Please Link to my site emails

From time to time I get emails asking me to link to there sites because of one thing or another. I have no problem linking to sites that I think have valuable information, but when I get email to link to sites that are really new I have a problem.

In the email he talks about how his business got scammed out of 6,000$ dollars and how he just created the site four weeks earlier due to how out raged he is that his business got scammed for so much money.

As you may have noticed this site that still remains unnamed because I am uncomfortable with adding the link to my site. Now I won’t say anything bad about creating a site, and I am sure it was something like the Check cashing scam I came across a few months ago and talked about.

So I wanted to talk about how to get people to come to you site:

• Submit your Site to search engines –  This is the first step to getting people to find your site.   Some sites to submit to for free are Pingomatic, Ask.com, and Yahoo.   These are the three that I suggest starting off to have Search engines finding your site.  All other search engines will come to your site over time.

Why website should Hide their Affiliate links

Yes you heard me right, lately I’ve been trying to figure out why some of my click were not used in my links. So I went to Google to find the answer. I found the answer to some of this. According to some other websites 40% of affiliate links are stolen or switched with spammers and scammer who are trying to make money. You see the virus writers have been trying to make money with there Fake Antivirus software and they will do anything to earn money. I have also though about how people would boost they have made Millions from Affiliate links and that is where this stilling would happen.

How to make your Affiliate links look like they come from your site:

I decided the easiest way to prevent link theft is create a directory called “go” and then used the program Profit Protector to encrypt and hide my affiliate links.  Then all you have to do is upload the created html file to the “go” directory. for Example:

http://www.affiliatesite.com/product.html?affid=1234

changes to

http://www.mysite.com/go/affiliatesite.html

Now all you have to do is change all your links like the example above and you would use the “http://www.mysite.com/go/affiliatesite.html” for your active link.  This would help reduce programs from stealing your affiliate links with there own.

When do you “Never Fold”

So I got this email and wanted to show you just how try to get you to link to their site:

I got this email and wanted to talk about how people link to sites they shouldn’t.  Although this a real site, I had my doubts from the get go.   You see it talks about sending 21 visitors to my site.  I got to the site Neverfold.net which after I looked and there I am but I wonder why? Because Poker and Calicanis have nothing in common with Poker or at least news and all that.

As you can see when you go to that site via the link he gives me, which by the way if you weren’t paying attention is a hidden link with Neverfold.net/?pg=YKchR. As you can see this is a way for him to know when you click it to put your name on the forum page. You can tell because Ref: YKchR is at the bottom of the email. This is most likely a generated email by a bot, I did even more research to find out more information. I found out that the so call 5k to 7k page views were bogus. I checked with Alexa, and I find out this:

Rogue Fake Codecs on the Rise

Panda Labs has been talking about Adware/VideoPlay and they are seeing a lot of variants on this.   They even play a game, find the difference in the installation screen:

Now as you can see this look to be the same agreement in all those difference installation.  Some things to consider Never install any software from a website that you don’t know Nothing about about.

Panda Labs also talks about these new variants in regards to what they do:

This file spreads by making copies of itself in the removable drives and it also creates an autorun.inf in order to be run when they are accessed. This file collects the data stored in the browsers, such as cookies, passwords, profiles, email accounts, etc, and connects to a remote address to send the information.
[Via Panda Labs Blog]

TINYURL being used by scammers and hackers — How to prevent it!!

With Phishing attempts going on with the TINYURL redirect website, I thought I would show you how you could prevent from going to a site you don’t want. Tinyurl.com has a great little feature, although it is a feature based on your cookies. It however will help prevent you from going to a site that you don’t know anything that about. It’s called the Preview Feature, and is available to any user who wants to use it.

As you can see if you enable it and you go to a click on a tinyurl, you will see this:

http://tinyurl.com/6t7ukk

As you can see, if you click any TINYURL links you will automatically be told where that link is redirecting you to. This however only works with there being a cookie left behind in your system to let tell Tinyurl that is has to show the link first. So if you clean your cookies out from time to time, you will need to enable it every time after you clean the browser cookies. This will help prevent you from being phished because you will be able to tell if it is the right site in the first place. If not then you don’t have to visit that site. This should be enabled on all Short URL Sites, I hope they make it a mandatory for any site that redirects. This would help stop phishing and scammers because they can’t hide behind unknown url. Only time will tell though, these sites are always going to have problems but this would solve so many problems.

Careless Facebook profiling can lead to Identity Theft!

I just got in contact with a old friend from High school and another friend of mine suggest the new friend. I was looking at her profile and couldn’t believe what I saw:

As you can see this is not good I was amazed at how many people are giving out there birthdays and who they are married to to friends and family. So we heard about how people are claiming they need help or are in need of desperate money. This is nothing new, as you know people are having hard economy times and people are using the social engineering to scam people out of money.

I feel that I should warn people the important necessity.   You shouldn’t be broadcasting your DOB and who your married to to your friends, just in case they get hacked.

Recent activity indicates that identity thieves are hacking into trustworthy profiles before selling on the login details to interested parties. This information is used by spammers to target legitimate users, posting misleading links on their “walls” – personalized message boards.

[Via Computing.Co.UK]

Facebook : Beware Spam for breakfast. (Virus)

In today’s society, we’ve been to complacent with people with people clicking links for the social group. In one such article on Channel Web, a nice little blog, says this:

The worm was discovered by IT security provider Kaspersky Lab, which said the threat, Net-Worm.Win32.Koobface.b, is targeting Facebook users by creating spam messages and sending them to the infected user’s friends via the site.

“Unfortunately, users are very trusting of messages left by ‘friends’ on social networking sites,” said Alexander Gostev, senior virus analyst at Kaspersky Lab, in a statement. “So, the likelihood of a user clicking on a link like this is very high.”

[Via Channel Web]

This seems to be a problem people thinking that a link someone sends them is a real good link but actually is a link to a video site. According to this article the links people are sending are actually a fake video link, telling you have to download some update to flash player, by downloading this program. The user gets involved with the virus and the fun begins. So how can you prevent this from happening, two ways one is a very good group of software to make sure you have the latest and greatest video codecs. That too can be something they’ll say you need and if you’ve already installed this list of codecs then you know they’ll not telling the truth and you can quickly get away from the site laughing.

Is this Hardcore PC Falcon Northwest Mach V Extreme or not?

Just saw this on PcWorld Reviews and thought I’d talk about the specs. I would love to get one of these for my self. It comes with:

• Silverstone Temjin TJ03 full tower case
• Intel Core i7 965 Extreme processor — Overclocked to 3.8 GHZ

12GB of DDR3-1066

7200-rpm Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000 hard drive

dual 2GB ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 graphics

• 22-inch Samsung 2243 LCD

All these are links are for those who would like to make this computer yourself.   The links are where you could go to buy the parts. The price after you buy the parts are estimated at $7395 price and I think you could get that down to 5000$ if you look for rebates and other incentives.   I wouldn’t mind having this computer for gaming myself.   It sure would be nice to give for someone on the holidays.  This would be good for people wh o are looking to computer game developers or people who are into 3D rendering.  Just though I share this little  review with you.   They really did a fantastic review of this product on there site.

Some good CyberMonday Sites to look at for 2008!

I was just getting done with that story about the Walmart Stampede, and thought I would encourage people to check these good sites for people to check out for great deals.   I have been looking through sites combing for some great sites to find the best deals and here they are:

• Dealio — Dealio will not only show you sneak peaks at Cyber Monday ads, but we will also send you directly to the store so that you can purchase the often limited inventory Cyber Monday deals before they disappear. Best of all, there is no need to hop from site to site – Dealio has all your Cyber Monday shopping covered.
• CyberMonday – Shop hot holiday deals from more than 500 merchants. All of Shop.org’s proceeds from CyberMonday.com support the Ray Greenly Scholarship Fund.
• Cybermonday Mahalo Deals — This Mahalo page collects links to websites offering information and discounted merchandise for Cyber Monday.
• Best Cyber Monday Sales –Well, I finally put together a list of the top retailers throughout the country with links directly to their Cyber Monday deals.

Hulu Launches the Hulu for the Holidays!

This is near and dear to my heart.  Hulu finally launches the Hulu for the Holidays sponsored by Wal-Mart.   I have talked about what they might bring to the holiday season and if you want to find out what I thought might come to Hulu check out these links:

• Some Movies that might be coming to HULU!
• Hulu Brings on Paramount Movies!

Some movies or show that will probably come to Hulu are going to be Christmas themes.  I would wager it will be Charlie Brown, Peanuts, The Grinch who Stole Christmas.  I am sure there will be even more later on, ones that I didn’t think would come to Hulu.   We shall see what comes from what they want to do the next few weeks.  To bad they aren’t doing clues this time around people seemed to like doing that.

You have an undelivered UPS/FEDEX Package. (Virus)

From what I’ve seen so far. There seems to be a new rash of email going around with the heading that makes it look and feel like either UPS or Fedex. Saying that you have an undelivered package from them and to either print the order confirmation or to click a link. I will say this once, if you get this delete it. Fedex and UPS will never hide the link and tell you have an package waiting in the email. They will leave a note your door. You must ask yourself how Fedex/UPS found out your email address to tell you have a package waiting? They don’t and they won’t, just a fact.

UPS/FedEx Delivery Failure : Snopes

TROJ_DLOADR.GG and TSPY_ZBOT.NM Trojan, which will Monitor and try to steal your data. The other one is a ZBot and will try to steal you data also. If you need help removing this virus, I’d suggest checking out my other virus article Avg detected Trojan Horse Generic 12.htc?. There are a lot of ways to remove this virus but the first step is never click on any links in your emails. I also wrote about Some Important programs to prevent yourself from having viruses and Malware!! This will help prevent and fix the common virus problems you might have.

Today everyone is doing there homework! Links to Election Day Results

Yep, You see it just like I do. People are studying to vote. People have been doing this from the time they went to school. It never fails the day before. To see who wins the election you might check out these links:

• Election Day through Associate Press Results
• MSNBC  Results Widget
• AOL Election Toolbar
• NYT SMS Results
• iDashboards

Now I won’t tell you who to vote for but I will tell you  that today we will be making History in more ways then one.  Whoever we pick will be historic, a black president or a Lady VP.  You decide go Vote and Here are some links to find out where you can vote at:

• Google Voting Info
• CNN Voter Hotline

These should help you go and vote. Now go and vote and remember to think about who you will vote for.

UPS expected to layoff people also

According to New York Times:

United Parcel Service reported a 9.9 percent drop in quarterly profit on Thursday and said it expected consumers to cut back on holiday gift purchases.  The company is planning cost cuts, including layoffs, in 2009. It said it expected profit for 2008 to be toward the low end of a range it provided in July.

[Via NYtimes]

So that creates more of a demand on Jobs and if you want to hear some other layoffs that I’ve seen on the go, just search my site.   Some useful links to check out is:

• Largest Employer : University of Pittsburgh Medical Center is planning layoffs!!
• Mahalo Lay’s off around 10% of it’s workforce!!

Largest Employer : University of Pittsburgh Medical Center is planning layoffs!!

Is this the beginning or the end of the recession?  After  seeing this today I wanted to talk about this development.  If they layoff a large number of people is this going to effect your chances of finding a job?  Here’s what they had to say:

The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center has plans to reduce its 50,000 workforce by a small percentage. UPMC did not immediately release any specifics.

“As the economy deteriorates, we are proactively taking these steps to ensure that our growth in expenses is not outpacing our growth in revenues,” a UPMC statement said.

[via WTAE.TV]

So now that they have said this, what’s the percentages of the workforce are going to be laid off? I wanted to talk about how you could get ready for the imminent day of this. Here’s some good links to consider:

• 5 ways to improve your chance of getting hired.
• Are you asking to be scammed?

And here are some other companies who are planning layoffs or have laid off people:

• Mahalo Lay’s off around 10% of it’s workforce!!
• Merck Laid off 13% of it’s workforce

What’s with Google trends?

Having been going to the Google Trends and keeping watching.  I am starting to wonder something?  Take a look at this and you tell me?

Can you see how someone might use this to create a Goog-411 and use it to promote there website? It is all about the hits and getting what publishers like to say the eyes on a website. Now is that going to confuse people or make people not want to come to a site.  So how would people abuse this?

Very Simple, they’d watch what is trending and post accordingly.  Now you as a reader would click on the website expecting to see what you want to see but instead it would popup with advertisements and maybe malware?  Check these links to better understand it:

• Skype isn’t always safe!
• Some Important programs to prevent yourself from having viruses and Malware!!

Now even though these are just a few.  You can see how someone might want to abuse it and get there site up on Google trends and be able to infect several to even millions of computers before Google sees that or stops.  You could in theory take over a website high in Google rankings and do exactly that.

Miketechshow Listener Round Table 148

Guests on the Show:

• Host – Miketechshow.com
• Mike – mikethinks.com
• Barbra – tanjents.com
• Me – Laforge129.blogspot.com
• Russ – GeekLinux.com
• Jerry – HelpTechOnline.com
• Justin

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