OzWebMasters

I was updating the content on my page of Free SMS Services, and noticed that, as you’d expect, several of these had disappeared without a trace. That’s not so bad, I just remove the link and move on…

…except there’s something else I could do - check to see if the domain name has expired. In this instance one of them, MentionIt.com.au was expired, and 5 minutes later (after paying $25 to Hostess) I owned it. The beauty of doing this is that already has links to it from 57 other sites, mostly ringtone/SMS related. Once I’ve added some content, there’s no reason why it can’t have a Google PageRank of 3 or 4, be receiving free search visitors, and generating an affiliate income via ads for SMS or ringtone services.

You won’t find one of these every day, but they can be an easy way to make a quick buck if you catch one.

I’m a merchant with ClixGalore, but only at the most basic level, and for me it has proven the old adage - you get what you pay for. My biggest two gripes would be

- the site doesn’t work properly in Firefox
- 95% of the affiliates applying are of the “bad neighbourhood” variety

Over at ABestWeb an Aussie is relating a very negative experience with ClixGalore, made especially worse by the fact he paid for the very top-of-the-line Corporate Platinum service. Despite this, he has great difficulty even getting someone to respond to his emails & phone calls, let alone the corporate features promised.

It’s just one person’s opinion, but feels accurate. Read here… 

Well, my site (GoogleFan.com) was hacked, but I figure I should blame my hosting service, in conjunction with this terrible American trait of never admitting to fault or failure…

Last week I got an email from RoutHost saying:

Please be informed that the CPanel password for your website has been changed as a security measure. The new password is as below:

It wasn’t until days later that I found out that my site had been replaced with a hacker message, which in part said:

GreetZ to all defacers and all redefacers : You sux ._

If RoutHost had told me the complete story (ie “hackers gained access, please check your site”), I could’ve fixed up my site sooner - fortunately for me, my site was not affected in the long-term in any way.

Lessons learned:

1) Often with hosting you get what you pay for
2) Be it manually or automatedly, check your site every day!

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RoutHost have written to me and said:

Actually let me clarify why did we changed all the passwords on the server where your account is - few accounts got compromised indeed, so we did this as a security measure. When we searched why such accounts got compromised we found that most reasons were:

1) Old not updated scripts that were having a security breech. We’re strongly suggesting to our customers to have all their scripts up to date.
2) Having passwords in a publicly accessible files, which we find absolutetly unacceptable.
3) Easy to guess passwords. We suggest having at least 6 characters long password with combination of upper and lower case together with a number in it.

I’ve never minded entering those CAPTCHA numbers & letters if it means my accounts & data will be more secure, although some versions of it are too difficult, with lines running through them that make the correct answer too ambiguous.

Now it appears that spammers have developed software that can crack CAPTCHA more easily than you or I can work out what to type in. The good news (fingers-crossed) is that new methods will be developed that are not only easier for us to use, but harder (impossible?) for software to crack. Or to put it another way, if the software does crack it, spammers could make more money developing AI stuff.

A simple example is offering a picture of an animal, and asking us to choose what type of animal it is. Computers find it harder to recognise what a picture is than characters.

Here’s an interesting quote from the inventor of CAPTCHA:

“I heard that 60 million captchas are solved every day around the world, which first made me quite happy for myself but then quite sad,” he said. “It takes about 10 seconds to solve a captcha, so that means humanity is wasting thousands of hours solving them. I wanted to do something good for humanity in that time.”

June 24/25 conference being run by Microsoft to promote their new Flash competitor called Silverlight. $140 for two days is not a bad price, and a very good price if you were considering buying their new Expression Web  software, because every attendee gets a copy for free (worth $550!). That’s a sweet deal…

I’d have to say I’ve been wondering how they managed to sell CDs so cheap. I’ve bought dozens of CDs from them, and they are usually under $AU20 delivered.

In the UK they’ve been found guilty of illegal importing. If they have the $US81M in the bank, then they must’ve been (until now) making a fortune. If they don’t, then I guess they’ll go bankrupt, so I’ll need to keep an eye out for whoever copies their model so I can buy from them instead. Obviously the model will need to be adjusted to avoid the UK.

Google Adsense recently had a survey asking what publishers would like changed/improved, and one of the things I ticked was “be paid by PayPal”. Yahoo Publisher Network have now taken the lead in this regard, offering it as a payment option. This alone has me keen to try YPN

All Registerfly accounts will be transferred to GoDaddy. This is great news, especially for people like myself who use GoDaddy for most of their domains already.
And it is great news for GoDaddy (who have 20 million domains), who will pick up an extra 850,000 domains to look after. They have said they aren’t buying RegisterFly, but presumably they have paid them something - my guess is between $1 & $2 per domain.

Whenever someone asks me whether they should buy an .com or a .com.au, I mention the public perception of .com.au being relatively free of spam and crap. This is because you need to be based in Australia to buy one, because they cost more, and because they cannot easily be re-sold or transferred. It’s a stamp of quality, a badge of honour.

Melbourne IT, the big for-profit company (was originally a non-profit org, part of Melbourne Uni, and several directors quit in disgust when they decided to go the IPO route), is not happy with AUDA’s plan to loosen the rules - in fact I’m surprised it’s not the corporate business wanting the change, not the governing body.

This is not a topic I have seen very often. So much is written about creating, growing and maintaining an online business, but what if you want to cash in your tips. Mitch Bettis has written a few tips, but really a book on the topic would be worth investing in….

• Make sure you have seperate bank accounts for business and personal
• The best places to advertise the sale are online listings and brokers
• Consult an attorney for legal help.
• Plan for any potential tax implications.