Win $10,000! Why don't you tell your friends about my site? Each referral gets you another entry in a contest for $10,000. Just click this link and fill in your friends' email IDs. They will get an email stating that you recommended my site. When they click the link in the email, you will get even more entries into the contest.

Free Epson printer compatible cartridges! If you have any of the following models: 440, 480, 640, 660, 670, 750 or 1200, take advantage of this deal while it lasts. Order one color and one black ink cartridge for $15, get an extra black cartridge for free! Folks have complained that they use up the black ink faster than the color. Here's your chance to make your black ink last longer absolutely free. Genuine Epson cartridges cost over $20 each. These cartridges are indistinguishable from the original. They look the same and work the same. Here is your chance to save more than 75% For more information

Digital camera bargains This month's digital camera values: the Casio QV-3000EX, a 3+ megapixel zoom with high quality Canon lens for $400, shipping included. Megapixel.net rated it as one of the best cameras in its class. It has just been discontinued, so the price has crashed as dealers look to unload it before its replacement comes on the market. Hurry before they're gone. The Toshiba PDR-M65 (3+ megapixel zoom for $450, Toshiba PDR-M61 (2.3 megapixel zoom for $300) and Agfa CL20 (1.3 megapixel camera and webcam at $125). I have a number of liquidators and surplus merchants that I contact for closeouts. It is difficult to update my web site because these items come and go.

I have also tracked down the manufacturer of the hard to find battery for the Fuji MX series, Toshiba PDR series and Kodak DC4800 and have some in stock at $33 with free shipping if you choose our label (we pay a few dollars more for the name brand labels, though they are all the same battery.)

Charge your battery in your car. We now have chargers that let you charge your digital camera, cellphone, laptop or camcorder battery in your car. Charge any Nicad, Nimh or Li-ion battery including those designed specifically for the Kodak DC4800, Toshiba PDR-M4/M5/M70 and Fuji MX series cameras. Charger for Kodak, Toshiba, Fuji is $42 including car adaptor cable and shipping. Universal charger for all batteries is $52 including adaptor and shipping. Kodak charger for Kodak, Toshiba, Fuji battery (does not include car adaptor) is $42 plus shipping. Add $28 for battery (NP-80, BT-2, Klic3000 compatible model. If ordered with Kodak charger, Kodak battery will be provided.)

NHI: Beware Bait-and-Switchhouse.com

NHI is a term in police slang. It stands for No Human Involved. Police use it to classify the types of crimes that won't get much of an investigative effort. Two drug dealers shoot each other in a dispute over turf. As long as no innocent bystanders are hit, it gets classified as NHI. I believe it's time that websites carried this designation so that customers know what to expect.

I received an email from an interesting site called Switchhouse.com. On this site folks can buy, sell or trade items such as CDs and videos. The email promised me a $10 credit toward my first order. I browsed around and found a used videotape for $10 plus $2.25 shipping. Now $12.25 was no bargain for a used videotape, but with $10 credit, I would only be paying $2.25 so I ordered it. My credit card was charged $2.25, as I expected. A few days later, I received an email from Switchouse saying, "Sorry, but the tape you ordered is out of stock. Your account has been credited with $12.25." I went back to site and looked for another selection. I finally found another used tape for $12 plus $2.25 shipping. $14.25 for a used tape is certainly no bargain. But I did have the credit to use. I placed the order and was disappointed to see that Switchhouse charged my credit card for $12 and only applied $2.25 of my credit. The $10 credit they had promised me had somehow disappeared. I emailed their customer service and received the response, "Your email has been received. We will respond within 24 hours." Two days later after no response, I emailed again. A few days later, I emailed a third time. Then I emailed to tell them that they were leaving me with no option but to charge it back. By the time I got the credit card statement, there had still been no response. I wrote the my credit card company explaining the situation. Even though I only asked for a $10 charge back, they charged back the entire $14.25, explaining to me that this was the procedure pending an explanation from the vendor. When Switchhouse gives me the $10 credit that I am due, they will reverse the $14.25 charge back. It has been several weeks and Switchhouse has not bothered to respond. How much longer can Dot Coms operate on the belief that computers can handle everything and sites can run NHI?

First Round in the Fight Against Spam

Article. Synopsis:

Spy Software e-mail spammer hit with $5000 fine - Boston Herald by Tom Kirchofer

A 20-year-old Woburn man accused of flooding the Internet with "spam" e-mails offering free money from the government and gee-whiz software has been ordered to clean up his act, in the first action by the state against a spammer. Robert Todino must also pay a $5,000 fine and give refunds to any consumer who requests one, under an agreement reached with Attorney General Thomas F. Reilly's office.

Todino was also accused of pitching software he said "lets you find out anything about anyone," such as criminal records, FBI files and unlisted phones. In fact, the AG's office says the $24.95 "software" turned out to be nothing more than a list of Web sites that may or not may not contain such information.

Since 1999, the AG's office says Todino's R.T. Marketing hawked "free government grants" which gave the impression that anyone over 18 with a net worth of under $250,000 and with a valid Social Security number could be eligible for a government grant. However, they say R.T. Marketing demanded $39.95 to "process your order" for the grant.

"But all he was producing was a list of various grant programs around the United States," said Alice Moore, head of the AG's public protection bureau.

Todino did not admit any liability in his agreement with the AG's office, in which he also agreed not to make such misleading claims in future marketing efforts. Todino couldn't be located for comment, and his lawyer, James Long, of Woburn, didn't return calls. Moore said she didn't know how much Todino raked in with his e-mail marketing campaigns. She said her office is looking for other spammers who may be operating in the Bay State.

HP To Release Rewritable DVD

ZDnet Article

Just in case this article gets taken offline, here is a synopsis.

Hewlett-Packard revealled its first DVD drive for PCs that lets people repeatedly record on discs. The DVD-writer dvd100i, which will cost $599 when it hits store shelves in September, will be the first commercially available drive based on the DVD+RW standard. With it, consumers will be able to record video onto a disc, play it on a typical home DVD player, and then erase and record again on the same disc. HP plans to incorporate the drives into its PCs later this year.

Two years ago, recordable/rewritable CD drives propelled PC sales. Rewritable DVD drives could do the same this year. DVDs can also hold 4.7GB of data, seven times as much as recordable CDs. The new drive will enter the mess that is the DVD rewritable market. Three competing standards--DVD+RW, DVD-RW and DVD-RAM--are vying for market supremacy, confusing compatibility issues and keeping prices high. HP, along with Sony and Philips Electronics, developed the CD rewritable format. HP estimates that 2.1 million DVD rewritable drives will ship by the end of 2002. 14.3 million by 2005. In addition to HP's backing, the DVD+RW format has the support of Dell Computer, Sony, Philips Electronics, Mitsubishi Chemical, Ricoh, Thomson Multimedia and Yamaha. The media for the new drive, which HP also plans to sell, will cost $15.99 per disc. The HP drive will rewrite onto DVD discs at a speed of 2.4x the equivalent of a CD-ROM drive reading at 20x, and can read DVDs at 8x. The drive will rewrite to CD-R discs at a speed of 12x and to CD-RW discs at a speed of 10x. The drive can read CDs at a speed of 32x. The drive and discs will be available initially at Best Buy, Circuit City and CompUSA. Dell also plans to incorporate DVD+RW drives into its PCs. HP is the largest PC manufacturer as far as retail sales, while Dell is the largest overall in the world. DVD-RW adherents include Compaq Computer and Apple Computer.

Credit Cards Posted by Hackers

ZDnet Story

It always amuses me when someone tells me they won't open an account with C2it because they refuse to give their CC information to a web site, but they have no problem giving it over the phone. As I have explained before, when you give the information over the phone, it does not fly from the sales person's brain directly to the card processor. The sales person usually enters into into a computer, which then transmits it to their merchant account processor which then transmits it to the card issuer. Why is this safer than giving it directly to Citibank? Hackers do not steal credit card information by tapping phone lines or stealing email. Why spend all day stealing mounds of data and rummaging through it in the hope of getting a credit card number? They might as well go to the garbage dump and search for discarded credit card slips. A much more plentiful source of CC info is available by hacking into unprotected sites and unfortunately, there are plenty around. Most of these sites are the very places called by the security-conscious folks who don't trust Citibank.

Here is an excerpt of the story:

A major security flaw has been discovered on a site called RegWeb.com that reveals hundreds of customer credit-card numbers. Representatives for RegWeb, a conference registration service and software provider, first found out about the hole on Friday when someone posted a link to the Web site of credit-card numbers to a hacker chat room. It's estimated around 300 to 400 credit-card files were left in the open. Mark Johnson, a developer at RegWeb, said he thought the problem had been fixed but apparently it wasn't. The client was 877Chicago.com, which provides online bookings for people traveling to Chicago. Darci Watson of Calo Valley, Ill., was one of the first on the list. She was obviously shocked to hear her credit-card information was left out in the open.

"It's a little unnerving because I've only done a handful (of online transactions)," she said. "I'm certainly going to be careful about buying anything online again." (That's right, Darci. Next time, don't se a web site. Phone in your information and someone else will type it into a web site. That's so much more secure.)

Fred Rica, a partner and analyst with PricewaterhouseCoopers, chalks this up to just another example of poor security practices when it comes to the storing of customer data.

"This is exactly what the problem with e-commerce and credit cards over the Internet is," Rica says. "Credit-card numbers are stored online and if those sites aren't configured correctly then you leave yourself open to vulnerability. This is a classic example."

Some customers today feel comfortable making an online transaction because they're told the process is secure. And it is. The actual credit-card transaction goes through the secure sockets layer (SSL) protocol to encrypt the traffic so no hacker can sniff it. But Rica says that's not where hackers are stealing credit-card information. They're getting it from the stored database that is poorly protected.

"The issue is they're stored on an Internet accessible machine," Rica says. "Then to my mind the bigger problem is whoever put this Web site together didn't take the appropriate measures to make sure this didn't happen."

Those measures include proper firewall configuration and intrusion detection systems. IDS is designed to notify someone when there's somebody breaking into the network. Also, even if someone gained access to the data, it should have been encrypted so it was unreadable, Rica says.

This hack comes in light of the recent incident involving a third-party dealer of wireless service for AT&T Wireless and Verizon Wireless, when customers' driver's license and social security numbers were posted to a hacker chat room.

"There is no question that with the popularity of the Internet and e-commerce, we're seeing much greater chances that data is getting compromised," says Albert Pang, e-commerce analyst with International Data Corp., "and it's just basically the sites out there have not taken he precautions to keep the data secure."

So once again, which is more secure: giving your CC info to every vendor you buy from or posting it once to a secure site like Citibank?

Smile, You're On Hidden Camera

Big Borders bookshop is watching you

In case the article gets taken down, here is a synopsis:

High-tech surveillance ... the kind used to catch terrorists will be spying on shoppers by Jenifer Johnston

Borders, the high street bookseller, has been using high-tech surveillance equipment to spy on their customers. SmartFace -- known as FaceIt in the USA -- keeps a database of 'unique digital face-maps' that will check customers' pictures against those of known shoplifters. The advanced CCTV technology can locate individual faces within crowds, track a targeted face and then match it against images of suspected criminals kept on its database. The American-based retailer has 11 outlets in the UK, including stores in Glasgow and Edinburgh. Only UK stores are participating in the SmartFace pilot.

The SmartFace technology is manufactured by Visionics, a major player in American surveillance technology. It is used by the US Immigration and Naturalisation Service to check for illegal immigrants trying to cross the Mexican border, by the Israeli Army on the Gaza Strip, and at Iceland's Keflavik airport to seek out known terrorists. The US Army Research Laboratory ranked the technology top of their list of face recognition systems.

SmartFace has already come up against strong opposition in the US. On Thursday a city councillor in Jacksonville, Florida began a legal bid to stop local law-enforcement agencies using the technology, claiming it breaches privacy laws.

The system is already used by South Wales Police to spot football hooligans who are banned from attending matches. In the London Borough of Newham, which has 300 cameras linked to a database, the council claims that SmartFace has helped to achieve a 34% drop in crime since its installation in 1998. Tony Blair gave the scheme his stamp of approval when he visited the borough last year.

Rosemarie McIlwhan, director of the Scottish Human Rights Centre, was appalled by the move by Borders, saying: 'I can see why they don't want shoplifters in their store, but I would question whether this is proportionate to what they are trying to do.

'We are talking about having a bank of pictures of everyone going into the shop -- I would consider that a serious breach of privacy. There is no control over what they do with those pictures, or how they are kept -- are they safe? Nor is there much control over whether Borders could sell the information on, or whether people will actually know this is happening.'

Images that are not matched on the database are discarded after they have been run through a complex matching process, using 80 facial features. Visionics claims its match rate can be more than 99%. Theft from book retailers is currently booming. Sydney Davies, trade and industry manager of the Booksellers Association, said: 'Customer theft is certainly the biggest problem that book retailers have in terms of crime. Most of the efforts used to combat theft concentrate on tagging books, and having security guards and CCTV in store, so the SmartFace system is certainly a new thing.'

Last year British retailers spent £626 million on crime prevention, and theft from stores reached a staggering £746m, equating to a cost of £85 for each household in the country. David Southwell of the British Retail Consortium said that new technology was one of many ways these costs could be reduced. 'When new technology becomes available it can play a very significant role in reducing shop theft,' he said, 'but there is no single magic bullet in terms of shoplifting that is going to eradicate this very serious problem.

Have No PC, Will Travel

One of the most common complaints on auction boards are buyers or sellers who don't respond for days after an auction ends. Then when they finally do, they use the excuse that they were on vacation. In terms of acceptability, this excuse has gone the way of "the dog ate my homework." Wake up, people! This is the Internet Age. The Internet, remember that? That marvellous collection of computers (connected by Al Gore?) which ties together practically the whole planet. That's right, the planet. Not just your local neighborhood. Do you tell your mother you couldn't call because you were on vacation? I hope not, because she knows that you can always find a phone if you look hard enough. So if you do business on the web and you know when the auction for the item you're buying or selling will close, it is not that difficult to find a way to communicate with the other party to the transaction.

If you don't have a laptop, you should be able to find someone with a PC and Internet connection. Most local libraries offer it free. There are Internet cafes and businesses like Kinko's that will let you rent a PC. If you are staying at a hotel or resort, perhaps the owner or manager will let you use one of the resort's PCs. All you need is an Internet connection.

But wait, you are saying, so I can get to the Net. But that doesn't give me access to the specific email program I use at home with my specific ISP.

Most email programs today use POP3 (Post Office Protocol) to handle email. There are many web sites that let you get external email (email from a different ISP than the site itself) if POP is used. This comes in very handy. For example, I have my own office but am often at a client site. I could install an email program at my client site and get my email from there. But then when I return to my own office, all the email I answered at the client site will not be available because it will be on the client's machine. So what I do is login to my yahoo email account. One of the options is to add an external email ID to my Yahoo ID. Then I choose Check Other Mail and Yahoo will pull the other account into my Yahoo email folders. Since these folders are not stored on the local computer but on Yahoo's server, when I return to my office and login to Yahoo again, I see all the mail I sent or received while at the client.

Aside from Yahoo, there are many sites that let you get external mail. Email.com, Iname.com, mailstart.com and thatweb.com just to name a few. So the next time you go on vacation without taking care of your ebusiness obligations, you had better come up with an excuse like, "Lightning took out all the phone lines for a week." Anything less is unacceptable.

Search Engine Smarts by Irving Weiss

Part V - Link Popularity

Part of an essay from Krishna Bharat, a Google employee describing an ideal search engine algorithm

"ii) Target Ranking: We believe a page is an authority on the query topic if and only if some of the best experts on the query topic point to it. Of course in practice some expert pages may be experts on a broader or related topic. If so, only a subset of the hyperlinks on the expert page may be relevant. In such cases the links being considered have to be carefully chosen to ensure that their qualifying text matches the query. Given the top ranked matching expert-pages and associated match information, we select a subset of the hyperlinks within the expert-pages. Specifically, we select links that we know to have all the query terms associated with them. This implies that the link matches the query. Out of all the links thus collected, we keep only those targets that are linked to by at least two non-affiliated expert pages on the topic. The targets are ranked by a ranking score which is computed by combining the scores of the experts pointing to the target. "

The most popular search engines are increasing the weight in their algorithms for link popularity. Link popularity does not only mean that your site is so popular that countless of other sites link to you. In fact, it can be detrimental if known spam sites link to your sites. Be cautious about submitting your sites to thousands of search engines with some automated service or tool. A more realistic definition of link popularity is the amount of highly respected and visited sites that link to you. Good examples are Yahoo, Looksmart, About, and DMOZ. These sites all have human editors that hand pick which links to present and they are all heavy hitters in Internet traffic.

Here is a four-step process to increase your link popularity.

1. Try to have most sites link to a single page on your site and that page should be in the top two levels of your site. Many search engines will not index a site beyond the second level. Also, if possible the link to your site should have the keywords you are targeting.

2. Submit your sites to the search engine directories. Submit your site wisely to Yahoo, Looksmart, and DMOZ. This will set you back $498 and forever costing more. You pay to apply and are not guaranteed to get a listing. There are many rules involved so read them well before you apply or hire a professional.

3. Submit and request that your site be listed in sites which are targeted high traffic sites and are complementary to your business. Examples are About.com and Business.com. There are many search engines, which specialize a particular region, interest, or business. Please see the following search engine listing from Yahoo Yahoo search engine listing

4. Set up a resource page on your site. This will allow you to promise reciprocal links to complementary sites. In fact, seek out complementary sites and present a formal request from the Webmaster to link to your site.

What is your link popularity?

Try typing link:www.mydomain.com on most of the search engines. You can test meta search engines like ww.queryserver.com and www.linkpopularity.com. Also, if you download the Google Toolbar from the Google homepage, it will show you who is linked to you. It's under "Page Info", and then do a search for "Backwards Links". The Google toolbar is very helpful for this, and also shows you the page rank of whatever page you happen to be looking at.

Need help with the Search Engines? Optimization or advice. Feel free to contact me.
Irving Weiss searchenginesmarts@hotmail.com 718-337-6907

Just For Laughs

George Bush can really sniff out those deals. Nose for Deals.

From the Langa Letter: Microsoft is issuing its own credit card. It will be:
o The first credit card that automatically spreads viruses
o The first credit card that steals credit from those who deserve it ([as MS did for the GUI, even DOS itself)
o The first credit card that charges users for a beta trial
o The first credit card that inspects and reports to Redmond on everything else that's in your wallet
o The first credit card that requires you to get permission to use it if you change wallets
o The first credit card that spawns a myriad of "Credit Cards for Dummies" books

Useful sites and freeware

Winpulse shows you lots of useful information about your system's current configuration, including how much memory, swap space, cpu power and disk space is being used. Download Winpulse.

Ever send someone email and not get an answer for days or weeks? You sit there wondering if the emails are getting "lost in the ozone" or if the person is deliberately ignoring you. Here's a nifty way to know. Go to itraceyou.com and register for a free account. Now you can send mail one of two ways. You can send it directly from the itraceyou site or you can send it from your regular email but change the TO field just slightly. Itraceyou will send you a confirmation email when your email has been delivered to the recipient's mailbox and then a second email when it has been read. The recipient isn't notified of the trace. Next time you get that "Sorry for not responding but I've been away for a few weeks" reply, you'll have some idea if it's true. A free account at Itraceyou is limited to 15 secretly traced messages a day. After that, Itraceyou places a banner on the email saying something to the effect of "This email was traced using Itraceyou.com."
Another service that does a similar job is Confirm.to. No need to register for an account. Just add .confirm.to to the end of the email ID it is being sent to, as in: izzy@ygoodman.com.confirm.to. This will send the email and send you a confirmation when it has been read. Confirm.to limits you to 30 messages a month.

While most of us use spell-checking with our word processors, how many of us spell-check email before it goes out or posts we make on web sites? Here is a free program that can check the spelling of anything in windows All Purpose Spell Checker.

Do your drive letters come up differently depending on which computer you use or which removable drives you plug in? I use a removable drive and while I love it, there is one annoying feature and that is that if I plug it in, it becomes my D: drive and my D: becomes E:. This interferes with all the other programs I have set up. Outlook prompts me for a new PST file and applications can no longer find the files I last worked on. I just recently learned of a free program that will let you assign just about any device to any letter. letter assigner.

Here's one you can do yourself. Create a file in notepad with the following two lines:

[InternetShortcut]
URL=javascript:alert(document.lastModified)

Save the file as: last_modified.url in the favorites directory of your machine (usually c:\windows\favorites but it might be c:\winnt40\profiles\favorites). Now whenever you are on a web site, you can go to your favorits and click this URL to see the date that site was last changed.

Here's a useful one for folks who are very exacting or find their PC clock inacrruate. It's a utility that can sync your PC's clock with the atomic time. You can run it manually or set it to run automatically in your start up. Atomic Time.

Co_citer - this free utility lets you grab info from a web page into a mini database. It also stores relevant information like the URL, date grabbed, etc.

CDR identifier - this free utility will read a CD and tell you the manufacturer and some other information.

the Langa Letter tips and tricks on using your PC, emailed to you absolutely free. I have included some of his tips in my previous letters.

I hope this letter contained useful information. Please email ccs@ygoodman.com with any comments.