Web Publishing

How would you feel if you woke up tomorrow and $75,000 or more was missing from your business bank account?

“When consumers lose money due to cyber fraud, retail banks are required by law to refund the money — provided the victim doesn’t wait too long in reporting the unauthorized charges. Commercial banks, however, are under no such obligation, although they usually will work with the victim customer to try to reverse as many of the fraudulent transfers as possible.” — Via Krebs On Security.

So, what can you do about it?

#1 Exclusively do your internet banking on a locked down machine, preferably running off of a recent Linux boot disk. Download Ubuntu, burn it to a CD, and boot from that.

#2 Get a Cybersecurity insurance policy.

#3 Stay the fuck away from small community banks. From what I’ve seen the big boys generally have more robust security policies (which still may not help if you or your secretary’s computer is full of trojans.)

I checked out the iPad at the Apple store for 15 minutes and was not impressed. Was it really more than a giant iPhone?

Then my birthday came along and my business partner bought me one. I’ve been using it or a good month now and have found it indispensable. The iPad is a multiple use device that kills a bunch of birds with one stone.

Who cares about a tablet PC when the iPad can control all of your desktops?

Over the past several years I have gone through a handful of mobile computing devices. There was the Fujitsu U810 which looked so unique I had to get one (screen and keyboard too small to use more than 15 minutes.) Later on I got the Macbook Air with an SSD which was thoroughly usable but went in the closet when I downsized from a 15 pound Alienware to a more modest Asus laptop.

What I think most people are missing about the iPad is its ability to remotely connect to just about any internet connected PC or Mac. Leave your laptop or desktop running 24/7 and remote to it in an instant to pull up a file or check something else out.

You can use LogMeIn Ignition ($30 one time app fee) or any of the numerous apps that use your desktop OS’s native remote connection feature. Try iTap RDP remotely connected to a Windows machine running at 1024×768 resolution (the iPad’s native res) and it will look like you have a PC in your hands.

My 3G iPad’s remoting capabilities have boosted my mobility even more than the almost instant-on Macbook Air SSD. Now I really have an always on internet device (other than on flights I never turn it off.)

The iPad’s ebook capabilities seem adequate to me. I’m about 500 pages in to a 1000 page book. Because Amazon has a Kindle app for the iPad I didn’t have to repurchase any books.

My expectation is that by gen 3 the iPad is going to be a must have device. Competition should start to show up from Google Chrome/Android making things real interesting.
Don’t bother waiting for a Windows tablet unless you are waiting to be disappointed.

So is the iPad most than a giant iPhone? Not really. What it does have is a bigger screen that won’t make you go blind. If you don’t have a iPhone or iPod, especially if you’ve never had one, the iPad is a must. Just make sure you can budget a few hundred more $ for the apps in order to fully push its potential.

As for web business owners, never before have you been so close to being able to lay out on a beach and do business (Apple just needs to make a bright sun friendly screen.)

As a percentage of all advertising revenue in the United States, newspapers have been steadily shrinking for the past 50 years. It was only recently that things tipped to the point where newspapers were losing money instead of turning a profit.

An old hierarchy wants the newspaper industry to survive. Whether from personal business interests, nostalgia, or an inability to use the internet, there is a subset of individuals who want things to stay the same. In fact, the FTC is holding preliminary discussions on how to put the industry in to cryostasis.

The web has been the best thing to happen to investigative journalism. While critics regularly claim that bloggers just regurgitate and repost articles from traditional news organizations it is bloggers and web publishers who regularly have their stories jacked without any citation or credit. No longer are stories “sat on” by editors for weeks or months, stories are released instantly for people to make up their own minds about.

Here are some of the “considerations” the FTC is currently looking at:
- Restricting news aggregators. Good bye, Google News.
- Preventing others from republishing facts from a news story until after an extended amount of time. Good bye, live search results from Twitter.
- Limiting copyright fair use. Good bye Google Image Search (FTC specifically notes the Perfect 10 case.)
- Surcharges added on to all monthly ISP bills.
- Exempting news organizations from anti trust laws. Hey, if we all block Google in robots.txt then no one will go there when they want news, right?
- Government subsidies.
- Tax breaks.

In the FTC’s defense, they give pretty strong counterpoints to everything but additional government subsidies & tax breaks. Whats scary is that someone at a government regulatory agency which is supposed to protect consumers would take any of these ideas more seriously than cracking down on abductions by aliens in flying saucers.

Can someone tell me whats wrong with this:

URL: http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/05/07/wikipedia-purges-porn/

Final paragraph of Article: “Still, as of Friday afternoon, dozens of categories of explicit sexual images remained on Wikimedia with no indication that they had been marked for deletion.”

If you are a blogger, please re-post this story from SecondShares.

“The second thing the Dodd Bill proposes is to eliminate the existing federal pre-emption over state regulation of “accredited offerings.” This means that venture and angel financings would be regulated state by state, creating a ton of rules and regulations that each financing would need to be subject to. Each financing would require startups to register with the SEC, which could take up to 120 days to review the filing. This may in itself kill most angel investments, since angels like to react quickly to the market, and most technology investments are clearly time sensitive.”

http://www.secondshares.com/2010/04/27/how-the-dodd-bill-may-impact-the-secondary-market/

Who the hell writes these bills? Wasn’t the whole point of finance reform to stop banks from being reckless?

I might be wrong, may be this SF Post article is inadequately describing what actually happened — “The men created computer programs that bombarded online ticket vendors including Ticketmaster.com and purchased tickets automatically by impersonating individual visitors, investigators said.”

The result? “Stevenson, along with Kenneth Lowson, 40, Kristofer Kirsch, 37, and Faisal Nahdi, 36, all of Los Angeles, were charged with wire fraud, conspiracy to commit wire fraud and unauthorized computer access.”

Problems with your forum, blog, or e-commerce website being spammed by impersonated users for commercial means? The FBI is on your side.

Many years ago I decided it would be a good idea to learn a foreign language. So I tried.

Then someone told me “If you were a CEO you could just hire a translator.”

Throughout my life I have read and heard plenty of good advice. However, it is extraordinarily rare that this advice is contained in a single sentence and that it is a specific sentence I never forget.

If you insist on doing everything yourself, make damn sure you can count everything you want to do on a single hand. If not, limit your competitions to those with a similar handicap.

The biggest mistake you can make when applying for a job is to not be bothered to read any special instructions to employer provides.

I had a few interesting responses over the past week to several job positions and freelance tasks and posted on different job boards.

For one job opening about 50% of responders followed the directions. Many of the candidates were very well qualified. With a quick glance at their application I could tell whether or not they really read my post. If they didn’t, they had no chance of winning the project.

For a freelance job opening, the person who “won” the project failed to follow instructions for the test project. Oops.

Finally, I had an opening where not a single responder followed the directions. Kind of sucks because it was a very well paying job for something that wasn’t exactly rocket science. And I spent a decent amount of money on the posting’s placement.

In 2009 I learned a lot about hiring people. Biggest lesson: most people are idiots.

I read an interesting but perhaps anecdotal column in the New York Times the other day — “The financial system nearly collapsed,” he said, “because smart guys had started working on Wall Street.”

So, it used to be that the people who graduated at the top of their class in Ivy League schools got respectable jobs — judges, college professors, etc. — while the ones at the bottom went to work for Wall Street. Then in the 80s the investment banks started paying tons of money and recruited those that graduated at the top of their class.

This meant suddenly all of the new guys were a lot smarter than their bosses. The bosses couldn’t understand all of the fancy financial stuff and thus we have the financial crises.

I don’t really believe this story.

However, I do believe the part about where people ended up working. My question is, if the brightest guys all work for Wall Street, does that mean dumb people are filling the slots everywhere else?

Secondly, is this actually a bad thing? (After all, if you did make it in to an Ivy League school you probably aren’t brain dead, and if you graduated at the bottom of your class you probably didn’t do much cheating.)

Michael Arrington posted an article defending Cash4Gold’s business. A previous TechCrunch post wrote about Cash4Gold’s $50 million yearly profit margin. A lot of people think they are a scam because c4g does not pay out on the spot price of gold.

Something Micheal’s defending post does not mention: no one is going to pay you for the spot price of gold. I suggest you try purchasing physical gold and then selling it. Here is what is going to happen, you are going to pay a 10%(ish) premium, and then sell it at a 10%(ish) discount. Now how much money did you make?

Cash4Gold or any other old jewelry for money service can pay you pretty much any thing they want as long as they don’t lie to you in the process. It might even be more profitable in the short term for them to start paying out even less.