TechPaparazzi » internet

Evil Online: Beyond the Virus

Sarv007 — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 17:27:54 +0000

The Internet used to be such a nice place. In the beginning, everyone played nice. They shared information about great websites and worthwhile stuff. Slowly and surely, it began to turn ugly. And with the new ugliness, a whole slew of new words and new definitions of old words were created: Troll, spam, spyware, virus, pop-up, trojan, adware, black hat, worm, malware, pop-under, rage, etc.

Image Courtesy of Flickr

There was bad stuff everywhere. Antivirus software was no longer an option; it was essential. Any new file with a .exe became suspect and was quickly quarantined by cautious network administrators. And every piece of email coming in or going out of the servers had to be checked and double checked as a possible threat.

Sometimes I long for the days when the worst you could do to your computer was accidentally drop it off the table.

Who Does These Things?

The worst part is these evils are no accidents. What all these have in common is they were created on purpose. Someone somewhere who is reasonably intelligent decided to create all the evils of the Internet. At least in Greek mythology when Pandora opened the box, she released existing evil–she didn’t have to make them.

And at least most people can understand the underlying reasons for some of these nasty things: pure profit. The online world created a system whereby money can be made for clicking links and visiting sites. With the right trojan or adware infecting unsuspecting computers, thousands of dollars were funneled into the pockets of some real jerks.

Innocent Victims

In its wake, these bad programs taught people to hate, and worst, fear some really useful programs that were accidentally sucked into the fray. Take for example the lowly toolbar. It was a handy tool to let people search the Web and visit popular sites from their browser with one click. Sadly, it got corrupted for a long time, but now they are back and are better than ever.

Online toolbars such as Zugo Bing are reminding us how good toolbars can be. Zugo lets businesses create their own customized toolbars and start pages and give to their customers. The free service lets the business get the branding they want and gives customers the powerful search capabilities, one-click access to sites and quick views of news and weather on the screen no matter what webpage they are visiting.

And best of all, these toolbars come with no evil malware or spyware. The web is still not a safe place, but it is coming back one step at a time.

A Day Without the Internet (gasp!!)

Sarv007 — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 07:43:13 +0000

While we float through our day, smartphone in hand, when often tend to think about what technology can do for us and not so much about what it can’t. For those of us that are connected while we work and play (computer, laptop, tablet) does it ever cross your mind what would happen if the internet went out for a day?

Offline

Alright, alright. Don’t panic and look at the screen as if the world is about to end! Just think about what would happen if you had to live for 24 hours with no internet. You actually might have to have a conversation with someone. OMG. LOL. You won’t BRB.

Being “offline” is a scary thought that would rock most of us to the core. Especially those that grew up with technology surrounding their every move, dictating how they operated throughout life. There was a time when shows were recorded on VHS and computers could not be carried with the help of a dolly. Without the internet, would it be time to dig the rotary phone out of the closet and stock up on canned foods? It just may be.

What to Do

On a basic level, all the work you complete in a day would come to a dead halt. No email, no online research, no company Facebook page and definitely no corporate Twittering going on. How would you know what article your colleague shared or what is trending at the moment? Forget social media, your entire office may not be able to function. VoIP a cloud, a server and everything else you have come to depend on to succeed in your career will vanish. For the day that is.

So, you leave work to deal with this mass chaos on your own, but wait! How do you know if public transportation is running on time or where your friends are headed? Maybe I will just say the words “traffic patterns” and let you figure out how to avoid them. Without an app for that and the internet, it may as well be 1984. Should you really dial a phone number to get a listing for local movie times? Maybe it would just be better to head home. Then again, if you can’t really stream TV, it might be in your best interest to stay out for a while.

Why don’t you go ahead and check your bank account to see if you have money for that lunch. Oh, never mind. Then again you could run to a coffee shop and play a game of Scrabble . . . on an actual game board. Hold on, I got it! You can shop (in a store), read (at a library) and even write (on a piece of paper).

Oh the World Wide Web, how we love you! The internet has changed our world and without it we are a pathetic heartbroken mass crying in the corner. And, let’s face it… if the internet went out for a day you wouldn’t be able to read this and well, that would also be tragic.

What the Heck has Google just done? Your Pageranks on the Cry…

Sarv007 — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 13:09:03 +0000

Recently, there have been worries and concerns from webmasters, often laced with heavy panic, that the “accident” that occurred with Google pagerank toolbar plugins must have some formidable effects on their sites and could have caused a fall behind on the rankings of their sites. To be sincere, I felt the same about my lunarpages discount and icontact coupon blog, too.

The fear that your site might have been affected and thus your pagerank must have dropped is now a major issue around the web. Even companies are frightened that their advertisers may stop coming to them when they notice that their google pagerank is nothing but 0. Here is what actually happened, to show you that nothing is wrong with your pageranks.

Google shifted some of their servers at the pagerank section to different set of servers which has made it impossible for the toolbar plugins to locate and track the google pagerank of websites on the internet thus giving rise for concerns.

So, it is neither the end of google pagerank nor a sign that your blog’s or website’s pagerank is back to 0.

There are actually some plugins that are said to have been able track the count of websites’ pagerank after the changes have taken place in google, but we can’t hold on to anything as certainty in this type of situation.

The best you can do now is to await the update of the next version of the google toobar plugin and other SEO and SERP toolbar plugins before you can hold on to a particular figure as your blog’s pagerank.

Author: John Edget is a writer for coupon blog, youlovecoupons.com and shares tips and ideas on SEO. You can have a feel of his lunarpages and icontact blog and even earn free discount coupons for lunarpages coupon code and icontact offer codes.

How to Opt for a Web Hosting Service for your Website ?

Sarv007 — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 16:27:37 +0000

Thinking of starting a brand new blog and looking out for the best web hosting service for your website ? What things you should keep in mind before selecting and signing up for a web hosting account ? All your questions will be answered here in this article.

1. Host uptime and reliability

This indeed should be placed at the top of the priorities as website uptime is of utmost importance. It can’t be more frustrating to see your website down because it means loss of targeted visitors and inturn leads and potential sales of your products or services. When your visitors are unable to access your website, it doesn’t leave a great impression on them and the possibility of them of them returning to your website is zilch especially if your website or blog is new and yet to be established. Added to his, we are well aware of the fact that how google frowns upon websites which are not accessible every now and then. This leads to loss in SERPs as Google wants to provide value to users and a website which is not up just hurts user experience. So to get rid of this, it’s a good idea to check out a web hosting company uptime reliabilityfrom various sources like web hosting review sites and web hosting related forums.

2. Fast Loading Servers

Nothing can be more painful for a visitor who comes to your site and your site loads slowly or loads incompletely. This agains hurts user experience and inturn increases bounce rate because these days everyone is looking for a quick solution for their problem. Why would anyone wait for your site to load for 30 seconds or 45 seconds when he can go to another websites which load quickly and provide him the same information or services you are offering ? So ensure that the web hosting you are choosing has fast loading servers even if its shared hosting. There are cases where some new and cheap web hosting companies can trick you by claiming unlimited bandwidth. Unlimited bandwidth is a misleading term. If the servers are overloaded with so many websites then the unlimited bandwidth doesn’t even matter because all websites are hogging up server resources. Good and reliable web hosting companies are known to have limited sites on their shared hosting servers thereby ensuring fast loading servers. Some examples of these reliable web hosting companies are hostgator, iPage, bluehost, fatcow, dreamhost etc.

3. Linux or Windows

When opting for a web hosting, there are generally 2 options : linux or windows. Nowadays majority of the sites and blogs today are opearting on wordpress and wordpress is written in PHP and originally developed for Linxu platform and it was later only when Windows added PHP support and after that only WordPress was able to run on a Windows server. For very this reason, it is recommended that you opt for Linux if you plan to use WordPress as you will face less technical issues on a Linux server.

4. Price

Lastly we should consider price ? Why lastly ? Simply because of the fact thatprice alone shouldn’t be set as the sole benchmark for deciding the web hosting service. The factors 1,2 and 3 are more important and it doesn’t hurt to spend an extra buck or two to keep your visitors happy. So coming to price, there are various plans when it comes to web hosting – Shared, VPS and Dedicated. In majority of the cases,shared web hosting is quite sufficient unless you have a big website with tens of thousands of visitors daily, in that scenario, you may need to opt for VPS or dedicated web hosting according to your budget and requirements. Good Luck !

Your Monotonous Life’s Reason is ?

Sarv007 — Sat, 17 Sep 2011 12:10:44 +0000

It’s funny really. The reason for your monotonous life is INTERNET…Here is the proof:-

Go and prepare a escape plan !
And be active socially but not through facebook

3 Major Challenges of Broadband Internet

Sarv007 — Wed, 04 May 2011 06:07:43 +0000

Since the invention of the internet, there have been various means of connecting to the internet and all these means that have been since then, none of them have equaled with the broadband in level. Broadband internet connection has been used to perform a lot of tasks that the other means of internet connection that have been in invention before the invention of broadband internet connection cannot perform. All these forms of internet connection, though, have their challenges and benefits. Broadband internet connection which has proved with time that it’s the best form of internet connection that could be ever appreciated also has its own challenges. And many people have been using broadband internet connection without it performing very well for them because they’ve got little or no idea of the challenges of broadband internet connection. That is why in this post we are going to be seeing the challenges of broadband internet connection.

High fee

Using broadband internet connection, you’re expected to pay almost twice the charges you pay when using a dial up internet connection. Broadband has a lot of extra values that have been added to it which has made it far better than the dial up internet connection. In the case of its speed, broadband internet connection can browse the internet 100 times faster than a dial up internet connection. There are also many more benefits of the broadband internet connection which are not there in the dial up internet connection and for this reason, the broadband internet connection is more expensive than the dial up internet connection.

Security risk

One of the major challenges of broadband internet connection is security risk. This is because of the blazing speed the broadband internet connection offers. This makes you more exposed to getting malwares into your computer system. For example, using the dial up internet connection that is very slow to download from the internet, when you start downloading, you might see what you are downloading once or twice before it gets installed on your computer. But it is not the same for broadband. Downloading with broadband, at a twinkle of an eye, what you want to download is already in your computer. If unfortunately this thing you downloaded without having more opportunity to verify its authenticity happens to be a virus, it means your computer is already attacked. This can be controlled if you are very careful when using you broadband internet connection.

Poor availability in local areas

One of the major problems people face when using broadband internet connection is its availability in local areas. There are particular areas that you will visit and you will find out are not a 3g enabled areas. The broadband internet connection is a very advanced form of internet connection and also very expensive for some internet service provider to handle. So many internet service providers that are in the rural areas might not be able to afford to incorporate it in their system or might not want to do so because they believe that they cannot derive their funds from the people living in the rural and local settings.

This is a guest post by Paul who helps you learn more about choosing a good free laptop with mobile broadband

Funny Pics Treat For Bloggers !

Sarv007 — Sun, 17 Apr 2011 12:42:50 +0000

Humor can be another way to gain both attention and make life rejuvenating. Here are some pics depicting moments in a bloggers life, Enjoy !

Blog Comments

source: shoeboxblog

A Very Brief History Of Web Publishing

(via 9GAG)

I have to post about this!

via: smashingapps

Ha! I’m Totally Putting This On My Blog

Source: Shoeboxblog

Warning Signs For Bloggers

The One Thing Internet Cant Ignoere

Source: Shoeboxblog.com

The Routine

How To Protect Computer from Infected PDFs Files?

Sarv007 — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 06:06:37 +0000

Virus scanners recognize the code of most viruses. Therefore, hackers split the code and distribute it often through encrypted- as smaller units of code in PDF documents. PDF docs consist of objects like text, fonts, spaces, forms,and hyperlink. there are at least 10000 objects in every 100 pages. Hackers split and distribute malicious codes to several objects so that they cannot be detected by virus scanners.

57% of web based malware attacks target vulnerabilities in PDF readers.

Ways to protect your PC from infected PDF files.

The first line of defense is to keep anti-virus software and Adobe Reader up to date to automatically scan and repair infected PDF files.

1. Switch Off Scripts:

In Adobe reader deactivate scripts in ‘Edit|Preferences|JavaSript’. In the menu item ‘Authorizations’, prevent the execution of external programs.

2. Use alternative PDF reader:

Since most of PDF exploits target Adobe Reader, an alternative like Foxit Reader is naturally more secure. Of course, this should also be updates regularly.

3. Online File Check:

Criminals send infected PDFs via email. To check such files, upload them with VirusTotal Uploader or use any other scanner.

10 Seducing Features Of Firefox 4.

Sarv007 — Fri, 18 Mar 2011 07:22:47 +0000

The Mozilla’s Senior Director of Engineering Damon Sicore has confirmed that the final build of the browser is ready to launch , and the date is Tuesday March 22.

Firefox 4 introduces several changes, including tabs now being placed above the address bar, mutli-touch support, a new add-ons managers, improved HTML 5 support and more. There are some features which would seduce a large number of internet users. Here are some of the highlights of what we can expect:

1. More Speed

The Firefox 4 uses JägerMonkey as JavaScript engine, Firefox 4 delivers huge performance enhancements, including faster start-up times, graphics rendering and page loads. Bottom line: It’s blazingly fast.

2. Panorama

First it was introduced as an add-on, Firefox 4′s new Panorama feature is another one designed to battle tab clutter. Using it, Web surfers can drag and drop their tabs into manageable groups that can be organized, named and arranged intuitively and visually.

3. Do Not Track

With a single check box, Firefox 4 users can ensure that any time the browser requests a Web page, it will send along a header specifying that the user does not want their browsing behavior to be tracked. Firefox 4 has the HTTP header feature disabled by default. To turn it on, users must go to Preferences/Advanced, and check the “Tell web sites I do not want to be tracked” box.

4. Less Clutter

Tabs are now given top visual priority in Firefox 4 so as to enable more efficient and intuitive browsing. In addition to its new “tabs on top” layout, however, the software now also offers a number of other features to make it simpler and more streamlined.

A Switch to Tab feature, for instance, helps reduce tab clutter by automatically calling up an already-tabbed URL rather than duplicating it all over again. “It took my tab list from 80 to 90 down to 50 or 60,” Nightingale said.

5. Sync

Another new feature that started life as an add-on is Sync, which synchronizes an individual’s multiple copies of Firefox across various platforms. So, a user might look up directions to a restaurant from their work computer, for example, and then be able to easily find and pull down those same directions from their Android phone on the road, Nightingale explained.

6. Improved Security

With HTTP Strict Transport Security, or HSTS, sites can now make sure information is always encrypted, thereby preventing attackers from intercepting sensitive data.

7. HTML5

Firefox 4′s new HTML5 parser and full support for Web video, audio, drag & drop, and file handling mean that it’s capable of supporting the latest Web environments.

8. Multiplatform Support

Whereas Microsoft’s IE9 can be used only on Windows–and only Vista and Windows 7 at that–Firefox, as always, is multiplatform. So, whether you’re on Windows, Linux or a Mac, you can enjoy its powerful new features.

9. Under the Hood

A number of other features–some visible to users, others not–will also appear in Firefox 4, including support for the WebM format for HD-quality video; 3D graphics via WebGL; elegant animations through the use of CSS3; and multitouch support.

Then, too, there’s super-fast graphics acceleration with Direct2D and Direct3D on Windows, XRender on Linux, and OpenGL on Mac enabled by default on supported hardware.

10. The Community Touch

Firefox has been shaped significantly by the people who use it. In fact, between 30 percent and 40 percent of its code was developed by the community, Nightingale told me. It’s hard to imagine a better way to make sure a product delivers what users want. Not like IE9 are developed by Microsoft’s team of paid developers to reflect their own vision of what users want.

Which internet browser seduces you?

Why Your Internet Connection is not a Broadband Internet

Techwriter — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 15:40:15 +0000

There has been a major misconception when it comes to the types of internet connection we have in the world, many people are often “sold” by the adverts and claims of their internet service providers that they fail to face the reality. Not every internet connection termed as broadband is really broadband and you have to be very careful when trying to choose a broadband internet for your home/office use because some of the internet connections referred to as broadband nowadays are not really broadband. If you’re unsure if your internet connection is broadband or not or you really believe your internet connection is a broadband internet you might want to make sure it doesn’t have any of the traits discussed below.

Below are some things that prove that a particular internet connection is not a broadband internet.

Its Speed Sucks

The number one thing that distinguishes a broadband internet from other forms of internet connection is the speed it offers and if you believe you’re not getting the best from an internet connection as far as speed is concerned then it is probably not a broadband internet.

Even though speed matters you should also realize that our speed needs are totally different from each other; what I do online everyday is different from what you do so the way we view an internet connection differs but you will easily distinguish a broadband internet from other forms of internet connection considering its speed. If your internet connection is taking longer than necessary to load web pages or download files then there is a very high probability it isn’t broadband.

It is Known for Consistent Connection Instability

Unlike other forms of internet connection a broadband internet is highly stable and consistent so you should know clearly that an internet connection that is otherwise cannot be referred to as broadband.

If your internet connection is something that works today and then refuses to work tomorrow or if it is something that keeps on experiencing a break or fluctuation in network signal then you should also know that it is not broadband.

If your internet connection is also characterized by consistent disconnection (like in the case of a dial-up internet) you should also know that it is not broadband. A broadband internet is always stable in terms of speed and service availability so your internet connection must exhibit this character before it can be classed as a broadband internet.

Conclusion

The reality nowadays is that a large percentage of “ordinary” internet connections are now being referred to as broadband and a large percentage of the masses who don’t really know how the broadband technology works are made to believe this.

Make it a duty to research effectively before choosing an internet connection; since you will be paying for it.

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