Chalk up one for the defenders: a trio of security researchers used a three-step attack to defeat a 250,000-pronged botnet.

For two years as a researcher with security company FireEye, Atif Mushtaq worked to keep Mega-D bot malware from infecting clients’ networks. In the process, he learned how its controllers operated it. Last June, he began publishing his findings online. In November, he suddenly switched from de­­fense to offense. And Mega-D–a powerful, resilient botnet that had forced 250,000 PCs to do its bidding–went down.

Targeting Controllers

Mushtaq and two FireEye colleagues went after Mega-D’s command infrastructure. A botnet’s first wave of attack uses e-mail attachments, Web-based offensives, and other distribution methods to infect huge numbers of PCs with malicious bot programs.

The bots receive marching orders from online command and control (C&C) servers, but those servers are the botnet’s Achilles’ heel: Isolate them, and the undirected bots will sit idle. Mega-D’s controllers used a far-flung array of C&C servers, however, and every bot in its army had been assigned a list of additional destinations to try if it couldn’t reach its primary command server. So taking down Mega-D would require a carefully coordinated attack.

Synchronized Assault

Mushtaq’s team first contacted Internet service providers that unwittingly hosted Mega-D control servers; his research showed that most of the servers were based in the United States, with one in Turkey and another in Israel.

The FireEye group received positive responses except from the overseas ISPs. The domestic C&C servers went down.

Next, Mushtaq and company contacted domain-name registrars holding records for the domain names that Mega-D used for its control servers. The registrars collaborated with FireEye to point Mega-D’s existing domain names to no­­where. By cutting off the botnet’s pool of domain names, the antibotnet operatives ensured that bots could not reach Mega-D-affiliated servers that the overseas ISPs had declined to take down.

Finally, FireEye and the registrars worked to claim spare domain names that Mega-D’s controllers listed in the bots’ programming. The controllers intended to register and use one or more of the spare do­­mains if the existing domains went down–so FireEye picked them up and pointed them to “sinkholes” (servers it had set up to sit quietly and log efforts by Mega-D bots to check in for orders). Using those logs, FireEye estimated that the botnet consisted of about 250,000 Mega-D-infected computers.

Down Goes Mega-D

MessageLabs, a Symantec e-mail security subsidiary, reports that Mega-D had “consistently been in the top 10 spam bots” for the previous year (find.pcworld.com/64165). The botnet’s output fluctuated from day to day, but on November 1 Mega-D accounted for 11.8 percent of all spam that MessageLabs saw. Three days later, FireEye’s action had reduced Mega-D’s market share of Internet spam to less than 0.1 percent, MessageLabs says.

FireEye plans to hand off the anti-Mega-D effort to ShadowServer.org, a volunteer group that will track the IP addresses of infected machines and contact affected ISPs and businesses. Business network or ISP administrators can register for the free notification service.

Continuing the Battle

Mushtaq recognizes that FireEye’s successful offensive against Mega-D was just one battle in the war on malware. The criminals behind Mega-D may try to revive their botnet, he says, or they may abandon it and create a new one. But other botnets continue to thrive.

“FireEye did have a major victory,” says Joe Stewart, director of malware research with SecureWorks. “The question is, will it have a long-term impact?”

Like FireEye, Stewart’s security company protects client networks from botnets and other threats; and like Mushtaq, Stewart has spent years combating criminal enterprises. In 2009, Stewart outlined a proposal to create volunteer groups dedicated to making botnets unprofitable to run. But few security professionals could commit to such a time-consuming volunteer activity.

“It takes time and resources and money to do this day after day,” Stewart says. Other, under-the-radar strikes at various botnets and criminal organizations have occurred, he says, but these laudable efforts are “not going to stop the business model of the spammer.”

Mushtaq, Stewart, and other security pros agree that federal law enforcement needs to step in with full-time coordination efforts. According to Stewart, regulators haven’t begun drawing up serious plans to make that happen, but Mushtaq says that FireEye is sharing its method with domestic and international law enforcement, and he’s hopeful.

Source:Network World

The iPhone, Oracle’s Sun buyout, and Windows 7 dominated the year’s tech news. Discover the key events that fell under the media radar

Think your wireless service is crummy? Just wait until next year when the spectrum drought really hits home. And maybe you’ve been telling your users that installing a graphics card in an office PC is a waste of money. If that’s the case, you’re missing a chance to make them a lot more productive (as long as the games stay at home). You’ve known about CMOS for years. But do you know that an emerging technology called PCMOS, which uses non-Boolean logic, is on the verge of slashing power consumption in ASICs?

Those are just three of the ten top technology stories of 2009 you probably haven’t heard about. Our writers, editors, and contributors have scoured the landscape, pinged their sources, and stayed up late to find the news you need to stay on top of the lightning-fast changes sweeping the information technology industry.

In a year when Google’s Android finally made the mobile market a multiplatform competition, when Microsoft seemed to redeem itself with the launch of Windows 7 and the beta releases of various 2010 server products, Oracle swallowed Sun as enterprise software vendors continued to consolidate, and the bottom fell out of the IT employment market, it’s no wonder that many important stories went unnoticed.  We think you’ll find these stories interesting and, above all, useful. Happy New Year!

The top 10 underreported tech stories of 2009

1. Wireless broadband woes are harder to fix than you might realize

2. “Conflict minerals” in your PC and cell phone fuel civil war in Congo

3. Malware’s new frontier: Organized gangs tricking users to act stupidly

4. GPU computing: Graphics accelerators aid mainstream, even business, PCs

5. Dumber may be smarter: Less-accurate chips bring more speed and savings on power and heat

6. Lawyers begin trolling in the cloud

7. Ruby on Rails gets respect in the enterprise

8. From feast to famine: Dark fiber gets hard, and expensive, to find

9. Patent Office to inventors: See you in 2013

10. Enterprise wikis become a platform

Source:Info World

China’s state news channel has blamed hugely popular online games for problems including drug addiction, teen pregnancy and even murder this month as regulators crack down on allegedly harmful content in games.

China’s state news channel has blamed hugely popular online games for problems including drug addiction, teen pregnancy and even murder this month as regulators crack down on allegedly harmful content in games.

In a program titled “Confession of a Murderer — Focus on Pornography and Violence in Online Games (Part Two),” China Central Television (CCTV) on Thursday reported on a Beijing juvenile prison where one man was serving a life sentence for murders he committed to obtain virtual equipment in an online game. Up to 80 percent of the violent criminals in the prison turned to crime because of online games, the report said.

“He himself killed five people, and the reason he took the path to crime was addiction to violent online games,” it said.

The program follows other CCTV reports this month that have blamed social ills on online games and given voice to concerns among some Chinese parents that excessive time spent on games and social-networking sites is interfering with their children’s schoolwork.

The reports, which also come amid a wide-reaching government campaign against Internet pornography, show how erratic political conditions can threaten companies operating in China. Chinese regulators this year have shut down dozens of online games designed overseas and ordered developers to stop including “lowbrow” content like monster-hunting in games. A struggle between government agencies for the right to regulate online games has further roiled the industry and helped send the hit game World of Warcraft offline for three months earlier this year.

Chinese state media have long criticized online games. The last installment of the CCTV series told the story of a 14-year-old girl purportedly influenced by an online dancing game to start having sex with people she met online. The game, called “Audition,” was said to encourage one-night stands and the girl to have had two abortions.

CCTV this month also aired a report on teenagers who became addicted to cough medicine and then drugs like methamphetamine as a way to keep their energy up during all-night gaming marathons. The boys were said to spend their time in Internet cafes, which are often filled with chain-smoking young men using instant-messaging programs and playing online games.

China has the largest number of Internet users in any country with at least 338 million people online. Over 210 million of those people play online games, according to a government survey.

Source:IDG News

According to recently released research from the Pew Center, we’re just as optimistic about the web as we were ten years ago during the Internet’s first boom cycle.

At the end of 2009, most Americans in this Pew survey have a dismal view of the 2000s. Between the Iraq war, the 9/11 attacks, economic and political distress and the curse of reality television, the decade has been voted the worst in our collective memory. But one of few bright spots in a tense ten-year period was and remains technological innovation, including the Internet, cell phones and email. Social sites, however, still have a way to go in the public eye.

Over a five-day period, the Pew Center interviewed 1,504 American adults and asked them to weigh their feelings about culture and technology over time. The respondents’ answers are enlightening.

While positive feelings outweigh negative ones for almost every cultural epoch from 1960 until 1999, our feelings about the 2000s are predominantly unhappy. Fully 50 percent of respondents have an overall negative impression of the past decade, while only 27 percent said they felt positively about these years.

It is worth noting that the greater a respondent’s age, the less likely he or she was to view these technological changes positively. For example, 45 percent of folks between the ages of 18 and 49 – a huge demographic – saw social networking websites as having positive effects on our society. But after the 50-years-old mark, that percentage lowered significantly to between 25 and 21 percent.

It’s also interesting to note that the dot-com crash hasn’t effected our late-nineties optimism about where the Internet would take us. Most of us still feel, as we did in 1999, that the Internet is having an overall positive effect on Americans.

Again, these responses were subject to age. Around three-quarters of younger respondents saw the web as a positive change, but only 42 percent of people age 65 and older felt the same way. But these older Americans didn’t seem to think the Internet was necessarily negative, either. Their responses indicated that they were unsure of its impact or thought its influence was negligible. Another correlation in this opinion was between a positive view of the Internet and a college education. A full 82 percent of folks with a college degree said the web is doing good things for America.

The year 2009 was pretty good to Microsoft, even as the weak economy ravaged sales. Microsoft actually did a few things right. For now, I present the list of 10 things Microsoft did right in 2009 — in no order of importance. They’re all important. Microsoft:

1. Flawlessly launched Windows 7. There’s a metaphor somehow in Microsoft launching Windows 7 during the 40th anniversary year of the Apollo moon landing. Microsoft’s precision reminds of NASA sending man to the moon. While the human risk wasn’t as great and many of the engineering challenges were far less than Apollo 11, Windows 7 needed perfect launch and delivery, from testing to release candidate to voluming licensing availability and retail release. Microsoft pulled it off.

It’s clear that Microsoft re-engineered the engineering process. The mistakes that led to overlong development of Windows Vista, the dumping of well-publicized features and late delivery (How could Microsoft miss Holiday 2006?) didn’t reappear. Microsoft successfully executed a taunt development schedule, improved performance in the right places (like startup and wakeup), made better the user interface and insured that most drivers would be available for popular devices.

Microsoft’s success was as much about managing perceptions as developing and delivering a good product. The company clearly worked the blogs that Microsoft influencers, IT managers and some consumers read, as well social networks and forums they might participate in. Early positive reviews and some kick-ass “Laptop Hunters” marketing helped Windows 7 to pull free from the negative reaction gravity that kept Windows Vista from achieving escape velocity.

2. Opened retail stores. Coordinated with Windows 7’s launch, Microsoft opened retail stores in Arizona and California and a café in France. The stores are a first step that will need many more to follow. During his Consumer Electronics Show 2009 keynote, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said that companies most likely to succeed after a recession make investments during one. Retail stores are one such investment. Apple opened its first retail stores during the 2000-01 recession. Microsoft’s situation and timing remind of Apple in May 2001, for starters during a recession. Microsoft’s retail strategy will require commitment, if necessary, including running stores at losses for their greater marketing benefit.

3. Offered crapware-free PCs. Microsoft started selling Windows 7 PCs through its online and brick-and-mortar stores in October, free of the preloaded software — crapware — that can bog down the performance of even a new system. It’s an important change to giving Windows 7 PC users the experience Microsoft engineered out of the box.

4. Launched Bing. Microsoft’s “decision engine” may never catch Google. Bing will cannibalize Yahoo search share first. But as a consumer product, with excellent user interface and simply exceptional advertising, Bing already is helping to revive Microsoft’s brand outside of the business market. Search is the most popular activity on the Web. By being there with a solid product and big brand, Microsoft can snatch some of the good consumer feeling that Apple or Google gets.

5. Released Security Essentials. Microsoft finally did the right thing by customers and the Windows brand by offering free malware protection. No doubt, Microsoft long resisted the inevitable for the benefit of its anti-malware software partners and for concern about antitrust problems. Security Essentials is reliable malware protection that doesn’t overtax Windows. For 2010, Microsoft could make the software better by making it even easier for consumers to get — say, on new PCs.

6. Promoted Steven Sinofsky. The man who methodically led the team that turned around Microsoft’s flagship operating system now leads the Windows & Windows Live division. Sinfosky hugely deserved the promotion to president of the division (see #1). Next up: Turning around Windows Live. Can Sinofsky and team deliver? First answer may come at MIX 10, in March.

7. Released Zune 4.0 software and Zune HD. It’s too bad iPod is so popular. Zune 4.0 and Zune HD are both kick-ass products. Microsoft showed that Xbox 360 and Xbox Live aren’t flukes. Microsoft can provide good end-to-end solutions in other markets. The company also learned, hopefully, an important lesson: Backwards compatibility isn’t everything. Microsoft broke backwards compatibility, by providing new features in Zune HD not available for older devices.

8. Settled antitrust case with the European Union. Last week’s browser “Choice Screen” agreement with the EU’s Competition Commission is much bigger than it seems. Microsoft’s concessions did more than end the browser antitrust case, they effectively sidelined another open investigation, by the company agreeing to release additional interoperability information — and for products broader than Windows, including Office and SharePoint Server.

9. Improved advertising. Microsoft advertising has long been major lame, particularly the persistent and pointless corporate commercials. From February, Microsoft hit a series of marketing home runs, each stronger than the last:

• “The Rookies,” featuring cute kids using Windows Live Photo Gallery.
• “Laptop Hunters,” where people shopped for a PC, which they could keep if within their pre-agreed budget.
• “Bing,” which commercials made real the limitations of search keywords.
• “Windows 7 was my idea,” what anyone’s idea of good Microsoft advertising should be.

If 2010 advertising is this good, or even better, Microsoft will get a good branding start for the new decade.

10. Debuted Silverlight 4.0. Microsoft continued making its nearly annual updates to Silverlight, releasing v4 beta during Professional Developers Conference 2009. Sadly, Silverlight 4.0 was the only real light coming out of PDC. Internet Explorer 9 is vaporware and Azure has morphed into last year’s Amazon Web Services. But Silverlight promises Adobe AIR-like capabilities, support for microphones and Webcams, standalone Silverlight containers and better HTML support, including HTTP streaming, among other new features. A good thing is getting even better.

Source:Betanews

Earlier today, I posted “10 things Microsoft did right in 2009.” I originally planned to post the did-wrong list tomorrow. But in view of today’s news about Microsoft’s out-going chief financial officer, Chris Liddell, I changed the timetable. Liddell’s departure is one of the things Microsoft did wrong in 2009 (He will become CFO at GM).

The did-wrong list was way too much easier to compile than the did-right list. I could easily put 20 items here. The year 2009 was perhaps the most difficult for Microsoft since Bill Gates and Paul Allen founded the company nearly 35 years ago. Company executives can thank economic turmoil for the hardships. But Microsoft could have handled 2009 much better than it did. Hopefully, 2010 will be better.

I present the list of 10 things Microsoft did wrong in 2009 in no order of importance. They’re all important. Microsoft:

1. Let Chris Liddell get away. Liddell has proven to be an exceptionally adept Microsoft CFO. He managed Microsoft finances in better times and bad, doing a resounding good job overseeing difficult cost cutting as global economic crisis sapped software sales. Liddell has an excellent relationship with Wall Street analysts and — until January (see #4) — he offered continually conservative guidance to them. His departure is a huge loss at Microsoft’s highest executive level.

There is simply no excuse for Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and his board of directors letting Liddell leave for General Motors. No incentive should have been enough to keep him, although given Liddell’s tight-fisted financial operations during the econolypse, as CFO he might not have allowed it. How ironic is that?

2. Offered no direct Windows XP to Windows 7 upgrade. Some Betanews readers will be surprised to read that this only marginally makes the list. From a customer relations and software sales perspective, the Windows XP upgrade path to 7 is a frak up. Windows XP users shouldn’t have to backup everything, do a clean installation and restore data from backup. For many enterprises, a fresh image would be business as usual. For consumers and small businesses, Microsoft has placed a huge deterrent to Windows 7 upgrades.

But like with Zune HD (see #7 in the did-right list), Microsoft backed away from the shackles of its longstanding practice of putting backwards compatibility before anything else. From that perspective, the Windows XP to Windows 7 upgrade is something Microsoft did right — and hopefully foreshadows more of it. Microsoft can’t support every customer running any old version of its software. Such practice keeps Windows from being the modern operating system it needs to be.

3. Laid off Don Dodge. Microsoft’s January announcement of 5,000-plus layoffs showed how quickly the economic crisis waylaid the company. Or did it? In a future post I will apply a magnifying glass to Microsoft layoffs, which appear to have been more about firing highly paid, tenured staff than making necessary cuts of employee fat. Microsoft’s ambassador to Silicon Valley, Don Dodge, was the most surprising of the layoffs — and yet from the perspective of lopping big salaries it was not. Microsoft lost three things with Dodge:

• Vital experience sussing out good startups
• Someone well respected in Silicon Valley
• An ally, who became a competitive enemy

In mid November, less than two weeks after being laid off by Microsoft, Dodge took a job with Google. How the frak did Microsoft executives not see that one coming?

4. Withheld financial guidance. Starting in January, Microsoft stopped giving financial guidance to Wall Street. It was simply a disastrous decision that established an even worse precedent. Sure, the guidance couldn’t be good (given sagging sales) and risked further run on the stock, as if the last quarter of 2008 wasn’t bad enough for Microsoft and nearly every other public company. But bad guidance would have been better than none. Successful public companies don’t just manage finances, they manage perceptions about their performance.

By withholding guidance, Microsoft let uncertainty and gossip determine perceptions about its sales and earnings performance. By comparison, Apple continued to release guidance and, combined with marketing and product launches and leaks, generated positive perceptions. These perceptions helped to lift Apple’s share price to new heights. Meanwhile, Microsoft shares remained in the doldrums, even while quarterly results remained relatively buoyant considering economic conditions. Microsoft lost opportunity to generate really positive perceptions on Wall Street during Windows 7’s late development and October launch.

5. Botched the mobile phone strategy. Earlier this month, I encouraged Microsoft not to hang up on its mobile phone strategy. But the company has fewer options by the day, as hardware manufacturers hang up on Windows Mobile and shift to Google’s Android. In October and mid-December posts, I observed how Google has put together a winning mobile strategy — in third quarter, according to Gartner, reaching 3.5 percent smartphone market share, up from zero a year earlier.

Meanwhile, Microsoft has got simply nothing to offer. Windows Mobile 6.5, which launched in October, lags behind Android and iPhone OS in critical areas of innovation. Meanwhile, Windows Mobile 7.0 is MIA, with rumors running about delays into late 2010 or early 2011. Microsoft’s mobile browser is oh-so early century, and the company is rapidly losing developers to Apple and Google. With sophisticated handsets and smartphones poised to be, with cloud services, the next-generation computing platform, Microsoft’s disastrous, run-aground mobile strategy is just short of corporate malfeasance against shareholders.

6. Chased Google in search — again. Microsoft should just give up its pursuit of Google in Web search from PCs. Google’s search share lead is insurmountable. Microsoft’s only real hope is mobile, which will be the future of search, but the company’s mobile strategy is hosed (as explained in #5). Microsoft frittered away 2008 chasing Yahoo, only to bag a Yahoo search deal in July of this year.

I called the agreement “Google’s Christmas-in-July present.” As I predicted then, and as recent ComScore numbers show, Microsoft can only take search share from Yahoo; when the deal is complete and implemented, Microsoft will cannibalize Yahoo share rather than combine with it. Microsoft’s Google search obsession distracts the company from what’s important: Mobile and the cloud, which will be the next-generation computing platform.

7. Retrenched into enterprise. Microsoft responded to the economic crisis by doing exactly what Ballmer recommended against. In January, during his Consumer Electronics Show 2009 keynote, Microsoft’s CEO extolled the importance of investing during hard times — that historically successful companies reaped from research and development and other investments sowed during recessions. But Microsoft did something else: Retreat to the enterprise. Microsoft also killed vital incubation projects (see #9).

Nearly as bad (reiterating #6), Google continued to set the development agenda, with Microsoft again chasing the search giant’s every cloud software or service. Aside from some modest Bing features and user interface changes, Microsoft failed to leap ahead of its rival.

8. Allowed netbooks to grow unchecked. Netbooks are a plague, sucking the margins out of the PC industry and from Microsoft. The company should have used every means imaginable to discourage these pesky, cheap underpowered portables. But somewhere inside the hallowed halls of Microsoft’s corporate campus, someone freaked about all those early netbooks running Linux, resulting in the disastrous 2008 decision to license Windows XP Home for the little buggers. If Linux on netbooks is so bad an experience, as Microsoft product managers claim, sales collapse should have been the future without Windows licensing.

Instead, Microsoft encouraged netbooks’ continued sales surge by licensing Windows 7 Starter Edition for them, all the while pushing costlier, thin-and-light laptops as the better alternative. Cheap rules the day. Gartner predicted that netbooks — and not Windows 7 — would lift sagging 2009 PC sales.

9. Killed incubation projects. Microsoft didn’t just wield the cost-cutting axe against valuable employees, it whacked vital incubation projects. The nastiness started in earnest with April’s gutting of Live Labs. As I blogged then: “Stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid. Did I not say stupid?” Microsoft continued jettisoning projects all year, again, contradicting Ballmer’s January assertion “that companies and industries that continue to pursue innovation during tough economic times will achieve a significant competitive advantage positioning themselves for growth far more effectively than companies that hold back. That’s why Microsoft continues to focus on R&D.”

Oh, yeah? How is killing incubation projects investing in R&D? Some of Microsoft’s best product development over the last three years came from incubation groups that acted more like internal startups. Who’s running this company, if the CEO says one thing and underlings do something else — or, worse, he is the contradiction?

10. Licensed ActiveSync to Google. Synchronization is the killer application for the connected world. So why in hell would Microsoft license its synchronization protocols to competitor Google? Perhaps someone at Microsoft saw advantage for Exchange Server. That’s one way Google used ActiveSync, but not where the company got the real bang.

Immediately, Google used ActiveSync for e-mail, calendar and contact synchronization from its cloud services to iPhone and Windows Mobile handsets. Google also used the technology to provide Exchange Server sync with Google Apps, so that businesses could use the hosted service instead of Outlook. Sync is quickly defining Google’s mobile handset and mobile cloud strategies, and Microsoft helped move it along faster. How dumb is that?

Source:Betanews

Firefox hit a new milestone today, as version 3.5 overtook Internet Explorer 7.0 with nearly 22% of the browser market, according to statistics from web analytics service StatCounter. This comes on the heels of statistics we saw earlier this month, which showed Firefox overtaking IE for overall usage in Germany.

For many reasons, the last decade has been both very difficult to me and also very kind to me in a variety of conflicting ways. I’ve had personal tragedies in my life that have brought me to my knees, while at the same time (and in some cases because of those tragedies) I’ve stumbled upon one opportunity after another. One of those opportunities was entering the Search Engine Optimization industry almost half a decade ago.

I initially stumbled upon the industry while I was struggling to win contract bids at freelance project bidding sites in order to earn extra income for my family. I took on a very underpaid role with the owner of a small interior design business who wanted to use a blog attached to his business website in order to draw in potential customers. He wanted what just about every blog owner out there today wants – highly optimized content that would draw in crowds from the search engines.

The SEO Learning Process

Here’s the first thing that I learned the moment I jumped into the SEO pool – the industry is full of sharks and “gurus.”  Often, I would find advice from someone who seemed to know what they were talking about, but it turned out the advice was 1990’s-era SEO, filled with common SEO mistakes and no longer an effective technique in today’s Web 2.0 world. And the sharks, – there are some SEO experts so fed up with the bad advice and the SEO scam artists that there are now entire blogs devoted to exposing bad SEO and revealing those common SEO mistakes – such as the aptly-named bad-seo.com.

I pity the folks that make the hit list of a blog like that! With that said, blogs like this serve an important purpose – they educate businesses and blog owners about the serious dangers of hiring an SEO “expert” who either (a) doesn’t really know what they’re doing, and/or (b) makes use of “black hat SEO” techniques that can gather significant immediate traffic, but will ultimately destroy your long term ranking with Google.

The Top Ten Most Common SEO Mistakes To Avoid

In the process studying SEO techniques over the years, I learned that many of the older techniques and myths from the 1990’s are not only ineffective anymore, but in some cases they can seriously hurt your website or blog search engine ranking.  So I would like to share a few of those SEO mistakes and help you avoid driving your blog or website straight off of the information superhighway and into the ditch.

SEO Mistake #1: Packing Meta-Tags Full Of Keywords Will NOT Optimize Your Page

During the 90’s, the extent of “SEO optimizing” for many webmasters was simply to insert relevant keyword phrases into the meta-tags for a page. Here’s an example of a site that’s heavily focused on the meta-keywords:

There’s nothing necessarily wrong with adding keywords into this field that represents valid information on the page itself, but placing a long list of similar phrases with duplicate words (reaching 10 or 12 phrases) is a major SEO faux pas.

And as of this year, September 2009 to be exact, due to many years of webmasters constantly using meta-keywords to spam keywords, Google no longer even looks at the meta-keywords in order to rank your website.  This doesn’t mean the meta-keywords are not useful for aligning the page with particular valuable search phrases – but it certainly is nowhere near as valuable as it used to be, and overusing it can put your site at risk for a lower ranking.

SEO Mistake #2 & #3: Using The Keywords In Your Title & Permalinks

When you visit MakeUseOf, you’ll notice that not only are the titles descriptive and relevant to what the article is actually about, but the URL link (otherwise known as the permalink) is as well. Every SEO guru worth his salt knows that the two most effective areas of a webpage that you can get the most bang for your efforts is the title and permalink.

They don’t always necessarily have to the be same, but they do need to focus on the a primary keyword phrase that you’re trying to target with your article. If you don’t target that phrase in your title and permalink, you’re wasting your time and you’ll only reach a small fraction of your intended online audience. In Wordpress, you can set up your permalink to be descriptive like this.

As you can see, I’ve set up my blog TopSecretWriters to use the month/name and post title.  Never set it up to use some nonsense numbering system.

SEO Mistake #4 & #5: Using Javascript Or Using Only Flash/AJAX

I would never suggest that a web designer shouldn’t make use of the latest and greatest website scripting languages that offer a more interactive online experience, but to use scripting to serve up all or a majority of your website content is SEO suicide. Take the website of fashion entrepreneur Marc Ecko for example.

The site is completely written in Flash. It is actually touted by most web design experts as one of the best-designed Flash websites on the net. Flash and AJAX websites are aesthetically superior to most traditional websites, however they struggle when it comes to search engine ranking because there’s virtually nothing for search engines to crawl. The same goes for websites that utilize Javascript to generate web pages on-the-fly depending on user interaction. Search engine crawlers cannot touch those script-generated pages at all.

The creator of Marc’s website tried to make up for this by listing about half a page of keywords in the Meta-Keyword tag – but how much will this help now that Google no longer looks at meta-keywords to rank websites? These sort of sites are excellent, but there should always be hand-coded primary HTML content that you can optimize even though there’s Flash on the page.

Build Your SEO Optimized Site From The Ground Up

The fact is that SEO optimizing should begin from the moment you lay down the first stone of your website’s foundation. That’s not to say that an existing site can’t be “fixed,” but you’ll see far more success if you get your website off on the right foot from day one. The tips above focus on how your website is built, and the elements that identify each web page to the world. In part two, I’ll discuss the actual content of your page and how you can optimize your site without ruining the quality of your content.

Do you have any SEO tips of your own? Did you make any mistakes that you’ve learned from? Share your experiences in the comments section below.

Source:Makeuseof

The mobile Internet is growing faster than its desktop counterpart ever did, and more users may go online via mobile devices than desktop PCs within five years, according to a new study by investment firm Morgan Stanley.

The mobile Internet is growing faster than its desktop counterpart ever did, and more users may go online via mobile devices than desktop PCs within five years, according to a new study by investment firm Morgan Stanley.

20 Mobile Trends and Future Technologies

The intriguing prediction is one of many in the firm’s massive “The Mobile Internet Report,” a 424-page epic that someone, somewhere is bound to read in its entirety. For the rest of us, the executive summary will do just fine. If you’re interested in perusing the full report, you’ll find it here.

The report states we’re “now in the early innings” of mobile Internet development, which is growing faster than previous tech cycles, including the evolution of the desktop PC. Given the rapid adoption of smartphones, including (obviously) the Apple iPhone and a growing number of devices using Google’s Android mobile operating system, Morgan Stanley’s conclusions shouldn’t surprise anyone.

The study also points out that mobile Net growth is global phenomenon, not one confined to the developed world, which was typically the case with prior tech trends. But despite the worldwide focus, U.S. companies including Apple, Google, and Amazon are taking a leadership role. Furthermore, “a host of relatively young, but seasoned world-class technology veterans,” including Apple CEO Steve Jobs and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, are leading the mobile push, the report states.

Five key tech trends are converging to spur mobile Net growth, including 3G (and soon 4G) broadband, the popularity of social networking, online video, VOIP services such as Skype and Vonage, and “awesome mobile devices” that do tasks that until recently were the sole domain of your desktop or laptop PC.

The short term looks especially bright for Apple, but challenges await.

The “mobile ecosystem” of the iPhone, iPod touch, iTunes, and various accessories and services will continue to bloom over the next two years. After that, however, Google Android, competition from emerging markets, and wireless carrier limitations may pose a threat to Apple’s market share, the report predicts.

There’s little doubt the mobile Internet will dominate in the coming years–just look how far mobile handsets have come since the debut of the iPhone in 2007. Toss in a growing selection of rapidly improving smartphones, a new breed of wireless-ready tablet devices, e-readers like the Amazon Kindle, and faster 4G networks, and it’s easy to see that mobile is the future of the Net.

Source:cio

Three vendors, three different paths on dealing with the open-source data architecture

The three leaders of the relational database market are responding to the sudden mania for the data processing technology Hadoop in three very different ways.

While startups and established data warehousing vendors such as Sybase Inc. and Teradata Inc. are embracing Hadoop and its Google-developed progenitor, MapReduce, Microsoft Corp. is resisting it.

“We’d never bring Hadoop code into one of our products,” said Microsoft technical fellow and University of Wisconsin-Madison professor David J. DeWitt.

DeWitt’s lack of interest is not surprising. DeWitt is an academic expert in parallel SQL databases, having co-invented three of them. He co-authored a paper this spring that argued that SQL databases still beat MapReduce at most tasks. He hasn’t changed his mind.

“Every database vendor wants to claim that they’re doing Hadoop because it’s the popular thing,” he said. “There’s too much FUD. SQL databases still work pretty well.”

DeWitt leads a database research lab at Madison that is helping Microsoft with R&D for its upcoming Parallel Data Warehousing version of SQL Server 2008 R2, formerly known as Project Madison.

As such, he said that the new edition of SQL Server will add some analytic functions that roughly mimic some of the features of MapReduce/Hadoop.

The additions are the result of incorporating technology from DATAllegro Inc., which Microsoft acquired, not Hadoop, DeWitt said.

He said does acknowledge, however, that MapReduce/Hadoop is better at keeping long-running queries from crashing than SQL.

Because of that, Microsoft may eventually try to incorporate those capabilities into future data warehousing-oriented versions of SQL Server, he said.

That would likely be a Microsoft-led effort, rather than a licensing of Hadoop’s open-source code, which is managed by the Apache Software Foundation.

IBM is the leading corporate supporter of Apache. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it is also “very bullish on Hadoop,” said Anant Jhingran, CTO of IBM’s information management division in the software group.

“I’m not saying that mind-melding Hadoop with a database is the answer for everything,” Jhingran said. “But in the end, I think every enterprise will want Hadoop. I’m just not sure in what form.”

Questions remain about whether enterprises want Hadoop integrated into their SQL databases, as a separate data warehousing appliance, or as a Web-only service where Hadoop is hidden underneath, as with IBM’s experimental M2 service.

To determine this, IBM is running pilots with a dozen enterprise customers, as well as doing R&D work in the lab, Jhingran said. He declined to comment on the likelihood of Hadoop functionality making it into the next version of DB2 or Informix.

One thing is for certain, says Jhingran: Hadoop is best used to solve emerging problems such as Web analytics, fraud, and analysis of unstructured and semi-structured data, rather than the problems that relational databases have already proven to excel with.

“For those vendors who simply want to use Hadoop to build a database replacement, I think they will fall flat on their faces,” he said. SQL technology “supports a $300 billion ecosystem. It’s extremely robust. I’m not that young [at 46], but I’ll be retired before SQL is retired.”

Oracle Database stands to lose the most if MapReduce/Hadoop takes off, critics say.

That’s not just because of Oracle’s longtime lead in the relational database market, but also because of its database’s poor reputation for scale-out — a MapReduce/Hadoop strength.

Oracle did not respond to a request for comment. But in October, it published a blog which argued, in the words of independent analyst Curt Monash, that “actually, we’ve been doing MapReduce all along.”

A senior product manager at Oracle, Jean-Pierre Dijcks, said parallel processing of large data sets been possible with Oracle Database using features first introduced with Oracle 9i back in 2001. He describes in detail how to implement it in a blog post.

“MapReduce in the end is a programming construct … SQL will allow for massive parallel processing as well. It is all a matter of looking beyond hype and finding a solution you are comfortable with,”

source:Computerworld