Saturday 05 July 2008 19:41
Now the search engine Yahoo! is defaming Tech-Pro.net and destroying our reputation by describing our site as a "potentially harmful website" and marking every search result from any of our domains with a red notice that says: "Warning: Dangerous Downloads." This is destroying our business and causing serious permanent harm to our reputation as a trusted site. And all because of a false detection of malware by McAfee's SiteAdvisor malware scanner, as I described in my previous blog posting. Read more...
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Wednesday 02 July 2008 22:52
Anyone who knows me or is familiar with my sites will know how important I consider it to be that Tech-Pro.net appears to be a trustworthy source of software downloads and information. I belong to the Organization of Independent Software Vendors (OISV) and the Software Industry Professionals (SIP) and display their logos on the front page of the site. We have also joined the Comodo UserTrust scheme, which allows users to rate a site for its trustworthiness. So you can imagine my dismay when I launched Firefox today and found McAfee Site Advisor showing a red warning alert when viewing Tech-Pro.net pages. Read more...
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Wednesday 02 July 2008 16:59
I started up the computer this morning to find a bunch of emails in the Webmaster's inbox telling me in no uncertain terms to stop sending unwanted mail. The language used provided an eye-opening insight into the stress caused by spam - something I'd forgotten since I started using Gmail, which reliably diverts all the unsolicited mail into a spam folder so I never see it. We don't send out bulk email, apart from the Daily Software Deals opt-in newsletter which contains clear instructions on how to unsubscribe, so I'd never experienced this before. Then I realized that some lowlife had used our URL shortener xaddr.com to cloak a link to his site, and then sent this out to thousands of unfortunate recipients. Read more...
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Tuesday 01 July 2008 18:06
When I created our URL shortener site xaddr.com a year or so ago, one of my reasons for doing so was that I did not like the way other short URL sites like TinyUrl hid the destination link, so you didn't know where it would take you until it was too late. TinyURL added the option of a preview page, but it is just that, an option, which is turned off by default and most people who click on one of their links don't know about anyway. Read more...
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Wednesday 28 May 2008 18:07
We used to use PayPal to take payments for our own-brand products. It was cheap and worked pretty well. However, we decided that we would rather use a payment processor that did more of the work for us, so we switched to Plimus. Unfortunately we had links to a PayPal order form hard coded in the setup program. That was a bad idea. Read more...
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Tuesday 13 May 2008 10:10
Last Friday morning our ADSL broadband connection stopped working with the usual authentication failure messages. Being reluctant to phone up and be referred to the Indian call center to be talked through a script checking things I had already checked, I left it for a few hours in the hope that the fault would be detected and fixed. It wasn't, so I had to call. Nothing worked, the problem was "escalated" and I faced a weekend (at least) without Internet. So I decided to get a mobile data connection to use as a backup. Read more...
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Sunday 06 April 2008 17:59
There is a bit of a stink being stirred up at the moment over a new online advertising service called Phorm. It's an online advertising platform that works like this: ISPs will scan the text of content downloaded by web surfers, analyze it and insert relevant ads on participating sites. Presumably ISPs will receive some of the advertising income for their participation in this scheme, which will help keep down the costs of web access. Predictably it is the ISPs with the most aggressive pricing that have signed up for this. But a lot of consumers are not happy about it, saying that it invades their privacy, and some security experts have even claimed it breaches data privacy laws. Read more...
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Friday 04 April 2008 09:49
Is it just me, or is everyone sick of the music industry's constant whining about how it is everyone else's responsibility to stop piracy of their products? They have apparently convinced the government, that well known expert in information technology, that ISPs should take steps to prevent ilegal downloads, or face sanctions. Now Charles Dunstone, head of Carphone Warehouse, operators of the TalkTalk broadband service, has refused. He has said the demands are unreasonable and unworkable, and it is not his job to be an internet policeman. Good for him. The next step would presumably be for the government to make telephone companies cut off people who use the phone to arrange crimes. That would put an end to illegal activity at a stroke, wouldn't it? Read more...
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