Archive for Privacyand Security
Brand abuse is increasing, but more important than the sheer volume is the increased sophistication and the opportunistic nature of brandjackers, who are quick to take advantage of current events and popular concerns.
Photo credit: Tyler Olson
As a matter of fact, so-called “brandjackers” continue to exploit the confusion over the financial markets that began in the last quarter of 2008 to prey upon vulnerable consumers, and such online scams continue to be quite sophisticated and difficult to detect for the unsuspecting Internet user.
Not only.
“Brandjackers” are also taking advantage of newer avenues like blogs and social media sites to find their victims, while utilizing a broad range of techniques ranging from spam to cybersquatting and phishing. Statistical information confirms indeed a profound increase – 36 percent in one quarter – in the level of phishing attacks as well as in cybersquatting cases, where fraudsters register domains that combine fake financial institutions and brands at the rate of more than one domain per day.
This MarkMonitor report on Brandjacking has been created by tracking millions of emails and billions of web pages, including pages featuring online advertising, eCommerce, auctions and social networking sites analyzed during the September 2008 April 2009 study period.
MarkMonitor, who has kindly granted MasterNewMedia with the permission to republish this unique analysis, is the company who has created the Brandjacking Index, which measures how pervasive brand-based attacks are and how to identify key online threats to strong brands.
Here all the details:
Brandjacking Index – Financial Brand Abuse
by MarkMonitor
In this edition of the Brandjacking Index, we look at brand abuse trends in the financial vertical, focusing on four major financial services brands and four terms associated with the financial crisis – foreclosure, mortgage, refinance and unemployed.
As the economy has worsened over the past months, we found that con artists have exploited consumers’ financial fears and uncertainties, and have rushed in to hijack well-known brands for their own profit.
There has been a profound increase – 36 percent in one quarter – in the level of phishing attacks as well as in cybersquatting.
We identified more than 7,300 questionable domains that were registered using the four financial brand names. Fraudsters registered domains that combined the financial brands that we studied with its four focus terms at the rate of more than one domain per day between September 2008 and the end of our study period in April 2009.
Scams continue to be complex and sophisticated to lure in unsuspecting victims; in fact, cybersquatted domains registered since September 2008 were 50 percent more likely to use the focus terms than domains registered earlier.
MarkMonitor created the Brandjacking Index to measure how pervasive brand-based attacks are and to identify the potential threats to the world’s strongest brands.
As in our previous reports, this edition of the Brandjacking Index tracked millions of emails and billions of web pages, including pages featuring online advertising, eCommerce, auctions and social networking.
Summary Financial Brand Findings
As our economy has worsened, brand abusers have sharpened their focus and created schemes to lure consumers into their trap for mortgage refinancing and phony get-rich-quick investments. Sadly, the only ones who are getting richer are the fraudsters. They are using a variety of simple yet creative techniques to misrepresent themselves.
Here are two examples of websites: the first shows you a phony mortgage refinancing site that exploits paid search listings to bring in traffic and a second site for a spam scam based on another bank brand.
Banking brand abuse site promoted with paid search
Suspicious landing page promoted by spam and taking advantage of a major bank brand
Then there is this page that has so much brand abuse going on, it could be one of those find-the-hidden-picture Sunday supplement puzzles.
The fraudster who created this page exploits trusted TV and newspaper media brands and has the page designed to look like an online newspaper, all with the goal of obtaining personal identity information. To add insult to injury, the page uses encryption technology to give it a greater air of legitimacy!
While many of the suspicious domains that we discovered tried to extract personal information, very few went so far as this site in offering encryption; 52 percent of the domains that we identified did not encrypt any data.
Site exploiting multiple brands, including media and financial brands, takes advantage of “bailouts”
Finally, there are new efforts that make use of social media to lure victims.
Here is “Jessica’s Money Blog” which on the surface looks like thousands of other legitimate blogs that participate in conversations about managing finances or running a small business. But “Jessica” is selling a “home business kit” that promises steep rewards in exchange for a small amount of effort and some personal information, including a credit card number.
Questionable site using social media
These are just a few of the sites that we have discovered that may be exploiting the financial crisis.
A summary of results is shown below for each of the four banking brands studied:
Number of abuses observed by brand and type of abuse
Of the almost 7,400 suspicious domains identified, 16 percent were registered since September 2008 and 17 percent of the total used the focus terms – foreclosure, mortgage, refinance and unemployed – in the site content.
When we examined the more-recently registered domains, the team found evidence of opportunistic abuse.
- Domains registered since September 2008 were 50 percent more likely to use the focus group terms.
- Fraudsters registered domains that combined the financial brands that we studied with our focus terms at the rate of more than one domain per day between September 2008, and the end of our study period in April 2009.
In general, many of the suspicious domains are newly created, as you can see from our analysis of the domain registration dates in the table below:
In terms of geography, 49 percent of the abuse domains were hosted in the United States, while six percent were hosted in the United Kingdom, four percent in Germany, and Australia and Canada tied at three percent each.
Phishing attacks against the financial brands that we studied saw a big jump, with 10,000 attacks in Q1 2009, which was a 36 percent increase compared to Q1 2008.
Phishing attacks on four banking brands by quarter
General Phishing Trends
Interestingly, when we observe phishing trends overall, we found that phish attacks against the payment services category grew more quickly than the financial services category in Q1 2009, with a 40 percent growth from the previous quarter and 285 percent annual growth.
Payment services trend upward while financial services spiked in Q3 2008
Phishers continue to target different industries, shifting their focus from quarter to quarter as the chart below demonstrates. They sharpen their focus using standard direct marketing methods – identifying the most profitable segments and then continuously harvesting new targets within those segments.
Changes in targets for phishing by industry segments
A total of 502 organizations were phished in Q1 2009, which is a 14 percent increase compared to the last quarter of 2008, and a 24 percent annual increase – a large jump from previous observations.
We also saw 93 organizations being new targets in the quarter; the vast majority of them were financial services-related businesses. This could signal that phishers will be redoubling their efforts against this segment going forward.
Number of organizations phished by quarter
We also observed how phishers are adjusting their techniques targeting the retail segment.
- On the left is an older example of a phished retail site, using the oft-used ploy of masquerading as a trusted site, with familiar logos and credentials.
- On the right is a more recent example of a phish against the same brand. In this case, a phony user survey purportedly offered by a trusted retailer promises a $90 credit for its completion, once your credit card number has been given.
Evolving marketing techniques for phishers
And as legitimate sites beef up their defenses, the phishers are following right behind by using similar techniques to make their efforts seem more plausible.
The first example below is a site that uses the ‘captcha’ method of typing a series of numbers to thwart subscription bots, and the second example is a Brazilian site that puts up a warning like a real credit card site.
While both of these sites are aimed at the payment services vertical category, neither is legitimate.
Payment services fraudulent sites
And while the US continues to widen its lead in the hosting of phishing sites, with a ten percent increase from last quarter, Canadian hosted sites have moved up to be the second most popular host country.
Social Media Phish Targets
We continue to see that cybercriminals are targeting new communication platforms like micro-blogging, virtual worlds and social networks.
Phishers are creating phishing sites to collect passwords, conduct identity theft schemes and carry out online advertising scams.
Phish attacks targeting social networks have grown 241 percent from Q1 2008 to Q1 2009 and have grown 1,500-fold since we first started tracking the category in 2007.
Growth of phish attacks against social networks
Phishers have also expanded their reach to web infrastructure sites such as domain registrars and hosting services. Economic reasons for exploiting these sites include redirecting traffic, holding a domain portfolio ransom or hosting further phish scams or pirated content.
Registrars
Hosting
Phishing attacks targeting web infrastructure
Conclusions
Brand abuse is increasing, but more important than the sheer volume is the increased sophistication and the opportunistic nature of brandjackers, who are quick to take advantage of current events and popular concerns.
Brandjackers continue to exploit the confusion over the financial markets that began in the last quarter of 2008 to prey upon vulnerable consumers.
Wielding a wide variety of techniques from more established abuses like spam, cybersquatting and phishing, brandjackers are also taking advantage of newer avenues like blogs and social media sites to find their victims.
Originally written by MarkMonitor for MarkMonitor and first published on March 1st, 2009 as “MarkMonitor Brandjacking Index: Spring 2009“.
About the author
MarkMonitor is a company specialized in enterprise brand protection that offers solutions and services that safeguard brands, reputation and revenue from online risks.
The Brandjacking Index is produced by MarkMonitor and explores numerical trends and statistics about online brand abuse. It contains anecdotal information about the business and technical methods used by brandjackers, along with analysis and discussion of the business and social implications of brand abuse.
The cornerstone of the Brandjacking Index is the volume of public data analyzed by MarkMonitor using the company’s proprietary algorithms.
MarkMonitor searches approximately 134 million public domain records, billions of web pages and spam emails and up to 16 million unique suspect phishing emails on a daily basis in order to identify brand abuse. These records come from various public domain data sources, along with Internet feeds from leading international Internet Service Providers (ISPs), email providers and other alliance partners. None of this data contains proprietary customer information.
Photo credits:
Brandjacking Index – Financial Brand Abuse – Robert Mizerek
Summary Financial Brand Findings – pertusinas
General Phishing Trends – Vladimir Popovic
Social Media Phish Targets – mipan edited by Daniele Bazzano
© 2009 MarkMonitor Inc. All rights reserved. MarkMonitor® is a registered trademark of MarkMonitor Inc. All other trademarks included herein are the property of their respective owners.
If you are an Internet user and are concerned about future control and regulation of your ability to freely access your preferred content and services online, no matter where you live it is now the time for you to stop and understand what the European Parliament is about to pass in the coming days unless you and I do something about it.
Photo credit: graffoto
On May 5th in fact, the EU Parliament will vote a package of new regulations (the so-called “Telecom Package“) which may free European Internet providers to decide which content, services and applications European users can access and use.
The Telecom Package will force users to choose among pre-packaged options of accessibility. Internet providers will be able to tell users WHERE to go and WHAT to use online, dismantling instantly the essence of the Web as you know it today.
In this article you can find out details about the Telecom Package being reviewed, what its consequences could be, and what action you can take now to prevent this from happening.
If you care about the Internet and about the amazing opportunity that offers to each one of us, I warmly invite you to read closely this report and to evaluate by yourself how to best act to stop this Telecom Package from becoming official law.
Here all the details:
Voting In EU Parliament 5th Of May 2009
by Blackout Europe Team
Internet access is not conditional.
Everyone who owns a website has an interest in defending the free use of Internet… so has everyone who uses Google or Skype… everyone who expresses their opinions freely, does research of any kind, whether for personal health problems or academic study … everyone who shops online…who dates online…socializes online… listens to music…watches video…
1. What They Want to Enforce. The Telecoms Package
The internet as we know it is at risk because of proposed new EU rules (the Telecoms package) are being discussed now at 2nd reading in the Parliament stage.
Under the proposed new rules, broadband providers will be legally able to limit the number of websites you can look at, and to tell you whether or not you are allowed to use particular services. It will be dressed up as ‘new consumer options’ which people can choose from.
People will be offered TV-like packages – with a limited number of options for you to access.
It means that the Internet will be packaged up and your ability to access and to put up content could be severely restricted. It will create boxes of Internet accessibility, which don’t fit with the way we use it today.
This is because internet is now permitting exchanges between persons which cannot be controlled or “facilitated” by any middlemen (the state or a corporation). This possibility improves citizen’s life but force the industry to lose power and control.
Access providers have now learned that controlling access they can control the information society development.That is why they are pushing to act those changes.
The excuse is to promote competition, offering choices to users which fit better their behavior on the Internet and, by collaborating with sectors interested in the promotion of lawful content (aka the entertainment industry), to control the flow of music, films and entertainment content against the alleged piracy by downloading for free, using P2P file-sharing. However, the real victims of this plan will be all Internet users and the democratic and independent access to information, culture goods…
2. Consequences for All of Us
Think about how you use the Internet! What would it mean to you if free access to the Internet was taken away?
These days, the Internet is about life and freedom. It’s about shopping, booking theater tickets… holidays, learning, job-seeking, banking, and trade. It’s also about the fun things – dating, chatting, invitations, music, entertainment, joking and even a Second Life. It is a tool to express ourselves, to collaborate, innovate, share, stimulate new business ideas, reach new markets – thrive without middlemen…
Listen to one of the fathers of the World Wide Web talking about network discrimination and how it could affect to the openness of the Internet.
He talks about the USA… but in Europe the same can happen if the Telecoms Package passes as it is now.
Just think – what’s your web address? Unless people have that address in their “package” of regular websites – they won’t be able to find you. That means they can’t buy, or book, or register, or even view you online. Your business won’t be able to find niche suppliers of goods – and compare prices. If you get any money at all from advertising on your site, it will diminish.
Yes, Amazon and a select few will be OK, they will be the included in the package. But your advertising on Google or any other website, will be increasingly worthless.
Skype could be blocked. (As it is in Germany in the use from iPhone, already). Small businesses could literally disappear, especially specialist, niche or artisan businesses.
If we don’t do something now – we could lose free and open use of the internet. Our freedom (of choice in information, market, culture, pleasure) will be curtailed.
3. The Value of Our Opinions and Our Votes
Tell the European Parliament to vote against conditional access to the Internet!
Remind them that they need your vote in June and that the Internet still give us the tools to be watching and judging what they are doing!
You must know you are not alone: hundreds of organizations are working on that and thousands of people have already contacted their parliamentarians about that.
In scambioetico website you can also find some letters responding.
4. What Our Politicians Want to Pass
The EU proposals hold an enormous risk for our future. They are about to become Law – and will be virtually impossible to reverse.
People (even the members of the European Parliament who are voting on it) don’t really seem to understand the full implications and the legal changes are wrapped up in something called “Telecoms Package” which lulls people into thinking it is just about industry. However, in reality, hiding from public view, the amendments are about the way the Internet will operate in future.
Text about your rights to access and distribute content, services and applications, is being crossed out. And the text that is being brought in, says that broadband providers must inform you of any limitations, or restrictions to your access.
Alternative versions use the word ‘conditions’ – and it is seriously being proposed that you will be told the conditions of use of Internet services. This is made to sound good – it is dressed up as ‘transparency’ – except that of course it means that the broadband provider will have the legal right to limit your access or to impose conditions, otherwise why would they need to tell you?
If the Telecoms Package as it reads now is voted in, the changes will not be reversible.
5. How We Will Respond
We all have a stake in the Internet! You need to act now to save it!
- Ask to your leaders and representatives’ in the European Parliament to support a free and open Internet, where restrictions and limitations are only decided by a judicial ruling and monitoring is forbidden.
- Demand that Internet access providers will be required to offer a service open and without discriminations.
- Promoting growth and competition of the European economy should not be detrimental for citizen’s rights and the democratic participation.
- A fair welfare will not be reached if Internet does not stand free and open.
6. How to Do It (Tools)
Click here to find a technical explanation by Monica Horten, article by article, so you can check with your own eyes what it is going on.
The open coalition has also sent a number of letters to the European Parliamentarians (MEPs) with an explanation of the controversial articles.
As suggested by La Quadrature, you can:
- Email, write to or phone your MEP – Follow the link to their website. to get the details.
- You can use this letter as a model if you want
- You are welcome to personalise the letter and include information that will make MEPs sit up, take note and take appropriate action. (Please do not be aggressive as they will not listen to you).
- In this link you will be able to send these recommendations directly to all the Parliamentarians, (hacktivistas) Believe, they will really receive it and they will really feel the pressure.
- Join this Facebook group
- Send this page to everyone you know so that they can take action
- Syndicate this page so that you keep been informed: disinformation is what they count on, we must be aware
Related Resources:
- Fac-simile letter for EU Parliamentarians
- Mail addresses of all EU Parliamentarians, categorized by country
- Political memory wiki page – Track and record vote of EU Parliamentarians
- La Quadrature Du Net – Info and resources
Originally written by the Blackout Europe Team and first published on April 20th, 2009 as “URGENT – VOTING IN EU PARLIAMENT 5th of MAY 2009“.
Photo credits:
Voting In EU Parliament 5th Of May 2009 – mipan
What They Want to Enforce. The Telecoms Package – Ruslan Gilmanshin
The Value of Our Opinions and Our Votes – James Steidl
What Our Politicians Want to Pass – kmitu
How We Will Respond – Konstantinos Kokkinis
How to Do It (Tools) – Yanik Chauvin
How To Blog Anonymously And Maintain Control Of Your Personal Privacy – Guide
Posted by: | CommentsIf you want to cover sensitive issues on your blog, or just keep unwanted readers off your content, here are some specific guidelines on how to blog anonymously while maintaining greater control of your personal privacy.
Photo credit: Slobodan Vasic
As whistleblowing bloggers keep reporting on stories often ignored by mainstream media, more and more working bloggers do get fired for what they write inside their blogs.
How do you then, under such circumstances, protect your content from too curious explorers while making it accessible only to selected people?
Hide your IP address, blog anonimously, avoid Google indexing like poison. Keeping your privacy defenses high does not require you to be a geek anymore.
To blog anonymously and to keep undesired readers away from your unvetted thoughts, put to use some of these simple privacy precautions.
Here’s what to do:
How to Blog Safely (About Work or Anything Else)
by EFF
Introduction
Blogs are like personal telephone calls crossed with newspapers. They’re the perfect tool for sharing your favorite chocolate mousse recipe with friends – or for upholding the basic tenets of democracy by letting the public know that a corrupt government official has been paying off your boss.
If you blog, there are no guarantees you’ll attract a readership of thousands. But at least a few readers will find your blog, and they may be the people you’d least want or expect. These include potential or current employers, coworkers, and professional colleagues; your neighbors; your spouse or partner; your family; and anyone else curious enough to type your name, email address or screen name into Google or Feedster and click a few links.
The point is that anyone can eventually find your blog if your real identity is tied to it in some way. And there may be consequences.
Family members may be shocked or upset when they read your uncensored thoughts. A potential boss may think twice about hiring you. But these concerns shouldn’t stop you from writing. Instead, they should inspire you to keep your blog private, or accessible only to certain trusted people.
Here EFF offers a few simple precautions to help you maintain control of your personal privacy so that you can express yourself without facing unjust retaliation.
If followed correctly, these protections can save you from embarrassment or just plain weirdness in front of your friends and coworkers.
Blog Anonymously
The best way to blog and still preserve some privacy is to do it anonymously. But being anonymous isn’t as easy as you might think.
Let’s say you want to start a blog about your terrible work environment but you don’t want to risk your boss or colleagues discovering that you’re writing about them. You’ll want to consider how to anonymize every possible detail about your situation. And you may also want to use one of several technologies that make it hard for anyone to trace the blog back to you.
1. Use a Pseudonym and Don’t Give Away Any Identifying Details
When you write about your workplace, be sure not to give away telling details. These include things like where you’re located, how many employees there are, and the specific sort of business you do.
Even general details can give away a lot. If, for example, you write, “I work at an unnamed weekly newspaper in Seattle,” it’s clear that you work in one of two places. So be smart. Instead, you might say that you work at a media outlet in a mid-sized city.
Obviously, don’t use real names or post pictures of yourself. And don’t use pseudonyms that sound like the real names they’re based on–so, for instance, don’t anonymize the name “Annalee” by using the name “Leanne.”
And remember that almost any kind of personal information can give your identity away – you may be the only one at your workplace with a particular birthday, or with an orange tabby.
Also, if you are concerned about your colleagues finding out about your blog, do not blog while you are at work. Period. You could get in trouble for using company resources like an Internet connection to maintain your blog, and it will be very hard for you to argue that the blog is a work-related activity. It will also be much more difficult for you to hide your blogging from officemates and IT operators who observe traffic over the office network.
2. Use Anonymizing Technologies
There are a number of technical solutions for the blogger who wishes to remain anonymous.
Invisiblog.com is a service that offers anonymous blog hosting for free. You may create a blog there with no real names attached. Even the people who run the service will not have access to your name.
If you are worried that your blog-hosting service may be logging your unique IP address and thus tracking what computer you’re blogging from, you can use the anonymous network Tor to edit your blog.
Tor routes your Internet traffic through what’s called an “overlay network” that hides your IP address. More importantly, Tor makes it difficult for snoops on the Internet to follow the path your data takes and trace it back to you.
For people who want something very user-friendly, Anonymizer.com offers a product called “Anonymous Surfing,” which routes your Internet traffic through an anonymizing server and can hide your IP address from the services hosting your blog.
3. Use Ping Servers
If you want to protect your privacy while getting news out quickly, try using ping servers to broadcast your blog entry for you.
Pingomatic is a tool that allows you to do this by broadcasting to a lot of news venues at once, while making you untraceable. The program will send out notice (a “ping“) about your blog entry to several blog search engines like Feedster and Technorati. Once those sites list your entry (which is usually within a few minutes) you can take the entry down. Thus the news gets out rapidly and its source can evaporate within half an hour. This protects the speaker while also helping the blog entry reach people fast.
4. Limit Your Audience
Many blogging services, including LiveJournal, allow you to designate individual posts or your entire blog as available only to those who have the password, or to people whom you’ve designated as friends.
If your blog’s main goal is to communicate to friends and family, and you want to avoid any collateral damage to your privacy, consider using such a feature. If you host your own blog, you can also set it up to be password-protected, or to be visible only to people looking at it from certain computers.
5. Don’t Be Googleable
If you want to exclude most major search engines like Google from including your blog in search results, you can create a special file that tells these search services to ignore your domain. The file is called robots.txt, or a Robots Text File. You can also use it to exclude search engines from gaining access to certain parts of your blog.
If you don’t know how to do this yourself, you can use the “Robots Text File Generator” tool for free at Web Tool Central (Update: the resource indicated is not yet available, try this free service from Hypergurl.com instead). However, it’s important to remember that search engines like Google may choose to ignore a robots.txt file, thus making your blog easily searchable.
There are many tools and tricks for making your blog less searchable, without relying on robots.txt.
6. Register Your Domain Name Anonymously
Even if you don’t give your real name or personal information in your blog, people can look up the WHOIS records for your domain name and find out who you are. If you don’t want anyone to do this, consider registering your domain name anonymously.
The Online Policy Group (OPG) offers privacy-protective domain name registration at https://www.onlinepolicy.org/forms/opg-domain-create.shtml
Blog Without Getting Fired
A handful of bloggers have recently discovered that their labors of love may lead to unemployment. By some estimates, dozens of people have been fired for blogging, and the numbers are growing every day.
The bad news is that in many cases, there is no legal means of redress if you’ve been fired for blogging.
While your right to free speech is protected by the First Amendment, this protection does not shield you from the consequences of what you say.
The First Amendment protects speech from being censored by the government; it does not regulate what private parties (such as most employers) do. In states with “at will” employment laws like California, employers can fire you at any time, for any reason. And no state has laws that specifically protect bloggers from discrimination, on the job or otherwise.
One way to make sure your blog doesn’t earn you a pink slip is to make sure that you write about certain protected topics. Most states have laws designed to prevent employers from firing people who talk openly about their politics outside of work, for example. Be warned that laws like this do vary widely from state to state, and many are untested when it comes to blogging.
1. Political Opinions
Many states, including California, include sections in their Labor Code that prohibit employers from regulating their employees’ political activities and affiliations, or influencing employees’ political activities by threatening to fire them.
If you blog about membership in the Libertarian Party and your boss fires you for it, you might very well have a case against him or her.
2. Unionizing
In many states, talking or writing about unionizing your workforce is strongly protected by the law, so in many cases blogging about your efforts to unionize will be safe. Also, if you are in a union, it’s possible that your contract may have been negotiated in a way that permits blogging.
Some states protect “concerted” speech about the workplace, which means that if two or more people start a blog discussing the conditions in their workplace, this activity could be protected under local labor laws.
3. Whistleblowing
Often there are legal shields to protect whistleblowers – people who expose the harmful activities of their employers for the public good.
However, many people have the misconception that if you report the regulatory violations (of, say, toxic emissions limits) or illegal activities of your employer in a blog, you’re protected. But that isn’t the case.
You need to report the problems to the appropriate regulatory or law enforcement bodies first. You can also complain to a manager at your company. But notify somebody in authority about the sludge your company is dumping in the wetlands first, then blog about it.
4. Reporting on Your Work For The Government
If you work for the government, blogging about what’s happening at the office is protected speech under the First Amendment. It’s also in the public interest to know what’s happening in your workplace, because citizens are paying you with their tax dollars. Obviously, do not post classified or confidential information.
5. Legal Off-Duty Activities
Some states have laws that may protect an employee or applicant’s legal off-duty blogging, especially if the employer has no policy or an unreasonably restrictive policy with regard to off-duty speech activities.
For example, California has a law protecting employees from “demotion, suspension, or discharge from employment for lawful conduct occurring during nonworking hours away from the employer’s premises.” These laws have not been tested in a blogging context.
If you are terminated for blogging while off-duty, you should contact an employment attorney to see what rights you may have.
Blog Without Fear
Blogs are getting a lot of attention these days. You can no longer safely assume that people in your offline life won’t find out about your blog, if you ever could.
New RSS tools and services mean that it’s even easier than ever search and aggregate blog entries.
As long as you blog anonymously and in a work-safe way, what you say online is far less likely to come back to hurt you.
Additional Resources on How to Blog Anonymously
- CNET’s guide to workplace blogging
- How Tor works
- Anonymizer’s Anonymous Surfing
- A list of fired bloggers
- The Bloggers’ Rights Blog
- A Technical Guide to Anonymous Blogging (An Early Draft), by Ethan Zuckerman
- EFF’s Legal Guide for Bloggers
- How To Surf The Net Anonymously: A Mini-Guide
- Online Privacy: How To Hide Your Google Search Trails
- Anonymous Surfing: What The Benefits And Issues Of Making Yourself Invisible Online?
- How To Bypass Internet Censorship And Filters: A Guide To Circumvention Technologies And Anonymous Browsing
Originally written by the EFF team and first published on May 31st 2005 as “How to Blog Safely (About Work or Anything Else)”
About the author
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is a donor-funded, nonprofit organization founded back in 1990 dedicated to defend free speech, privacy, innovation, and consumer rights on the Web.
Photo credits:
Blog Anonymously – tombaky
Use a Pseudonym and Don’t Give Away Any Identifying Details – Richard Thomas
Use Anonymizing Technologies – depo881
Use Ping Servers – tombaky edited by Daniele Bazzano
Limit Your Audience – Harris Shiffman
Register Your Domain Name Anonymously – Alexey Pinchuk
Blog Without Getting Fired – simonkr
Political Opinions – Julián Rovagnati
Unionizing – Jiri Kabele
Whistleblowing – OtnaYdur
Reporting on Your Work For The Government- adkok
Legal Off-Duty Activities – lincolnrog
Blog Without Fear – Vitalik
Are you tired of giving away your personal e-mail address to those sites you know you’ll visit only once? In this mini-guide you can find a way to create anonymous, temporary e-mail inboxes that expire right after you used them, helping you avoid letting your private personal email out for spam bots to harvest.
Photo credit: Mike Flippo
E-mails are the currency of the Web. Each time you register for a service, join a forum, or browse sites which are not secure, you expose your personal e-mail address to be caught in the net of spammers.
What you can do to drastically reduce the quantity of junk messages you receive is to set up an anonymous, temporary e-mail inbox to use anytime you don’t want to give away your private address.
Most of the sites which allow you to create a trash-away mailbox are free and do not require registration. You simply go there, create your anonymous, temporary email address in a few clicks and select an expiry date establishing when the disposable email service will delete all the messages you received.
Obviously if you plan to join a site that sends information which may possibly come in handy in the future, do not use an anonymous temporary mailbox, but rather stick to your personal address.
Curious? Do you want to know more about anonymous temporary e-mail services?
In this mini-guide I have collected the best services out there to create an anonymous and temporary, disposable e-mail address.
Here below the set of key basic characteristics that I have utilized to compare the tools I hand-picked and reviewed, so that you can easily find the best disposable email service to fit for your needs:
- Price: Find whether the service you need is free or not.
- Registration: Indicates if you need to register to use the service.
- Duration: Specifies whether the service allows you to choose when your temporary address will expire.
- Check ways: Some service offer different ways to check your inbox: RSS, web widgets, Firefox extensions, and more.
Here all the details:
Top Disposable E-Mail Services And Tools Comparison Table
Top Disposable E-Mail Services And Tools
- Melt Mail
Melt Mail is a service that allows you to create a temporary e-mail address that can be used for one-time registrations, or to avoid giving away your personal address. You can even specify how long your temporary inbox will last. Free to use and with no registration needed, Melt Mail allows you to check the expiration of your mailbox in a handy auto-updating pop-up window.
http://www.meltmail.com/ - MailExpire
MailExpire is a service to create disposable inboxes that you can use to filter the spam at your personal inbox. You can use it to register to those sites you plan to visit just once in your lifetime. Your temporary inbox can last from 12 hours to three months. Mailinator is free and no registration is required to use the service.
http://www.mailexpire.com/ - Incognito Mail
Incognito mail is a clean, simple service to create a disposable e-mail address that you can use for one-shot registration purposes and avoid spam to reach your personal e-mail address. Completely free and without registration. You can check your 1-hour temporary inbox via RSS feed or iGoogle gadget.
http://www.incognitomail.com/ - Mailinator
Mailinator is a service that lets you avoid spam messages the easy way creating a temporary e-mail inbox to receive all the unwanted messages you get. Free to use, no setup nor registration required, and you can check your disposable inbox via web, RSS, or the Mailinator widget.
http://www.mailinator.com/ - Jetable
Jator is a free online service that lets you create a temporary e-mail inbox to receive the messages you don’t want to be delivered to your personal address. Your inbox can last from one hour to one month. The web interface is available in different languages. No registration required, and you can check your trash-away inbox via web or the Jetable Firefox extension.
http://www.jetable.org/ - spambox.us
spambox.us is a service that allows you to create a temporary e-mail inbox for all your unwanted messages. You can choose an expiry date up to one year. spambox.us is completely free to use and no registration is needed. The web interface is available in different languages.
http://www.spambox.us/ - Yopmail
Yopmail is a free service that lets you create a disposable, anonymous e-mail address. Messages on your temporary Yopmail inbox are stored for 5 days and you can check them via a dedicated Firefox extension or widget. No registration process is needed.
http://www.yopmail.com/en/ - temporaryinbox
temporaryinbox allows the creation of a free anonymous, temporary e-mail address that you can use to receive spam messages. Your disposable address will expire automatically after six hours. The site is available in different languages. Checking your mailbox is possible via web, Firefox extension or Opera dedicated widget. No registration required.
http://www.temporaryinbox.com/ - GuerrillaMail
GuerrillaMail allows you to create a free disposable e-mail address that helps you to filter spam messages. You can check your GuerrillaMail temporary inbox via web or customed iGoogle gadget. No registration required. The web interface is available in different languages.
http://www.guerrillamail.com/ - KasMail
After registering for an account on KasMail, you’ll get a temporary inbox to receive and store all those messages that you prefer to keep separate from your private e-mail account. You can decide when the disposable mailbox will expire, or even choose to keep it forever. Free to use.
http://www.kasmail.com/ - spamfree24
spamfree24 is a free service that lets you check a temporary inbox where you can receive all junk mail. You cannot indicate an expiry date for your trash-away inbox, but on the sites it says that messages to your disposable inbox will be deleted “after a few hours“. No registration is needed.
http://spamfree24.org/ - Mailboxable
Mailboxable is a free service that lets you generate a disposable e-mail inbox for one-shot registration purposes or any other situation where you don’t want to give away your personal address. Completely free, you don’t need any registration process to use the service. Messages in your disposable inbox are stored by Mailboxable for 7 days.
http://mailboxable.net/ - LiteDrop
LiteDrop provides you with a free disposable e-mail address which expires in 1 hour, although you can get another free hour just by clicking a button. You can use it to receive all those e-mail messages that you don’t want to be delivered to your personal address. LiteDrop is a registration-free service and you can check your anonymous inbox via web or RSS feed.
http://www.litedrop.com/ - myTrashMail
myTrashMail is a free service that allows you to create a temporary e-mail inbox to filter spam and any unwanted messages you receive. RSS checking of your inbox is activated by default. Upgrading to the PRO version you can extend the expiry date of individual e-mails up to 30 days and get extra features like secure temporary email or automatic forwarding to your trash-away inbox.
http://www.mytrashmail.com/ - MailCatch
MailCatch is a free service to create an anonymous, disposable e-mail inbox to filter spam messages. Easy accessible via web or RSS feed, MailCatch inboxes last “from a few hours to a few days depending on the traffic“. No registration is necessary.
http://mailcatch.com/ - MailEater
MailEater helps you fight spam creating a disposable e-mail address that will automatically expire after 4 hours you create it. Free to use, no registration nor setup is required to use MailEater.
http://www.maileater.com/ - 10 Minute Mail
10 Minute Mail creates for you a random temporary e-mail address that you can use to receive junk messages instead of using your private address. The inbox auto-expires in 10 minutes. Free to use, no registration needed.
http://10minutemail.com/ - TempEMail
TempEMail is a free online service that lets you create a temporary, anonymous e-mail inbox that will last for 14 days. You can use it to receive one-time messages from sites that you won’t visit again in the future. No registration nor setup is required to use TempEMail.
http://www.tempemail.net/ - Tempinbox
tempinbox allows you to create a random receive-only, temporary e-mail inbox. Unlike other similar services, tempinbox does not allow you to choose an expiry period. Completely free to use and without registration. You can access your inbox even via RSS or Atom feed.
http://www.tempinbox.com/ - SpamMotel
SpamMotel is a free, simple disposable email address service. After registering for the service, SpamMotel allows you to create a temporary anonymous email address to help you filter the quantity of spam you get. Although the service is fully accessible via Web, it can be used via a small Windows application as well.
http://www.spammotel.com/
Originally prepared by Daniele Bazzano for MasterNewMedia and first published on January 9th 2009 as “Best Anonymous Temporary Email: The Top Disposable E-Mail Services And Tools – Mini-Guide“.
How To Make Money Online? The Secret Is Revealed Without Selling You Anything
Posted by: | CommentsMake tons of money online with my internet marketing secret formula! At one time or another you have probably already landed on a sales page claiming to be able to make you become another Internet millionaire only by reading and applying a few simple tactics, “anyone” can use. Haven’t you? And ever since you have been wondering if there is really a secret to be discovered to make fast money online.
Photo credit: Aspen Country
The answer to that question is: yes, there is a secret to most of the apparently successful internet marketing offers you increasingly see online.
It may not be the secret you expect to hear about, but it is nonetheless a quite well kept secret. The unique thing is that the secret is in front of everyone and yet many can’t see it.
In this article, Enrico Madrignano, a true internet marketing expert explains in a simple and direct way why internet marketers are so effective in selling you their secrets and why you may be deeply disappointed with the results you are going to get.
Here all the details:
Make Money Online or Doing Web Marketing?
I believe that whoever consciously mixes “making money online” with “Internet marketing“, does it more to increase her revenue than to help others better understand how things really are.
As a matter of fact, the phrase “make money online” helps catching many more fishes and it’s not strange that the keyphrase “money online” is often among those most searched on internet marketing blogs.
One of the basic marketing principles is: “give people what they want.” The trick works simply because the phrase “to make money” triggers desires and impulsive attraction much more than the word “internet marketing” does.
The new “internet marketing” gurus have well understood this and they also know that mixing the idea of “internet marketing” with “making money online” creates the perfect mixture. It has worked for a long time in the US and it also works well in Italy.
Can we say it’s their fault? I don’t think so: just like you, they want to make money. Can we scold them? Absolutely yes: if those two concepts are not clearly and distinctly explained, then you are playing a cheating game.
Creating Value
Doing “internet marketing” means creating value that is built around the needs and desires of the customer or the market. And this value must be discovered by doing extensive analysis, tests, and experiments.
“Making money” only means selling something to someone who is willing to buy, even in a short time, and even if no additional value is created.
To provide an example, I could make money going to a crowded beach and selling ice-creams with a cart at the hottest hours, when the sun is high in the sky. I have a product that sells itself automatically, no matter how good or bad it really is (my customers can only find out after they buy it).
But if I want to transform my ice cream cart into a multinational ice-cream corporation, then things change drastically. Now I really need marketing to take my business to the next level, otherwise, in one year I will still be at the same beach, selling ice-creams to the beach-goers.
A Gambling Card Game
The cheating card game of these “internet marketing” gurus is built specifically around the idea that marketing is actually that ice-cream cart.
Here is how they do it:
- They make the whole thing look as simple as possible and accessible to anybody out there. Do you need an astrophysics degree to sell ice creams on the beach? Anyone can do it, you too!
Just think of this: While you are reading this page, thousands of entrepreneurs are already out there making billions of money by selling ice-creams on the beach, while you…
- If I write a 500-page ebook to tell you how you can buy the ice cream cart, where you can buy it, which wheels you need for it, what kind of ice cream refrigerator you need to install on it, and so on… I won’t need to waste my time explaining you the strategies to distribute, promote and add value to your product (that is “marketing“).
Why? There is nothing better than having an ignorant customer. They let you believe that they hold the key to success, while the reality, is they are just selling you information to setup an ice cream cart.
If you understand the problem, then you get mad and you stroll around discrediting the guru or, if you still buy into the cheating card game, you fall into the final trap, which is this.
- You have understood that with the ice-cream cart you can make money, but you have also understood that to make real, significant money, you need something much more advanced than an ice-cream cart.
And it’s now, that the guru suddenly pulls out from his magic hat a secret envelope and lets you sniff it. Obviously, you have a hard time resisting to such offer, and you buy the expensive envelope with the secret formula. You open it slowly, excited and curious… and what do you find inside it?
Good or Evil Gurus?
If the guru is an evil one, then in the envelope you’ll find some marketing strategies. But, to be put to use, these strategies require you to buy a new, motorized, 12-wheel ice-cream cart that your guru is going to sell to you, or yet worse, you will have to become a reseller of his motorized 12-wheel ice-cream carts, s/he has been selling for years that will make you a millionaire in a very short time…
I guess you have understood how the story goes.
On the other hand, if the guru is a good one, then in the envelope you will find some real good marketing strategies. Too bad that on the way to get there your good guru had you spending all your life savings. And not taking into account that now, if you really want to make money online, you will need to roll up your sleeves and start working very hard for quite some time.
Conclusion
The two concepts, “making money” and “internet marketing” go perfectly hand in hand as long as they are clearly distinguished by whoever promotes them.
Whoever consciously mixes these two concepts, creates an inviting dish that is as poisonous as venom. This approach can be valuable at a first stage, but in the long run it bears only disgraces.
I have seen this mix utilized for many years in the American market, almost in every field, but firstly in “internet marketing“, where marketing gurus grow faster than mushrooms.
It is always the same story, with the same plot being sold over and over again. “How to make money online with the superninja formula“, “find the ultimate web marketing secret“, are the typical slogans that characterize this ambiguous universe.
As a matter of fact, there would be nothing intrinsically bad with all this, if it wasn’t for the fact that these slogans and tactics are always the same, copied over and over again, and promoted by supposed gurus who have never tried and experimented them for real in their own strategies.
Here in Italy, it is a little bit better, because culturally we are much more prepared to sniff out situations where someone wants to take advantage of our ignorance. But I don’t know if this will last.
Making money online is something that sometimes can happen fully naturally, in a short amount of time and without excessive efforts. On the other hand, to do effective marketing you need real dedication, perseverance and a lot of time to try and experiment all possible venues.
To say it in simple words, in marketing you really need a lot of experience gained by having experimented lots of strategies in a real world situation.
Who has gotten this experience through lots of efforts and over many years, out of respect to you or by being coherent with his hard-learned skill, will never sell it you as the magic formula to become a millionaire in 24 hours while selling ice-creams on the beach.
Many understand all of the above right away, while others need to be caught in the trap before they start realizing how this internet marketing magic works. And this is part of the game too.
Originally Written by Enrico Madrignano for Web Marketing Forum and first published on January 11, 2009 as “Il Web Marketing NON è il guadagno online“.
Photo credit:
Make Money Online or Doing Web Marketing? – Rido
Creating Value – Eduard Härkönen
A Gambling Card Game – Visual 7
Good or Evil Gurus? – Piksel
Conclusion – Xiao Fang Hu
Net Neutrality: Is The Open Web For Anybody Or Just For Some?
Posted by: | CommentsThe celebrated openness of the Internet in which internet providers are not supposed to give preferential access or treatment to any Internet traffic keeps quietly losing powerful defenders.
Photo credit: Norma Cornes
Internet providers are still free to sell higher-speed traffic and better overall service levels, but letting big companies like Google get an unfair advantage in distributing their content online just because they can afford to pay more, represents a big threat to the democratic and egalitarian approach independent web publishers have been vouching for.
Net neutrality boils down to one basic concept: Don’t make audiences pay for artificially-created scarcity.
That means that Internet providers of all kinds can be still free to sell “bigger pipes” and better overall service levels at higher prices. What should instead not be allowed anymore is for artificial cartels of content and Internet bandwidth providers to gang together and create preferential access routes to their own content by virtue of reserving faster and broader chunks of their bandwidth to their commercial gang partners.
Here is John Blossom reporting on this story:
Net Neutrality Spin: WSJ’s Take on Google’s Caching Plans Draws Fire
by John Blossom
WSJ vs. Google on Net Neutrality
Talk about a bad hair day for WSJ tech journalists.
When The Wall Street Journal ran an article on a Google plan to add “edge caching” servers at key internet service provider facilities, this fairly common practice to accelerate content delivery to audiences via the Web was mangled into a political imbroglio. To wit, their lead:
“The celebrated openness of the Internet – network providers are not supposed to give preferential treatment to any traffic – is quietly losing powerful defenders.
Google Inc. has approached major cable and phone companies that carry Internet traffic with a proposal to create a fast lane for its own content, according to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.
Google has traditionally been one of the loudest advocates of equal network access for all content providers.“
Google was quick to correct the WSJ’s outlook, as noted on their public policy blog and in a subsequent AFP story. Their point:
“Despite the hyperbolic tone and confused claims in Monday’s Journal story, I want to be perfectly clear about one thing: Google remains strongly committed to the principle of net neutrality, and we will continue to work with policymakers in the years ahead to keep the Internet free and open.“
Intellectual property guru and net neutrality proponent Lawrence Lessig noted that his take on Google and the political ramifications of this move were a bit off-key in the WSJ article as well:
“The article is an indirect effort to gin up a drama about an alleged shift in Obama’s policies about network neutrality.
What’s the evidence for the shift? That Google allegedly is negotiating for faster service on some network pipes. And that “prominent Internet scholars, some of whom have advised President-elect Barack Obama on technology issues, have softened their views on the subject.”
Who are these “Internet scholars”? Me… I’ve not seen anything during the Obama campaign or from the transition to indicate it has shifted its view about network neutrality at all.“
Is the Open Web a Possible Future Scenario?
With more moving pieces than a Swiss watch in Washington right now, the current political environment surrounding net neutrality and other Web access issues during a transition in Washington’s power brokers is bound to be subject to as much jockeying and bullying as possible.
Today the U.S. Federal Communications Commission canceled a vote on making radio frequencies available that would provide free Internet access as a public utility, bowing to pressures from both industry advocates and politicians.
There’s a big push for open Web access, but plenty of pressure from all points of view keeping things comfortably in neutral for now.
Net Neutrality and related issues such as public Web wireless frequencies seem to boil down to one basic concept: Don’t make audiences pay for artificial scarcity.
Carriers are still free to sell “bigger pipes” and better overall service levels, but artificial cartels based on reserving audience-facing Internet bandwidth for private use will only create more challenges for publishers in the long run.
If you want to have proof that this is so, just take a look at the balkanized state of mobile service carriers that lassoed content providers for many years into deals for distribution on their private networks. What publishers now confront are scattered and overpriced deals for growing but underperforming mobile markets, even as the carriers now reach for ad revenue shares to sweeten their take.
Net Neutrality and Its Implications for Online Publishers
Proprietary mobile breakthroughs such as the iPhone and the Amazon’s Kindle are great for publishers in many ways, but they represent a relatively small share of the potential marketplace for mobile content and ultimately just continue the myth that artificial network scarcity can benefit the publishing industry as a whole.
All these devices do is lock publishers in to proprietary networks that are bound to make it harder to reach their audiences cost-effectively.
The truth is that the fastest-evolving, most cost-effective technology changes are best for publishers, making it imperative to enable an environment in which mobile and Web technology providers are not resting on proprietary laurels that hinder the development of Web and mobile markets for publishers. Without these breakthroughs, the audience reach that content producers need to make mobile networks a highly profitable distribution medium is not likely to materialize.
Let’s keep the future of publishing out of the hands of companies that still can’t tell us whether to dial “1“, an area code or nothing extra to make a phone call to the next town.
Net Neutrality will ensure that there is a cost-effective, rapidly evolving electronic distribution infrastructure that serves publishers best.
Originally written by John Blossom for Shore and first published on December 15, 2008 as “Net Neutrality Spin: WSJ’s Take on Google’s Caching Plans Draws Fire“.
About the author
John Blossom’s career spans more than twenty years of marketing, research, product management and development in advanced information and media venues, including major financial publishers and financial services companies, as well as earlier experience in broadcast media. Mr. Blossom founded Shore Communications Inc. in 1997, specializing in research and advisory services and strategic marketing consulting for publishers and consumers of content services.
Photo credits:
WSJ vs. Google on Net Neutrality – Olga Demchishina
Is the Open Web a Possible Future Scenario? – Alfredo Angeles
Net Neutrality and Its Implications for Online Publishers – Wikimedia Commons
