A law firm is asking what we’d like to see in draft legislation about identity theft.
The basis is that companies aren’t doing enough to help victims after their data is lost/stolen/compromised.
Here’s a few of my suggestions:
1. Stop storing information you don’t need. If you don’t automatically bill my credit card number, don’t store it.
2. Encrypt all that data you DO store. There’s no reason my SSN should ever be stored in plain text anywhere.
3. Stop storing my SSN on laptops. If you’re a US veteran, there’s probably 2-3000 laptops out there with all of your personal information on them. Laptops are easily lost or stolen and there’s no reason anybody needs to take my information home with them every night.
4. Make massive fines for data loss. I’m talking a 2nd occurrence should cause any company (including even a Google or Microsoft) to go bankrupt. There’s no reason for a first occurrence to even happen but without stiff penalties companies just don’t care.
5. Require companies send letters in the mail to anybody whose data may have been compromised and offer free credit monitoring for 1 year to all those possibly affected.
I myself had had my SSN and personal information stolen from an advertising company I once used (RMX Direct) and it can be a scary process. Sadly, there’s really nothing you can do once it’s happened. Cops don’t prosecute, nobody looks into it or helps you – you’re on your own.
KATV reports that an Arkansas man is using the local library after his sons found a book on lesbian sex among it’s shelves.
Earl Adams, if you’re reading you might want to include KATV in your lawsuit. Their “Google more on this topic” takes me to a Google search for lesbian sex and oh boy what you can find if you happen to click the “images” after clicking your link. Not to mention where you end up if you click a few of the search results.
In all seriousness though Earl, I really hope your suit gets thrown out and you get laughed at. It’s not the library’s job to shelter your children – it’s your job to supervise them. Libraries are places for information – some of which you may not agree with. Regardless of your beliefs or feelings about certain information though, it still belongs in a library; no matter what it is. If you don’t want your kids reading certain books go to the library with them.
It would seem that the article lists Blacksburg Virginia as one of the top places to live. The brief article on network world chides them for listing Blacksburg in the article so close to the tragedy that happened just a few days ago. It also mentions them listing a New Hampshire town where a professor was also murdered.
It’s things like this that make America weak. Tragedies happen all the time. I’m not trying to take anything away from the VA Tech tragedy – but that doesn’t mean we need to shelter ourselves from mentioning the city.
We did the same stuff on 9/11 by pulling spider man trailers that had the twin towers, editing movies that showed the world trade centers, taking the images off of tv, etc etc.. Sure, people may be emotional after a tragedy – but we can’t ignore a place and forget it exists.
Selectively avoiding bad memories is not a safe way to deal with emotional distress. It’s even worse to stop mentioning a place all together.
The people of Blacksburg Virginia still woke up today. They still made and ate their breakfast before going to work or school, and they still got on with life just like you and I. Sure, they’ll never forget what happened there the other day – but they won’t hide from their daily lives either.
There’s nothing wrong with moving on after a tragedy.
Has anybody else noticed the prevalence of job spam on some of the major job sites?
Check out this screen shot from doing a PHP Detroit search on HotJobs
Of the 35 jobs that it returned, 27 of them were that same mystery shopper job. You know, the one where you pay them first then they send you information about being a mystery shopper. I don’t think anybody has ever made money off of that job except the person offering it.
Come on Yahoo, clean this crap up.
I haven’t noticed nearly as much spam on Monster, and none at all on DICE (of course, compared to monster there are only about 1/10 of the jobs on DICE)
So far I’ve tried Monster, HotJobs, HiddenNetwork, DICE, computerjobs, and craigslist. Are there any other great sites out there that you guys use?
There’s a thread over on webmasterworld right now about how to complain to Google about a competitor using trademarks in their META tags.
While I can understand the frustration here, I see several issues.
Firstly, I don’t think Google is the first company I’d report any type of trademark violation to. The best thing to do if somebody is misusing your trademark is to contact that company and ask them to stop. (disclaimer: IANAL so don’t treat this as legal advice.)
Failing that, I’d contact my Thailand litigation lawyer to get them to stop. I’d be more concerned about misuse of my mark than Google’s ranking algorithm. The very nature of the question tells me that they’re more concerned with trying to outrank this person in Google than they are with the use of their trademark. (note: It’s very likely that these META tags have nothing to do with your competitor’s rank in Google)
Secondly, I’m not sure if using a trademark in META tags always counts as a trademark violation. If it only appears in META tags and not in the site title or anywhere else on the site then it’s not showing up to users – so there’s no confusion possible. There’s no way users are going to look at META tags and assume that this website is affiliated with your brand. (in all likelihood, most users will never even see these META tags)
Furthermore, if the site is comparing their brand to yours, reviewing yours, offering information about your trademark, etc then they’re not doing anything wrong. If I recall correctly, a trademark (just like a copyright) doesn’t give you strict control over the term. It just gives you exclusive rights to use it in marketing your product.
All in all, I wouldn’t worry about it. META tags are pretty useless. Don’t believe me? Look at 2 of the most competitive companies in the world: Coke and Pepsi – neither one has even their own trademarks in their META tags.
Just a brief post today, but family is requesting more pictures of Who Dey, my bengal cat – so here are some more.
I’m kinda sick so I don’t feel like typing too many captions or what not, I think I’ll just upload the pictures. Besides that, Who Dey won’t freaking shut up right now – she’s driving me crazy. My cat, sensing that I was upset, just sat beside me and kept me company.
This is the new toy my parents bought her. It looks lovely in my dining room :'(
Just so you know, I didn’t put those toys in the bed, she put them in the bed before falling asleep there.
That’s baby, the neighbor’s cat. She usually comes to visit and her and Who Dey paw and growl at each other through the glass door.
That’s her trying to retrieve the peice of cellophane she was playing with after I threw it away.
Ok, I hope that should hold you guys for a while. I’m not too good at taking pictures.
My friend Alex has a great blog about finance that for some reason I just discovered today. Honestly, if you’re into that type of thing check it out.
Reading it today got me started thinking about my own savings account. (of course, being unemployed is also a good reason to start thinking about your savings account)
I myself happen to have 2 savings accounts, and a checking account. I usually keep enough in checking to pay 2 months bills, and the rest in savings. My other savings account handles all of the money my websites make. I decided to keep them separate so that I can measure actual earnings after I deduct for hosting, advertising, etc.
The question I asked today but couldn’t find a clear answer on is “what’s the interest on my savings account?” I noticed it’s not even listed anywhere on my bank’s web page. When I did track it down, I was shocked to see that it’s only at about 2%.
Why was I shocked? Well, that’s because the standard rate of inflation is just over 3%. That means I’m losing money simply by leaving it in the savings account. That’s not good.
Luckily, my website earnings are making 4.5% in their ING direct account. That means I’m actually earning money on that.
If you want more information about high interest savings accounts check out Alex’s blog post.
Many of my colleagues in the SEO field give me dumb looks when I start talking about parasite hosting. (OK I can’t see their faces through the IM window, but if I could I’m sure they’d be giving me dumb looks.)
It seems that a lot of people haven’t heard of parasite hosting, and that’s a shame because it’s currently overtaking the Google SERPs like a swarm of locusts.
Parasite hosting is the process of creating spammy keyword filled pages on an older trusted domain. Once they get this page to rank, they can direct traffic elsewhere. Many of these pages just contain 1 link for the user to click over to the desired page.
If you don’t believe me, just do a Google search for buy cialis and look at all the .edu domains that show up. Clicking the first result you’ll see some text on a page, and then a giant image link to a place where you can actually buy cialis. (/me cringes at the thought of all the spam I’m going to get after pinging weblogs.com with a post that contains “buy cialis”)
The same is true for some other spammy searches. As seomoz pointed out, even Forbes is getting in on the benefits of parasite hosting.
Basically, what this tells us is that it’s important to have a trusted domain. Let’s say for example you have a website that sells widgets and you want to branch off into selling sprockets. Should you make a separate website, or keep them together?
According to the success of the parasite hosted sites, you’d be best to just add some sprockets pages into your widgets site. It kind of makes me wonder what I could get away with on a 7 year old PR5 website (not that I would!)
As you can see from the dotCULT sidebar, I’ve been using MyBlogLog for a few months now. If you haven’t tried it out, you probably should. It’s neat to be able to put a face with your readers.
Some of the things I love about it are the ability to accurately track both adsense and YPN clicks. I like that feature so much that I’ve installed it on a couple of other sites just for the stats.
With that said, there’s a few places I’d like to see some improvements on the stats.
For starters, it’s impossible to share your stats with others. Why is that? I’m in talks to sell one of my sites, and there’s no way for me to share stats. An export feature here would be great. Failing that, sizing it so that I can fit the whole report on a screenshot would be ever better.
I like the dashboard for each day. It’s great to see the top 10 referers, pages, and things people clicked. But if you try to run this for a date range it limits you to one category at a time. Why? I’d love to be able to see that same “yesterday” report but for a whole week or month instead. After all, I’m not as concerned with daily numbers as I am with monthly numbers.
I’d also like to see some further integration with other Yahoo properties. (If you hadn’t heard, Yahoo recently bought MyBlogLog.) It’s doing a great job of tracking my YPN clicks, but how much cooler would it be if I could have it show my revenue too? What about ad spending on overture? Can you tie those together and show me a net profit/loss for the site?
I’m not sure exactly what the pro service offers, but these would be some killer features!
What changes would you like to see with MyBlogLog? What do you think of the service? What features would you add?
