Posted by admin on Nov 14, 2008 in
Google,
Internet,
Software,
technology
I have seen too many people arguing that you don’t need Antivirus software if you are careful. Well this is a pretty ignorant argument. It may have been the case when viruses only came in .exe form and all you had to do to protect yourself was simply not to click on it. Well since those days are long gone and viruses can take almost any shape or form going unprotected on the internet is about as smart as digging through medical waste with your bare hands.
Contrary to popular belief viruses also exist on webpages and you don’t have to click a thing! They are embedded and your browser just “clicks” on them when it downloads them to your computer. See the problem is that most people don’t understand how the internet works. Everything you see and hear has to be downloaded onto your computer. Thus everywhere you go files are being stored on your computer. Some are benign but you never know.
I was actually using MSNBC the other day and I got a virus warning. It may have been a false positive but how could you know? I wouldn’t have known at all had I not had any protection.
Well now it seems Google went even further and actually sold ads to one of these companies. They were using Adsense to send people to infect themselves with a known virus. In this case the virus actually tricks you into purchasing a second virus that further infects your computer! How sly. That being said you simply cant trust any site no matter how well known they are. Don’t trust for a second built in things that say “trusted sites” because there is no such thing. The well known sites are the most heavily targeted for obvious reasons. They are also the most easily exposed and very often infected. They don’t tell you this of course because what you don’t know cant hurt you right?
You can read the rest here.
If you would like to work with an agent who is leading the way call 715-894-1001 today or send me an email.
Tags: AntiVirus
Posted by admin on Nov 14, 2008 in
Internet,
Software,
technology
I promised earlier today that I would write a blog about spam and what is being done to stop it. If you have an email account and who doesn’t then you probably are pretty sick of getting spam. First we had junk mail to try to stop it and the spammers just got trickier and trickier. The more we struggled the harder they worked against us. It was sort of like “Chinese” hand cuffs.. if you pull hard then they pull harder against you.
Well I have written a few stories showing how serious of a problem is. There are a few sites reporting on this issue. One article showed just how much spam it takes to actually make some money. Now you can see why they literally have to send so many spam emails. It is literally a Billion dollar industry fighting it and doing it on both sides!
Well yet another ISP was taken offline and this time it seems to have done some good. Personally I just wish everyone used a good anti virus program to prevent this from happening in the first place. Thats all it would take to put a huge dent in this whole thing.
Anyways here is a good read about more recent news in the battle.
If you would like to work with an agent who is leading the way call 715-894-1001 today or send me an email.
Tags: spam
Posted by admin on Nov 14, 2008 in
Internet,
Software,
technology
Well Twitter may or may not be news to you. If you are part of the social networking bandwagon then you may have heard of it but you might not even be a Twit or Twitterer? (Some humor is ok right?) Anyways it certainly is all the rave lately and for some more than just a craze. Many have been able to incorporate this into their business models. I for one have used it and so far it seems effective. I can post into my blog on Active Rain and then have it sent to Twitter which sends it to my Facebook profile. I guess its a good way to stay in front of your customers and clients and show them you are busy. Personally I see it as more than a toy and hope that everyone can realize its potential as a professional tool.
What some might not know is how it was used during the campaign. You might be aware of how Obama used Facebook to his advantage. In fact if you Google the word Facebook he comes up second. If you are at all familiar with SEO or how search engines such as Google works this is no small achievement. In fact its quite crazy that someone could do this in such a short time.
Well like I said you probably don’t know how they were using Twitter as well. In fact “Barack Obama’s Twitter account has the most followers, with a whopping 121,000+ followers.”
To that all I can say is WOW. Thats pretty impressive when you consider that there are only “3.2 million users of the free service” If I did my math correctly that means 1 in 26 people on Twitter follow him alone. It is no surprise how powerful the internet can be. But if you are a business or in business and you have a product or service, advertising is everything, yes? Shouldn’t you be using every tool available to get your message out? The only thing stopping you is you!
You can read the article here.
If you would like to work with an agent who is leading the way call 715-894-1001 today or send me an email.
Tags: Twitter
Posted by admin on Nov 14, 2008 in
Internet,
technology
It may seem from some of my recent blog posts that I am pushing a pro-Obama agenda but trust me I am very critical of our leaders and I will never hesitate to criticize what they do. Although it might be too early to say whether any of this stuff comes about, presidents do tend to have problems passing into law what they say on the campaign trail, I for one remain hopeful that we do have some changes.
If you follow my blog at all I think the internet is great and I love technology. But there are some serious issues with how ISP’s handle our privacy and so far there has been a trend to sell out this information. If you don’t know what net neutrality is you might not even know that it is under serious attack. During the last administration corporations were given substantial powers that mostly went unchecked. It was actually rare to see the FCC actually take a stance against this especially since they are very partisan.
In a previous post I hinted that the possible new FCC chairperson might have an ambitious agenda to reverse all previous trends. Now it seems this might actually go into effect sooner rather than later. You probably have no idea how close you were to giving up all your rights on the internet. For me it was scary to watch. The only groups doing anything about it seemed to be the ACLU and the EFF. If you aren’t familiar with those groups I highly suggest taking a look. You might not agree with everything they do but overall they do a good job at protecting our rights. Someone needs to stand up to the corporate bullying and monopolistic actions that corporations are doing. If we aren’t even aware and no one else does anything I cant imagine where we would be right now in this country.
Well whatever you think about Obama, I don’t think anyone would think its a good idea to give out personal information to corporations and then let them sell this information to third parties. On top of that it looks like they want to start breaking up some of these larger telecom companies and pursue cheaper, faster internet. Tell me thats not good change?
You can read the full article here.
If you would like to work with an agent who is leading the way call 715-894-1001 today or send me an email.
Tags: news
Posted by admin on Nov 14, 2008 in
Gadgets,
Internet,
Software,
technology
Every year virus makers try to keep their software hip and relevant. They try to take advantage of whatever is popular in the news or culture. Often times it seems to merely poke fun at our society with silly names. The main way that these people trick the unknowing is through social engineering. There are some rather tricky methods and although they have changed the tactics slightly by using the campaign and Obama victory, the main tactics are the same. Deception and tricking people into clicking on links or opening files they shouldn’t. Although this would all be prevented if people used good anti virus software (here is a link!!!)
What are they doing different this time? “One such method is to send out e-mails with a link to his victory speech, but rather than have the Adobe Flash video and necessary plug-ins, it’s actually a malware executable file. Other internet users have been receiving e-mails that have attached .exe files that have been downloaded to harvest personal information.”
This is big business. They want control of your computer to use as a spam machine. I will actually be writing a few more articles about that later today so stay tuned.
Here is the article.
If you would like to work with an agent who is leading the way call 715-894-1001 today or send me an email.
I originally posted this in my Eau Claire Wisconsin Real Estate Blog.
Tags: AntiVirus
Posted by admin on Nov 14, 2008 in
technology
I came across this article the other day and I was greatly concerned. I wont lie. I don’t like nuclear fission. It is messy and poses great potential risk. There is still no way to clean up the spent fuel and as such I don’t see why we would be pursuing this technology. It certainly seems to have a great potential for disaster. Chernobyl anyone? I don’t want to see a giant dome of concrete in my lifetime thats for sure.
Well that doesn’t seem to have stopped one ambitious company that not only wants to pursue fission technology, they want to miniaturize it and make it more readily available. I know that smaller, more controlled reactions are much safer and this certainly is safer than larger reactors but there is still risk. I for one am not worried about terrorists but for those that are, our current nuclear plants are completely unguarded. Creating more seems very risky to me.
But I guess this is a case of the good, the bad and the ugly. The good is that it seems to be cheap and less of a carbon footprint. The bad is that, well fission is just bad. The ugly is that while this might be less carbon than some alternative energies, the plutonium footprint is huge! That was a small joke but seriously nuclear waste from these things is going to pose a health risk forever.
Well if the article is right I guess we will see in 5 years.
You can read the article here.
If you would like to work with an agent who is leading the way call 715-894-1001 today or send me an email.
Tags: Homes
Posted by admin on Nov 12, 2008 in
Gadgets,
Internet
If you followed my blog at all or in case you saw this in the news Circuit City recently announced it was closing 150 stores. Well apparently that was not enough to stay afloat. Personally I think its too bad because someone needs to take out Best Buy because I am sick of that store and it being an oxymoron. It is not the best at anything least of all the best buy. In fact if you price shop most of the time its the worst buy and after they were caught blatantly ripping people off through their in store website my personal boycott went from full strike to nuclear wasteland. I do all my electronics shopping at www.newegg.com and have no problem giving them a plug because they deserve it.
Anyways if you didn’t heed my advice about your gift cards at CC they might be useless now.
You can read the story here.
If you would like to work with an agent who is leading the way call 715-894-1001 today or send me an email.
Tags: news
Posted by admin on Nov 12, 2008 in
Internet In the last week I have won the lottery so many times that it is strange that I would still be in Real Estate. In fact my luck has been crazy lately! I have rescued a dozen princes and princesses from all over Africa. I see it as a great investment opportunity. I just wire them some money or even easier I just give them the details to my account and they can just take the tiniest little bit for now because they promise to pay me back soon! They need the account numbers to transfer the money into my account! Duh you silly!
Ok well you figured it out. I am talking about scammers and apparently they have wormed their way into Facebook. It was only a matter of time I guess. Social Engineering is perhaps the single greatest security threat today. Arguable the greatest hacker of all time Kevin Mitnick was not even a hacker! He didn’t actually break in, he merely convinced the right people to give him the codes he needed or whatever relevant information he needed to proceed to the next target. I know he was talented in other regards but for the most part this is actually what he did contrary to rumor.
So now the next time you use Facebook and your “new friend” contacts you and asks you for $500 to help them out of Nigeria, yes, its the same Nigeria from the other scams! How about this as a general rule to follow:
Don’t ever wire anyone money or give anyone your social security number, drivers license, wallet, back account info, etc.
Unless its me of course! 
You can read the full story here.
If you would like to work with an agent who is leading the way call 715-894-1001 today or send me an email.
Tags: news
Posted by admin on Nov 12, 2008 in
Internet,
technology
What is listing syndication? Basically this means that an Agent sends out data to a large amount of websites who host this data. The goal is to make the content of large, national sites relevant and useful for consumers.
The thing they aren’t telling you on these sites is that the listings you are looking at are old! Yup, these are old news! Only a handful of syndications integrate into the MLS in our area and usually these feeds are done only once a day. The rest rely on the agent to update their listings. Well if the agent isn’t changing the information as soon as new things change on their listings then the information is not current. Every time the price changes the agent has to go back and manually change the price on over a dozen sites! It probably goes without saying that most Agents aren’t going to have time for this. So what happens? The data becomes old and basically useless. Many of these sites are showing listings that are months old! I have seen some sites that have listings that were from 2006. What good is that?
Check out my website! It is full of relevant tips and information as well as providing one of the area’s most comprehensive search portals where you can search MLS listings in the Chippewa Valley.
If you would like to work with an agent who is leading the way call 715-894-1001 today or send me an email.
Posted by admin on Nov 12, 2008 in
Google,
Internet,
Software,
technology
I saw this a few days ago but it didn’t seem to be that big of a change as to warrant a blog post. I did consider it but I guess I just ran out of time. Well now today I see even bigger news with a completely different layout so I figure this is the time to report on this. In case you don’t check yours daily you might not have noticed. Here is a screenshot of the new Analytics look:
(Click for a larger view)
One of the more significant changes besides the look is that Google now lets you actually delete your account without a complicated procedure….
Or at least it seems that way until you actually try to do it! If you look in the picture I deleted the top account but it still wont let me erase it! If you were to click it shows nothing but still keeps the entry. Why Google?!!
Beyond that there is now custom reporting as well as Advanced Segments. If you look at the link I provide it explains those features in depth more. They might work for you its hard to say.
Another major improvement is the inclusion of Adwords into Analytics. Before from Adwords you could see Analytics but it was just plain confusing. I actually had to erase my Adwords account after running into problems with the two. It was one or the other…
Motion Charts is the big one that Google says to check out. Personally it seems confusing to me and doesn’t seem to work for everything. Here is an explanation of what doesn’t work where.
The features that I think are new in Webmaster tools is that it appears to have changed the site links feature a bit. I don’t know what the issue is because I cant seem to get it to work right on my account. Just a few days ago it stopped displaying all the incoming external links and removed the categories. My guess is that a major announcement is coming soon and to further speculate I think they might be categorizing this better into a table that you can actually use the data better. Currently there is no way to sort the data and it is confusing trying to read it.
Here is the full link to some of the announcements.
If you would like to work with an agent who is leading the way call 715-894-1001 today or send me an email.
