Blog for "the-enabler" of the letsnet.org network

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"Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored."-- Aldous Huxley

As the prostitute said, "It's not the work, it's the stairs." As told to me by Elaine Stritch, star of stage, screen, & TV, right after she won her 1st Emmy. Ago 79.

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The Fed. think that they have found and stopped the 2nd largest spammer in the country. We all can but hope.



MY ADVICE endeavors at keen.com. The number is 1-800-275-5336 (800-ask-keen) + ext. 0329063 for tech stuff, 0329117 for running a small business, and 0329144 on investing. Want to CHAT, I use Yahoo's IM as the_web_ster. View me in the Friends & Family part of webcamnow.com, just click on "view cams", then in the Java window click on WebcamNow Communities drop down arrow & select Friends & Family. Under the live webcams look for & click on me "the_webster".

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"Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored."-- Aldous Huxley

As the prostitute said, "It's not the work, it's the stairs." As told to me by Elaine Stritch, star of stage, screen, & TV, right after she won her 1st Emmy. Ago 79.

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Submitted to me by The PuterDiva of letsnet.org

Link to the story
With their top-notch antivirus and personal firewalls, both Norton Internet Security and ZoneAlarm Security Suite are excellent options. But now, for the first time, ZoneAlarm stands alone as our Editors' Choice. Detail after detail edged us over to the ZA camp.

As usual, there's little to choose from between the two antivirus apps. Both Norton AntiVirus and Zone Labs' AV package have received detection and removal certification from all the independent testing labs. For firewall protection, ZoneAlarm is the tops, stealthing that last pesky port that none of the other firewalls can get to.

Both suites offer antispam modules, but ZASuite's antispam module, licensed from Editors' Choice winner MailFrontier, does a better job of weeding out unwanted mail. Both NIS and ZASuite use privacy controls to help protect sensitive data, such as credit card numbers. They also include Internet filtering to keep young 'uns away from inappropriate Web sites. Here, Norton's controls are more sophisticated, tying into Windows log-on accounts. We like ZASuite's real-time determinations for sites not in its database.

NIS hasn't slipped; we have to give it an honorable mention for continued proficiency. But the small differences between the two suites add up to a real difference in overall experience. We've also found in real-world trials that NIS can slow a PC considerably—in some cases, enough to persuade people to disable it, which doesn't keep anyone safe. ZASuite has been intimidating to new users in the past, but its advice has improved, and it didn't slow down real-world PCs as much as NIS did.
Link to the story
Boy, can I pick'em, and years ahead of the others too. And yes I'm still using them. Them and AVG for viruses. And Ad-Aware for spyware. Someone is recording your every keystroke.


MY ADVICE endeavors at keen.com. The number is 1-800-275-5336 (800-ask-keen) + ext. 0329063 for tech stuff, 0329117 for running a small business, and 0329144 on investing. Want to CHAT, I use Yahoo's IM as the_web_ster. View me in the Friends & Family part of webcamnow.com, just click on "view cams", then in the Java window click on WebcamNow Communities drop down arrow & select Friends & Family. Under the live webcams look for & click on me "the_webster".

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"Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored."-- Aldous Huxley

As the prostitute said, "It's not the work, it's the stairs." As told to me by Elaine Stritch, star of stage, screen, & TV, right after she won her 1st Emmy. Ago 79.

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Feb 11, 2:51 PM EST


Click Fraud Looms As Search-Enging Threat

By MICHAEL LIEDTKE
AP Business Writer

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- Like thousands of other merchants, Tammy Harrison thought she had struck gold when hordes visited her Web site by clicking on the small Internet ads she purchased from the world's most popular online search engines.

It cost Harrison as much as $20 for each click, but the potential new business seemed to justify the expense.

Harrison's delight dimmed, though, when she realized the people clicking on her ads weren't really interested in her products.

She was being victimized by "click fraud," a scam that threatens to squelch the online advertising boom that has been enriching Google Inc., Yahoo Inc. and their many business partners.

The ruse has different twists, but the end result is usually the same: Merchants are billed for fruitless traffic generated by someone who repeatedly clicks on an advertiser's Web link with no intention of ever buying anything.

Harrison figures she has spent about 200 hours documenting the mischief that drained her budget and diverted customers to a competitor, costing her an estimated $100,000 in sales.

"Click fraud has gotten out of control," said Harrison, who sells computer software to doctors. "It's stealing money from my pocket. It's just as bad as someone walking into a store and taking a television."

Estimates vary widely on how much click fraud is going on in the $3.8 billion search engine advertising market.

"Click fraud exists, but it's mostly a big paranoia," said Chris Churchill, chief executive of Fathom Online, a San Francisco firm that studies the spending patterns on search engine ads.

Others believe anywhere from 10 percent to 20 percent of the clicks are made under false pretenses.

"Click fraud is like a big elephant standing in the middle of the living room," said Lisa Wehr, president of Oneupweb, a search engine advertising consultant. "Everyone sees it and knows it's there, but no one is quite sure what to do about it."

Both Google and Yahoo acknowledge the perils of click fraud, but believe improved internal controls and the increased vigilance of advertisers will prevent the problem from escalating.

"We are always worried about it, but it hasn't been a material issue so far," said Google chief executive Eric Schmidt.

After recently expanding its staff to patrol click fraud, Google broke up a scheme that had generated several thousand bogus transactions, chief financial officer George Reyes told analysts earlier this week.

Yahoo also has been shoring up click fraud protections, said Patrick Giordiani, a senior manager for the company's advertising subsidiary, Overture Services.

Such reassurances from search engine executives aren't surprising, given how much they stand to lose if advertisers curtail spending, said Jessie Stricchiola, president of Alchemist Media, which helps businesses detect problems and negotiate refunds.

"There's some serious positioning and politicking going on," she said. "Click fraud isn't going to destroy the industry, but it's not going away either."

Harrison said she didn't know a thing about the problem until a former employee formed a rival firm and started to repeatedly click on her ads as a competitive tactic. The fraudulent clicks frequently exceeded spending limits Harrison had set, knocking her ads out of the display rotation.

The search engines have issued refunds to cover the bogus clicks, but Harrison says those payments don't compensate for missed sales opportunities.

In November, Google filed a lawsuit that revealed the search engine can't even trust some of its own advertising partners.

Houston-based Auction Experts International never responded to claims it collected at least $50,000 in illegitimate commissions by clicking on the ad links that Google delivered to its Web pages.

But the site shut down and Google won a default judgment against one of its principals.

The suit won't be Google's last to combat click fraud, said Palo Alto attorney David Kramer, who represents the company.

Stricchiola believes it's only a matter of time before advertisers become so exasperated with click fraud that they file a class-action lawsuit against a major search engine.

The incentives for click fraud have increased along with the money devoted to search engine advertising - a concept that didn't exist until Overture Services introduced it in the late 1990s.

Such advertising, Google calls it AdWords, works like this: The search engine auctions off the right to have advertising links displayed when designated words, such as "vacation Hawaii," are included in a search request. The top bids get the most prominent display on Web pages.

Once widely ridiculed, the idea has turned into a fast-spreading craze as more merchants realized substantially higher returns on search engine ads than on more traditional marketing campaigns conducted through the Yellow Pages, direct mail and newspapers.

By 2008, industry research firm eMarketer expects $7.4 billion to be spent on search engine advertising, up from just $108.5 million in 2000.

The success of search engine advertising has substantially raised prices, too.

In mid-1999, advertisers paid Overture an average commission of 11 cents per click. By the end of last year, advertisers were paying an industrywide average of $1.70 for the hundreds of keywords tracked by Fathom Online.

The cost of prized search terms runs much higher. For instance, the top price for mesothelioma, a cancer that spurred scores of lawsuits linking the illness to asbestos exposure, recently stood at $51 per click, Fathom said.

Higher prices have turned click fraud into a cottage industry.

Some swindlers have hired cheap overseas contractors to sit in front of computers and click on targeted links all day.

Others are developing sophisticated software to help automate and conceal click fraud.

On the other side of the fence, entrepreneurs like Dmitri Eroshenko are trying to develop technology solutions to counteract click fraud.

"This has become a real cat-and-mouse game," said Eroshenko, who runs Clicklab in Miami. "Advertisers are going to have to accept a certain level of click fraud as a cost of doing business."

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Mike Liedtke can be reached at mliedtke(at)ap.org



MY ADVICE endeavors at keen.com. The number is 1-800-275-5336 (800-ask-keen) + ext. 0329063 for tech stuff, 0329117 for running a small business, and 0329144 on investing. Want to CHAT, I use Yahoo's IM as the_web_ster. View me in the Friends & Family part of webcamnow.com, just click on "view cams", then in the Java window click on WebcamNow Communities drop down arrow & select Friends & Family. Under the live webcams look for & click on me "the_webster".

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"Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored."-- Aldous Huxley

As the prostitute said, "It's not the work, it's the stairs." As told to me by Elaine Stritch, star of stage, screen, & TV, right after she won her 1st Emmy. Ago 79.

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It's no news that malware sometimes attacks security programs running on the victim's system, but there have been some noteworthy reports lately. First, we have a worm now that tries to shut off Microsoft's new Anti-Spyware beta program. Perhaps MS will do more to harden the program.

And we've had a couple of vulnerability reports about security programs, both originating with Internet Security Systems: First, a bug in the UPX unpacking component in a variety of Symantec products makes it vulnerable to remote code execution. Symantec has issued fixes and you should install them pronto. Second, several F-Secure products are vulnerable to buffer overflow in the ARJ file handling.F-Secure has also released fixes and users should install them.

I suspect bugs of this scale have always existed in products such as this. If I'm correct that increased scrutiny is responsible for these reports, then we should expect many more such reports to come soon.



MY ADVICE endeavors at keen.com. The number is 1-800-275-5336 (800-ask-keen) + ext. 0329063 for tech stuff, 0329117 for running a small business, and 0329144 on investing. Want to CHAT, I use Yahoo's IM as the_web_ster. View me in the Friends & Family part of webcamnow.com, just click on "view cams", then in the Java window click on WebcamNow Communities drop down arrow & select Friends & Family. Under the live webcams look for & click on me "the_webster".

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"Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored."-- Aldous Huxley

As the prostitute said, "It's not the work, it's the stairs." As told to me by Elaine Stritch, star of stage, screen, & TV, right after she won her 1st Emmy. Ago 79.

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1. Sex
2. Super Bowl commercials
3. Tsunami
4. Shaving
5. Teens and sex
6. Violin
7. Plane Crash
8. Houston
9. American girl
10. Deep throat

MY ADVICE endeavors at keen.com. The number is 1-800-275-5336 (800-ask-keen) + ext. 0329063 for tech stuff, 0329117 for running a small business, and 0329144 on investing. Want to CHAT, I use Yahoo's IM as the_web_ster. View me in the Friends & Family part of webcamnow.com, just click on "view cams", then in the Java window click on WebcamNow Communities drop down arrow & select Friends & Family. Under the live webcams look for & click on me "the_webster".

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"Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored."-- Aldous Huxley

As the prostitute said, "It's not the work, it's the stairs." As told to me by Elaine Stritch, star of stage, screen, & TV, right after she won her 1st Emmy. Ago 79.

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When you start your investment program, don't expect to become a millionaire overnight. History has shown that the stock market has many ups and downs. When looking at the long term (five years or more), however, investors have been rewarded for their patience. Additionally, riskier investments held over the long term provide higher rewards than low-risk investments. Less risk = less return.



MY ADVICE endeavors at keen.com. The number is 1-800-275-5336 (800-ask-keen) + ext. 0329063 for tech stuff, 0329117 for running a small business, and 0329144 on investing. Want to CHAT, I use Yahoo's IM as the_web_ster. View me in the Friends & Family part of webcamnow.com, just click on "view cams", then in the Java window click on WebcamNow Communities drop down arrow & select Friends & Family. Under the live webcams look for & click on me "the_webster".

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"Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored."-- Aldous Huxley

As the prostitute said, "It's not the work, it's the stairs." As told to me by Elaine Stritch, star of stage, screen, & TV, right after she won her 1st Emmy. Ago 79.

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By ANICK JESDANUN, AP Internet Writer

NEW YORK - An Internet browser feature meant to permit Web addresses in Chinese, Arabic and other languages could encourage online fraudsters by making scam Web sites look legitimate to visitors.

For once, the affected browser is not the industry-leading Internet Explorer from Microsoft Corp. but rather several of its more robust competitors.

That's because the aging IE lacks support for internationalized domain names — at least without a plug-in, which would then make IE vulnerable.

"It's kind of ironic that it affects some of the supposedly safer browsers," said Neel Mehta, a research engineer at the Internet Security Systems Inc.

A fix won't be easy because the vulnerability, publicized at a weekend hacker conference, that enables so-called "phishing" scams involves a feature, not a coding error.

Engineers at the Mozilla Foundation, developer of the No. 2. Firefox browser, said they were reviewing options and should have more to say within a few days.

The maker of the Opera browser said in a statement that although a fix is possible, "it's extremely hard to find a balance between making the fix too comprehensive or too limited. Even though you limit yourself you can create problems for valid domains."

Officially, the Internet's Domain Name System supports only 37 characters — the 26 letters, 10 numerals and a hyphen.

But in recent years, in response to a growing Internet population worldwide, engineers have been working on ways to trick the system into understanding other languages.

Engineers have rallied around a character system called Unicode. The newly discovered exploit takes advantage of the fact that characters that look alike can have two separate codes in Unicode and thus appear to the computer as different. For example, Unicode for "a" is 97 under the Latin alphabet, but 1072 in Cyrillic.

Subbing one for the other can allow a scammer to register a domain name that looks to the human as "paypal.com," tricking users into giving passwords and other sensitive information at what looks like a legitimate site.

Some browsers, including Firefox, let users deactivate the other character sets but doing so is complicated and would cut off access to the relatively few sites that use non-English characters in their addresses.

A better solution is to always manually type Web address directly into a browser rather than clicking on a link sent via e-mail or even copying and pasting that link.

The potential for the vulnerability has been known for awhile, but it has only recently gained the attention of security experts as non-English domain names become a reality.

Eric Johanson, an independent security consultant in Seattle, publicized it on Sunday, saying he wanted to pressure vendors to act.

Dan Hubbard, director of security at Websense Inc., which monitors phishing scams, said he knew of no e-mails circulating on the Internet that take advantage of the vulnerability, but he expects scammers to start using it soon to target non-IE browsers.

Hubbard said plenty of flaws already exist with IE because users don't keep up with security updates.


"Attackers will check to see what browser you're using and then use vulnerability A if it's Internet Explorer and B if it's Mozilla Firefox," Hubbard said.

But Johannes Ullrich, chief technology office with the SANS Institute's Internet Storm Center, said scammers may focus on exploiting other flaws because IE remains dominant.

"Right now the one thing that will likely prevent them from using it is that Internet Explorer users will not be able to see the page at all," he said.


MY ADVICE endeavors at keen.com. The number is 1-800-275-5336 (800-ask-keen) + ext. 0329063 for tech stuff, 0329117 for running a small business, and 0329144 on investing. Want to CHAT, I use Yahoo's IM as the_web_ster. View me in the Friends & Family part of webcamnow.com, just click on "view cams", then in the Java window click on WebcamNow Communities drop down arrow & select Friends & Family. Under the live webcams look for & click on me "the_webster".