This is a warning that has been floating around the survey world for years. Never do any OTX surveys through any company and do not join their parent company. Most of their surveys have glitches and errors and it’s rare that you will fully qualify or get paid. I do not recommend them at all! Now watch out for Opinion Outpost. They are are using Survey Exchange for surveys that will waste your time and take your information for who knows what. Nail these bas***** to a web coffin.

A majority of companies still do not carry out any web analytics at all. We’ve seen any number of companies over the years spend tens of thousands of dollars on a costly re-design because of a vague feeling their website doesn’t work – and then repeat the same mistakes because they don’t carry out analytics first to find out what the problems are. Some of the companies that do limited analytics do not fully understand what they are looking at. Many people still talk about the numbers of hits their website receives mistakenly believing that these are the same as either page impressions, or worse, website visitors. Sometimes a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

Carrying out proper web analytics is vital to determining the true value of your website to your business. There are many aspects to analytics in assessing website performance, such as using Key Performance Indicators. The bottom line though is to try and calculate its value to the business as a whole – the website Return On Investment (ROI).

Calculating website return on investment

For an e-commerce website, this might look fairly straightforward. Determining revenue through direct sales and the lifetime value of repeat customers gives the income stream. While your website might not generate income directly, tracking the conversion rate of enquiries made by email or telephone calls to sales (and the average sale value) will give you a cash value for those enquiries.

Similarly, while some websites are technically information-only, they play a part in the sales process by referring leads to partner websites that handle sales. Tracking those leads by using redirect pages and then working with your partners to determine leads to sales conversion rates and average sales value also provides a monetary value attributable to your website.

Revealing the hidden benefits of a website

Cost avoidance is another area where your website could be helping your business without you realising it. If your website can reduce the number of enquiries made to a call center it could save you a fortune. IBM claim to save $2 billion a year in call centre costs with their online support website. Even for a small business, with limited human resources, key personnel could by using their time more profitably than answering questions that could be answered, for example, in a Frequently Asked Questions section of the website. Calculating average costs for a phone call, email and a help page request – which will vary from company to company – should enable you to calculate savings. A word of warning though – because a customer reads a help page, doesn’t mean an issue is resolved to their satisfaction. Making help resources available that are both effective and cheaper is an art form.

For e-commerce and information-only websites alike, there are also more imaginative ways of determining website ROI. Take, for example making white papers, annual reports or product catalogues available to download. The baseline cost of printing and posting an annual report might be $8. The cost of downloading the same document will be far less, say $40. to reformat the document and server costs. 500 downloads a month would equal an annual saving of $28,500.

So if you are still thinking in terms of the number of hits your website attracts, then you are missing out on the information that will help you calculate the true value of your website to the business. But it is never too late to start; your competitors probably don’t know the value of their website either, so you can still gain a competitive advantage by beginning a program of web analytics.

Better website ROI

Calculating Return on Investment is the starting point, not the final goal. Once you know what you have an initial figure, you want to look at ways to better website ROI.

Web analytics can help you to identify any weak points in your website offering that undermines your conversion rates. Are people abandoning shopping carts? Are visitors emailing you in appropriate numbers? Are visitors abandoning the website at specific pages? Once you have that information you can address the problems, and start to improve website ROI.

First published in ‘Total Business’ magazine, November 2005.

After you connect and you realize that the customer service representative is not from the USA (you can always ask if you are not sure about the accent), please very politely (very politely – this is not about trashing other cultures) say, “I’d like to speak to a customer service representative in the United States of America .” The rep might suggest talking to his/her manager, but, again, politely say, “Thank you, but I’d like to speak to a customer service representative in the USA .” YOU WILL BE IMMEDIATELY CONNECTED to a rep in the USA. It only takes less than one minute to have your call re- directed to the USA. Tonight when I got redirected to a USA rep, I asked again to make sure – and yes, she was from Fort Lauderdale.

Imagine if tomorrow, every US citizen who has to make such a call and then requests a US rep, imagine how that would ultimately impact the number of US jobs that would need to be created ASAP. Imagine what would happen if every US citizen insisted on talking to only US phone reps from this day on.

If I tell 10 people to consider this and you tell 10 people to consider doing this – see what I mean…it becomes an exercise in viral marketing 101.

Remember – the goal here is to restore jobs back here at home – not to be abrupt or rude to a foreign phone rep. If you agree, please tell 10 people you know and tell them to tell 10 people they know….etc…etc…

Last week the new Obama administration launched n initiative to stamp out piracy. This looks to be a first step with the feds shutting down nine websites responsible for streaming pirated movies to the world.

ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement) chief John Morton trumpeted the bust as the beginning of a “long-term effort to turn the tables on these thieves.”

Movie streaming sites beware

Federal authorities announced that they had seized domain names from nine websites engaged in the “criminal theft of American movies and television.” The websites include TVShack.net, PlanetMoviez.com, ThePirateCity.org and Ninjavideo.net. Combined, the sites drew 6.7 million visitors a month, authorities said.

Officials also seized assets from 15 bank, investment and advertising accounts and executed residential search warrants in North Carolina, New York, New Jersey and Washington, according to a statement from the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which coordinated its investigation with the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, the Department of Homeland Security and other agencies.

The crackdown, which involved 100 agents working in 11 states and the Netherlands, was part of a renewed campaign dubbed Operation in Our Sites by federal authorities to curb Internet counterfeiting and piracy. The announcement comes a week after the Obama administration unveiled a detailed plan on how to tackle global piracy, including targeting illegal websites.

The difference between this bust and previous ones is that the websites in question did not actually offer the movies for download, but instead streamed the movies and TV shows. Previously, movie crackdowns had concentrated on sites that distributed movie files.

So could this be the end of illegal movie and tv streams? Well, this is a drop in the ocean of sites that provide this kind of content, and with new ones appearing every day plus most of the streaming coming from China who are no assistance to the US authorities. Dont bet on a pirate free web anytime soon.

Article source:http://www.worldtvpc.com/blog/federal-government-shuts-movie-streaming-websites/

Firesheep

When logging into a website you usually start by submitting your username and password. The server then checks to see if an account matching this information exists and if so, replies back to you with a “cookie” which is used by your browser for all subsequent requests.

It’s extremely common for websites to protect your password by encrypting the initial login, but surprisingly uncommon for websites to encrypt everything else. This leaves the cookie (and the user) vulnerable. HTTP session hijacking (sometimes called “sidejacking”) is when an attacker gets a hold of a user’s cookie, allowing them to do anything the user can do on a particular website. On an open wireless network, cookies are basically shouted through the air, making these attacks extremely easy.

This is a widely known problem that has been talked about to death, yet very popular websites continue to fail at protecting their users. The only effective fix for this problem is full end-to-end encryption, known on the web as HTTPS or SSL. Facebook is constantly rolling out new “privacy” features in an endless attempt to quell the screams of unhappy users, but what’s the point when someone can just take over an account entirely? Twitter forced all third party developers to use OAuth then immediately released (and promoted) a new version of their insecure website. When it comes to user privacy, SSL is the elephant in the room.

Today at Toorcon 12 I announced the release of Firesheep, a Firefox extension designed to demonstrate just how serious this problem is.

After installing the extension you’ll see a new sidebar. Connect to any busy open wifi network and click the big “Start Capturing” button. Then wait.

As soon as anyone on the network visits an insecure website known to Firesheep, their name and photo will be displayed:

Double-click on someone, and you’re instantly logged in as them.

That’s it.

Firesheep is free, open source, and is available now for Mac OS X and Windows. Linux support is on the way.

Websites have a responsibility to protect the people who depend on their services. They’ve been ignoring this responsibility for too long, and it’s time for everyone to demand a more secure web. My hope is that Firesheep will help the users win.

To view the the first run of this article: FIRESHEEP

Original source page

Nicholas Merrill, 37, was president of New York-based Calyx Internet Access when he received a so-called “national security letter” from the FBI in February 2004 demanding records of one of his customers and filed a lawsuit to challenge it. His company was a combination ISP and security consultancy business that was launched in the mid-90s and had about 200 customers, Merrill said, many of them advertising agencies and non-profit groups.

Despite the fact that the FBI later dropped its demand for the records, Merrill was prohibited from telling his fiancée, friends or family members that he had received the letter or that he was embroiled in a lawsuit challenging its legitimacy. He occasionally showed up for court hearings about the case, but sat silently in the audience with other court observers. In 2007, he was prevented from publicly accepting an award for his courage from the American Civil Liberties Union, because he was not allowed to identify himself as the plaintiff in the case.

U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero in New York finally released Merrill partially from the gag order (.pdf) on July 30, which Merrill revealed publicly only on Monday.

“After six long years of not being able to tell anyone at all what happened to me – not even my family – I’m grateful to finally be able to talk about my experience of being served with a national security letter,” Merrill said in a statement. “Internet users do not give up their privacy rights when they log on, and the FBI should not have the power to secretly demand that ISPs turn over constitutionally protected information about their users without a court order. I hope my successful challenge to the FBI’s NSL gag power will empower others who may have received NSLs to speak out.”

A national security letter is an informal administrative letter the FBI can use to secretly demand customer records from ISPs, financial institutions, libraries, insurance companies, travel agencies, stockbrokers, car dealerships and others. NSLs have been used since the 1980s, but the Patriot Act, passed after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, and a subsequent revision in 2003 expanded the kinds of records that could be obtained with an NSL.

With an NSL, the FBI does not need to seek a court order to obtain such records, nor does it need to prove just cause. An FBI field agent simply needs to draft an NSL stating the information being sought is “relevant” to a national security investigation.

The letters come with a life-long gag order, so businesses that receive such letters are prohibited from revealing to anyone, including customers who may be under investigation, that the government has requested records of transactions. Violation of a gag order can be punishable by up to five years in prison.

The gag orders raise the possibility for extensive abuse of NSLs, under the cover of secrecy. Indeed, in 2007, a Justice Department Inspector General audit found that the FBI, which issued almost 200,000 NSLs between 2003 and 2006, had abused its authority and misused NSLs.

In Merrill’s case, although the letter’s gag order “was totally clear that they were saying that I couldn’t speak to a lawyer” about it, he immediately contacted his personal attorney, and together they went to the ACLU in New York, which agreed to represent him.

“My gut feeling is I’m an American,” Merrill said, in an interview with Threat Level on Tuesday. “I always have a right to an attorney. There’s no such thing as you can’t talk to your attorney.

“I kind of felt at the beginning, so few people challenge this thing, I couldn’t just stand by and see, in my opinion, the basic underpinnings of our government undermined,” he continued. “I was taught about how sophisticated our system of checks and balances is . . . and if you really believe in that, then the idea of one branch of government just demanding records without being checked and balanced by the judicial just is so obviously wrong on the surface.”

Merrill and the ACLU filed the lawsuit under the name “John Doe,” challenging the legality of the letter and asserting that customer records were constitutionally protected information. Merrill said the NSL, which listed 16 categories of records, including e-mail and billing records, was “very broad.”

“It was kind of open ended,” he said. “It went through a list of things and then said ‘and anything else.’ The implication was just send us everything and the kitchen sink.”

Merrill wouldn’t say how many records he had that were relevant to the request but said in general, “In the most broad understanding of what is electronic communication transaction records, I probably had like thousands and thousands of records on each client, if you consider that you host things and you’re using software that creates log files. . . . ISPs have a lot of records on every client typically. They may have records of every time you posted something, of every web site you visited.”

Over the years the case progressed, Merrill was careful not to disclose his identity. At one point he attended a packed hearing — filled with law school students and media — but he was careful not to speak with anyone.

Friends began to question whether he was John Doe when he was publicly identified with a second case involving a grand jury subpoena from the Secret Service for customer records related to the news site IndyMedia. In that case, no gag order was imposed. Merrill said he was forced to lie when asked about John Doe or simply refused to answer.

“It put me in a very difficult position,” he said.

In 2007, the ACLU granted “John Doe” a liberty award, along with four Connecticut librarians who also filed a legal challenge over NSLs. Because of the gag order against Merrill, the ACLU had to present his award to an empty chair.

In December 2008, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that some of the NSL gag provisions were unconstitutional, in part because they limited judicial review of the gag orders and forced courts to defer to the government’s assertions about the necessity of a gag order and also thwarted the ability of recipients to challenge a gag order. The case was sent back to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, forcing the government to justify the constitutionality of the gag order imposed on Merrill.

In June 2009, the government introduced secret evidence to the court to justify continuing the gag order, claiming that if information were revealed about the letter it would harm an ongoing investigation. Merrill and his attorneys were prevented from learning the specifics of the evidence in order to refute it. The government was then ordered by the court to produce an unclassified summary of its evidence.

The ACLU worked hard to negotiate a partial gag-lift with the government that allowed Merrill to finally identify himself, while still keeping the details of the letter secret. In return, Merrill and the ACLU agreed to drop their appeal of the case.

Although the case helped expose the secrecy around NSLs and resulted in some First Amendment progress for entities receiving such requests — Congress amended the law to allow recipients to challenge NSLs and gag orders, and the FBI must now also prove in court that disclosure of an NSL would harm a national security case — the fight over NSLs is not over. The Obama administration has been seeking to expand the FBI’s power to demand internet activity records of customers without court approval or suspicion of wrongdoing. If granted, the data sought without a court order could expand to include web browser and search history, and Facebook friend requests.

“Even though this case has resulted in significant improvements to NSL procedures, innocent Americans’ private records remain too vulnerable to secret and warrantless data collection by the FBI,” said Melissa Goodman, staff attorney with the ACLU National Security Project in a statement. “At a minimum, the FBI should have to show individual suspicion before it issues an NSL for an individual’s personal information and invades Americans’ right to privacy and free speech on the Internet.”

The FBI’s use of national security letters to get information on Americans without a court order increased from 16,804 in 2007 to 24,744 in 2008. The 2008 requests targeted 7,225 U.S. people.

In the 2007 inspector general’s report, investigators found that the FBI had failed to adequately justify some letters, had evaded limits on (and sometimes illegally issued) NSLs to obtain phone, e-mail and financial information on American citizens, and had under-reported the use of NSLs to Congress.

About 60 percent of a sample of the FBI’s NSLs did not conform to Justice Department rules, and another 22 percent possibly violated the statute because they made improper requests of businesses or involved unauthorized collections of information.

Subsequently, the number of NSLs issued in 2007 dramatically dropped from 49,000 to 16,000, but has rebounded in recent years.

Merrill’s experience with the case has prompted him to launch a non-profit, the Calyx Institute, aimed at educating the technology and telecommunications industry and developing best practices and tools for safeguarding the privacy of customers.

“I feel there’s a lot of work to be done,” he said. “The case has made me realize that just one or two people standing up can have a great effect. I either want to inspire others to follow the example . . . or develop technology that makes it more difficult for people to be snooped on.”

Photo: ACLU

Read More http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/08/nsl-gag-order-lifted/#ixzz0wQjm7dhO

• In your Administrator interface, go to Extensions | Plugin Manager
• In the Select Type dropdown box on the right, select ‘system’
• Make sure ‘System – SEF’ is the first plugin in the list of system plugins, so before the ‘System – sh404sef’ plugin
  
• Clear your cache and it all works correctly now!

This works even if you are not using the sh404sef plugin, ” It did for me”
Here is a link to the full article

(NaturalNews) The United Nations’ World Health Organization (WHO) is pushing hard to impose global consumer taxes to help fund its various programs, including a new proposal that would tax the internet in order to pay for vaccines and other pharmaceutical medicines for third-world countries. Yes, you read that right – WHO wants every person in the world to help pay for drugs that make Big Pharma even richer.

Consider it a reverse Robin Hood ploy: They’re stealing from the working class and giving to the ultra wealthy drug companies!

Of course this isn’t the first time the UN has petitioned governments around the world to illegally tax citizens in order to further its own agenda. This body of unelected officials tried to push “cap and trade” legislation for supposed climate change just last year (but failed to do so because many countries simply refused the idea).

In the current scheme, WHO appointed a so-called panel of “medical experts” to prepare a report highlighting various financing ideas that would fund all the projects WHO is trying to accomplish in the world. One of those ideas is to have governments tax internet usage in their countries and give the money to WHO for “medical research and development” in poorer, developing countries. (This is code-speak for unlawfully pouring billions of taxpayer dollars into the coffers of Big Pharma in the name of charity).

An executive summary of the report is available at:
(http://www.foxnews.com/projects/pdf…)

Other ideas for funding include taxing people when they make financial transactions like paying bills online or withdrawing cash, as well as taxing the international arms trade. WHO also threw in the idea of possibly having governments voluntarily contribute (which is actually the only somewhat legitimate idea in the report, considering the U.N. has no legal power over any sovereign nation to force it to pay global taxes).

As usual, the entire proposal is blanketed in expressed concern for the health of people from poorer nations who don’t have access to the same medical treatments as people from richer nations. Although this may sound nice and good in theory, the real agenda here is to transfer wealth from the people of developed nations to the U.N. and then to either wealthy drug companies or the corrupt governments of poorer nations. The everyday people of these poor nations will receive little to no actual benefit from the tax money (other than the vaccinations that will be forced on them, if you consider that a benefit).

WHO wants to control the world’s health

On page 8 of WHO’s Executive Summary for its proposals, there’s an interesting statement about WHO’s global health agenda. When speaking about its more than 90 proposals for obtaining funding, the organization reveals that it also wants to restructure the global health system and place itself in control.

“[The proposals] include proposed structures to centralize, manage and disburse funds to health research and development,” it states, adding that in order to do this, it would need funding and certain “mechanisms” in place first.

WHO basically wants all nations to give up their sovereignty, particularly in terms of medical research and development, and hand it over to them so they can distribute “health” as they see fit. Nobody else will have a say in the matter as WHO will be the sole health care authority in the world. This matches perfectly with the UN’s agenda of world domination through other means (blue helmet military forces, for example).

If WHO’s funding and control dreams were to come true, most of the tax money it received would probably end up in the pockets of WHO officials, corrupt third-world country governments and dictators, and Big Pharma executives. Whatever is left over will be used to pay for pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines, both of which actually harm the local environments in any country where they are used due to their chemical runoff impacts on aquatic ecosystems.

Global taxes are illegal in the U.S.

According to the U.S. Constitution, Article 1, Section 8, only the U.S. Congress has the power to collect taxes. In fact, there’s a whole list of what taxes can be collected for, and there’s no mention of funding a global entity that wants to control health care (nor is there any mention of nationalized health care at all, for that matter).

Then again, since when did any presidents or political leaders in the United States actually honor the Constitution they swore to protect? What we have in Washington today is not a band of dedication Constitution defenders but rather Constitution destroyers who seem determined to hand over our sovereignty to some global authority as quickly as they can pull it off.

What WHO is trying to do is not only illegal in the U.S., but detrimental to real health care worldwide. It will not bring true health to the poor, but rather drugs, vaccines and other patented chemicals that make a few people rich but everyone else poorer and more dependent on medical intervention for years to come.

Notice that the WHO plan doesn’t try to bring nutrition to poor nations? Feeding those people some vitamin D, vitamin C and plant-based nutrients would do more to end sickness and disease (including infectious disease) than any vaccine or pharmaceutical. It would also be significantly less expensive. But nothing in the WHO’s world domination agenda includes anything about nutrition. It seems that nutrition has no place in the WHO’s vision of the world — it’s all about chemicals and vaccines.

That’s the world they want to force upon us: A world where you and I are taxed to pay for the mass poisoning of populations around the world with toxic pharmaceuticals and dangerous vaccines. Remember, the WHO is the same organization that fronted a false pandemic because its health advisors are on the take from the pharmaceutical industry. The WHO is essentially being bribed by Big Pharma to push an agenda that benefits only Big Pharma, not the people. And the only reason they’re now trying to tax you and I to pay for all this is because the profit margin on drugs and vaccines is so ridiculously high that working people even poor nations can’t afford to pay for these items themselves. Instead of lowering the prices on their medicines, they’re trying to force a tax upon everybody else.

The WHO, much like the FDA, is operated as a criminal racket. And like any criminal racket, they want to force everybody to pay them as much money as possible. It’s like a mob-style shakedown: Pay up or else! Things might be different if they were using the money to fund vitamin D nutrition programs or genuine nutritional education programs in poor nations, but those ideas aren’t even on their radar. They are 100% fixated upon the Big Pharma agenda of drugging everyone on the planet while pocketing obscene cash profits at the same time.

Do your part to demand that the USA resist WHO domination over health care, and speak out against any global internet tax that would be used to inject viral fragments into the bodies of people who live in poor nations.

Here is a link to the full page http://www.naturalnews.com/029066_World_Health_Organization_vaccines.html