Many people use the terms Spyware and Adware interchangeably. You shouldn’t! There are important differences between the two. True, both terms refer to the act of tracking your computer activity, such as how long you visited a particular Web site.
However, the key difference is the intent behind how and why a business collects your information. Adware is commonly associated with pop-up advertisements used by businesses trying to sell you something. However, Spyware, the more malicious of the two, isn’t trying to sell you, instead, it’s trying to take something from you — your credit card and social security numbers and bank account information. Some Spyware collects information about you and, if placed in the wrong hands, could be detrimental to your financial wellbeing and used to steal your identity. Adware is usually something you can see. Whereas Spyware often can’t be seen, in fact, businesses behind Spyware don’t want you to know they’re lurking. Therefore, you may have a Spyware infection and not know it. One vicious Spyware is keylogging, a tool that hangs about in the background, logging your keystrokes, including account numbers and passwords you type on your keyboard, and then sends the information to the originating source.
Future of Spyware
Spyware will only become more invasive with no concern for your privacy, regardless of what you want or think. Worse, no one piece of software will protect you from the above. Why? One belief is that there are far more research dollars being spent on developing Spyware than combating it, since the information derived from the former is more lucrative.
Protecting Yourself
There are two methods to protect yourself, both are equally important.
1. Manage your computer usage behavior. If you download most anything for free - movies, software, music, etc., then you can anticipate being exposed to highly aggressive forms of Spyware.
2. Utilize anti-spyware software programs and a hardware firewall. Both help to fend off Spyware. Lavasoft’s Ad-Aware se and Microsoft’s AntiSpyware (Beta) programs are reputable.
About The Author
Sharron Senter is co-founder of http://www.VisitingGeeks.com - an on site computer repair, security and networking company serving north of Boston, Southern NH and Maine. Visiting Geeks’ technicians are crackerjacks at squashing viruses, popups and securing and making computers perform faster. Learn more about Sharron at http://www.SharronSenter.com
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When you browse the web information is continuously collected by the websites you visit and by your own computer. For example, websites at a minimum collect information about the web browser you use the operating system of your computer and the geography you reside from. However, what surprises most users is the amount of information that is collected on your computer from your surfing habits and daily use.
Your web browser stores a lot of different types of information which is designed to improve your internet surfing experience but nevertheless poses a privacy risk. The sites or URLs which you visit are stored in the browser’s “history.” Search results are saved when you enter a search term into a search engine like Google. Web content and images are stored in the “temp” folder. Files that you download are stored in the download manager.
Websites also place “Cookies” onto your hard drive. A cookie is a small text file and is used by websites to offer advanced features. Some of the information that cookies store include shopping basket items or log-in information for a membership site. Cookies can also store information about when you visited the site including date and time.
Given all this information being collected above you can easily see why this could become a privacy risk. It would not take someone who knew what they were doing too long to figure out what websites you visit, what you have bought online and what search terms you are looking for. This is unfortunately not the end of it.
If you are a user of instant messenger or chat programs like AIM, MSN Instant Messenger or even Skype then it is important to be aware that the programs saves your chat history. Most programs allow you turn this feature off.
There are number of other places besides your web browser where information is stored on your computer. This data can allow people to figure out what you have been doing on your computer. Media players like RealPlayer and Microsoft Media Play store audio and video playing history. Microsoft Office like Excel and PowerPoint applications store information about the most recently accessed files.
Another important thing to remember is that when you delete a file it is not necessarily permanently erased and can be recovered with the right software. When you first hit delete the file is moved to the Recycle Bin. Even when you empty the Recycle Bin the file still exists on your hard drive until Windows overwrites it.
Here are two things you can do to help reduce the privacy risks from your computer.
- Use a free software tool called “CCleaner” (http://www.ccleaner.com) to clear information collected by your web browser and Windows’s Temp Folder. This software automates the manual process of using your browser options menu to clean out cookies, URL history etc. Try to run this tool once a week or more frequently if you are a heavy internet user.
- If you work with sensitive data files on your computer then you may want to consider investing in secure file “shredder” software. This type of software actually overwrites or “bleaches” the file you want to delete which means that it cannot be restored.
Richard Rogers runs a number of computer-related sites offering Spyware Remover and Anti Virus Software help.
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About three years ago, I received the first email from Nigerian scammers. They have different methods to introduce themselves. Some of them claim that they work on some Nigerian banks and need someone from another country to help them to transfer a huge amount of money. They say that the previous owner of the money has lost his/her life in a car accident or airplane crash and they couldn’t find any other member of family to give the money to him/her and….
Click here to reads some samples of the letters and stories they send to their potential victims:
http://www.work-at-home-topics.com/scams
What to do if you receive a Nigerian scam letter?
1- Do not respond to it.
2- Notify your own nation’s national law enforcement agency and your own nation’s foreign office.
3- File a complaint with the Nigerian embassy or high commission in your nation.
4- If the contact from the scammers was via email, write their email provider at their “abuse” address (abuse@yahoo.com, abuse@onebox.com etc.) And include the scam message with its headers; complain about the scam message; and ask that the account be shut down.
Why they focus on people who look for business opportunities or have internet business opportunity websites?
They know that people who look for business opportunities or have internet business opportunity websites are eager to make money. On the other hand, they know that making money is not easy and these people always look for a better way to make more money, faster and easier. So they will respond to scam letters more than the others.
Please prevent scammers!
If you promote a business on internet, you can easily help to prevent scammers to cheat more people. One of the best ways is placing a separate page on your website with a visible link on the home page to inform your website visitors about these criminals and scammers. Try to educate your websites visitors who can be the future victims of scammers. People should know about them and the ways they use to cheat and if so, they can never be fooled by them.
If you promote a MLM or affiliate program, you’d better to inform your referrals about scammers. Most of your referrals are new to internet and online business opportunities and so they can easily be cheated by scammers. This is your responsibility to educate them about scammers because you have referred them to the new world of internet with all its good and bad things.
Always keep yourself updated about the new ways that scammers use, their websites and everything related to them. Try to join work at home business opportunities forums like http://www.work-at-home-topics.com/forums and let others know about your experiences and also know about others experiences. Also try to take a look at article directories like http://www.work-at-home-topics.com/articles every now and then and learn about new scamming methods. Only if you know about them, you can easy distinguish and avoid them and also help the others to avoid them too.
Work At Home Topics Team is a group of working at home people who try to make working at home and finding reliable work at home jobs easier: http://www.work-at-home-topics.com
This article can be distributed but not sold as long as no single word is modified or deleted. Work At Home Topics Team owns this article and in every publication of this article, this copyright notice must exist at the bottom:
© Copyright 2005 Work At Home Topics Team. All Rights Reserved Worldwide.
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PROBLEM: Customers complaining about site outages and slow site response times. Hosting company claiming that the problems had been resolved. Customers remaining dissatisfied.
METHODOLOGY: External website monitoring on a page-by-page basis at one-minute intervals pinpointed the problems.
SOLUTIONS: Realigning shared hosting, fixing database indexing, DNS server upgrade, altering the web host’s BGP configuration and regular website monitoring.
THE STORY:
Once seen as an alternative marketing channel, online shopping has carved its own niche in the marketplace. The online shopping sector has grown rapidly, outstripping other sectors and opening new business prospects. The factors contributing to the continuous growth of online shopping include wider product ranges, convenience, lower prices, and availability of clear product information. Recent large investments in e-commerce by companies large and small have further energized the sector and strengthened its roots.
This growth has not come easy. Although most shopping sites feel that they have rid themselves of persistent growing pains, some remain. A recent Andersen Consulting Services survey reveals that more than 25 percent of online shopping experiences fail during holiday seasons due to site outages. Another survey by the NDP Group reveals that up to 23 percent of online shoppers still experience temporary website outages, late shipments, and customer service issues.
Dotcom-Monitor website monitoring network specializes in ensuring performance and uptime in online transaction processes, including shopping carts, sign-ins, and form submission. By simulating end-use actions, Dotcom-Monitor.com verifies each step within a transaction, not only for proper content, but also for requested performance. If any test parameters fall outside of the specified range, responsible personnel are immediately notified.
One of Dotcom-Monitor’s recent customers, a large online auto parts retailer, approached Dotcom-Monitor with concern about website performance issues. Even after aggressive marketing campaigns, this retailer of name brand parts was still noticing a decline in their online business. Customers persistently complained about site outages and slow site response times. Despite repeated complaints by the IT department to the ASP provider and reassurances from the hosting company that the problems had been resolved, customers remained dissatisfied.
Realizing a potential disaster for their online business, the IT department sought a third-party external monitoring service provider to monitor their e-commerce site 24/7 and identify the issues and dependencies that were causing website outages.
After one-minute monitoring each day for 7 days, the following issues were identified:
1. Slow Website Response
Dotcom-Monitor’s “report by hour” feature discovered quickly the issues causing poor performance. The collected one-minute performance data was aggregated on an hourly basis into a single weekly report. This report provided summary statistics about transaction by hour. Information such as average response time (in seconds), required time to access the website, and the number of successes and failures, provided a clear picture about site performance during different daily intervals. Using Dotcom Monitor’s proprietary algorithm, it was possible to calculate the site’s slow response periods. Dotcom-Monitor found that, although the e commerce site was hosted on a dedicated shared server, during certain times in a day, other applications on the server consumed most of its resources. This led to slow site response. This happened only during certain hours, as the conflicting application was run only a few times a day.
2. Slow Web Page Response
The retailer’s IT department also discovered that several pages within a transaction, such as shipping history and “Invoice printout” were extremely slow. They took a long time to load, causing shoppers to abandon the site and instead call customer service. Unfortunately, the other pages within the same transaction were extremely fast to load. Dues to this discrepancy within the network, Dotcom-Monitor was able to identify the specific online pages that were slow and traced the problem to the database table that those pages were accessing. Once proper indexing was performed, the issue was resolved.
3. Problem in Accessing the Website
During certain intervals in a day, the retailer’s site became inaccessible altogether. A number of services, such as mail servers, websites, and proxy servers, would become unavailable to the online world. To make matters worse, the ISP could not find any issues, but customers were still complaining. After a “ping pong game” to determine the problems between the ISP and customers, Dotcom Monitor enables its “DNS Monitoring.” Dotcom-Monitor tested the retailer’s DNS servers by querying specified servers performing Every minute, website monitoring showed that one DNS server was occasionally unable to resolve the address. This implied that the DNS server supporting the organization was not working consistently. The retailer upgraded the DNS server and the problem was resolved.
4. Varying Website Response from Different Geographical Locations
Persistent monitoring showed that this retailer’s shopping cart website responded at varying speeds from different locations. Some customers complained that the site took too long to open, while others had no issues. Using Dotcom-Monitor’s “Report by Location” feature, which gathers data from multiple remote agents at different locations, a traceroute snapshot was recorded. This report was accompanied by the error message from every location where slowdown was detected. After analyzing the data, it was found that the ISP hosting the site used several providers that did not peer properly with certain networks. This network peering problem was identified and brought to the ISP. They took the necessary actions to resolve the problem by altering their BGP configuration.
5. Website Downtime required frequent monitoring
The retailer’s website occasionally suffered downtime, which led to customer dissatisfaction. The outages were mostly related to software glitches that the customer was unable to fix in a short period of time. These glitches usually required manual intervention. Enter Dotcom-Monitor. The goal to reduce downtime was to alert key personnel of any issue immediately. Once website monitoring detected any problems with the web server, immediate alert by phone and SMS would be sent to on-call personnel. This decreased downtime periods from an average of 25 minutes to less than 5 minutes.
In today’s highly competitive environment, customer expectations about website availability and performance grow daily. What was once acceptable a few years back is no longer the case today. Website monitoring features, such as immediate alerts, detailed reports, and aggregated statistics, help clients find and address issues, and thus enhance the customer experience.
External website monitoring services offered by companies like Dotcom-Monitor have helped customers explore issues and discover otherwise elusive data required to take corrective actions well before receiving customer complaints. Dotcom-Monitor.com services extend into all industries. It is important to note that website monitoring services are a must for all mission-critical services, and are not just limited to the current example of shopping cart customers. In industries such as finance, insurance, medical, and manufacturing, or any industry that requires high website uptimes and excellent website response, it is becoming essential to employ external website monitoring services.
David Leonhardt is a freelance writer. He wrote this article for Dotcom-Monitor, providing external website monitoring and external network monitoring from agents positioned around the globe.
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