February 13, 2009 at 10:28 pm · Filed under Miscellaneous
Shot-Online an Internet MMORPG Golf game run by GameCampus.com which has become hugely popular over the years ran into a problem this evening.
At approximately 6:15 server time (GMT -8) a large number of users were dropped while in game. Upon re-log in attempts many were hit with a message that claimed they were unable to log in due to ” Hacking Program Detected” while other were met with, “You failed to log in due to unknown reasons. If you continuously have same problem, please contact the GM”.
At the present time, 7:20 PM Shot-Online server time the game is still down due to unknown reasons.
Some long time members speculate the recent addition of a new server has something to do with the down time while others believe that one or more of the servers were hacked or that the Auction system used in game was hacked.
At this point no reason for the down time and log in error messages can be confirmed.
Players of the game have been flooding the Shot-online forum truing to find and answer and hoping they are able to recover items lost while in game during the crash.
There has been no word from Shot-Online with regard to the length of time the server will be down or why it is down.
To visit the Shot-online forum click here
October 9, 2008 at 5:36 pm · Filed under Computers, Technology, VOIP, Electronics, Gadgets, Geek Tech, Miscellaneous
Are you old enough to remember when video phones were the “wave of the future”. For decades video phones popped up everywhere from Sci-Fi movies to cartoons. Some of you may remember George Jetson talking to Jane via his ultra futuristic video phone. Remarkably, the first video phone was actually invented in 1955 and was known as the “Photo Phone” however it was extremely slow as you can imagine and very expensive thus was never rolled out. And even before the “Photo Phone” AT&T back in 1927 demonstrated a one way picture phone.
In 1970 AT&T rolled out the “Picture Phone” which was the first video phone offered to consumers however it was again very expensive and with very few customers it fizzled out around 1974. They took another stab in the early 90’s but as was the case with their previous two attempts the cost kept consumers away.
A myriad of other companies including Panasonic have made attempts at tackling the consumer video phone market to no avail.
Commercially, Intel was the industry leader with their Intel ProShare Conferencing Video System 500 launched in 1995. Two years later they only had 50,000 users and today theyno longer support the product.
Finally, someone MAY have gotten it right! Read the rest of this entry »
March 11, 2008 at 10:05 pm · Filed under Search Engines, Technology, Money, Google, Miscellaneous
Over the past few days I have noticed some major changes in the rankings of several of my websites. Typically, a google update may move my rankings around slightly however these recent changes were drastic.
One of my sites which has been ranked #5 for it’s best keyword for over 6 months, suddenly dropped to the 10th page. Conversely, one of my sites which didn’t rank in the top 10 pages for it’s best keyword suddenly jumped to the top of the second page.
This is just an example of what some of my sites have done over the past 2 days. Others have remained in their same position but these are mainly sites which are ranked in the top 1-3 positions.
I am hoping this is not in fact the “new” google algorithm in action but just a small hiccup. If it is the algorithm change then my better quality sites are in trouble as the site which was dropped to page 10 is a very informative, well coded, well optimized site with unique content while the one which rose in position is very new and has few quality back links.
Now, if it were only my sites seeing changes then we could just write it off as an error on our part however there are more and more threads appearing at the major webmaster forums including forums.digitalpoint.com and sitepoint.com.
There are a lot of theories floating around as to how the algorithm has changed or if the algorithm has changed. I believe it has but only google knows.
I am trying to compile as much information as possible from those who have been effected either positively or negatively. If you have seen some changes in ranking please comment.
February 14, 2008 at 1:00 am · Filed under Miscellaneous
There has been a recent rash of fraudulent domain name purchases at forums such as Digital Point.
One or more scammers are using phishing techniques to acquire the usernames and passwords of forum members and then capitalizing on the hacked members good will and purchasing domain names from other , unsuspecting members.
It appears that the scammers are targeting 4 letter .com’s and at this point are solely paying via paypal. It also appears the scammers are targeting only domains which are registered with Godaddy.com.
Godaddy.com is the largest domain name registrar so it is not hard for the scammers to target domains registered with Godaddy however it seems there is a more devious reason to target Godaddy.com domain holders using Paypal.com as the payment method.
So how does the scam work?
- The scammer acquires the forum members username/password.
- He/she responds to “domain for sale” post
- The scammer and domain seller agree on a price
- The scammer pays for the domains via Paypal.com. Probably from a hacked Paypal account.
- The seller receives the funds for the domain sale and “pushes” the domains into the scammers account.
- The scammer immediately does a chargeback
- The funds are removed from the sellers account and the domain names are gone
Initially, the seller will contact the buyer and in some cases the fraudulent buyer will make up some excuse such as “I’m sorry I need to use a different account. I will send the funds right away” which simply buys the fraudster a little time.
Once the seller realizes it is a scam the first step is to contact Paypal.com. Of course Paypal should be able to assist as they facilitated the payment. Unfortunately, the paypal account MAY have been hijacked in which case the funds are reversed back to the buyer. Whether or not the purchase was from a hijacked account or not is unknown but it stands to reason it was from a hijacked account.
This leaves the seller with no domains and no money so the next logical step is to contact Godaddy.com and apprise them of the situation.This is where it gets really interesting!
In most of the cases we have witnessed Godaddy has not offered much in the way of assistance. In fact, Godaddy has allowed the scammer to keep the domains and suggests contacting local law enforcement. But is it Godaddys job to protect the domain seller? In these cases, no. The seller approved the transfer into another Godaddy account. Who’s to say that the person requesting the domain back is not actually the trying to steal the domains?
So what can you do if you are the victim of this type of domain theft?
- Be vigilant! Stay on top of Godaddy. If the first rep is of no help continue to call back until you get a rep who at least attempts to assist you
- Follow the name. The new owner cannot transfer out of godaddy for 60 days however the scammer may be trying to sell it elsewhere. Search google regularly!
- Post the stolen domain at all of the major domain forums including DNforum.com, namepros.com, sitepoint.com, forums.digitalpoint.com, webhostingtalk.com, domainstate.com, domainnameforum.com, discussnames.com, acorndomains.com plus any others you can find!
- Search all of the domain sales venues including ebay.com, sedo.com, afternic,com as well as auction houses like pool.com.
- If you see the domain for sale contact the venue and let them know the name was stolen.
- In the event the domain is sold contact the new owner. Although this person may not want to get involved in many cases the new owner may be willing to assist you. Be polite and convincing when you tell them you are in the process of filing a dispute so you may regain control of YOUR domain. Since the new owner stands to lose their money AND the domain he or she may become your best ally.
Unfortunately, it is next to impossible to keep yourself 100% protected during a domain sale but there are ways to make it harder to be scammed.
- Use escrow services such as escrow.com when possible
- Require the buyers shipping address when using Paypal and send the domain access information via fedex
- Research the buyers background. If it is a stolen account it is possible there are inconsistencies. Does this user typically buy domains? Is the users writing style consistent with the writing style in older posts?
- Has this user been on a big buying spree?
Remember due diligence is your best protection!
March 10, 2007 at 3:32 am · Filed under Miscellaneous
It appears my post of 2 days ago was overly optimistic.
In what appears to be a bizarre ruling by the New Jersey courts ex Registerfly.com CEO Kevin Medina was awarded back his postion of CEO.
Most of their DNS has probably updated already and attempts to transfer out may be in vein but I suggest that you give it a shot and FAST!
A couple of registrars including Mydomain.com and Godaddy.com have set up special offers for transferring your domians out of registerfly.
$6.25 transfers in from registerfly to Godaddy.com
$5 transfers out of registerfly and into mydomain.com (use coupon code “registerflies”).
Let’s all hope ICANN steps in and pushes the issue. To date they have been slow to move on the hordes of complaints they have received.
March 8, 2007 at 5:37 pm · Filed under Miscellaneous
Courtesy of Registerfly.com
Official Statement from Unified Names, Inc. Wednesday March 7th, 2007
Important Announcement concerning recent events…
If we’ve learned one thing at RegisterFly, it’s that the actions of a few can affect a great many people. It’s no secret that we’ve been experiencing significant problems here at RegisterFly, and how these problems have affected our customers.
First, we want to take this opportunity to apologize to you for the significant impact these problems have had on you. We are well aware that you all have been greatly affected by the events at RegisterFly. Whether your loss has been financial, personal, or otherwise, our single deepest regret is that our corporate woes have made it to your door. While the repercussions for RegisterFly are not insignificant, they pale in comparison to the devastating effect they have had on our customers.
While the underlying causes of these issues are varied and complex, we understand that you’re likely far less concerned about why they happened than about how we intend to address the issues they’ve caused. However, we do wish to assure you that we are taking every necessary measure to address the problem at its source, and that steps are being taken to correct the vulnerabilities that allowed them to happen in the first place.
The RegisterFly website and systems are now under the full control of Unified Names. In the process of fixing the control, the servers were also optimized, and are now running far faster than before. It is important to note that the official RegisterFly is located at www.RegisterFly.com and not at www.RegisterFly.net. While you may have heard differently, this information is inaccurate.
All RegisterFly-related activity must be performed through the official RegisterFly web site at www.RegisterFly.com. Read the rest of this entry »
March 3, 2007 at 4:19 am · Filed under Adsense, Google, Miscellaneous
The sheer number of MFA (made for Adsense) sites has been causing a rapid decline in adsense earnings for the rest of us for some time.
The problem isn;t that these pseudo sites exist it’s the PPC advertising using Adwords which is influencing the EPC in a large number of niches and growing.
If you don’t understand here is a brief summary of how this is negatively impacting EPC.
Lets use truck parts as the niche.
MFA site is set up with articles and/or information about truck parts and uses adsense for monetization.
MFA owner then sets up an adsense campaign for search and content.
Advertiser bids $.01 - $.05 per click for a large list of keywords. Higher bids depending on the ROI.
Advertisers ads appear on sites in the same genre.
MFA site makes money from the adwords traffic.
EPC drops for legitimate sites monetizing using adsense.
At some point this tactic is going to run it’s course and the methods used to increase an MFA’s adsense revenue is going to cause their own sites to suffer.
Using the blacklist feature in your adsense account can help to prevent some of these sites from showing up however the MFA’s have already figured out ways around the filters by changing the URLs of their sites on a regular basis or even rotating the urls.
Since the blacklist feature only allows for 200 urls there is no way to blacklist every new MFA site.
Is it time for Google Adwords to increase the minimum bid to $.05? This would get rid of a lot of MFA advertisers and at least guarantee a couple of cents per click as opposed to those penny a click ads.
February 28, 2007 at 5:24 pm · Filed under BlackBerry, Miscellaneous
There has always been one thing missing from my blackberry and that is MSN Messenger.
I have tried every application I could find and although some worked marginally well like the Free MSN Messenger from handango.com most were not worth downloading.
Recently there was some speculation that MSN and Research in Motion had “burried the hatchet” and MSN Messenger will be available for blackberrys sometime in late March. I have not been able to verify this yet although I have seen some posts with regard to the subject on blackberryforums.com.
If this is true I will be one happy BB user!
February 16, 2007 at 7:41 pm · Filed under Miscellaneous
Ok I have been trying to get removed from this spam list for too long now.
ShopNSaveToday.com must be one of the most ruthless spammers I have met yet. The domain name itself is absolutely terrible which is the earmark of a spammer but they will not remove you from their list.
Their removal process is set up the old fashined way. You must type in (or paste) your email address to be removed. Obviously this is not efficient and they know this. They just figure the more steps it takes to remove yourself the less likely you are going to do it.
“Please allow 5-7 business days for your
e-mail address to be completely removed
from the system. If you do receive e-mail correspondence for this offer from ShopNSaveToday.com after the allotted time, please contact privacy [Email address: privacy #AT# ShopNSaveToday.com - replace #AT# with @ ] with the original e-mail so that we might address the issue immediately.
We maintain a ZERO SPAM POLICY.”
My ass! Zero spam policy? lol
February 15, 2007 at 7:58 pm · Filed under Miscellaneous
I have been using stumbleupon for a while now and have seen huge traffic spikes however the traffic does not seem to convert very well.
A couple of weeks ago I noticed a one day spike of about 1000 unique visitors from stumble however my earnings for that day were pretty much unchanged. This was while trying a stumble exchange.
There are several potential reasons a few of which are:
No one liked my site
The stumblers are imune to ads
The stumblers were stumbling through sites too fast to actually “visit”
The stumble exchange I joined was a waste of time
Getting stumbled is not worth the effort
I was stumbling more to test than anything else so to give stumble a fair shake I compared my pre stumbe exchange stumbles and revenue increase against the traffic I received while being the member of an exchange.
What I noticed was that there was a definite increase in revenue when I was receiving stumbles the old fashioned way aka the way stumbleupon intended their site to work. Conversely the the stumble exchange traffic althouh pretty big in terms of unique visitors was simply using up bandwidth.
February 10, 2007 at 8:49 pm · Filed under Games, iPod, Miscellaneous
This week we finished our free online game site Gametopia.com. Gametopia.com launched on February 9th 2007.
With thousands of free arcade sites we felt it was important to have good “hook” to both generate new memberships and retain our members.
As part of our ongoing promotion we will be giving away prizes to members on a regular basis. During our launch we will be giving away ipod shuffles through free drawings. To be included in the drawings members must simply accumulate 50 Points by playing games.
This is NOT one of those free ipod sites where you need to complete or make a purchase or complete a trial offer in order to win. This IS a legitimate offer to people who play online games. The only requirement is registration on the site which is free and takes about 1 minute.
Since we just launched the odds of winning are extremely high! In fact, right now there are very few members!
So if you like free online games visit Gametopia.com
January 26, 2007 at 11:53 pm · Filed under Miscellaneous
As Mr. Parsons anguishes over his inability to produce an advertisement worthy of the Superbowl the rest of us netizens are wondering how Godaddy can justify pulling the plug on the well know seclists.org website.
As the news broke on DNforum.com among other places seclists.org was still recovering from the downtime.
According to News.com, Myspace.com demanded that Godaddy “pull the plug” on seclists.org because of an archived list which contained thousands of myspace.com user names and passwords. This list had been widely circulated and is available on Google.com via a simple search.
According to seclists.org it was about a minute from the time they were left a voice mail and email warning that their domain was going to be pulled to the time the domain stopped resolving. Neither the voice mail or email included a phone number to call.
According to Fyodor Vaskovich owner seclists.org:
“WTF??! Neither the email nor voice mail gave a phone number to reach
them at, nor did they feel it was worth the effort to explain what the
supposed violation was. They changed my domain nameserver to
“NS1.SUSPENDED-FOR.SPAM-AND-ABUSE.COM”. Cute, eh?
Christine Jones summed everything up with one excerpt from the Godaddy.com ToS, the company “reserves the right to terminate your access to the services at any time, without notice, for any reason whatsoever.”
Now that makes me want to run right over to Godaddy and register a “dot com domain name”!
January 25, 2007 at 2:59 am · Filed under Miscellaneous
After some time off for the holidays I decided to start off with an entry which is a little different than our standard fare.
A family in Stonington, Connecticut is facing $54,000 in fines because their tiny 6′x8′ play house is being considered a storage shed.
Now folks, this is a very small structure. It is not large enough for 3 adults to comfortably hang out in for any length of time. I know because my daughter has a 6′x8′ playhouse very similar to the one in question.
The town of Stonington will not give the homeowner a variance (why?) however they will waive the fines if she gets rid of her daughters play house.
The fines have been racking up for a year at $150 per day and what makes this even more bizarre is that the neighbor installed a much larger shed without a permit years ago. The neighbor, Thomasina O’Boyle, does not have to remove the shed because she had it for more than 3 years before the town found out about it. She has received a special variance due to the length of time.
What makes this story even more odd is that O’Boyle resigned from the zoning board last month. Favoritism? Me thinks yes.
In the town of Stonington a Swing set, Play set or Play structure is exempt from zoning yet they refuse to consider this tiny play hosue a play structure.
There has to be a point where we draw the line. Understandably, there are zoning regulations for a reason but if every play house or fort was to be considered a “shed” and fall under the zoning regulations for a shed then every tree house would require a permit and would have to meet the towns/states building codes.
There is obviously something more to the story and now that it has been on the local news and has been picked up by countless newpapers it appears that the powers that be have a fair amount of egg on their collective faces.
Click here to see the video
December 27, 2006 at 10:06 pm · Filed under Microsoft, Search Engines, Adsense, Money, Miscellaneous
I had the $200 code and procrastinated. I mean there are always promo codes floating around blogs and forums right? Wrong. I couldn’t find a promo code that worked after an hour of searching. At least not a $200 promo code. Codes which were not supposed to expire until sometime in January were expired? Odd.
Anyway, I found a $100 Microsoft adcenter promotional code that still works.
Promo code BNR-100-1006
Hope you can put it to good use!
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