Sometimes you bump into the ruins of a website – something you remember was mind-blowing awesome, yet now stands frozen in time like an old black and white picture. Beyond the WayBack Machine, I’m talking about real sites still online that got stuck in time. My favorite such site is:
Avatar Teleport
Do you have a favorite stuck-in-time site?
Business is business, and if you’re in the business of DDoS blackmail, you’ve got to keep tabs on the prices your ‘clients’ might pay to get rid of you. Next time you’re about to send that zombie army out, check out this handy Storm on Demand DDoS protection pricing chart before you hit SEND on the ransom note:
We need to get rid of the “copyright” idea and create a system that really provides the benefits copyright delivered gracefully until the dawn of the digital age – and then got literally murdered by modern computing.
Here’s the thought process:
A copyright is intended to aid the creation and dissemination of new works by providing the economic benefit derived from real and artificial scarcity
Scarcity is becoming harder to come by these days. We have abundance.
In the past/present pretty much everything you do is your property and copyright. The default is “protected”
I propose a system where you have to apply for a scarcity license. This isn’t like simply filing for a copyright for a piece of work – this is much more than that – it puts the burden on the creator to DEMONSTRATE that if they are granted an “Artificial Scarcity License”, then society will actually benefit. Society has to benefit here, not the creator of the work exclusively (I have a feeling the Generation Y and Millenial tree huggers would love this idea).
So you could prove that by protecting your motion picture that cost xx to make, next year you’ll be able to provide audiences with a better movie they will enjoy more. If the protection wasn’t there, we’d be limited to youtube clips. You could prove that protecting your blog post will give you a chance to make more good posts. Protecting your software will allow you to make better bug-free software. You might also be able to prove something similar for your music if you’re a music label. You probably won’t be able to prove this unless your business delivers something other than just scarcity and rapes the market. The key here is you have to prove you have been doing this broader improvement of the art, the economics or society, or can at least plausibly deliver on your promise, and will be accountable to do so with your Artificial Scarcity License on the line if you don’t.
In the age of abundance, the burden of proof needs to lie with those that desire scarcity. We will give you scarcity, only when you work in favor of our broader abundance.
PS: No, I’m not actually going to do anything substantial other than write about this. I’m a big-picture whiz-bang idea guy – Let the folks with OCD figure out the details.
PPS: Yes, this is similar to patents.
This little snippet will dump for you a formatted reference of your globals plus your PHP environment. Really useful especially if you have geolocation variables and other junk getting added to your PHP globals by web server modules.
Practical checklist to spotting internet scammers trying to fleece internet marketers.
The only thing you need is a bit of an ability to read your own emotions and this handy list. Don’t surf without it!
Now, now… Many legit products will show up with one or two from this list of shame. Simply put, if you hear good things from your friends, then it doesn’t matter what the site looks like. If you don’t hear anything other than hype, hope and expectation – close your wallet, make a note and come back to the site in a month – if you still want it a month later, get it… Or search… Whatever floats your boat.
So if 95% or whatever of the “gurus” are selling bullshit. Then maybe someone can come out and do real reviews to point out the 5% which are legit and actually helpful. I can’t say I have seen anyone do that. Of course, you can’t find a bad review on anything selling through Clickbank via a Google search. Hell, that would be revolutionary.
Dude, love your comment about Google – It makes them a farce, really – You are right you can’t find a single normal non-paid review of ANY ClickBank product. … BTW, your comment spurred the next blog post – there you have it. Thank you!
Excellent post. I always struggle with the negative comments about how “Program X isn’t worth $297″ or “stay away from Program Y; it’s all useless information.” Sure, there are crap programs out there that were designed and built to do nothing but pad someone’s pockets. I get it. But to blame the program when magically your bank account didn’t grow…not so much.
The other thing that’s typically missed is that not every program is right for every person at that point. They’ll buy it because they’re squeezed into it but can’t spare 30 minutes a day for the next month to even get it running. So in 30 days they look back and say “that was worthless, the program sucks”. Not really – if they would have devoted some time to it maybe they’d have gotten something. Right product…wrong time.
One interesting bit of info from “Guru” Frank Kern in his List Control was that something ridiculously small like less than 10% of people make it to the last “modules” of the trainings – usually they stop 1/3rd of the way through and then they show up at his in-person gathering.
Its also hard for people to stay away from these programs when they are pitched so hard… I mean, come on, you really think making a good video is going to save your sorry ass if you have nothing else going? Of course not – there’s nobody on this planet you can stop cold on the street, ask them that question and they’ll say yes – NOBODY. The way these prospects get literally ‘marinated’ in the hype spun out is pretty bad. Then again, perhaps the biggest lesson to the IM-Guru-product buyer is: Do as I do, not as I say.
Woopra is an Analytics tool I picked up after peeking under the hood while doing some competitive research. It really kicks Google where the sun don’t shine in many areas.
The amount of stats is impressive, the way its presented looks almost like one of those Wired magazine InfoPorn infographics – Heck, you can even set a real-time visitor color-coded world map to display full screen on any monitor you’re running, separate from the main app. Ever fancy a Network Operations Control Center-style setup? Here’s your chance.
They’ve recently added funnel analysis and some other deep bells and whistles that use can use to build a dashboard with your own KPIs.
I has a nice WordPress plug-in, soon using asynchronous JavaScript, as well as plug-ins for a ton of other platforms… Not that adding a bit of Javascript is difficult. Check it out, its free for a lot of visitors, then they offer reasonable plans.
Here’s a screenshot of a drill-down into the activities of a single user across two months, it even includes the comments the visitor posted, files downloaded, etc and pretty much everything is clickable to filter and sort.
Click to Expand
Its so good for content-rich sites like a blog that I’ve shut off Google Analytics – Woopra crushes it for these sites.
Talk about fucked up. I’ve seen this pretty much all over the place – reputable news outlets carrying the shadiest of ads. Some of these advertisers clearly have the dough to grease the wheels — if you go try to advertise this crap with these same ad networks, you’ll get declined. I tried. Fuckers.
Then it dawned on me… Maybe, just maybe, its the advertising network itself running these ads on their own placements. Nice.
Either way, this is messed up. Trust is transient, so the trust a person has over the news outlet they are visiting transfers to the ads they carry and over to what they read.
Disclosure: This is fucked up only because I’m not doing it. If I were, then this would be “business as usual”.
I know what you mean! I tried to do the same thing a while back.
Also I believe there is a double standard with Facebook advertising + Myspace advertising as well.
Agreed, this sucks. And also agreed, if I was getting away with it too, it would not suck as much.
They just probably made an exclusive IO with the network, so noobs are out
We are increasingly playing in someone else sandbox, and the limits are starting to show and suck.
Largest site on the web. In the future, forget about having a blog outside FB – who will bother reading it when they’re too busy reading the ones already inside FaceBook? Its funny how the pendulum swings – AOL used to be as neutered as Facebook and it died a lonely death, now many of the the same concepts come back in Facebook.
Here’s a thought: Let’s create a distributed trust protocol so we can build a Facebook outside Facebook and fuck Facebook in the Face.
Huge platform seemingly derived from an IRC service. Some very many years ago IRC was all the rage, we had channels starting with hash # tags, and nicknames and pretty much Twitter without the Twitheads at Twitter. Then IRC died a lonely death for mainstream users – all that’s left there is – for the most part – some die-hards and the royal scum that controls the underbelly of the beast nobody wants to see… bot-nets, pedos, creeps, worms, distros… Its the Mad-Max style nuclear wasteland of the internet. … Then along comes Twitter and the pendulum swings again. They call it microblogging – WTF? It chatting, people, chatting – and all your chats belong to Twitter.
Here’s another thought: Let’s create a federated chat protocol and layer it on a web interface… Isn’t that one done yet?
Remember Altavista? Yeah, I didn’t think so. I’m not sure what is worse – having your content belong to Facebook, Twitter and others, or having the index to your content belong to them. Not only do they determine what gets found and read by the results of their searches, they directly determine what gets purchased when and where – they control the flow of money. I don’t think they’ve realized this yet at least not in a way that is noticeable – and frankly, I don’t really expect most folks reading this to understand how really big numbers of really small things work (scientific fact, most folks are too lazy to think like this) – Google has greater potential influence over the economic outcomes of the US and half the planet than any Illuminati conspiracy theory ever even conceived possible.
I suppose they suck especially bad when you’re not the owner of the monopoly. I also suppose if the monopoly was mine, I’d be telling everyone how I’m going to bring “Peace and order throughout the galaxy“.
In closing, nothing – I don’t have any super-stellar words of wisdom here other than: This party ain’t over yet, so bring Vaseline.
“…so we can build a Facebook outside Facebook and fuck Facebook in the Face.”
LOL. But I humbly suggest:
“…so we can build a Facebook outside Facebook and fuck Facebook right in its fuckin Face.”
I dunno… maybe one fuck was enough?
Nice post. Google is taking over the world. They even own my phone.
Good catch. I must have been in a mellow mood yesterday.
Last week I joined the Super Affiliate Twins’ Internet University.
I have to say I’m impressed. Very positively impressed.
Ryan and crew are all over the forums giving good solid advice and literally shepherding folks along.
When they say that they teach all this about internet marketing, they aren’t joking – All the modules are up and you can get access to it for a one-day $5 trial or just go for the monthly membership.
The best part is that they’re small... That probably won’t last very long. The second best part is that it shows that Ryan and the crew are interested in seeing folks succeed. Its not common to see an abundance mentality at work in such a competitive landscape.
Abundance Mentality: Stephen Covey coined the term abundance mentality or abundance mindset, a business concept in which a person believes there are enough resources and success to share with others. It is commonly contrasted with the scarcity mindset, which is founded on the idea that, given a finite amount of resources, a person must hoard their belongings and protect them from others. Individuals with an abundance mentality are able to celebrate the success of others rather than be threatened by it.
A number of books appearing in business press since then have discussed the idea. The abundance mentality is believed to arrive from having a high self worth and security, and leads to the sharing of profits, recognition and responsibility.
I felt the University paid for itself in just watching one of the videos they’ve put out. I watched the PPV video about five times. It comes with survey-style landers, normal landers, reference of PPV networks. There are NO affiliate links on the stuff linked to. Really everything you need and the instructions on video – I mean, if I can’t figure it out with that, I should probably stick to flipping burgers. Someone put a lot of thought into this.
They are now starting a contest on PPV marketing (yup, there’s still time to join the contest) – The contest is designed to teach the ropes of PPV marketing by starting out with a simple Zip/eMail submit Direct-linking campaign, learning to set it up and optimize it to get it profitable. Ryan is posting step-by-step videos on doing everything, and folks are sharing their campaigns. To keep it competitive the only thing we’re not disclosing is the target URLs.
What’s the Prize? … Does it matter? I would do the same if it was a lollipop or a Ferrari – The true prize is the EXPERIENCE, the Knowledge and who knows, maybe a friend or two – the rest is anecdotal.
I do feel pretty lucky to be a part of the contest as it unfolds – It is *exactly* what I want to learn and done in a great way – Plus Ryan and folks answer questions in a very straightforward manner, holding nothing back and really guiding folks.
Really great work on the part of Ryan and team, and I have to thank Mike for egging me to join up.
Haha I am going to laugh when we are all geared up for the contest and then next week we are all asking for discounts on the membership since we blew all our cash on campaigns!
My recent post Fully Revealed Campaign – Making Money on DirectCPV
Dang, man… Are you sure that’s the way its supposed to work? I’m going to get my burger-flipping spatula ready, and go apologize back at the drive-thru.
o_O nice Gratuitous Eye Candy section!
I say, if you can’t give them great stuff to keep them coming back, throw in some tits and ass and see what happens. Just like at tradeshows!
Tip 1 – Get Dedicated Servers or a Virtual Private servers. I just spent the last two days migrating and consolidating hosting accounts. Total waste of time, but had to be done. Be smart, not like me.
Tip 2 – Use the Domain Registrar’s DNS service, not your server’s. The main reason is because if you have a dedicated server and all your domains are being served by a single domain name server, which is highly likely, or by different domain name servers that share the same IP addresss, once a competing affiliate develops an interest on one of your campaigns, figuring out the entire portfolio of sites on your server is trivial. If you are using your registrar’ DNS, the same lookup will return thousands of other unrelated sites, essentially cloaking yours even if you have them on the same registrar.
Tip 3 – Don’t skimp on IP addresses – Get one for each domain name. Same reason as for the DNS servers above. You could share some betweena few campaigns… Its not the best of ideas, though.
Tip 4 – Parallel’s Plesk control panel is more user-friendly, but less feature rich. WHM from Cpanel is chock-full of features, but really unfriendly (check out a screenshot of WHM here).
Tip 5 – You NEED a “Managed” server or VPS. Whatever you get make sure it says its “Managed” or get the “Managed” add-on option. This way when it turns out you need a newer version of MySQL to run Prosper, you can just pick up the phone or open a ticket and get it upgraded instead of messing everything up yourself.
Got any other affiliate hosting tips? Share with a comment!
I have a vps where my lps and prosper is setup, do you think i should move over to dedicated or storm on demand?, really appreciate it. I am really worried that the redirects are a bit slow plus lp load times are a bit high
Joseph, as long as you can control how much CPU you get and how much bandwidth I don’t see a reason to move. I tried DreamHost’s VPS offering and you could not control the CPU (they would only tell you the amount of RAM) and were not terribly helpful when I needed MySQL to support partitioning, so I cancelled that. The amount of CPU is an estimate (1 Gigahertz is just a measure of frequency, not of compute power or I/O power).
I’d stick with brands you’ve seen before. My suggestion of Rackspace is solid, a bit on the expensive side, though. You can also check out vps.net – amazing offering but its not managed from what I remember.
Best suggestion is to test it. Almost all the companies will give you your money back if it doesn’t work out. Another thing you should could into is using Amazon’s CloudFront to store your landing pages, or at least any graphics in them. The graphics on this blog, are all coming from CloudFront. I talked about how I’m using CloudFront on the post titled “How to Accelerate your Site to Warp Factor 9.9 without paying $99 a month” here: http://negbox.com/how-to-accelerate-your-site-to-…
Thanks man, i currently use a wiredtree vps storing my lp images on amazon s3 . It helps. I tried vps.net, but it isnt managed, and it has a fifficult interface.
Well, hang on to your hat – I’m going to post a little script I had developed to pre-load landing pages from CloudFront while all the redirects happen in the background – The script is already up inside the Affiliate Twins’ Internet University message board. I should have it up today/Friday soon for everyone. It works well.
Disclaimer: I’m not a lawyer. Do not use any of the information on my site for anything other than wasting time.
The goal of this post is to protect you from the casual “oops” of business – NOT to arm yourself for battle. Oops happen. Keep an open line of communication through your site (a monitored e-mail address, or feedback form, for example). You’re not trying to be invisible or anonymous, you’re trying to shield yourself from legal retards, and want to listen for real communications. If John Doe wants to sue you because your logo reminds him of his favorite cat, you’ll be well protected. If Lady Gaga’s agent wants you to stop using something, you might want to stop or change regardless of where your corporation is based or how many shells you have – Consider it a bonus you most likely won’t have to pay legal fees, produce ridiculous logs or settle anything. Try to keep it at the goodwill level – the last thing you want is someone very pissed at you – The way to keep people from getting pissed is to let them get a hold of you easily, and right any wrongs quickly.
I just watched the new Shoemoney System video and felt it was missing information. I find the multinational perspective missing from a ton of folks and material – Its like World War III broke out, the entire world is a nuclear barren wasteland but only the US survived… Only that didn’t happen – everyone else is still there, folks!
Jeremy did an awesome job on the videos and it is really cool that he is sharing the information he is… Well, that and he is also sending a message out to the marketplace. The message reads “Don’t fuck with my brand and my stuff, or I’ll unleash the Sith Lords on your sorry ass“. Nice dual-purpose video! Wish I had thought of it.
What Jeremy doesn’t mention is what he does when he is faced with an international dolt stealing his stuff. Are all his cases US-based? Only the ones worth pursuing?
If you’re going to run ANY sort of business, you need to protect yourself legally. While Jeremy comes across as a nice guy, the world is full of assholes (I know this for a fact – just look at all the shit around you… And where does shit come from? Assholes, of course!)
How you go about creating your little legal cocoon can take many forms. You can wrap yourself in the equivalent of bubble-wrap by incorporating an LLC in Delaware, or you can order a Stealth Klingon Bird of Prey from eastern Europe – it all depends if you want to protect yourself from a knee scrape or a plasma cannon, which in turn depends on what you’re trying to do – sell an eBook or scam the planet. Let’s assume you are not out to screw everyone, but would much prefer to stay away from trouble…
The key to preventing problems in the US is to not be there. Simple, huh? It all hinges on what laws affect who and where. Your state laws do not affect other US states, and US federal laws do not affect other countries. What DOES affect other countries are international treaties and how different countries have implemented them – The nice thing about international treaties is that bullshit rarely makes it into a treaty, so you’re safer from some of the sue-happy legal circus.
Here are five steps to ‘be gone’. You only really need Step 1 and 2 to protect yourself from 90% of nut cases. Step 3 and 4 if you’re paranoid. If you need to go as far as Step 5, please do not tell me what you’re into.
Create a limited corporation overseas… You are an investor in it and a managing director – The “limited” means your liability is limited. Different countries will call this a bit different, but they all have this figure… Sociedad Anonima de Responsabilidad Limitada (Anynomous Limited Asociation) in most of Latin-Ameria, osaühing in Estonia, GmbH in Germany, Société à Responsabilité Limitée in France, etc… You get the point. Talk to a lawyer. A corporate lawyer. A good one. A very expensive one. You need one with experience in this or living in the country you’ve picked. Alternatively, there are a TON of online services that will do this for you in whatever locale you heart desires. I hear the weather in Cayman is awesome this time of year.
Get all the papers squared away. Expect anywhere between two weeks and two months for this. Make sure you document your funding into the company, as well as who gets what share, and any major decisions, such as appointing yourself king of Umpa Lumpa Land and Managing Director of your company. Sounds retarded and ridiculous, you appoint yourself, yes… Just trust me you have to do all this paper stuff – don’t dismiss it.
Register any domains you will use with a registrar located in your favorite jurisdiction – For example gandi.net in France. If you have to ask why, watch Jeremy’s video again.
Get hosting overseas, and MAKE SURE their data center and your server is overseas. Ideally, make sure they don’t have a US presence at all (like a sister company). Some companies resell us-based virtual servers or will use a European IP that by some magic maps back to the US. Avoid with simple geo-location tools. Re-test the geolocation using traceroutes and network assignment maps after getting the hosting to make sure.
Beware of anything linked to the site. If you have AdSense in the site, or drive traffic with AdWords, or if you promote a zip submit with neverblue, think what jurisdiction(s) neverblue or Google are in.
If you are a US citizen or Permanent resident, make 120% sure you PAY YOUR TAXES. Consult a good tax person. Understand that whatever money you make (you, not the corp) will be taxed by the US just as if you had earned it in the US – Don’t let an overseas lawyer derail you here, taxes are serious shit – And remember the corp will be paying taxes wherever it is based. Again, I can’t stress this enough… Remember Capone, do your taxes right.
The goal of this post is to protect you from the casual “oops” of business – NOT to arm yourself for battle. Keep an open line of communication through your site (a monitored e-mail address, or feedback form, for example). Listen for real communications. Try to keep it at the goodwill level - The way to keep people from getting pissed is to let them get a hold of you easily, and right any wrongs quickly.
A useful Social Media map, courtesy of of CMO.com (CMO = “Chief Marketing Officer”). If you’re interested in getting traffic to your site, you go down the “Traffic to your site” column, find the green boxes, read the text in the box and look at the row you’re on to see what site its referring to. It also tells you what each site is good at, and what it sucks at, before you do something stupid like trying to get some SEO juice from Facebook, like I did a couple of weeks back.
Click on the picture to enlarge, save it doing whatever works for you.
Map of Social Media by Marketing Task
Don’t believe me… Take a look at Jellyvision’s un-believable samples. They make even the most boring stuff funny and entertaining.
This is the complete opposite of the “no-control” video Mike mentioned last week.
I have a feeling we’ll be seeing greater use of those very soon.
Was this the company you were mentioning before? I checked out a few of their videos and those are pretty nifty. They are good ideas but in reality not that hard to make some of the more simple ones (ie: Auto Desk). I agree though it would be an excellent way to drag someone through a lead gen signup.
My recent post How Effective Are No Control Videos for Marketing?
Yup, this is the one. Its a brilliant format – Interactive, and quirky. Extremely engaging.
They say the porn industry is usually two years ahead, they might be right… I recently saw one for a site called "getiton.com" or something like that where there was a gal that would undress while asking you questions, lol.. Similar to this but not quite as refined.
I can’t for the life of me imagine a complete newbie with little technical background trying to make money online… Not like this, at least.
Seriously… What Shoe is trying to do with the Shoemoney System is laudable – Creating an approachable course. Now come on… How could a complete non-techie do this stuff?
I spent the majority of the day setting up aweber on a site:
1 – Getting the landing pages right – There’s the page when you sign up that tells you to confirm, then there’s the confirmation success page. You gotta do a bit of upsell or trust building or something in those pages while you have eyeballs in them – taking aweber’s default is a no-go.
2 – Get the hoverbox, the sidebar box, install them on the right places. Add the tracking codes for aweber in the right spots.
3 – Create a nice e-mail or two to greet them and point them to your bribe/landing page above
4 – Drive traffic to it… Adwords, Facebook, Whatever… Don’t forget to track the traffic with Tracking 202 as well as the conversions with the Adwords/FB/Wahtever tracking snippets… Create a good landing page.. Campaigns.. And the Sub-id’s when folks click to offers.
Those four steps are like hundreds of little steps, and I skipped some biggies in there – some way beyond the capabilities of non-techies.
… and that isn’t even making me real money!
If you’re reading my blog you’ve got a pretty tough skin already. I don’t mean to discourage anyone, but this shit is harder than it looks.
I agree. There is a ton of additional stuff you learn as you go. When you have an idea you don't think 'shit I gotta hide the referring page and then track sub ids….wait I have to track success ids on email submissions through aweber and then go over them, damnit'
Then before you know it your simple landing page still isn't launched at 4 am.
You don't know what a relief your comment is. I was starting to think I'm a mega-retard. I try something simple: "Hey, lets add an e-mail list here"… Sure enough I've never ran an e-mail list, but how hard can it be? Then it takes me a week. Three days to get the content half-straight straight, two to sign up to aWeber to nail all the pages and forms, and one to glue it all together with traffic… Only to watch it do nothing on the seventh day… Almost biblical.
If I had an exploitable flaw in Tracking202, like an SQL injection bug, and was a real prick looking for easy targets, I might run the following query on Google:
allinurl:”tracking202/redirect”
That happily returns a couple hundred thousand results… All Tracking 202 servers.
Its always a good idea to secure your shit…
A robots.txt won’t stop a hacker of any kind – but ye’olde security through obscurity shouldn’t be underestimated… It will stop all well-behaved search engines if you add the following to a file named robots.txt in the root of your domain.
User-agent: * Disallow: /
Yup, it’s that easy.
Heh yeah I seen this one a while ago. This is just like Nicky Cakes landing page protect thing. Sometimes they just make you an obvious target.
I should have my SSL setup on my tracking202 server by tomorrow and then I might actually start using it.
Its a balancing act too. Usually the more secure you make your system, the harder it is to use!
My recent post Googlehack Tracking202
Tracking202 isn't secure!!!
You're probably right, it isn't secure – at least not against a determined attacker. I personally don't have the skills to crack open a server like that… I do know nothing is really secure given enough cash to hire the right folks, which isn't really that much considering exchange rates. I'm all ears open to suggestions on the tracking aspect. Develop my own stuff? Fly blind?
My recent post WordPress 3 Released!
Brilliant article from Ian Lurie on the Internet Marketing Gold Rush – via Ran Aroussi’s mailing list.
Some questions for self-reflection:
Brilliant article for self-examination – Go read.
I love Jonathan Volk’s weekly interviews – They’re literally a weekly kick in the balls for me. They’re a not-so-gentle reminder that somewhere out there there’s a dope doing what I want to be doing – and I’m not.
Its also a great source of blogs. Finch’s blog is actually really good. I’m starting to notice that -in general- the more successful internet marketers have the least useful blog content. Of course there are many exceptions – my blog being one of them – according to that “inverse correlation” rule I should be surfing in a limo made out of internet marketing wads of cash all the way to some high-class strip club while sipping champagne and smothering my weiner in caviar… Not quite… Yet. A boy can dream, can’t he?
I’ve found a nice little company that puts together consumer and pro-sumer external storage devices – hard drives. They are Cavalry storage an their stuff can be bought on Amazon, buy.com and other places. Check out dealnews.com for good deals on their stuff too.
Why are they good? Warranty. It’s not the story you want to hear – it’s the truth (BTW, last I checked drives were designed to last at most 5 years). Over the past two years or so I’ve had two drives sent in for warranty with Cavalry and had no trouble dealing with them. I’ve decided I’m not going to deal with half a dozen manufacturers, just Cavalry and save myself the headaches.
Smooth move, everyone, smooth move: Blogger Raided
Now you know, dude… Next time, you get a Halloween voice changer, head to a payphone (if you can find one) and hit up some Chinese ripoff manufacturers – or HTC. Or better yet – play nice and call Apple…
Whatever happened to “Finders Keepers”?
I’m wondering weather backlinks inside PDF or PPT files might be easier to disseminate and how they affect ranking… Hmm… Interesting idea.
ALL YOUR BROWSERS ARE BELONG TO US
Nice one with my morning coffee: Sun Releases Emergency Java Patch
A week ago, Oracle claimed the vulnerability that had been discovered in Java was not a big deal at all. Apparently, they’ve changed their minds on that.
Yesterday afternoon, Oracle pushed an update to Java that fixes a vulnerability that exposed Windows users to drive-by attacks. While Sun had claimed that the issue wasn’t serious enough for them to release a patch prior to the next scheduled version’s release, once Google’s Travis Ormandy released details of how the attack could be used, Sun relented and released a fix.
The vulnerability was independently discovered by Ruben Sanamarta as well, and occurs because ofthe Java-Plugin Browser which runs “javaws.exe” withough validating command-line parameters.
The new version, Sun Java 1.6.0_20 is available at the Java web site, or you can wait until it’s automatically pushed to you version. Which will happen within 30 days. Which you probably shouldn’t wait for.
You can also read the full release notes on Oracle’s site.
Don’t walk, run to update your Java… This affects ALL YOUR BROWSERS.
Personally after getting pwned two weeks ago I’m running all browsers inside Sandboxie – See here for other ideas.
ALL YOUR BROWSERS ARE BELONG TO US
After much searching I found a good host. I was exploring the maze trying to do a bee-line to the answer (Why do they call it a Bee line when bees do not fly straight at all?). In the end the way I managed to find them was by going into a hosting directory like hostsearch and NOT going with the companies they list. The process is simple:
1) Go to HostSearch
2) Pick your country and scroll to the middle/bottom of the list (avoiding the sponsored listings)
3) Pick a random host
4) Go here: Who Is Hosting This and figure out who hosts the hosting company. You’ll get their company name and IP. Check out the company and the IP on a geolocation tool. If the parent company is where you want it to be – geographically speaking – Go forth, young man!
5) If not, repeat with next hosting company on the list
This little process gets though the barrier of Crapellers - My new term for Crap Resellers. Sometimes the parent company offers only high-end stuff, but sometimes it offers the usual fare. You can go for a reseller account yourself!
Have fun!
I’ld still like to know what diabolical deed you are up to in the oversees market.
My recent post Dear Facebook, Fuck You
Its not THAT diabolical. It isn't porn – I get too carried away to do that – it isn't warez or virii. Its just grey area and I prefer to stay on this side of trouble..
There are just too many jerks with too much time on their hands and not enough Viagra hand cream… So it makes sense to take a little caution.
Plus the folks I'm hoping to take over on SEO might not like it. But hey, its all fun and games… 
BTW, I finally found a host… I'm paying about 5x what I would be paying stateside – so this shit better work. Now! LOL!
There you go, that’s the extent of my German.
I’ve spent around five solid hours combined searching for good international hosting. Good as in: More than 15GB, more than 10x the bandwidth, a reasonable price tag for an experiment and dealing with a hosting company and not a reseller.
Challenge #1) Try typing Hosting anything in your favorite search engine and its a zoo. Mostly resellers. And msotly totally GARBAAAAGE.
Challenge #2) You find a company – Do the plans match what you need or do they have 250MB for $50?
Challenge 3#) Are they REALLY located where they say they are? – The company may be, but check their customers and their datacenter if you can. I’ve used Discover Who Hosts Any Website | Who Is Hosting This to successfully sniff out companies in India reselling a server around the corner from me – all you need to do is nab the name of one of their clients and put them though that site. That and nice IP geolocation tool like http://www.ip2location.com
Challenge #4) Are they for real? Or is it fly-by-night hosting on Grandma’s PC? This is a combination between a judgment call and the info you’re able to gather.
This doesn’t sound like much of a challenge until you try. The US market is dead simple – Great offers and easy to tell apart the good from the crap. The international market – not so easy my friend.
I tried the Warrior Forum, Digital point and some others – People are not talking much about this so came up really empty.
The single most useful resource I found in this hunt was Hostsearch.com – The decision isn’t final on where I’m plunking this stuff down but I’m taking the plunge in the next few minutes… I’m just going to spin the wheel of fortune here. If you have recommendations, I’d love to hear them.
Now that was stupid. I spent the past 60 minutes trying to find a good recommendation for international hosting. Panama, Mexico, Netherlands, Germany, UK… Nothing was fitting the bill (ie: the bill was huge) Then it hit me like a brick: India. Doh!
I decided to give that low-hanging-fruit I mentioned a while back a GO. What the heck, lets go for it. Its an SEO job, essentially. If it works out, it will be stellar – if it bombs, I hope it doesn’t splatter.
I had four 2Ghz cores crunching the data for the site for about 48 hs during the weekend… My back-of the-envelope calculations say that it should take about 15 hours to shuttle the content to the site – even with the 4x bigger pipe I asked for. I have no clue how long it will take to get everything online and accessible – there’s a couple of things I still need to figure out how I’m going to pull them off.
Ideally, shortly afterwards this scene should unfold in the market space I’m entering:
However, for visitors, the site should look and feel like this:
After last week’s fiasco of getting pwned by what looked like an overflow bug exploited in the latest Firefox (3.6.3), it dawned on me today the simplest way to lock this one down – Way simpler than a Virtual Machine and with zero impact on performance – and a mild hit on ease of use… User privileges!
Hello! McFly!! I should have been running my browser as an unprivileged user already. Doh!
Then I remembered there is a very useful little program that does sandboxing really well called Sandboxie – How well does it stand up to getting pwned? Probably pretty well, unless the exploit is targeted at the browser and the sandbox tech – which is extremely unlikely. In that case, running in a sandbox with an unprivileged user would take care of pretty much everything – but it might be a bit of overshooting. Sandboxie loads a kernel-mode driver and provides really nice controls over what is allowed and what isn’t, it boxes up whatever changes the app wants to do but is not directly allowed, and lets you review them. Not only can you see what you’re doing, prevent malware, but actually see that something bad was about to happen. Really cool tech.
Using just an unprivileged user is pretty rock solid safe – but it is also a royal pain in the ass. Operations fail all the time – especially in Windows where every program thinks they ought to own the box, you’ve got to mess with the event viewer to figure out what the program tried to do that failed and made it explode, then figure out what permissions to give it – and remember to take them away if it was just a temporary thing – Then to top it all off, half the settings get stored in the profile or home directory of the unprivileged user the browser was running under – so when you try to run it under an administrator ID to change that something that wasn’t working as a regular user – whatever you wanted to change is not there anymore. Enough rant… Lets see what happens.
I’ve got no ties to Sandboxie other than its a fine piece of software for a decent price (around $30) – Anyone have any other similar tech to recommend in this area of Windows browser safety?
PS: Anyone who suggests either Linux or a Mac will be cursed to have hair grow out of their ears until it looks like ponytails.
I just saw this on the left side of a search I did on Facebook:
Wow… I checked to make sure it wasn’t an app I had installed. It isn’t. I don’t spend that much time on FB but to see that it pulls web search results via Bing instead of Google was a shocker.
Let me get this straight:
1 – The FTC approved the search engine market merge between Bing and Yahoo
2- Bing serves the search results for the #1 traffic site on the web, Facebook
3- Apple wants to boot Google from it’s iPhone and iPad future and get Bing
There we have it, the four horsemen of the Googlelypse:
Wow… I can’t wait to see what the Google SiniStar comes up with next.
Sharing a link that I’ve found… “intriguing” in the past.
Whenever I go there I always learn something. The audience is really very technical – the “Black Hat” they’re referring to is 99% on the technology side. I’ve yet to see anything on naughty marketing techniques.
Today I stopped by Black Hat World looking for the “ShomoneyX” course. Its free at shoemoneyx.com but Jeremy has it on an autoresponder that takes three freaking months to deliver it complete – 12 installements, one each week. I’m on week 1.
Well, you get the picture. In ten minutes I went from Week 1 to Week 12.
Like I said, I always learn something. In this case I just learned what “WordPress Cloaking” means. Essentially they show a blog to the search engines and forward live users to an offer page. Call me clueless, but setting that up seems like a waste of good time that can be used in building something real – not a card castle.
Anyway – Here’s more info on WordPress Cloaking is that floats your boat: Simplified SES and WPCloacker with some informative videos.
As Anakin, players will unleash the power of the dark side in ruthless lightsaber and Force attacks. Url Cloaking
LOL.. Thanks for the link on your comment. Looks interesting. Posting it as a post.
My recent post The Four Horsemen of Googlelypse
Leon is discussing. 
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Joseph are discussing. 
hackwack, and 
Hi
I`m writing a blog post about DDoS ransom notes. So far the only reference I’ve found was:
http://www.incapsula.com/the-incapsula-blog/item/221-the-greeting-card-no-business-wants-to-get
Can you provide me with other samples?