Archive for Internet
DCS:1 Life Technology: 0
Posted by: | CommentsOh a nice thing happened today on one of my post: two comments suddenly appeared with one minute between each of them on the post about Life Technology’s purple energy shield scam and these comments were actually positives about the product. Something is wrong right? Two positive comments in a row for the biggest scam in history? No way. First of all, here are the two comments:
dylan:
its not a scam trust me ive had 1 for a night it may not do dna repair but i definatly felt better after 1 night of wearing it.rob:
dylan is telling the truth i own one myself and could notice the difrence
Now, one thing the author of these two posts didn’t figure out is that the blog framework I use (Wordpress) actually log the IP address of every comment’s author for security reasons. Guess what? That’s right, the comments were coming from the same ip address meaning it was, as I suspected, the same person posting the two comments. For those of you not familiar with ip addresses, an IP address is a unique address that identifies you have when you access the internet.
Ok, so that was funny but I wasn’t satisfied with my findings. I wanted to check if that IP address was actually a Life Technology employee’s (if they have any) address or just the address of a random person feeling bad because he/she got scammed. So I traced the IP address and found out where it was coming from. Unfortunately, I can’t conclude on whether the comment is from life technology or not because I don’t know where LT is located. I’ve tried to search for a postal address on their website but couldn’t find any. The only information I was able to get is that their ebay store seems to be shipping from the UK. So, if they truly are located in the UK, the comment wasn’t coming from them because the city I’ve identified with the trace was in the US. They could of course have used a fairly simple technique to trick the IP address (By going through a proxy), but I doubt that this person is intelligent enough to do so because he/she didn’t even think about spreading the two comments by a day or two or asking a friend for the other comment.
Anyway, coming from Life Technology or not, somebody’s angry. 
wixist - What’s missing in you life today
Posted by: | Comments
Here’s an interesting social experiment a friend of mine pointed out to me today. It’s quite new and in fact I think it’s not even indexed in Google yet, but it’s definitely interesting. It’s called wixist and the goal if the website is stated as follows:
wixist is a social experiment to find out what’s missing in our lives, in 50 characters. What is it for you? Is it love, sex or would you kill for strawberry Coke if it existed? Would a new feature in Microsoft Excel made your life easier today? That’s what wixist want to know: everything you’re missing in your everyday life and everything you wish existed. It’s plain simple, write it down in the box above and submit it. It’s anonymous and purely done as a social experiment.
I think it’s funny just to see what will come out of this project, so give it a try!
Don’t stay a virgin
Posted by: | CommentsHere’s a funny but quite interesting website: Don’t stay a virgin
I could explain you what this is all about, but the website does a pretty good job at that and here’s a little something taken from it to give you an idea:
Certain ISP’s are planning to limit internet access in a way that infringes upon internet freedom or ‘net neutrality’.
I’m using sex in a positive way to spread awareness. The reason why only virgins can apply is because I don’t want to make this promise to such a large amount of people that I’ll have to turn some down.
Net neutrality is paramount to safeguard free speech and innovation on the Internet. With only one arguably negative side-effect: an unusual amount of today’s Internet users are virgin. That’s a problem I intend to solve. In history, man has always waged war for freedom. Now it’s time to obtain our freedom with love.
Sex is all over the net and yet it’s still a big taboo for many. Using sex to spread awareness will be yet another big step to sexual freedom. This is just another great example of what’s possible thanks to net neutrality.
So what do you get?
The services consist of Tania performing sexual intercourse with the applicant, the form and style of the performance will be discussed prior to the act, Tania tries to allow as much freedom as possible in this area but she does reserve the right to decline suggestions. Tania covers all her personal expenses, including travel. Any sort of recording (video, audio or photographs) of the performance is allowed for non-commercial use. Tania adheres to high standards of service but due to time limitations each performance can last no longer than 30 minutes, no exceptions will be made under any circumstance.
This is all very strange and weird, but it is definitely funny. Any virgins out there willing to give it a try and provide some feedback?
Predictify: A little something to keep predictions’ gurus busy
Posted by: | CommentsIf anyone likes to predict stuff and is good at it, try this website: Predictify. It’s not as fun as predicting the end of the world and stuff like that but you can get paid for it. The website offers you a list of things for you to try to predict and if you are right, you can even get paid. In fact, Predictify describes itself as follows:
Studies have shown that large groups of regular people are often more accurate than a small group of experts at predicting the outcome of future events. Predictify is a prediction platform that harnesses this collective wisdom.
Predictify provides a simple, fun way to engage in current and future newsworthy topics. You can research, discuss and predict the outcomes of real-world events, challenge your friends to private prediction contests, build a reputation based on your accuracy, and even get paid real money when you’re right. Best of all, it’s free – no points or bets required. Click on the Predict tab above to get started.
So I can get paid, right? But how much? Well, according to the website:
By accurately predicting the outcome of Premium questions. Predictify charges Premium question-askers a fee of $1 per response and shares a portion of this fee (the pot) with the predictors based on their accuracy.
So, the price you get paid depends if it’s a premium question, how many answers there are and how many good answers there are. I haven’t tried the concept so I can’t tell if it’s worth it but it’s certainly a nice thing to try if you are a guru in a core sector like finance.
I think it’s a nice initiative and concept, but at the same time there’s probably a big company behind that trying to use the community to make money. Let’s admit it, you probably don’t get paid a fortune for your answers but I’m pretty sure the information extracted from the community’s answers is really worth it and worth a lot of money.
Anyway, see this as an entertainment if you like that kind of stuff.
Web bots - There’s no magic
Posted by: | CommentsThis is a follow-up to my previous article about the web bot. In that article, I briefly explained what the web bots are and if they were able to predict anything. I strongly suggest you read the article but it’s not a prerequisite to this article. In that first web bot post, I made a slight mention of the “2012 prophecy” and guess what? Most of the comments are about the 2012 prophecy and whether or not the world will end in 2012. I won’t be talking about 2012 in this article but I will focus on the limits of the web bots because there’s a really important concept we all have to understand: Web bots scan man-made information. This article might look similar to my previous one, but is shorter and more focused on limits of web bots. It is a reminder of the core concept of web bots.
Web bots scan man-made information
This is the most important concept of web bots because it sets the limits to what the web bots are able to predict. This also explains why it’s impossible to predict any end of the world prophecy. Why is that? The main goal of a web bot is simply to crawl the web the same way Google would do it to extract important information from websites. That important information is usually the most relevant keywords on a website put with a certain algorithm that is able to get the meaning of the sentences the keywords are used in. This information is then put in a large database and the final goal is to compare similar topics to determine if they each point towards similar conclusions.
So, if we put all the pieces together: The web contains information written by humans, the web bots crawl that information, find correlations and make predictions. If the web bots take its information from man-made sources, then what can it predict? Only things humans can predict or have control over. Does that includes the end of the world? No. There’s nothing super-natural in web bots. It’s computer technology at its best: Gather, keep and interpret information the human brain can’t.
Sure someone can argue they sometimes predict the stocks market, but I know people who are damn good at this too. They can try to predict a whole lot of stuff, but it cannot go any further than what we can predict.
We have to be careful here, because web bots do have a power we don’t have: to merge all that information across the web and try to find a correlation. So, they can go a little further than what a single human can do, but they can’t go any further than what’s possible to predict by humans.
If it was really possible to predict incredible stuff, Google would have the answer to every question. Wait a minute…They do! Seriously, it’s possible to extract relevant information from the web but it has a limit. Google use the data it collect to do a lot of other stuff than giving you search results, but they wouldn’t be able to predict things humans don’t have control over if they tried. That’s the same thing for web bots, except it’s much more smaller than Google.
Put everything in perspective
Web bot is a really nice project but I think it’s going to be one more argument for doomsday prophets in the future. It already started with videos about the end of the world and web bots predicting it would happen in 2012. There are certain things we don’t have control over and we have to accept it. There are certain parts of our lives we don’t control and we have to accept it. Computers are useful but they’re not God. I think the web bot project has a nice future but always keep in mind the web is man made and the bots crawl the web: there’s a limit to their capacities, it’s no magic.
Some examples
What’s best than a couple of concrete examples?
Could the web bots predict:
- Natural disaster: There’s not much chances, unless it’s a natural disaster we can predict. We sometimes know in advance of a tornado and are able to predict the disaster. In that case, a web bot could do the same by gathering information from websites talking about a possible disaster on a certain date.
- End of the world: Unless it’s a very obvious situation or caused by humans’ actions, no.
- Terrorist attacks: Yes. at least it can help.
- Stocks markets: Yes it can help.
- You get the idea.
Hope it’s clear
I hope it clears everything up so that it’s now obvious that it is impossible for a web bot to predict things humans have no control over.
Google fear Alex Chiu will put them out of business
Posted by: | CommentsRemember that good old Alex Chiu? That’s right, the guy selling immortality rings. He’s now back with a direct attack at Google because he thinks Google is afraid that Alex Chiu will put them out of business. Here is what he wrote on his website recently:
Obviously, some very important people don’t want you to know about Chiu.
Close to 50% of people use Google search engine. And for some reason, AlexChiu.com is banned by Google. They don’t want you to know about Alex Chiu because Alex Chiu’s stuff is no joke. I mean if Alex Chiu’s technology is just a scam, why would a big guy like Google ban a domain like AlexChiu.com? Surely some very important people, mainly the ones that control the pharmaceutical industry, do not want you to learn about Alex Chiu. They fear that Alex Chiu’s technology will one day put them out of business.
Put it this way: Even Kevin Trudeau’s website ‘naturalcures.com’ can be found on Google. Kevin Trudeau, the famous author of the #1 selling book ‘Natural Cures’ was not even banned by Google. Why is a small website like AlexChiu.com banned from Google? Ask yourself this question. Isn’t it strange? Why would a big guy like Google tease a small guy like Chiu? It’s because the smart people at the top know that one day Chiu’s technology will destroy their trillion dollars industry. If Chiu’s technology is not threatening, why would they ban his site? They are not afraid of Kevin Trudeau at all. But they are so afraid of Chiu. This means Chiu’s technology is truly threatening.
Go to Google and type in ‘alexchiu.com’, and this clickable domain will not appear. More than 1 million people visited alexchiu.com since 1996. Yet it won’t appear on Google.
Even Google is afraid of Alex Chiu. You can imagine how much the medical industry fears Alex Chiu.
Like if Google care about Alex Chiu. There is only one reason why Alex Chiu is banned from Google: He is trying to trick the search engine rankings and Google doesn’t like that. How does he tries to trick search engine rankings? Simply go to his website here and scroll down to the bottom of the page. On the left side, you will see a really small white box with scroll bars. Well, this white box literally contains thousands of hidden keywords! Just do a “view page source” and you will easily see all of the keywords. Google use the text on your website to figure out what it is about and by putting thousands of keywords there, he’s trying to appear in more search results than he should.
Every decent webmaster know that nasty trick and also know that it will get you banned from Google. Plain and simple. No matter how shitty your website his or how shitty the product you sell is, you won’t get banned by Google. Play fair and you will continue to appear on Google.
Alex tried to mess with Google and he’s now banned, it has nothing to do with his immortality ring scam.
I still love Alex Chiu, I think he’s a funny guy.
I wrote three other articles about Alex Chiu if this is of any interest to you:
Alex Chiu’s Eternal Rings and Gorgeouspil Scam
John Chow’s insult to honest bloggers
Posted by: | CommentsJohn Chow is a legend in “making money on the internet”. He actually recently claimed on T.V. that he was making 30k a month with his online business, which is mainly johnchow.com. I’m pretty sure it’s close to the true numbers as he’s really known to make a lot of money from his websites. Anyway, the point of this article is to express how I feel he is insulting every honest blogger out there with one of his recent post. He posted an article on viral videos and how it can help you drive traffic to your website. He actually made a viral video which is total crap. While being a working way of driving traffic to your website, I think it has to be done in a very clever way to be efficient. Obviously, he didn’t.
The video is at the end of the post if you can’t wait to see it and don’t want to read the rest of this post. But, rest assured, I couldn’t watch more that 60 seconds of the video so you can wait. For every honest blogger out there, the video is an insult. I personally try to post intelligent articles with good content every 1-3 days. I get extremely positive comments and this guy comes in, making 30K a month, and does the worst video I’ve ever seen to promote his website. Honestly, the video is a total pain. He probably got a couple more readers with that video just because he is “John Chow”. I would have lost all reputation by making this video, but unfortunately, he’s still quietly making 30k a month. Maybe he’s more clever than all of us and tried to make the shittiest video available so I would link to his website. In this case it worked, but it’s still an insult for all of us.
Here’s the video for your non-entertainment:
The future of Internet Advertising
Posted by: | CommentsI posted an article about the future of Internet advertising on my technology blog Adopt A Packet and I think it might be of interest for a lot of persons at Daily Common Sense.
Internet Advertising has reached a certain limit and Google experienced it recently. They’ve recorded a drop in the number of clicks on their banners displayed all across the web. Even if they say it’s because they’ve increased the quality of their ads, which means they’re more targeted, they have to face the reality: There are more “ad blind” people than 5-10 years ago when Internet Advertising all started. Continue to read The future of Internet Advertising - AdoptAPacket.com
Introducing my new blog - Adopt A Packet
Posted by: | CommentsJust to let you know that I’ve launched a new blog: Adopt A Packet. It’s mostly aimed at techies and there’s little chances of you enjoying it if you’re not in the computer industry! It’s funny stories about the inside life of packets. Anyway, check this out. It’s fresh from today so there’s not much content but it will grow and will only get funnier with time!
How does Google make money?
Posted by: | CommentsOne of the question I often have to answer is: “How does Google make money?”. They don’t sell any product, everything you use from them is free and on top of that they seem to be very active in the “open source” community. So how the hell can they cash-in?
Advertisement
Advertisement, that’s how Google is making its money. Every time you do a search on Google, you’ve probably noticed that there was a section called “Sponsored Links”. Every time you click on one of those links, Google charge a certain amount of money to the website for the click. When you go on a website you’ll notice advertising from Google too. Daily Common Sense has ads from Google. Same thing happens here, when you click, Google charge a certain amount of money to the website you clicked on and part of that money is given to the webmaster publishing the ads. This is called AdSense and is an enormous source of income for Google.
How much does Google charge for a click?
The price advertisers pay for a click depends on a lot of factors and this is where Google is playing smart. They use some sort of bidding system. When you want to advertise with Google, you select keywords you are targeting. Let’s say I own an online guitar store and I want to bring potential customers to my website. I’m going to bid on the keywords “guitar” and “buy guitar” for example. The price I’m going to pay will depend if there is other companies bidding for that keyword. The more companies are fighting for a keyword, the more I’m going to pay for a single click to my website. The price can vary from 0.01$ to 100$ and more. Not to bad for a click hey? You can imagine that for highly competitive keywords like finance and health it can cost quite a lot of money for a company to advertise with Google.
No production cost
Google doesn’t sell any tangible product and that’s the beauty of their business. They sell something that doesn’t really exist. They really sell traffic. It mostly comes down to this: They get paid for sending traffic to other websites. That’s why Google seems to be everywhere now: They have to show substantial growth to their stakeholders and to do that they have to drive more and more traffic to provide more and more advertisement. That’s also the reason they’ll be jumping in the cell phone industry, so they can make a bit of money from all the web traffic that next generation cell phones are going to drive in the next couple of years.
Expect to see Google around more and more in the next couple of years…
A little more Alex Chiu please!
Posted by: | CommentsAlex is awesome. As most of you know it’s not my first post about Alex Chiu and all his scams. But now it’s not about the scams, it’s about Alex Chiu himself. Here’s a video interview with Alex Chiu from the Web Drifter. It’s simply awesome and a definitive classic:
My favorite part is definitely Alex Chiu saying:
Well, they definitely don’t have strip clubs!
When talking about heaven.
Other highlights:
This place is so gay.
This doesn’t help girls thinking you’re Frankenstein because you think you can make people live forever!
And the song at the end…I just love Alex.
Wow, great moment, enjoy!
How come conspiracy/scams websites are all Web 0.1?
Posted by: | CommentsThis is truly amazing. The more respect you seem to gain is in direct link with the ugliness of your website when it comes to conspiracy/scams website. I say web 0.1 because it seems so far from the web 2.0 websites we see today. I mean how do they plan to get respect from rational people with that kind of web design? You just don’t feel it’s an honest website!
You just have to search for “2012″ in Google for example and you’ll see the ugliness. The worst thing is that these websites are appearing on top Google search results, which means they have some sort of reputation. It’s the same story whenever I get on a conspiracy theory website.
Alex’s Chiu’s website is the ugliest thing I’ve seen in my entire life. When you search for “Conspiracy” on Google, the first result is http://www.conspiracyplanet.com/ and once again it confirms the theory. India Daily is ugly as hell also and I could go on and on.
I feel better now…
The Web is Empty
Posted by: | Comments
Do you have the feeling you’re always visiting the same web sites over and over again even if it’s supposed to be different web sites? I’m really sick of what I call “Content Replication” and this is particularly true about blogs. Whatever the subject I’m searching about I usually end up reading more or less the same content over and over again. This is especially true when searching about paying subjects like web design, search engine optimization (SEO), making money online, finance, medical, etc.
Why is it that way? People blogging for money. When you search for popular content, you have millions of webmasters trying to make a buck with their website/blog. You will find original content on maybe 1% of the web sites, others are just “content replication”. Bloggers who do content replication are bloggers seeking easy money so they re-write existing articles in their own words. We all do it in a certain way as we have to gather our information somewhere, but there’s a way of being creative and not repeating the same articles over and over again.
What is more annoying is that webmasters can make money with content replication. Search for “How to make money online” and you will most likely get 10 similar posts on the main search page. The only credit that goes for the webmaster is its ability to be ranked on the first page of Google. Apart from that, it’s more or less the same content.
The Web is empty because probably 98% of the content is duplicate content re-written in the hope of getting some traffic and making a couple of bucks out of it. Sad thing is it works if you manage to get traffic.
I understand sometimes as a blogger you don’t have time to write but you have to write a little something for your readers. It’s quick and easy to take existing content and re-write it a bit, but this shouldn’t be more than 1-2% of the posts.
Anyway, I would just like to see more original content and stop having the impression of re-visiting the same web site over and over.
How to Avoid Internet scams
Posted by: | CommentsI’ve seen numerous persons being scammed on the Internet and it always surprised me a bit. I agree the Internet has changed the way we think and no longer do we need to leave our homes to go shopping or find the information we need. We can surf the net and shop from the convenience of our homes. But with this has come some risks. There’s risks when you shop, when you sign up on a website and even just when surfing the Web.
Number one trick - Spyware and virus
Spyware is computer software that is installed surreptitiously on a personal computer to intercept or take partial control over the user’s interaction with the computer, without the user’s informed consent.
Spyware are installed on your computer just by browsing the Web without you knowing. These spywares then gather informations about what you do with your computer, like what sites you visit, what do you search for, etc. It is very important to get rid of those as it’s a pure and simple invasion of your privacy. The same way, you have to avoid viruses. You’ll get infected by viruses usually by downloading something from an unsafe website.
How do you prevent spyware and virus ruining your Internet experience? Simply get a good Spyware remover and an Anti virus. Don’t want to pay for it, but still want the best tools? Get the Google pack! With Google pack you get a free lifetime version of Norton with a free spyware protection tool, it’s definitely worth the download! And it’s a safe download from Google…Download it with this link button:
Number two trick - Be a safe buyer
It is important you buy from reliable websites. There’s obviously websites you can trust buying from like amazon.com, apple.com, etc. but what about less known sites? Before buying always do a search on Google for reviews on the website you want to buy from. There’s a ton of websites actually collecting customers’ feedback about their purchase online. If it’s a reliable website, you will most likely find information and reviews on it. You’ll be able to read about other persons experience and take a decision.
If you buy on eBay or similar online auction website, always make sure the person you buy from has a near 100% positive feedback.
Number three trick - Pay with paypal when you can
Paypal is an e-commerce business allowing payments and money transfers to be made through the Internet. It serves as an electronic alternative to traditional paper methods such as cheques and money orders. PayPal performs payment processing for online vendors, auction sites, and other corporate users [...]
When you can pay through Paypal, do it. If you don’t know how it works, it’s pretty simple: You give your credit card or account information to paypal and then you can pay other persons/companies through Paypal. It’s actually like if you were paying Paypal and then Paypal giving the money to the seller. This way the seller never get you credit information, only Paypal has it. Paypal is really safe and is the most used payment service on the Internet. It’s actually owned by eBay so you can use it with confidence. This is a nice way to avoid your credit information being spread all over the Internet.
Number four trick - Get information
Never sign up for anything without knowing the website reputation. Whether it’s for a work at home website or anything like that, make your own research with Google before giving any personal information. If it’s a scam you’ll find about it and if it’s not you’ll also find out. It’s really easy. There’s tons of forums out there and Google is your best friend!
Happy safe surfing!
