Root Love // Cyberpunk NIFO

Having graduated university in 2002 I can still remember the good old days when I used to sign up for classes over the phone. I had to pick up a course catalogue wait for my registration time and then punch in all of the numbers for the classes I wanted. Those days are no more thanks to LinkProof a piece of network hardware that allows students to remote access their schools. LinkProof is made by Radware a company specializing in network front end application hardware.

Why do students need remote access?

Students can now sign up for classes from where ever they can get an internet signal. They do it form home, a coffee shop with WiFi, even from a different country if they are spending a semester abroad. LinkProof also act as a security shield for school applications protecting the school’s programs and hardware from viruses, Trojans, and denial of service attacks.

Students who can remote access their schools can also get extra information passed on by teachers and professors. They can see class locations and most importantly check their test scores and grades.

Is remote access just for universities?

Absolutely not, remote access is currently being used by elementary schools as well. The Education Bureau of Yi-Lan County in Taiwan recently used Radware technology to assure remote access for its school system.

Teachers can correct work from home and remote access their grading programs remotely. Parents of students can check on their child’s progress and see if they have missing assignments. They can also check their child attendance records to see if their children are skipping classes.

Where is remote access being used?

Remote access is being used all over the world. Keimyung University in Korea built a campus-wide 10-gigabit high-speed backbone network to accommodate more than 27,000 students and 90 departments in nine faculties and 19 colleges. As a result, users have a continuous and secure connection to university resources. Concordia University in Wisconsin is one of 10 universities in the Concordia University System responsible for ensuring the availability and optimized performance of all email, Web access and administrative systems for more than 5,200 students. Remote access with Radware technology lets them do it all.

When looking for school, check to see what remote access capabilities they offer. For both parents and students remote access is a valuable tool used at all levels in the education system.

The move to Voice over Internet Protocol (or VoIP) has grown in popularity so to have the security issues that surround VoIP systems.

Security issues are now a major concern of companies thinking about changing to a VoIP system.

Vunerability to attack

VoIP is internet based and this creates the problem of being open to all the attacks that are associated with this method of communication.

It opens up the telephone network to attacks from hackers, who could infiltrate and listen to phone conversations and steal confidential data, and Spammers have the opportunity to target a system with denial-of-service (DoS) attacks.

Before making the move to VoIP, companies need to thoroughly acquaint themselves with the security issues surrounding this new technology and plan protection in advance.

VoIP networks are threatened with the same security risks as traditional IP data networks and similar meashures need to be taken to add protection and security.

Protecting a VoIP System,

Companies should adopt a multi layer security strategy to secure their VoIP systems.

This can be done by dividing the network into secure zones adding protection with firewalls and intrusion prevention techniques.

A company should in fact secure the network itself by putting in place layers of security to protect at all levels including:

Telephones, conversations, computers, and servers.

A specific method of authentication (encryption) should be standard as to should control access ( by passwords and firewalls)

Companies should always look to encrypt data sent for confidentiality, and use call software to establish a tracking of calls for all employees, to create accountability of information sent.

Internal Security

A potential breach in security that many companies ignore at their peril is internal traffic flowing over a VoIP system.

It is critical this is addressed and secured as well.

An increasing number of workers use voIP to communicate with company staff from wireless phones or soft phones and this creates a serious potential security problem.

Therefore companies should look to encrypt voIP traffic moving internally over a corporate network to prevent attacks from within the company itself.

The increasing use of desktop-based soft phones to make and receive VOIP-based telephone calls creates a breach in firewall security that of course can be exploited by unscrupulous employees.

The best way to address this problem as we have said, is to restrict access to the network.

In addition, make sure all inbound VOIP traffic that flows through a firewall is routed through a gateway server, thus eliminating a direct connection to the Internet and all the security issues this entails.

Securing a VoIP System.

Many corporate users are discouraged from using VoIP systems as they feel they are not secure however, this is the same as saying it is not safe to use a computer connected to the internet, it can be secured its up to companies and individuals to do so

Securing VoIP systems is like securing any IP network.

Just as you protect your PC with virus software, firewalls etc so to should you protect a VoIP system with similar meashures.

VoIP can and is secure, providing adequate steps are taken.

Security is a network issue as well

Security is not a server issue it’s a network issue and companies can achieve security by placing the above measures in place to make their VoIP system secure just as they do with an IP network.

PDFs, ebooks, audio files, video packages, and software programs are examples of digital information products. Like all products, they need to be manufactured, inventoried, and finally shipped to the buyer when the purchase is made.

Some advantages of digital products are that they can be stored easily on a variety of media like your hard disk, cd, dvd, or usb memory stick as well as delivered electronically anywhere in the world with an internet connection.

Traditional physical products incur significant expenses in production of inventory, storage, packaging and shipping that contribute to the reduction of your profit margin especially where there is competition.

On the other hand, the main expense incurred with digital products is in production. Storage and delivery advantages provide instant fulfillment to buyers and so can realize very high margins and profits.

While competitive advantage over traditional product lines are obvious, a new form of competition is emerging in the digital marketplace. The quantitative problem being solved by technology leaves only the quality to be measured or tested.

What all publications have in common is that they contain information and the quality of that information is discovered by reading. Unfortunately, digital products can be more difficult to evaluate without a table of contents to consider. Whether the publication is free or not, evaluation can be frustrating and the wrong choice lead to wasted time, effort, and sometimes money. Although refund guarantees are included with some packages, there is no refund of your time or effort.

What instant food did for kitchen prep time, digital ebooks are doing for business building. However, quality remains in the content or use value not the package. Unfortunately, the current trend appears weighted toward excellent sales and marketing techniques not content.

The extraordinary bonus and content bundles sometimes priced in the thousands of dollars are typically offered for a low one time payment usually less than a hundred dollars and is akin to the million dollar opportunity theories that in reality is quite different. In other words over delivery claims may significantly differ from actual content value.

To help mitigate diminishing return found in the gap between over-delivery-theory indicated by quantity and under-delivery-reality indicated by quality, I set up a site at h4h.biz to list exceptions to help leverage time in favor of the buyer and to stimulate content enrichment.

So far, low cost or free ebooks that are not produced in pdf format tend to be at least unavailable to some operating systems and frequently of low quality, content poor, or just dysfunctional.

To achieve the best results with your online business, focus efforts on finding digital products that you can promote that are of high quality and in a professional pdf package. Alternatively, you can produce your own ebook to expand your market by using a service like h4h.biz that offers professional pdf packaging. After all, content now appears to be the next great opportunity knocking.

Sometimes scammers, clever and scheming vultures they are, may not immediately prey on you for your financial contribution. They may have something more deadly in mind – deadly to you, your computer, and the computers of all your friends. Once the scammers establishes a relationship with you, he/she knows that your email address is a “live” address (one that will give him and others he will sell your address to) so he can secretly then move on to phase two – flooding you and all the other “live” addresses he obtained with hoaxes and chain letters.

And, sadly, these emails and chain letter emails carry hidden spyware (pieces of coding that will allow the originator to take control of all the computers it touches). The code is so written that even if the email is deleted, it will still work effectively from the Recycle Bin. That’s the work of scammer who are also hackers.

What Are Internet Hoaxes and Chain Letters? Internet hoaxes and chain letters are e-mail messages written with one purpose; to be sent to everyone you know. The messages they contain are usually untrue. A few of the sympathy messages do describe a real situation but that situation was resolved years ago so the message is not valid and has not been valid for many years. Hoax messages try to get you to pass them on to everyone you know using several different methods of social engineering. Most of the hoax messages play on your need to help other people.

Who wouldn’t want to warn their friends about some terrible virus that is destroying people’s systems? Or, how could you not want to help this poor little girl who is about to die from cancer? It is hard to say no to these messages when you first see them, though after a few thousand have passed through your mail box, you (hopefully) delete them without even looking.

Chain letters are lumped in with the hoax messages because they have the same purpose as the hoax messages but use a slightly different method of coercing you into passing them on to everyone you know. Chain letters, like their printed ancestors, generally offer luck or money if you send them on. They play on your fear of bad luck and the realization that it is almost trivial for you to send them on. The chain letters that deal in money play on people’s greed and are illegal no matter what they say in the letter.

The Risk and Cost of Hoaxes: The cost and risk associated with hoaxes may not seem to be that high, and isn’t when you consider the cost of handling one hoax on one machine. However, if you consider everyone that receives a hoax, that small cost gets multiplied into some pretty significant costs. For example, if everyone on the Internet were to receive one hoax message and spend one minute reading and discarding it, the cost would be something like: 50,000,000 people times 1/60 hour times $50/hour = $41.7 million

Most people have seen far more than one hoax message and many people cost a business far more than $50 per hour when you add in benefits and overhead. The result is not a small number.

Probably the biggest risk for hoax messages is their ability to multiply. Most people send on the hoax messages to everyone in their address books but consider if they only sent them on to 10 people. The first person (the first generation) sends it to 10, each member of that group of 10 (the second generation) sends it to 10 others or 100 messages and so on.

Generations and (Number of Messages): 1st (10); 2nd (100); 3rd (1,000); 4th (10,000); 5th (100,000); and 6th (1,000,000)

As you can see, by the sixth generation there are a million e-mail messages being processed by mail servers. The capacity to handle these messages must be paid for by the users or, if it is not paid for, the mail servers slow down to a crawl or crash. Note that this example only forwards the message to 10 people at each generation while people who forward real hoax messages often send them to many times that number.

Recently, we have been hearing of spammers (bulk mailers of unsolicited mail) harvesting e-mail addresses from hoaxes and chain letters. After a few generations, many of these letters contain hundreds of good addresses, which is just what the spammers want. We have also heard rumors that spammers are deliberately starting hoaxes and chain letters to gather e-mail addresses (of course, that could be a hoax). So now, all those nice people who were so worried about the poor little girl dying of cancer find themselves not only laughed at for passing on a hoax but also the recipients of tons of spam mail.

How to Recognize a Hoax: Probably the first thing you should notice about a warning is the request to “send this to everyone you know” or some variant of that statement. This should raise a red flag that the warning is probably a hoax. No real warning message from a credible source will tell you to send this to everyone you know.

Next, look at what makes a successful hoax. There are two known factors that make a successful hoax, they are: (1) technical sounding language. and (2) credibility by association.

If the warning uses the proper technical jargon, most individuals, including technologically savvy individuals, tend to believe the warning is real. For example, the Good Times hoax says that “…if the program is not stopped, the computer’s processor will be placed in an nth-complexity infinite binary loop which can severely damage the processor…”. The first time you read this, it sounds like it might be something real. With a little research, you find that there is no such thing as an nth-complexity infinite binary loop and that processors are designed to run loops for weeks at a time without damage.

When we say credibility by association we are referring to who sent the warning. If the janitor at a large technological organization sends a warning to someone outside of that organization, people on the outside tend to believe the warning because the company should know about those things. Even though the person sending the warning may not have a clue what he is talking about, the prestige of the company backs the warning, making it appear real. If a manager at the company sends the warning, the message is doubly backed by the company’s and the manager’s reputations.

Both of these items make it very difficult to claim a warning is a hoax so you must do your homework to see if the claims are real and if the person sending out the warning is a real person and is someone who would know what they are talking about. You do need to be a little careful verifying the person as the apparent author may be a real person who has nothing to do with the hoax. If thousands of people start sending them mail asking if the message is real, that essentially constitutes an unintentional denial of service attack on that person. Check the person’s web site or the person’s company web site to see if the hoax has been responded to there. Check these pages or the pages of other hoax sites to see if we have already declared the warning a hoax.

Hoax messages also follow the same pattern as a chain letter. Chain letters and most hoax messages all have a similar pattern. From the older printed letters to the newer electronic kind, they all have three recognizable parts: (1) A hook. (2) A threat. and (3) A request.

The Hook: First, there is a hook, to catch your interest and get you to read the rest of the letter. Hooks used to be “Make Money Fast” or “Get Rich” or similar statements related to making money for little or no work. Electronic chain letters also use the “free money” type of hooks, but have added hooks like “Danger!” and “Virus Alert” or “A Little Girl Is Dying”. These tie into our fear for the survival of our computers or into our sympathy for some poor unfortunate person.

The Threat: When you are hooked, you read on to the threat. Most threats used to warn you about the terrible things that will happen if you do not maintain the chain. However, others play on greed or sympathy to get you to pass the letter on. The threat often contains official or technical sounding language to get you to believe it is real.

The Request: Finally, the request. Some older chain letters ask you to mail a dollar to the top ten names on the letter and then pass it on. The electronic ones simply admonish you to “Distribute this letter to as many people as possible.” They never mention clogging the Internet or the fact that the message is a fake, they only want you to pass it on to others.

Because cybercriminals are becoming smarter and more sophisticated in their operations, they are real threats to your personal security and privacy. Your money, your computer, your family, and your business are all at risk. These cybercriminals leave you with three choices:

1. Do nothing and hope their attacks, risks, and threats don’t occur on your computer.

2. Do research and get training to protect yourself, your family, and your business.

3. Get professional help to lockdown your system from all their attacks, risks, and threats.

Remember: When you say “No!” to hackers and spyware, everyone wins! When you don’t, we all lose!

Resource Box:

Affiliate Marketing is a modern variation of paying finder’s-fees for the introduction of new clients to a business. Compensation may be paid for each visit (Pay Per Click ), registrant (Pay Per Lead), or as a commission for each sale (Pay Per Sale), or any combination.

Businesses like affiliate marketing because no payment is due to an affiliate until results are realized. The pay for performance model reduces cost of sales by leveraging the Affiliates’ time and money to the desired goal of making sales.

Affiliates are encouraged to build their own business within the existing business model they are affiliated with. While at first this may appear rational, most affiliates start marketing and sales with little or no experience. They rely on the materials and training provided by the business to develop a customer base.

While affiliates dutifully build a network of customers and associates who want to do the same thing to earn money, some key business building strategies are foregone to “live the dream”. If the dream and reality are similar then all is well. If not, then a course correction is in order.

Upon waking, some affiliates may discover limits to their effort combined with their personal cost of doing business adds up to less than expected return on investment of both money and time.

When affiliates can look at their business as independent of the products, services, and businesses they promote, the costs of doing business become more apparent and can be used to plan and build for growth.

Key building blocks of internet business include products, services, technology, traffic, and conversion. Products and services are acquired by affiliation, purchase for rebranding, or development of a unique brand. They can be physical hard goods or digital soft-wares.

The cost of doing business with physical products is significantly greater than digital ones that can be easily stored and delivered quickly over the internet. It makes sense then to affiliate with businesses that are reliable in their warehousing, delivery and service after sale.

Leveraging affiliate business then can be viewed as operating your business independent of any one particular product or line and choose complementary products to diversify and hedge investment by picking up and discontinuing lines as products and trends change.

One of the most important aspects of business are the prospect and customer lists. Affiliates supply customers to the businesses they are associated with but must also keep each and every contact for their own personal business as well. The acquisition and management of lists are functions of capture web pages, autoresponders, and marketing strategies.

If you are thinking of building a business that can grow outside of the packaged affiliate deal, then it’s important to look at your options for growth and management of your assets. If leverage is not a two-way opportunity then you’re paying someone else to manage your assets for their benefit and not yours.

When it comes to leverage there is no profit in free and paying for easy can add up if you’re not careful about how to measure your return on investment.

Companies spend billions of dollars each year combating spam. Billions more is spent with the loss of productivity, having to purchase additional equipment, software, and man hours filtering through unwanted spam, and fixing problems directly related from spam. Direct effects of spam are the consumption of network and computer resources, data and intellectual property theft, identity theft, infection from virus and malware infection, and more.

When most people think of spam, they are thinking of the unsolicited emails sitting in their inbox that is time consuming to clean up. However, there are many more different types of spam; instant messaging spam, chat spam, newsgroup and forum spam, even cell phone spam, blogs and guestbook spam, video sharing spam, video gaming spam, mail bombing, and non-commercial spam. Email and Internet spam is frustrating and sometimes embarrassing when pornography pops up in front of grandma.

Why would someone want to send out so many annoying messages or pop-ups and what is the benefit for a spammer? A spammer expects total profit and if even only small percentages of people respond or make a purchase from the spam message, the spammer stands to make a bunch of money. Other non-commercial spammers are criminals seeking banking information, committing fraud, and have even lured people to their own kidnappings and murders. Competitors might use spam as a denial of service to your website to flood the viewer of your website with a ton of pop-ups and make it impossible to view the site. This is another malicious way spammers attack.

So what can you do to protect your email and be able to surf the Internet without the unwanted pop-ups and phishing sites stealing your information? There are two solutions; Mozilla Firefox for your web browser and Anti-Spam Software for your email. These two solutions will provide the protection you need without having to worry anymore.

Having a positive Internet and email experience is what everyone wants. Mozilla wants this for everyone too. Mozilla is a non-profit organization who is dedicated to making your online experience incredible. They offer their web browser Firefox free of charge. Firefox is available to all Windows, Mac, and Linux platforms, in over 35 different languages. This web browser has integrated protection from spam, pop-ups, and phishing protection that tells you when you have accessed a website that is looking for information.

Mozilla Firefox is the leading web browser because they care about what the user wants. This browser allows you to personalize it the way you want it. Firefox includes a spell checker and search engine suggestions. It also includes a session restore so when you lose your Internet connection and have to sign online again, Firefox will take you back to the exact webpage from where your session terminated. That way, you don’t have to spend hours finding where you were before. Firefox even has accessibility features that integrate with Microsoft’s accessibility features in Windows for people with physical impairments to easily surf the web without having too many keystrokes to get to the site they want.
The best quality of Mozilla’s Firefox is the protection. Unlike Internet Explorer, Firefox has a button to clear private data so the browser doesn’t keep personal information. It also automatically updates itself. This is much better than having to go to Microsoft’s website to install the latest security updates and patches.
Anti-Spam Software can be found at www.antispampage.com. This useful tool provides the email protection you need with a user-friendly interface, which makes it simple to setup. Anti-spam software is learning software. This means, you teach it what is spam and what is not. Eventually, you will not be receiving anymore spam in your inbox. This software will block incoming spam before it even reaches your inbox and automatically delete malicious viruses. Anti-spam is compatible with Windows platforms 98, ME, 2000, and XP. 24-hour technical support is provided and 100% satisfaction or you are entitled to a full refund. Millions of users worldwide are using Anti-spam software and they couldn’t be happier.
Don’t allow unwanted spam, pop-ups, and phishing sites ruin your computing experience. Using a smart web browser like Mozilla Firefox and Anti-spam Software are the best ingredient for total protection on your computer.

Putting the axe to spam, viruses, malware, and other unwanted annoyances are only a couple steps away if you have the right tools. But until then you join millions of others fighting a losing war.

The “get-rich-quick deals” using “fast-and-easy money machines” may sound convincing in theory, but in practice, there is a gap in understanding the full meaning of the words “quick” and “fast” as it relates to making money. If the claims proved true, wouldn’t everyone be rich tomorrow? In addition, why would anyone sell them rather than use them?

Well, many people do sell them and some do use them, but not many get wealthy overnight. So part of the process of business building has to do with selection of opportunity with respect for how much time and money you are ready to invest.

Selection of opportunity is based on interest, your interest in a subject or niche, and your interest in the time and money you spend on it. You have to like it to do it. If you don’t know what you’re doing then you find out along the way and that is an indicator of the time factor built into experience. In other words, the more experience you have in the niche you market in the sooner your income will exceed expenses.

Experience is a journey everyone takes and in business it makes sense to like what you do. Once you have decided on your niche of interest, internet business building can be expressed in four steps; create in-demand content, attract targeted traffic, pre-sell visitors, and monetize pre-sold traffic.

Content is the result of experience, your own or what can be gleaned from others. You can package what you know as a book or ebook and you can draw from other’s experience to add content to your niche. A new packaging service is about to launch that is focused on qualitative improvement path of both content and packaging.

Once you have content built in a web page or site, traffic is the next step in the internet marketing process. Traffic is built with advertising and list building for direct email. Advertising can start out free and when you’ve got some experience on how the internet ad agencies work you can purchase more targeted exposures for traffic. Lists to send email to are far more likely to generate sales but only if they are highly targeted. A highly qualified double opt-in list takes time to build but like a customer base in any business, on or off line, a list of customers is the most valuable part of your business and well worth the investment of time and money.

Pre-selling visitors to your web site is in many ways the art of invitation. The science is in the list where the opt-in response is like R.S.V.P. to an invitation.

Monetizing your product is the result of the process. At this point, you have quality content and a package proportionate to the price you ask. You have built traffic to your web page, captured email from interested browsers, and invited them to your sales page. The sales page is of your own creation or produced by a company you affiliate with and in some cases both. So, how quick and fast you actually go is mainly due to preparation with a good measure of fortune, preferably good.

Keywords are the basis for internet search, search engine optimization, niche market identification, competition analysis and a host of other identity and cross-linking business building techniques. So I’d like to outline a method to use free internet utilities that will suggest keywords, indicate approximate bid values, and derive metrics for leveraging supply and demand for doing business on the internet.

To get an idea of how this works launch your browser and go to a website at pixelfast.com/overture/ In the upper left corner you’ll see an Overture search box where you can type in a keyword like “marketing” to follow this example. You will be challenged with a security box so type in the code and a list of maximum bids and listings for the term is displayed in the left column. The right column displays the Overture search of the keyword [highlighted], the number of search requests in the “Count” column and related “Search Term”(s) opposite.

This page displays the bid value or what advertisers are bidding to pay for their ad to be displayed when the term is searched. The advertiser pays per click. If you display the ad on your page and a visitor clicks on the link, you will be paid a commission. The bid column indicates demand for advertising on a particular keyword search term.

The Overture search results in the right column indicate demand for information based on the same search term. For example in July 2006, 196,638 visitors searched on the term “marketing” and as you read down the list you will see the number of searches on similar keyword phrases. The keyword selector tool indicates consumer demand for information relating to a keyword and keyword phrases as well.

Open another tab or window, go to google.com, and then in the google search box enter “marketing”. In the blue bar on top of the list, you will see “Results 1-10 of about 1,590,000,000 for marketing” This indicates the supply of information on the term marketing.

The basic metrics that can be drawn from this data are that consumers demanded 196,638 requests for the term marketing and there were 1 billion 590 million suppliers of which the top bid for the keyword “marketing” was $1.07.

The ratio of supply to demand indicates whether to buy or sell advertising. For example, the closer the ratio is to zero the less competition, so the keyword would be a good buy. Alternatively, the greater the difference, the greater the supply for a keyword, therefore the higher the bid to pay per click and a good indicator to be selling that keyword advertising on your site.

Supply and demand can also be used to identify competition in a niche market or where to position your existing business using keyword phrases to leverage a less competitive position within a larger market.

You can get more facts on the closely-guarded secrets of internet marketing that are finally being revealed in the Business Builder Report that shows you how to improve your business building results with leverage and other tactics. To join our group and get your weekly report sign up at www.h4h.biz.

Spyware and viruses are so common that you would be hard pressed to find anyone that isn’t aware of them. Under the umbrella term Malware, these little programs have been causing trouble for computer users for many years, and they seem to get more powerful everyday. A new incarnation of malware is becoming very common as of late, and it involves using a virus or trojan horse to place a computer under the remote control of a hacker. The controlled computer is referred to as a zombie and it is used to commit various dastardly deeds without the knowledge of the computer owner.

Zombie computers are almost always attached to the Internet via a broadband connection such as DSL or Satellite Internet. This is important as spammers have found that by using zombie computers to send out their junk mail they can easily avoid detection. As of 2005 it was estimated that up to 80% of all spam was sent via zombie computers, and that number is on the rise.

The increase can be attributed to smarter hackers and better technology, but the real driving causes behind the increased zombie trend are better spam filters and anti-spam laws. According to Tom Spring at PC World Magazine, “spammers are hiring virus writers and hackers to help them create armies of zombie PCs to send spam.” This union of hackers and spammers has been beneficial to both parties in opening new revenue steams that are extremely difficult to shut down.

Gregg Mastoras, a senior security analyst at the security firm Sophos says, “A new underground economy is evolving.” This new economy is for the most part illegal and to date impossible to stop completely.

As of late the Chinese hackers have thrown their hat into the game and have taken the zombie computer business to the next level. Senior Pentagon Advisor Paul Strassmann recently said, “As of September 14th 2007 there were exactly 735,598 computers in the United States infested with Chinese zombies”.

Large groups of zombie computers can be used to form a “botnet” or network of slave computers. This network can be used to send out millions of spam mails in a short period of time. Slave networks are also used to commit a DoS attack. DoS attacks, or Denial of Service, target a particular website and overwhelm the server with information requests until the server can no longer handle the load. These attacks or in no way secretive, and once discovered are easily shut down. There will be a period of time however when site traffic will be disrupted by the DoS attack. Larger more sophisticated networks such as those used by governments or large firms have defensive measures in place to prevent damage from a DoS attack.