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The customer simply has to sign up for any of our hosting services online at our site, and the 50% off coupon will be AUTOMATICALLY applied.

The Coupon code is CYBERMONDAY2010 (valid for new customers only).

This will apply to the client’s first invoice (first term length they sign up
for whether that be 1 month or for 3 years for shared and reseller hosting plans, and for the first month only on VPS and dedicated servers).

This promotion will run Monday November 29^th from 12:00AM – 11:59PM CST (-6 GMT).

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Hosting coupon code CYBERMONDAY2010 for Hostgator originally appeared on Core Digest on November 28, 2010.

The hacker tool, dubbed DECAF, is designed to counteract the Computer Online Forensic Evidence Extractor, aka COFEE. The latter is a suite of 150 bundled, off-the-shelf forensic tools that run from a script. Microsoft combined the programs into a portable tool that can be used by law enforcement agents in the field before they bring a computer back to their forensic lab. The script runs on a USB stick that agents plug into the machine.

The tools scan files and gather information about activities performed on the machine, such as where the user surfed on the internet or what files were downloaded.

Someone submitted the COFEE suite to the whistleblower site Cryptome last month, prompting Microsoft lawyers to issue a take-down notice to the site. The tool was also being distributed through the Bit Torrent file sharing

This week two unnamed hackers released DECAF, an application that monitors a computer for any signs that COFEE is operating on the machine.

According to the Register, the program deletes temporary files or processes associated with COFEE, erases all COFEE logs, disables USB drives, and contaminates or spoofs a variety of MAC addresses to muddy forensic tracks.

The hackers say that later releases of the program will allow computer owners to remotely lock down their machine once they detect that it has fallen into law enforcement hands. The hackers, however, have not released source code for the program, which would make it easy for anyone to see if the program contains malware that might also harm a computer or allow the attackers to take control of it.

Update: The developers of DECAF have taken issue with Threat Level referring to them as hackers. Were just two developers who support the free flow of information and privacy, one of them wrote Threat Level in an anonymous e-mail. You could say were just average joes

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Hackers Brew Self-Destruct Code to Counter Police Forensics originally appeared on Core Digest on December 16, 2009.

After nearly five years of loyal service, Mininova deleted over a million torrent files when it partly shut down its website a week ago. What remains are a few thousand torrents that were uploaded though its content distribution platform, which only lists uploads by approved users.

Mininova was forced to take such a drastic measure following a negative verdict in their court battle with the local anti-piracy outfit BREIN this summer. The torrent indexer was told by the court to remove all infringing torrent files from its index. This was technically unfeasible according to the Mininova team, who were left with no other choice than to remove all torrent files uploaded by regular users.

This move resulted in the deletion of more than a million torrents, many of which were not infringing any copyrights at all. As expected, the consequences of this decision for Mininova traffic, as well as the number of searches and downloads on the site, are disastrous.

In just a few days Mininova traffic plummeted by 66%, from well over 5 million visits the day before the torrents were removed, to just 1.8 million yesterday. If the downward trend continues at this rate, the site will have less than a million visits a day a week from now, throwing it out of the top 10 most visited torrent sites that it led for two years in a row.

Even more striking perhaps is the drop in downloads and searches. As can be seen from the graph below, the number of downloads dropped from over 10 million a day to just 371,424. The number of searches went down from 10 to 3 million, a less steep drop than the downloads, probably indicating that not everyone is aware of the reduced number of torrents on the site.

So what next?

There is no doubt that Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN will be proud of their accomplishment, but aside from ruining Mininova business it will not have a significant impact on the overall volume of BitTorrent traffic. As always, new sites emerge by the dozens as old ones are shut down and users quickly adapt to the new situation.

A network engineer at a major Aussie ISP has confirmed that Mininova partial shutdown has had no noticeable effect on traffic volumes. I didnt notice any reduction in [torrent] traffic when The Pirate Bay went down. It hard to see how thered be any significant change from Mininova withdrawal.

That said, the ‘end of Mininova does leave a scar behind. For years most torrent indexers heavily relied on torrents that were uploaded to Mininova. With over a million user-uploaded torrents, the site was without a doubt the main torrent provider on the Internet. Although most of the torrents are still mirrored on other sites, Mininova role as content provider has to be taken over by others.

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Mininova Traffic Plummets After Going Legal originally appeared on Core Digest on December 11, 2009.

For instance, the DreamSpark program has provided design and development tools to students worldwide free of charge, while the BizSpark program has provided licenses for the same set of tools to software startups for a mere token fee of $100.

Now there a new Website Spark program from Microsoft that is aimed at web professionals and small web development companies who are involved in designing websites and other web-based applications.

Eligibility Criteria for Website Spark

If you build websites for your clients and have no more than 10 people working for you (including owners and employees), you are eligible to sign up for the Website Spark program.

The only restriction is that you must launch a new website or service within 6 months of getting accepted into the program that is built using the tools that you received through WebsiteSpark.

Software Tools included in the Program

If you agree, you will be offered licenses for Visual Studio, Expression Studio, Expression Web, Windows Web Server, and SQL Server Web Edition for three years. You can purchase the licenses at the end of three years or simply exit the program.

There are no up-front costs but youll have to pay a $100 program fee once you decide to exit the program. In addition to software licenses, participating web development companies will also get discounts on hosting services for their websites, as well as coverage on the upcoming WebsiteSpark portal.

The WebsiteSpark program is available to web design companies around the world, so if you are planning on launching a company or currently run a small company that meets the requirements, WebsiteSpark might just help company save a ton of money in software licenses and you may also get some extra visibility through the various Microsoft portals.

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Microsoft Offers Web Designers Free Tools to Build and Host New Websites originally appeared on Core Digest on December 10, 2009.

1. Dont Feel Shy – If you are seriously willing to monetize your website with AdSense, make sure that you place advertisements in prominent locations where visitors will notice the ads.

2. The best performing ad units for AdSense are 160×600, 336×280 and 300×250. For text only ads, you should go with the 336×380 format but in all other situations, 300×250 may be a better format since it is most popular among advertisers and also supports rich media. 160×600 can easily fit in the sidebar of your blog.

3. Web visitors have a very short attention span and majority of them may simply leave after a quick glance. Their eyes follow a F pattern so you can get good results if the Google ads are placed in the areas colored red on the heat map. Sidebars and leaderboards at the top are often ignored.

4. Depending upon the layout of your website, you should consider placing the first unit somewhere in the middle of the page and above the fold.

5. Even kids would know that AdSense works best if there are no borders and that the background color of the ads matches with the background of the page. That may not always be true and sometimes colored backgrounds (like light yellow or very light grey) can convert better – look at the top AdWords unit on the Google search page.

6. If you have a website with a dark theme (like a black background), experiment using a contrast color scheme for Google ads.
7. While it is a good idea to use section targeting around the main content, you should skip adding the section targeting tags for the comment section in your blog because the comments may not exactly convey what the page is all about. The aim is to increase the relevance of Google Ads.

8. Site visitors generally look for a search button at the top left region. Use the word “search” in the submit button else some visitors may not notice them. AdSense doesnt allow publishers to pre-populate search boxes with keywords
9. I recommend using only text ads for the first Google Ad unit but place another 300×250 unit in the sidebar (or somewhere below the fold) – these generally serve CPM based ads and will therefore help you monetize visits from places like Digg and StumbleUpon even when the bounce rate is very very high.

The CPM of ad units will decrease as you come the page but that may not be the case with link units – they are small, text based, can fit in even small locations and perform brilliant.

10. These are recommended ad placements for a website depending upon the design (two-column or three-column). If you write long articles, try fitting an ad unit somewhere in the middle of the article or at the bottom because when readers are done with reading, theyll probably look for more resources or related information.

11. Once your new ad placement is live, make sure you test the AdSense layout with help of your grandma or subscribe to a professional mouse tracking service like CrazyEgg to know how people interact / navigate your content.

12. Sometimes traffic flowing in from Image search engines can earn you more AdSense Revenue than regular web traffic. So upload good quality images and use text captions with alt tags to make sure that blog images rank good in Image Search results.

13. Flickr is another great source of traffic (especially from Yahoo!) and you may also use it to indirectly improve your organic rankings.

14. You can also increase relevance of Google Ads on your site by linking to authority websites using descriptive anchor text. This will also help improve your organic ranks since outgoing links and citations carry weight in the eyes of the search engine who may then consider you as an authority for that niche.

15. Look for variations in Google Analytics – AdSense reports. If you are seeing impressions for a page but no CTR or CPM, chances are that the page may be serving PSAs or the ads arent relevant enough. You may also use the AdSense Sandbox to figure out if visitors from other countries are unable to see ads on some page that have low (or zero) CPM
17. Archives, Tags, Category or Author pages in a blog arent good landing pages and are hard to monetize as well. Redirect their Google juice to single post page using NOINDEX, FOLLOW tags.

18. Reward your regular visitors (I call them influences) with ad-free content. AdSense in feeds is not a loved option either so you may have use the feed footer to find spammers & feed scrappers.

19. If you run a multi-author blog, you can very easily implement AdSense Revenue sharing through channels. Assign a separate channel to each other and use that number for his or her blog posts.

20. AdSense Premium sites like CNN, Mahalo, New York Times, About.com, etc. generally have dedicated AdSense account managers to help them optimize their Google ad units. You can study their layouts and probably implement some of the techniques in your own blog(s).

Another great resource are these official Case Studies discussed on the AdSense blog. Folks like Jensense, Problogger & Barry Schwartz are also pretty good at spotting trends early and often. I also recommend joining the AdSense forums at Webmaster World – especially follow conversations of “Preferred” or “Senior Members” as they generally have lot of experience.

With Google AdSense, one should never feel complacent because there always a chance to improve earnings provided you are willing to experiment. The software theory – “If it aint broke, dont fix it” doesnt really apply here.

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Google AdSense Optimization Tips – WordCamp Presentation originally appeared on Core Digest on December 10, 2009.

WebMynd is an extremely useful Firefox add-on that embed search results from Flickr, Wikipedia, Backtype (for blog comments), Delicious, Digg, Amazon, LinkedIn and a dozen other custom locations into Google search pages.

It like building a personal Google Universal Search page but you have complete control over sources that are displayed in the search results. And since WebMynd would search the other sources after displaying the main Google results, you wont see any real dip in performance or speed.

The results are neatly embedded in the right side of the Google page and you can easily re-order and / or hide any of these services. WebMynd will remember the settings even if you exit the Google search page.

WebMynd also includes a recording feature (disabled by default) that keeps a track of all websites that you may have visited inside Firefox. If you are worried about privacy, keep this feature “OFF” as this data is periodically uploaded to WebMynd servers for history search visual playback.

Best of all, the new release works with Yahoo and Windows Live Search as well.

I think most Google users will love the WebMynd Firefox extension but Google may have issues with it since it pushes the AdSense ads way down the search page that they are almost invisible.

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Enhance Google Search Results with Twitter, Wikipedia, Flickr, etc. originally appeared on Core Digest on December 10, 2009.

Following are the key areas of a website that were examined during the Site Clinic for potential issue and you too can follow this simple checklist to improve upon your own site or blog.

1. If there are pull-down menus on your website, they should be accessible even without JavaScript – this is all the more important because a lot of mobile phone browsers either dont support JavaScript and have that disabled so save on data costs.

2. The contact information on your website should be available in plain text and always provide a link from the home page.

3. Make sure a robots.txt file exists on the root directory.

4. The logo image of your site should have proper ALT text – good for graphic accessibility as well as search.

5. Always check for URL canonicalization else you may splitting your PageRank across different pages and this may also lead to tracking issues in Google Analytics. Here how to check for canonicalization:

6. Run a query like site:abc.com Viagra to make sure that hackers have not inserted spam links in your content.

7. Always have different feeds for different topics. So if you have a blog, you can have individual feeds for all the categories.

8. Comment moderation in blogs is very essential because if too many comments on a site end up linking to bad neighborhoods, Google may have problems with your site.

9. Google (probably) doesnt use META description tags for determining organic ranks but it does read this information to know what a page is all about.

10. Adam recommended the following TITLE structure – “Page Title – Category – Site Name”

11. Use the site: and intitle: operator in Google to determine that all web pages on your site have your company name. This is because when people bookmark your pages in the browser or social sites, the title of your site will also be added to the bookmark.

12. Dont repeat keywords and synonyms in your content.

13. The URL structure doesnt matter from the perspective of search but clean URLs can give users a clue about the target landing page and hence may get more clicks in search results.

14. If doesnt matter if have categories or directory names in URLs – just make sure that you follow a consistent URL structure across the website.

15. Dont use the same images across multiple pages of your site. You should consider including targeted pictures that are very relevant to the content of the page where you are embedding them.

16. Use the Enhance 404 Widget in Google Webmaster Tools to embed a search box on your 404 pages.

17. Dont do a soft 404 as it might penalize your site in Google.
18. Always block pages (via robots.txt) from Google that contain search results as users dont want to see another search page in Google search results and this may even invite a penalty.

19. Good links are like votes. They are given consciously.

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Site Clinic: An SEO Checklist for your Website originally appeared on Core Digest on December 10, 2009.

The compliance issue is almost always related to content. For instance, if any particular website is centered around banned topics (like gambling or pornography), Google can disable AdSense serving for that website.

The next issue is more serious as it relates to “click fraud”. No one obviously has a clear understanding of how Google determines “invalid clicks” but such an activity can invite an AdSense ban for life. There an appeal process at Google but again it doesnt guarantee that your AdSense account will be reinstated even if you provide all the required details (like web server logs).

Aaron Greenspan was another happy AdSense user until he received an email from Google saying that his account has been cancelled.

While going through our records recently, we found that your AdSense account has posed a significant risk to our AdWords advertisers. Since keeping your account in our publisher network may financially damage our advertisers in the future, weve decided to disable your AdSense account.

Aaron writes in Huffington Post that his AdSense account was disabled without warning and he literally ran from pillar to post at Google trying to reach everyone from the AdSense Customer Service to the Legal Team to Google forums but with no success.

If an AdSense publisher account is disabled for invalid clicks, he is not entitled to any further payment from Google and all the current earnings are returned to the corresponding AdWords advertisers. The same happened to Aaron as he had made around $721 from AdSense but the payment was stopped after the account was disabled.

With literally no options left, Aaron made a final attempt and filed a civil lawsuit for $721.00 (the amount Google owed to him) saying that Google could not prove any wrongdoing and that Google fraud detection algorithm was imperfect. All he had to pay was $40 as the court fees for this lawsuit.

The AdSense account was disabled on December 9, 2008, he filed the lawsuit against Google on January 15, 2009 and on March 2, 2009, the judge delivered the following verdict:

I dont think I have the power here in Palo Alto small claims court to make you reinstate his account, but I think you owe this young man $721. I think there might be money in Google treasury for that.

Google paid him all the “due” AdSense earnings along with the court fees though his account still stands cancelled.

I think a big reason why Google lost this case is because their lawyer couldnt convince the judge about how “click fraud” was detected in first place. Google has good reasons to not disclose their fraud detection algorithms in public court cases but the fact that this decision went against Google could probably convince many more ex-AdSense users to follow the footsteps of Aaron.

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Banned AdSense Publisher Gets His Money Back from Google originally appeared on Core Digest on December 10, 2009.

Let me explain. Say you are tracking an item on eBay and like to get notified as soon as someone places a new bid or if the seller helps modifies the product description or shipping cost. You can either do this by continuously refreshing that eBay auction page in your browser or simple add the eBay slice.

Now whenever anything changes in auction, it will reflect right in the favorites bar of your IE 8 browser. Click the bookmark (or web slice) to know what has changed.

Think of an IE 8 Web Slice as a mini web page that is displayed inside your browser no matter what site you are on. And unlike Live Bookmarks of Firefox, which are nothing but a plain drop down of website headlines, you have complete control over the layout and look-n-feel of web slices in IE.

How to Create IE 8 Web Slices

It is the responsibility of the website owner to develop web slices for his or her website. You have to decide what content should be made available in the web slice, how often should that be refreshed and what should be the layout (or design) of the web slice.

MSDN Library has some good documentation to help you get started with web slices including a style guide to ensure that your web slice looks good and readable inside the web browser.

You may find the documentation a bit technical in nature but dont lose heart – here a really simple example that will show you how to create a custom web slice for any WordPress blog (self hosted).

1:
2:
3:
4:

11:

An IE8 Web slice is a simple HTML web page that has the following structure. You just need to specify the title of a web slice (as that displayed on the browser favorite bar) and then change the content inside the “entry-content” class (line 7-9).

You can also define your own CSS styles as this real example – open the link in IE8 to see how the browser auto-discovers the web slice on the page by flashing the green slice icon.

If you dont have IE 8 or have trouble getting the web slice to work on your computer, here an HD screencast demo of the same.

If you have a WordPress (self-hosted) blog, here how you can create a web slice that IE 8 users can add to their menu bars.

Create a new file (say webslice.php) in your WordPress installation folder and copy-paste the follow code in the php file.