Researchers Question Google Security for Businesses

As reported on gigalaw, Much as the ubiquity of Microsoft's Windows operating system and Office productivity tools has made the software giant a focal point of security research, search giant Google is facing new scrutiny as it diversifies its products and moves further into the business environment. In a report to be published on July 16, researchers at Ponemon Institute will detail their findings about existing concerns among IT professionals regarding the overall security of Google Desktop, the company's PC search utility, specifically within the confines of business operations.

Read the article: InfoWorld

Exploiting Your Current Backlinks and Link Referrals

In many aspects of life, we often work much harder than needed and overlook great opportunities lying at our doorstep. The same holds true for link development. Existing links are often just taken for granted and are not delivering their full potential. Besides the obvious link value, they are also an invaluable source of referral links from other sites.

Part of the reason they are often overlooked is people fall into the notion that more is better. "If I can just get more links, I can break into the top ten." While in reality, the "right" links will get your site into the top ten much quicker. In the rush for "more" links people take their current links for granted.

Current links can often be fine tuned to provide better link value and exposure. An added benefit to this approach is often, these links are from older, trusted sites that have a high-level reputation in search engines to pass onto your site.

However, this technique benefits sites that have been around for a number of years more than newer sites. Older sites have worked hard, promoted themselves, and earned a reputation over time. This is their opportunity to take advantage of those years of hard work.

Fine Tuning
The first thing to do is to find your current backlinks. Keep in mind, no search engine will give you an accurate list. Not even the all-powerful Google. Sage Lewis wrote a column last week on on finding your backlinks.

When you find a quality site in your backlinks, examine how it is linking to your site. It would be fairly easy to send the Webmaster an email asking him/her to add your keywords to the anchor text, yet that would not be taking full advantage of the opportunity at hand. Plus, it's likely the email will just be deleted. After all, what's in it for the Webmaster?

Instead, try approaching it from a relationship-building standpoint. There may be opportunities to contribute articles, sponsor a project, or help that site with promotions. Perhaps it wants to expand a section on the site, and your copywriter has downtime you can provide. The site maybe looking to do a research project, and you have access to the resources to make it happen. Explore the different ways you might benefit the site and its users. This is really the key to building a successful, long-term relationship with other sites.

Tips
Once you have established that relationship, here are some tips to enhance your current backlinks and create a better link profile for your site. Keep in mind, it is not just links to your site, but also how natural and editorial those links appear. Search engines are getting very good at giving more value to true editorial links, while devaluing other links.
Vary your anchor text.

Get deep links to multiple sub-pages of your site.
Get links from within the content of the target site.
Get links from several different pages of the target site.
Get placement that will encourage click-throughs.

Referrals
We all know the high value of referrals. They can open doors to opportunities one would not ordinarily have access to and to remarkable sales leads. Many of the sites currently linking to your site likely work with other Webmasters in the same niche, or they may operate other sites themselves. Since these sites are already linking to your site and you have developed a relationship, ask for a referral. Ask the simple question of, Do you know other Webmasters who could help promote my site?

The results can be astonishing. On numerous occasions, I have found someone running a hobby site who also works for a national association or publication for that industry. Other site owners I have worked with over time have gone on to become writers for major industry publications. The key is to start building those relationships. Great link development is merely good marketing and sales tactics.

When approaching link development, remember those opportunities sitting at your doorstep. While they probably are not the latest SEO rage, they can be highly fruitful and lead to even better opportunities. Find out who the people are that currently link to your site, and develop those relationships just as you would in every other aspect of your business. The results might just surprise you, and your competition, with your new rankings.

This article was written by Justilien Gaspard July 12, 2007 on Search Engien Watch

DNS Start-Up Helps Users Avoid Domain Name Typos

AN FRANCISCO, July 2 — David Ulevitch is trying to turn two numbers into a multimillion-dollar business.

The numbers — each composed of a quartet of digits — are just two of the more than four billion unique identifiers, the street addresses of cyberspace, that permit computers and other electronic devices to find one another on the Internet.

With the cleverness of a Wall Street arbitrageur, Mr. Ulevitch, who is a 25-year-old anthropology graduate from Washington University in St. Louis, has figured out how to use the numbers to make a business out of the propensity of Web surfers to make simple typing errors.

Moreover, he has done it in a way that has not outraged the band of gray-bearded technical designers of the original Internet, which in itself is no simple feat and plays no small part in his success.

Mr. Ulevitch’s offer is quite simple. People who sign up for his service at OpenDNS.com are promised an easier way to locate Web pages and more protection from people who try to steal personal information from Web users.

It can also block Web sites that offer pornography or other undesired material.

He does this by using the Domain Name System, or DNS, which is the phonebook for the Internet. Every Web site is assigned unique machine-readable numbers which are used to direct Internet traffic. Mr. Ulevitch inserts his service between a user’s computer and the broader Internet. When an Internet-connected computer or router is configured by adding OpenDNS.com’s two numbers — 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220 — OpenDNS makes it possible to access Web sites faster.

His service will also correct standard spelling mistakes. For example, if a user types google.cm instead of google.com, OpenDNS will redirect the query to the correct Web page. OpenDNS also makes it possible for users to use the Web address query box of a Web browser in the same way users now use the search engine query box found in all modern Web browsers. Typing a search request into the regular Web address box on a computer that uses the OpenDNS service will return search results and related advertisements from Yahoo.

OpenDNS makes money when a Web user clicks on the advertising links. It is nearly profitable, Mr. Ulevitch said.

Mr. Ulevitch founded the company a year ago with a $2 million investment from Halsey M. Minor, the former chief executive at CNET.com.

Mr. Minor was an early investor in Salesforce.com, the customer relationship management company, and he recently sold another company he founded, GrandCentral Communications, which offers users a single number that can be set to ring their mobile, home or work phones. It was sold to Google last week.

Mr. Minor said that he had gone looking for someone who was an expert in DNS, but who was not frozen in the past.

“We’re not about DNS, which is a 30-year-old technology,” he said. “We’re really about allowing people to find the information they’re looking for.”

Mr. Ulevitch had developed a reputation for his ability to exploit DNS. The San Diego native grew up on the Internet. In high school he went to work for a year as an intern at MP3.com, an early digital music service created by the Internet entrepreneur Michael Robertson.

“I saw how a company can do great things quickly, and how someone else — the music industry — can crush them,” he said. “I also saw how someone can be a leader and visionary by being able to meet and watch Michael Robertson.”

From his college dorm room in 2001, Mr. Ulevitch founded EveryDNS.net, a provider of free DNS management services that was based on a volunteer technical support group he organized. He was able to do well enough from donations — the largest was $10,000 — that he had enough money to move to San Francisco after college. The service continues to operate with about 100,000 users.

He used that expertise first at Internet firms and then later to germinate the idea for OpenDNS. The service, running with four servers in the United States and a fifth in Europe, now handles about 1.4 billion DNS lookup requests daily. That is almost 5 percent of the roughly 30 billion DNS transaction processed each day by Verisign, the company that manages the .com and .net top level Internet domains, during the first quarter of 2007.

It is not an entirely new idea. In 2003, Verisign offered a similar service called Site Finder, but it touched off a storm of protest. The Internet technology community was outraged, pointing out that the company was misusing its control of the Internet domains for marketing purposes.

The protest forced Verisign to halt the service.

Mr. Ulevitch learned from that controversy. OpenDNS service operates only with a user’s consent. “A big part of what makes it O.K. is that its opt-in all the way to the individual user,” said Bill Woodcock, a veteran Internet technologist who is research director at Packet Clearing House, a nonprofit Internet research group.

OpenDNS can also do a better job than an Internet service provider because its computers cache the most current address information. That makes it possible to have the information for most queries instantly available, rather than having to make a time-consuming second request for the information, as is the case for many ISP DNS systems.

OpenDNS has attempted to solve some of the biggest problems associated with the DNS system, such as Internet security.

Phishers and botnet herders employ the DNS as part of elaborate scams that fool unwary Web users into providing information on a fake site set up to resemble, for example, sites run by banks or the government. Turning on the phishing protection offered by OpenDNS makes it impossible for the offers made by phishers to ever appear in a user’s browser.

Mr. Ulevitch shies away from the idea that OpenDNS is part of the computer security market, which so far has grown to billions of dollars in revenue while doing little to stem the tide of malware that now pervades the Internet.

“I don’t want to be seen as a security company,” he said. “They live off the bad guys.”

Instead, he has grander ambitions for helping Web users navigate the Web, though he is leaving those ideas opaque. “We’ve done more in a year than anyone else has done in the last 20,” Mr. Ulevitch said.

Article originally posted in the NY Times by JOHN MARKOFF

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Companies processing credit card payments for Web sites featuring pirated content are not liable for copyright violations, a U.S. appeals court panel ruled on Tuesday.
The ruling by the three-judge panel of the San Francisco-based U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals affirms a lower court decision against Perfect 10 Inc. in its dispute with Visa International Service Association, MasterCard International Inc. and affiliated banks.
Perfect 10, which operates a Web site featuring images of nude models, has also tangled in court with Google Inc., claiming the Web search leader violates its copyrights by linking Internet users to sites that republish its images without authorization.
A 9th Circuit Court panel in May allowed Google to display images of Perfect 10 models, but said the Internet giant may be liable for linking pirated content. Beverly Hills, California-based Perfect 10 asked the court to reconsider its lawsuit against Google and will ask the court to reconsider its challenge against credit card processors.
Norm Zada, president of Perfect 10, said the court majority's opinion in favor of the companies would encourage theft of intellectual property over the Internet by giving thieves a means to profit.
"On the Internet, it is easy to steal and almost impossible to defend against that," Zada told Reuters in a telephone interview. "How much business do I lose? There are least 70 sites I subscribe to that sell every picture that I own."
Perfect 10 should focus on such Web sites and not on providers of business services, said Andrew Bridges, the lawyer who defended MasterCard.
"The plaintiffs want to create an economic blockade of anybody accused of infringement," Bridges said.
Writing for the majority, Judge Milan Smith Jr. said credit card processors, unlike Web search providers, do not direct online traffic. "They in no way assist or enable Internet users to locate infringing material, and they do not distribute it," Smith wrote.
read more...

Purchasing Links for SEO

Everything in the search engine optimization world is extremely hard to justify, especially for those managing big business sites. When it comes to buying text links, it's more and more important these days to have a solid understanding of what your program is going to do to drive the business.

So the question becomes: How do you purchase text links to your large portal and have a bulletproof explanation that the executive team will understand?

Several things must be addressed before we get into this. For example, it is imperative to know that controversial linking strategies have a short shelf life, so it's important to have this in the back of your mind. Programs like reciprocal link popularity only lasted for a short period of time. These programs are very easy to detect by search engines, and we need to give them enough credit on the quality of work they are doing.

Paid Links
Now that reciprocal link popularity is dead and buried, it's important to know that paid links are on their way out as well. How long do you think it will take a search engine like Google to be able to determine that links within a site's navigation or footer appearing on every page may not be relevant? This type of pattern matching is very easy for search spiders to find and will only cause problems down the line.

Link Brokers
Now that we have this out the way, I think we should go back and think about the consequences of handing over a large sum of money to a huge link broker, possibly ruining your business with one campaign. Keep in mind that these companies are in business for the sole purpose of buying and selling links. They are very good at it, and if there is a possibility that their business may be failing, they will combat it any way possible.

Purchased Links
If you were to purchase a link to a category page within a very large Web site, you would wind up with several effects or results.

The pages being linked to could move up in the index, which would be a win/win for all. The pages that are just below the category pages could move up as well, which again would help the overall purpose of the site in general.
The last thing to remember is that most large Web sites with millions of pages are very difficult to track when it comes to what's working and what's not. Thus, it's important to keep an eye on the entire category and make sure that all efforts are being watched on a global level.

The results mentioned above are what I like to call the bleeding effect; it's an effect that takes the credit from one page and transfers it to many pages around the primary page. The effect could either be up or down, or even sideways or horizontal in nature.

Thus, it can be very difficult to say that a given key phrase derives a certain amount of value in revenue – especially since there is a possibility that the page can affect many other pages along the way, including but not limited to the category pages, product pages, and supporting pages. These page types will change based on the business model of each and every business. Thus, a proper tracking system must be in place to ensure that there are no major issues with understanding the spend and the revenue associated with the spend.

In conclusion, from time to time, purchasing links can add value if they are very targeted. But how long will this current SEO strategy work before it is completely weeded out like the reciprocal link popularity strategies that we see today? There will be new strategies available on an ongoing basis that will be very important to watch for. Be sure that you are ahead of the game rather than behind it.

This article was written by Aaron Shear

Independant contractors Rights in the Cyber Age

I recently read an article by E-Legal Lawyer, who wrote about the rights of indepedant contractor's in the inforamtion age, especially as it realtes to copyrights. Below is most of the article. The analysis of each of their cases rested squarely on the legal principle of work for hire. It seems unfair, that one can put their creative talents to work for another, where that artist is not compensated in anyway for their efforts, yet the copyright would rest with the intended beneficiary of the work, and not with the artist who was uncompensated. Yet, the intended beneficiary of the work does in fact hold a strong claim on the exclusive rights to that work.

To determine who truly owns the rights to a work, a full analysis is generally required. As a general rule, under section 201(a) of the United States Copyright Act, copyright ownership “vests initially with the author or authors of the work.” 17 U.S.C. § 201(a). For example, if Victoria draws a picture of a park, she is the owner of the copyright.

However, in some situations, the creator of the work does not hold the copyright. The reason for this is the work is a “work made for hire.” A “work made for hire” is defined as: (1) “a work prepared by an employee within the scope of his or her employment;” or (2) nine specified types of work specially ordered or commissioned, “if the parties expressly agree in a written instrument signed by them that the work shall be considered a work made for hire.” The “work for hire” doctrine has been long recognized by the United States Supreme Court in Bleistein v. Donaldson Lithographing Co., 188 U.S. 239 (1903). Section 201(b) of the Copyright Act provides that in the case of a work made for hire, “the employer or other person for whom the work was prepared is considered the author … and … owns all of the rights comprised in the copyright.” 17 U.S.C. § 201(b). For example, Victoria is an employee of Animal 57 Web Productions. She draws a picture of a park that Animal 57 will use in its brochure. Animal 57, would then own the exclusive rights to that picture.

The central question, under the copyright law, to be asked to determine if the work is considered a “work for hire”, is who is an employee? In a United States Supreme Court case, an advocacy group, contracted with an artist to create a sculpture to be displayed for a Christmas Pageant. The advocacy group paid the artist pursuant to the contract, and “determined a number of key aspects of the design of the sculpture”.

The Supreme Court held that the artist owned the sculpture since he was not an employee of advocacy group. Moreover, the sculpture was not one of the nine specifically enumerated categories of commissioned works where the commissioning party owns the work. Community. for Creative Non-Violence v. Reid, 490 U.S. 730 (1989).

The Court held the test for whether the creator is an employee is the same as the test for “the common law of agency.” Cmty. for Creative Non-Violence v. Reid, 490 U.S. at 740–41.
The factors which should be considered are: (1) who supplies the materials, (2) the location of the work, (3) the duration of the relationship, (4) whether the hiring party can assign additional projects to the hired party, (5) the hired party’s role in hiring and paying assistants.

The aforementioned case increases in significance as the digital age progresses. As so many companies now hire independent contractors, rather than employees. The key element to look for is, whether the contractors and employees sign agreements stating that all work created while retained by employer, if it is not work made for hire, will be assigned to the employer.

Google talks about public policy legal matters

Law.com had a great article today about Google's new public policy blog, googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com , a blog in its first month of existance, explains the search giant's views on a variety of public policy matters, including privacy, so-called "net neutrality," patent reform and copyright protection -- all subjects in which Google has found itself tangled in recent years. The blog also offers a chance to hear from some of the legal muscle behind the company.

On the very first posting on the blog, Andrew McLaughlin, the Google's director of public policy and government affairs stated "We're seeking to do public policy advocacy in a Googley way," . "Yes, we're a multinational corporation that argues for our positions before officials, legislators, and opinion leaders. At the same time, we want our users to be part of the effort."

read more inforamtion...