Xavier Media Blog

The spammers are back online

2008-12-03T19:29:24Z

Washington Post are reporting that the spammers are back online after the recent closure of their latest spam nest .

When McColo in San Jose was closed on the 11th of November spam emails in the world decrease by about 70-75% over just a few days. McColo didn't send any spam themselfs but they hosted the servers that did.

Not only did the email spam decrease but also child pornography and other nasty stuff like malware and trojans decreased after the closure of McColo, but say the happyness that lasts forever . According to Washington Post the new botnet network taking over after McColo is controlled by some "Russian individuals" .

Lets just hope Google, McAfee and Arbor Networks can do their trick closing the spam network once again.

The spammers are back online

Upgrade to Wordpress 2.6.5

2008-11-27T05:14:39Z

There's a new version of Wordpress available and you need to upgrade ASAP due to some important security fixes.

Internet way back in 2001 - part 4

2008-11-24T21:09:52Z

This is the 4th part of our series about life online back in the year 2001.

Spam

In 2001 the worst with spam was still email spam and you couldn't post your email address on your web sites since evil spam bots crawled the web for new victims to spam . Also whois records where highly spammed and because of that a new million dollar industry saw the daylight: Whois privacy services. Many newbies noticed the bad idea of listing their real email address in the whois records since as soon as a domain name got registered it didn't take long before you started getting spam to the email addresses listed in whois records . Today we rarely see spam to email addresses listed in whois records and that may be because of the whois privacy services out there. Spammers may have figured out the poor response rate due to the fact that none read their spam.

At this point spam filters got more and more popular to filter out all the email spam. Today you rarely get email spam if you use services like Gmail, but in 2001 I got over 200 spam email per day to just one of my email accounts (before I activated spam filters ).

Spam in forums wasn't that common yet. I guess spammers changed tactic when they noticed the decreasing response rate for email spam. Back in 2001 countries like Bangladesh and many parts of Africa (big sources of spam these days) weren't fully connected to Internet and broadband Internet access where expensive. Unluckily that changed and together with cheap labor we experience forum and blog spam like never before.

Yet Another SQL Injection

You never saw any injection problems with databases and scripts in 2001. Of course it happened once in a while, but not like today. Today it's big business to find and abuse vulnerabilities in insecure code (especially where you can inject evil code in an SQL database). Most hacking attacks that happened in 2001 where "for fun" or to prove a point, but today it's a big business industry . If you search for "Yet Another SQL Injection" in any search engine you'll see it's way too common today .

I think it took until about 2003 or 2004 until I experienced cross site scripting for the first time.

I miss the good old days when you din't have to secure your code in 1,000 ways before you released it. Now you have to code way too many lines of code before you can release the exact same function .

Internet way back in 2001 - part 4

Check out the Clickbooth blog

2008-11-24T21:08:11Z

The Clickbooth blog is perfect for anyone that got an online presence no matter if you're planning to advertise your products and services or if you want to earn some extra money from your site. You can of course make Clickbooth your main stream of income too since we all know that targeted offers pay much much more then pay-per-click programs

But I'm not going to write about how to make money from Clickbooth, instead I will focus on their blog since they got a good habit of posting editorial articles every now and then. Once in awhile they also post a video or two too.

For example one article I found really interesting is the one called "To Click or Not To Click" and it's about ad sizes and ad placements (especially banners). In the article you learn that size actually matters (and then I mean banner sizes ). You should not just focus on standard sizes, but also try more odd sizes like maybe 300×250 to find the sizes giving you the best click rates.

If you want to succeed as an affiliate advertiser or publisher you should have a look at all the articles found at Clickbooth blog.

Check out the Clickbooth blog

How to avoid duplicate content penalties

2008-11-19T19:47:59Z

I guess you all know that search engines may see www.sampleaddress.com and sampleaddress.com as two different pages with the exact same content. Because of that your site may get duplicate content penalties from the search engine and in some horrible cases you may even get de-listed completely

By focusing all your traffic to just one of the options with or without www you may get higher pagerank as well since everyone will link to the exact same domain name. You may of course also gain other advantages too, but I'm not going thru them here….

If you got a Unix or Linux based web server it's quite easy to redirect all your traffic to the site with www (or without if you prefer that like we do at adv.erti.se).

Create a new text file called .htaccess (or edit the one that may already exist in your www or public_html directory) using a text editor like Notes or Wordpad. If you use Wordpress for your site you already got a .htaccess file in 99.99% of the cases, so then you just add the following lines of test:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.sampleaddress.com$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.sampleaddress.com/$1 [R=301]

If you're editing an existing .htaccess file you must make sure you don't add the first line if a similar already exists since that may cause errors. The above example will redirect all your visitors at sampleadddress.com to www.sampleaddress.com and also give the browser a 301 status message. The 301 status message is not really important for your visitors, but for search engine spiders since it means that the page they're looking for has moved permanently to it's destination at www.sampleaddress.com.

To do the redirection the other way around (i.e. from www to non-www) you just modify the code to be:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^sampleaddress.com$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://sampleaddress.com/$1 [R=301]

What do the lines of text actually mean?

The first line is activating something called Mod_rewrite on your server letting your server rewrite URLs to a new destination. The second line is doing a logic test. If the host name (HTTP_HOST) is different from www.sampleaddress.com a rewrite should be done according to the condition on the third line.

How to avoid duplicate content penalties

Internet way back in 2001 - part 3

2008-11-16T12:48:06Z

In this Sunday series we're continuing our trip back to 2001.

Payments

In 2001 Paypal had already seen the daylight, however they where so far not widely spread so not everyone used them. So to accept payments you would have to use a company to accept credit cards, receive a check for your monthly payments, cash it in and then use your own credit card to pay hosting fees etc. Today I can't even remember how we could live like that

I think Clickbank was the number 1 popular company to accept payments online and I got my first account with them in 2001. At that time they didn't accept multiple currencies, couldn't work with subscriptions and you had to wait for your pay-check to arrive by snail mail . Today they've evolved in a good way. They can work with several currencies, subscriptions are possible, you don't have to wait for a check any more since you can get paid by wire transfer. Since they also accept Paypal transfers today I have to say that they are prefect (not everyone like Paypal so by using Clickbank you can offer direct credit card payments with out going thru PayPal).

The best thing with Clickbank is that they actually offer wire transfers so you no longer have to wait for your check, since checks can get lost in the mail and you have to wait longer before you actually got the money in your hand. So I actually love the development where more and more companies are offering ACH or wire transfers to pay affiliate commissions etc.

PayPal existed, but they didn't have many of the features they got today . In the beginning they only accepted users from US, which meant that you couldn't send or receive money outside US. They didn't have that many currencies you could charge your customers in (only USD ). I got my PayPal account in 2002 so I guess they started accepting non-US account holders in the end 2001 or beginning 2002.

Did you by the way know that PayPal was actually called X.com in the beginning?

So the summary of 2001 is that it was hard to send payments online and it was almost completely impossible to send micro-payments.

Internet way back in 2001 - part 3

Debt Consolidation and Bill Consolidation

2008-11-16T08:37:53Z

Are you looking for help to consolidate your debts? Then you should have a look at Bills.com because they got a lot of useful resources to help you get free from your debts, maybe even lower your payments, cut your interest rates, or maybe consolidate all your debts into one. The tips and resources at Bills.com will help you find the best options to consolidate your options and maybe even speed up the process a little bit

So what is actually debt consolidation? Well, it's when you consolidate multiple loans into one new. With just one loan it's easier for you to keep track, and it's also in some cases much easier to negotiate for a better interest rate which means that you can become debt free much faster (and cheaper). Debt consolidation can also refer to a credit counseling program that don't include any new loan.

As always in life it's important to set goals before you start.

To better help you understand how debt consolidation works for you and which options are best for your economy you can use their Debt Consolidation Savings Center to find the debt consolidation providers best for you. You just answer a few questions like your primary goal, the state you live in and if you rent or own your own home.

Debt Consolidation and Bill Consolidation

Less spam, at least for now

2008-11-15T18:25:11Z

I don't know if you've noticed in your spam filter yet, but the spam has actually decreased lately.

Thanks to a fantastic job done by a couple of Internet companies (Google, McAfee and Arbor Networks) the spam has actually decreased by 70-75% after the shutdown of McColo Corp . As a web hosting company, McColo didn't necessarily send out all of the offensive or illegal spam. But it apparently provided the servers that enabled spammers to do their nasty work.

By shutting down McColo Corp not only did email spam decrease, but we also got less malware and child pornography online. The bad thing is that all this is just temporary since spammers will find new companies to host their servers

Recently a research report was released saying that only one email out of 12.5 million spam emails resulted in a response which means that email spam is getting less and less profitable. Many years ago I heard that one spam email of 1 million resulted in a response (I don't have any source for that) which means that people and spam filters are getting smarter. If this development continues spammers may have to stop sending out spam emails. It's good that email spammers are getting harder times , they deserve it.

To make it even harder for the spammers you can help Xavier Media fight email spam by using this tool.

Unfortunately this is just email spam that's having hard times right now but we shouldn't forget about all the other spam types online: blog comment spam, splogs (spam blogs) and forum spam. Just our own blogs and forums have seen a huge increase lately and if you also take into consideration that Akismet isn't working as good as it used to we may see an even bigger increase in this type of spam. In this area we also see smaller "entrepreneurs" freelancing (see New blog spam) and so far they are too small for the big companies to shut down like they've done with McColo Corp

Online Surveys

2008-11-13T18:55:03Z

One fantastic thing with Internet is that it's so easy to do online surveys and find out what your customers and visitors like or dislike about your web site, company or even products. Imagine if you would do something similar in a real store or at a shopping mall, then you would have to first hand out a questionnaire to people, collect it again and then count your collected data. Most of the people you ask will unfortunately not be interested, but with Internet it's so much easier. They just have to answer a few questions (and it can also be fun for your visitors depending on the questions you ask ).

This is where Zoomerang.com can help you setting up your online surveys. They got several survey templates you can choose from to use or why not edit them so they fit your purpose perfectly. You can of course also setup your surveys from scratch too

By using the survey coach you get suggestions and help to create your surveys in the most effective way possible.

When your survey has been created you can choose between importing emails from your customer database or generating a URL you can post on your web site. The results and reports are immediately which means that you can follow the results in real time.

After you've received results you can filter the results, or you can create Cross Tab Reports to compare results.

Check out their online video for more information.

Online Surveys

.CA domains now available at eXavier.com

2008-11-11T21:01:50Z

You may have already secured the .com, .net and .us versions of your domain name, but what about the .ca version?

If you don't have the .ca version you should consider securing it since loosing a good domain name to a competitor isn't that nice at all (belive me I've done it ) so get your own .ca domain today.

The price for one year is only $12.99 at eXavier.com (US dollars ).

As with all domain names you register at eXavier.com you get fantastic extra services at a value of $140+:

Online Photo Filer
Quick Blogcast
Hosting with Web site builder
Personalized Email Account
Starter Web Page
" For Sale "/ Parked Page
Domain Forwarding
Domain Masking
100-Pack Email Forwarding
Total DNS Control
Change of Registration
Status Alerts
Domain Locking

Visit eXavier.com to expand you business to yet another country

.CA domains now available at eXavier.com