Softrak News

Email address lists: buy, rent or leave alone?

2008-11-12T13:39:00.002-05:00

Many people are intrigued by the idea of obtaining a ready-made list of email addresses they can send promotional emails to. Why wait months to slowly build up your own list of email addresses when you can piggy-back (for a price) on someone else's efforts?

While the idea seems attractive, there's a big trap waiting for anyone pursuing this course of action without care.

The important issue is how you come to obtain that bulk list of email addresses. And here we distinguish between renting a list (list rental) and buying a list.

Read the Full article here.

Microsoft to put fear of God into scareware vendors

2008-09-30T08:02:00.001-04:00

Microsoft tries to put fear of God into scareware vendors
By Joel Hruska | Published: September 29, 2008 - 09:20PM CT

Microsoft and Washington State officials announced a new partnership today aimed at fighting scareware in general and one specific vendor in particular. Today isn't such a good day for one James Reed McCreary IV, of The Woodlands, Texas. Mr. McCreary is the sole director of Branch Software, which created the Registry Cleaner XP program, and the CEO of hosting company Alpha Red. Scareware, it should be noted, isn't malware—at least, not technically. Instead of installing its own set of viruses, worms, or Trojans, a scareware program tricks the end user into believing he or she needs the program to correct a nonexistent error within the operating system. This type of falsified error was a common tactic in the days before Windows XP's SP1 (supposedly) closed the door that made the random pop-ups possible; I still remember seeing ads pop up on customers' desks insisting that they needed to download Program X for $9.99 to fix this issue.

Read the Full arstechnica article here.

Eleven ways Google can help your business

2008-08-28T08:32:00.006-04:00

Google offers a lot of great services. There's a very good chance that you use at least one of them.

However, many of the small business owners I speak to don't leverage Google's great tools in the best way they might. They buy Microsoft Office, when Google Docs would save them a bundle. They buy Google Adwords but don't use Analytics to properly assess how they're ads are performing.

Visit internet-biz.blogspot for the whole read!

A Turning Point for Touch Screens, Says the NYT

2008-08-25T09:35:00.000-04:00

The New York Times has a story up on the suddenly brisk market for touch screens and the devices which can make use of them, which it says "has grown quietly for years, both in commercial applications and in consumer devices." Besides the obvious (the iPhone, and Apple's use of multi-touch generally), the article also mentions the recent inclusion of Israeli company N-Trig's version of multi-touch technology in a Dell notebook computer, and some of the other places you can expect to see touchscreens instead of display-only ones in the near future — if the price drops quickly enough.

See Full Article here.

Apple Sells One Million iPhone 3Gs in First Weekend

2008-08-24T00:23:00.001-04:00

CUPERTINO, California—July 14, 2008—Apple® today announced it sold its
one millionth iPhone™ 3G on Sunday, just three days after its launch
on Friday, July 11. iPhone 3G is now available in 21 countries—
Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Hong
Kong, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway,
Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, UK and the US—and will go on
sale in France on July 17.

See Full Artical here:
http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2008/07/14iphone.html

.org owners facing 10% hike in registration fees this fall.

2008-07-10T17:03:00.000-04:00

From Ars Technica :

Organizations that own .org domains may soon find themselves paying a bit more to renew, transfer, and register new domains. The company that operates the .org domain, Public Interest Registry (PIR), has decided to raise wholesale rates from $6.15 to $6.75 per domain this year—a 10 percent fee increase, following last year's 2.5 percent increase. Of course, smaller registrars that buy wholesale domains won't want to eat that fee themselves, meaning that they will likely pass on the increase to customers.

PIR informed the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) of its plans in a letter (PDF) sent earlier this month. No reason was given in the letter for the rate increase, but it stands to reason that since other domain operators have raised fees (like VeriSign for .com and .net domains), that PIR doesn't want to be left out when it could make more money.

The increase will go into effect on November 9, giving those who own or want .org domains another six months to take advantage of the current price. Although the 60¢ may not matter much to individual customers, groups that operate multiple domains might feel a little more pain in their wallets—especially nonprofits and small organizations that .org was once limited to.

PIR doesn't require ICANN's approval in order to raise rates, but it is limited by ICANN on how much it can raise them per year. According to ICANN's registry agreement for .org domains, service fees cannot be increased by more than 1.1 times the previous year's max service fees. The original agreement started out in 2006 at $6 per domain, meaning that 2007's maximum service fees would have been $6.60, and 2008's maximum is $7.26. It looks like PIR has a ways to go before hitting the ceiling for this year, unlike its greedier counterpart VeriSign, which has raised the prices for .com and .net the maximum allowable each year under its agreement with ICANN.

XP gets stay of execution—for budget laptops

2008-04-02T01:18:00.004-04:00

What do you do if your flagship operating system isn't designed to run well on a popular new class of hardware? It's a problem currently faced by Microsoft. Budget laptops like the Asus Eee PC with minimal amounts of RAM, relatively slow CPUs, and solid state storage have proven popular, and Vista wasn't designed to operate well within such hardware confines. In response, Microsoft is reportedly planning to extend the availability of Windows XP for the budget laptop category.

Read more of this artical at arstechnica.com

The Blu-ray format is now the new standard!

2008-02-20T20:25:00.001-05:00

The two-year war between HD DVD and Blu-ray officially ended Tuesday morning as Toshiba waved the white flag and declared it would stop producing HD DVD products.

The company, which began sales of HD DVD in March 2006 with the HD-A1 player, "decided it was not right for us to keep going with such a small presence," said chief executive Atsutoshi Nishida. The Blu-ray format is now the definitive winner in the war and stands unopposed as the optical media replacement for DVD.

You can read the entire article on crave.cnet.com

Stanford University / Copyright and Fair Use

2008-01-28T22:39:00.000-05:00

Stanford University / Copyright and Fair Use

This chapter discusses these Web-specific permission issues and how to obtain the necessary permissions for website uses. We also provide a sample linking agreement for you to use. Since websites are becoming increasingly common targets for infringement lawsuits, we will focus on how website owners and people who manage websites (webmasters) can minimize their liability.

If you have hired a webmaster to maintain the site, the information in this chapter will be of use to both of you. While the webmaster will need to understand copyright rules in order to keep the site out of legal trouble, it's generally the owner of the site who will be liable for any claims of infringement. When we refer to the webmaster or the owner of a site in this chapter, keep in mind that both the webmaster and the owner should be aware of and compliant with copyright rules on the Web. In general, the trouble areas include using copyrighted material or trademarks used without authorization, or using a person's image used for commercial purposes without authorization, or if a person is defamed or suffers invasion of privacy

Compromised web sites serve more malware than malicious ones

2008-01-22T23:09:00.000-05:00

From Ars Technica News Site:

The fact that legitimate web sites can be compromised and used to distribute malware under an admin's nose is something Ars has touched on of late. In that particular case, the culprit has been a particular type of JavaScript exploit, but the general issue of legitimate web sites serving malware is a growing problem.

According to security firm WebSense, the number of legitimate web sites that have been hacked and are distributing or enabling various types of malware attacks is greater than the number of malicious sites created specifically for that purpose. The company's latest report (PDF) discusses this trend, along with the tremendous impact the Storm Worm had on the 'Net through all of 2007. As WebSense states, there's a clear advantage to infecting a legitimate site that comes with its own built-in traffic and a user base.

The type of theft varies depending on the site. Personal data and credit card information are the most obvious acquisition targets, but online gaming account theft and click-fraud are apparently common as well. It's well known that there are forums, discussion groups, and IRC channels devoted to the topics of which web sites are known to be vulnerable. The problem also runs deeper than simply educating administrators about security vulnerabilities in the software that they use—locating the correct host provider for any particular web space can be difficult, and many sites don't fall off WebSense's malicious site blacklist quickly, sometimes remaining there for weeks or even months after being notified of a problem.

Reports like this highlight the inherent gap between ideal security practices and the real world. Ideally, system admins would be able to easily and quickly install security patches as soon as they became available. Reality, of course, is far more complicated, particularly in a corporate environment. Security updates may need to be carefully vetted before installation to ensure that they don't break anything else—and even this assumes the presence of a system admin with permission to make such decisions without needing a nod from higher up the corporate ladder.

In this case, it's software vendors and web site authors that need to work together and improve their lines of communication in order to discover and deploy updates more quickly than malware authors can discover new ones. Client-side security on any particular system might stop a bug from infecting one particular rig, but it won't help users surfing in from other locations.

Google's new 411 service is free, fast and easy to use.

2007-11-10T16:51:00.000-05:00

GOOG-411's

Google's new 411 service is free, fast and easy to use.

1-800-GOOG-411

Note: "The bippedy-bippedy-bippedy sound you hear when using 1-800-GOOG-411 is actually a senior voice designer at Google. (Here's the sound.) The technical term for that noise is the 'fetch audio,' and it's more complicated to design than you'd think. For the first time, the voice of GOOG-411 talks about how he came up with it, how important that sound is, and how people now ask him to 'perform' it."

Facebook On-line Storage

2007-10-01T13:25:00.000-04:00

"Facebook has quietly started offering beta testers access to the latest version of a new storage service , according to Computerworld's Brian Fonseca. The wiki does warn users that the page is still in development and that users should make sure that data used in testing the service is properly backed up. Nick O'Neill, creator of the blogsite AllFacebook.com, said it would be "revolutionary" if the service is free."

Best way to get pictures out of iPhoto

2007-09-09T15:16:00.000-04:00

Recapping the Getting your pictures out of iPhoto to view on a non-Mac PC is sometimes confusing. Another common use is to make a CD or usb stick copy to take to the store to print.

If you use Apple’s convient ‘burn CD’ option from with in iPhoto, you get an iPhoto library, which does a Windows or Linux user no good at all.

Click here to read

Apple’s official support document

on how-to save your iPhotos and be compatible with Windows and Linux.

Google is offering individuals up to $10 to visit local businesses!

2007-08-14T11:30:00.000-04:00

"Google has come come up with a novel way to boost the information it has about local businesses. As part of its Business Referral Representative program, Google is offering individuals up to $10 to visit local businesses and tell them about Google Maps and Google AdWords, collect information (such as hours of operation and types of payment accepted), and take digital photos of the business. Reaction to the program has been mixed."

You can find out more about Google's program here:

http://www.google.com/services/local-business-referrals/repfaq.html

Softrak News Release

2007-07-19T23:20:00.000-04:00

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If you need a custom software application or internet site to get your word out, we can build it for you at a very reasonable cost.

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Please use our contact form to send us your request and someone will reply right away.