpage in your browser. Many times, legitimate, high-traffic websites might become infected unbeknown to their rightful owners. Google might sometimes alert you when that happens and they are known to remove such sites from their index(4). Perhaps the best way to protect yourself against such malicious websites is to use a secure browser, such as Opera (the most secure browser of all) or Firefox with the NoScript extension, with Java disabled. Secondly, be very careful with what information you are giving away. In 99% of the cases, there is no reason to give away your real name, your real address or your D.O.B. even though the website might insist on it.. Use your judgment, don't be an automaton.5. eBay, PayPal or other shopping sites
This chapter would most likely require a separate article all by itself. Suffices to say for now that the problem with PayPal as well as its parent corp, eBay, is the lack of or inadequacy of their buyer or even seller protection policies. Most credit cards offer some kind of protection, but with PayPal, you're toast. You are completely at the mercy of your vendor, who may or may not deliver your merchandise, and may or may not send you what you thought you were purchasing. Either way, you will probably end up on your own and you will have to swallow your losses. That is why, if you have an alternative (such as a credit card), avoid PayPal.
There are even certain fraudulent non-Internet activities you cannot really protect yourself from. One such case involves the fraudulent use of Interac. If when you pay with your bank card the vendor makes a backup copy of your number and password, then imprints them on a card and empties your bank account, you will find that your bank will seldom reimburse you for the loss. Similarly, if somebody breaks into a shopping website that has your credit card numbers, there is again very little you can do about it. If a payment processor is dishonest, again, there isn't much you can do either (1).
Credit cards used to provide some form of protection against fraudulent charges, with usually $50 or $0 deductible for fraud, but lately, some agreements have been updated to either remove or drastically reduce such protections. We will be writing more about this shortly.Sources
Corrections
none so far!
OLPC - charity or 3rd world profiteering?
What if we told you that you can buy a cheap laptop and, for the price you would normally pay for a Windows based one, you can get a laptop running a much more stable operating system AND send a similar laptop to a child in Africa?
What if that laptop would be useless to a thief?
Finally, what if this laptop, called XO, was not only rugged & child-proof, but was actually designed to be used even by a child?
This offer was initially available only until the end of November, and we covered the XO in the past, but it has now been extended until the end of December. Some people have purchased a laptop for a child they know instead for their own child, effectively donating 2 laptops. Although I do not need yet another laptop, I am very tempted to get this one...
You might think there isn't really a need for a laptop where people have nothing to eat, and you are not alone. Although Lybia's rulers have committed to give each child a laptop, India has resisted (even at $100/laptop) and decided to build their own, without releasing details. From the FAQ:
You're expecting this to be a magic bullet for poverty.
False: Not at all. It is simply a tool for education and communication and only helps, in part, in contributing to the entirety of aid programs where these laptops are distributed. Nevertheless it provides access to education, health, technology, economic opportunity, and more, and a few children will be able pull themselves out of poverty with no other assistance.
You're forcing this on poverty stricken areas that need food, water and housing rather than a laptop.
False: Not at all. Like it was said earlier, this is only a tool and should not be seen as more than that. We agree that other more urgent matters must be attended to before you insert high tech into the situation of poverty.
Not everybody agrees with that idea. Some think that access to the Net is the fastest way for poor people to get the political clout to require their governments to provide services to them. Or to get the education for real jobs that take them out of poverty completely. Or access to innovative technologies for providing food, water, clothing, shelter, energy, etc.
But we believe education and communication with the modern world to be important as well. Food, water, clothing and other necessities come first. Nevertheless, a world view and good education can do wonders for a child's mind and continued health. Computers, especially those that are networked, have shown to be development 'multipliers', that is they help to improve the delivery of medical, educational and communication services.
If you are doubting that the XO laptop is needed in the first world, I can assure that a laptop is far better for a child than the TV (the most used and abused babysitter), simply because a laptop is interactive.
If you buy the XO for Canada, shipping is $35 and the $200 used to send the 2nd laptop to an African child might be tax deductible against your US income:
A Canadian donor may claim charitable tax credits for a gift to a recognized US charity, provided that the charity would have qualified in Canada if it had been a Canadian charitable organization. The charitable credit is limited to the donor's US-source income, and subject to the normal donation ceiling. Any excess credits can be carried forward and used in subsequent taxation years. (Article XXI(6) Canada-US Income Tax Convention)
This disruptive product has been in design since 2005 and it was a cause championed by Negroponte, who stated:
"From my point of view, if the world were to have 30 million" laptops made by competitors "in the hands of children at the end of next year, that to me would be a great success," he said in a recent interview. "My goal is not selling laptops. OLPC is not in the laptop business. It's in the education business."Strangely enough, a Nigerian company is suing OLPC for infringement of some copyright on its keyboard. As the old saying goes, no good deed goes unpunished. Writes alsee in the ensuing /. debate:
Lawsuit states that keyboards were purchased and illegally reverse engineered.Most commentators seem to believe that this is either a lawsuit backed by the Wintel Hydra who is upset that the project uses Linux and AMD chips, whereas others think that this is simply an attempt by a dishonest corporation to scam some money out of anything they can. In response, Intel has designed a laptop called "Classmate" which sells for more than double the price of XO, which its marketing team claims it is far superiour. For its part, Microsoft has claimed that the cost of software is not an important issue in the developing world. The Wall Street Journal writes that the XO was seriously derailed by the marketing push of the two big tech giants, while BBC places the blame on "politics". Anyway, if you are enraged by Microsoft and Intel's products, your best course of action would be to vote with your wallet and boycott their products. Luckily, their competition is good to excellent.
The only way that could be true is if Nigeria has a seriously defective legal system (quite possible), but even then the "truth value" of that statement would only exist within Nigeria.
Like someone who illegally wears a t-shirt that says "Vote".
The phrase "illegally reverse engineered" only weighs in favor of a case of this company being a "patent troll", it is not an argument to refute that label.
A further note is that all uses of the word "invention" appear to false. According to the article this is a design patent. At least in US law, design patents are not for new useful inventions, design patents are not for functional aspects, design patents are for aesthetic and ornamental aspects. Design patents are about "our product looks cool and distinctive". Design patents are trivial to work around, you just change the shape or arrangement of your product to any of a zillion other equally reasonable equally functional looks.
...ok a little Googling and yes Nigerian RD#### patent are "Registered Design" patents. This is not an invention patent, this is an ornamental design patent. It also turns out that there is no official website to look up Nigerian patents, not only is there no website for it but the Nigerian Patent Office official contact point is a Yahoo email address.
This company is suing a charitable high-tech project to aid 3rd world children, and doing it based on an ornamental patent registered with a government operating from a Yahoo email address. I don't know whether to laugh or cry.
Perhaps the funniest outcome of this silly lawsuit would be a new class of Nigerian/419 scams, as shown in Mateo LeFou's comment:
Dear Honest IndividualI am Stella McBride, aged 21years old the daughter of Late Darl Makoba a politician,gold and software merchant from Angola. I and my mother now residing in Senegal dakar west africa.
As a result of the on-going problem in our country, we must relocate US$500 million of intellectual property to an overseas account...
A secondary outcome is that the price of all laptops will come down and in fact it has already.
Echoes
Ecoble
wsj Read More to See the Light...
Monkeys for Nothing You Get Chimps for Free I
Money for nothin' was perhaps the first British MTV success. The channel had just launched and they needed some cool videos to go with their song, so they persuaded Knopfler to go with this idea. In the first days of the British MTV, this video was playing non-stop and although today the animation appears a bit crude, back then it was hailed as revolutionary. And so was the very concept of a video clip in the symbolic 1984. It was the start of a new era, the start of a new consumption channel, a channel that was going to fundamentally change the music business.
Blogging for money is also a relatively new business. Although it's been around for a few years, today it seems that everybody wants in. You can find articles about professional blogging (or "blogging for money" as everybody knows it) on Microsoft (How to make money from your blog: 5 tips), Washington Post (Make Money off Your Blog), CNN (Business 2.0: Blogging for Dollars), O'Reilly (Blogging for Dollars: Giving Rise to the Professional Blogger) and others. Tellingly, the New York Times compares this fad to an addiction (For Some, The Blogging Never Stops) :) Even the Economist has started blogs, which is a radical change for a publication that's not a daily. Apart from the attention of established new media outfits, there are clear signs that the blogging revolution is far from over. Although Technorati has been around forever, search engines, including Google, have recently launched "blogging search". The Internet market research clearinghouses (Alexa, Netcraft, Compete, ComScore, Hitwise, Nielsen//NetRatings, Netcraft, Ranking.com, and Quantcast) seem to also indicate blogs' increasing mind share.
Another very clear sign that blogging is a profession in its own right is the appearance of blogs dedicated to this very phenomenon. There are two major blogs dominating the landscape, and gathering the lion share of the traffic: Steve Pavlina's blog (SP) and ProBlogger (PB). While Steve Pavlina is dedicated to self-improving and as such is more general, PB has a bevy of articles about blogging for money. I've read a few from SP, and to me they seem mostly "inspirational" but short on substance or things that I did not already know. By contrast, PB is far more task and detail oriented. I suppose SP makes his readers feel good but without really offering anything visionary or mind-blowing, in much the same way a motivational speaker uplifts her audience. You could combine reading SP for inspiration and read PB for the technical perspective.
The one thing you learn well reading SP's blog is the fine art of keeping your readers' eyeballs glued to the screen without exploding them or burning them out. Unfortunatley, this is an art I am unlikely to ever master. I am too opinionated. Even though it may not seem that way, writing this kind of articles takes a lot of self-control and focus, and I'm not sure I have that in the required quantity. I spent a few hours reading some of their very many articles (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21), only to realise at the end that I haven't really learned anything new; this could very well be because I've been working in IT since the 90's, but a total newbie would probably find something new to learn in there. I don't think I could emulate SP's style, and even if I could, I would get no satisfaction, no matter how much money I'd be making (and that's unlikely anyway). So as a result, I've decided to remove columnar banner ads from my blogs.
Read More to See the Light...Echoes of the WGA strike
Now in its second week, the Writers' Guild of America strike is what has kept many TV viewers from their favourite shows. The bone of contention is now compensation for web content, with WGA making some rather audacious demands, such as a percentage of non-skippable ad revenue. Here's the YouTube clip Not The Daily Show, With Some Writer:
There's no way we can hide it: we love the writers and the work that they do. We fully support their struggle.
Annoy telemarketers automagically!
This is a freeware program that will answer the phone and check a text file full of phone numbers deemed "annoying" by the user and checks caller ID when the phone rings. If the caller is on the list the Telecrapper jumps into action, playing WAV files and waiting for the person on the other end to pause before playing the next WAV. After a while Telecrapper resorts to a subset of WAV files and plays them randomly until the caller hangs up. Watch it in action.
Not all telemarketers have a great time:
Information Architecture > Data Warehousing > An invisible abomination
Information Architecture > Data Warehousing > An invisible abomination
Nebu (meaning "gold" in Egyptian) is a company with a sneaky product. It enables ISPs to surreptitiously insert ads in webpages they serve to their customers transparently. This means that they can do so without the knowledge or consent of either their customer or the content provider. Obviously, this product can be misused, but it can also be used to provide advertising supported Internet access far better than NetZero used to. Put to good use, it has the potential to divert more advertising dollars and bring to the limelight more obscure sites, to the detriment of the sites with the lion share of eyeballs.
That's an interesting development at a time when the net neutrality debate rages on.
These guys' lawyers stand to make a lot of money. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if this was not somehow started by lawyers. :)
