Click PLAY to Watch the demo

If you’ve been watching what’s going on in SEO (search engine optimisation) and other areas of web technology, you’ll already be aware that VIDEO is big and getting bigger.

People really respond to videos, so they are becoming a must-have for businesses who want to engage the user, establish a rapport and hopefully sell a service or item.

The problem is that videos of an acceptable quality, which are effective for small businesses to use as promotional tools, are too expensive or too complex to use, or both.

Video marketing had to evolve. It was inevitable.

It was becoming much too complicated. And if it isn’t too complicated for some people, it’s still definitely too time consuming.

You had to worry about the following:

• Redoing videos over and over again to make sure you got everything right in one take or face the daunting task of loading your raw video into Camtasia or another editor to make everything perfect.
• Making sure your videos were optimized for the web (So they looked good and didn’t take too long to start playing).
• Having a different mobile version of your videos to show users of iPhone, iPad, Android and other mobile devices (More and more people are doing most of the web viewing from their smart phones and other mobile devices).
• Basically using “duct-tape” to try and put all the pieces together with Camtasia, Screenflow, Jing, Handbrake while continually looking for the “perfect” solution to make it all easier or less time consuming.
• Uploading large files to your own server, Youtube, Amazon S3 or other video hosting service.
• Getting the proper code in place to display your videos with the hope that mobile devices would be able to see the mobile version of your video.

Well, someone has finally done something about it.

Josh Bartlett, the creator of the industries leading video player called Easy Video Player, has truly done something innovative in video marketing.

His Easy Video Player software had game-changing features two years ago that other video marketing solutions have just recently tried to introduce.

And on top of that, Josh could boast about the following:

• Tens of thousands of satisfied customers.
• The lowest refund rate in the industry for Clickbank (Only 2%).
• More top marketers and 6 to 7 figure launches use Easy Video Player than anything else. (Mike Filsaime, Chris Farrel, Ryan Deiss, Jason Moffatt, Maria Andros, Justin Brooketo name a few).

Rather than throw in a few, new and “cool” features and re-launch his product simply for the money, he listened to his customers and did something else.

He took over two years and hundreds of thousands of his own dollars to create something that will change the way you market your business with videos.

You’ll now be able to record, edit, publish, market and track all your videos with one, easy-to-use solution.

Josh is releasing this all-in-one video marketing solution on January 15th, 2013 with a free video series leading up to the launch.

Watch the first video here.

He’s going to reveal the story about his journey and passion that led him to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars from his own pocket to create the ultimate video marketing solution.

And how you can now do the following:

• Drag and drop your video into a desktop application (Mac and Pc Compatible) that will optimize and convert your video for the web, let you edit if needed, upload it and give you the code to copy and paste to your website.
• Record your screen or face camera from within this application and even draw on the screen.
• Never worry about whether users on mobile devices can see your videos (It creates and displays a mobile version of your videos for you).
• Split test your videos to see which ones are shared the most, have the most engagement and which versions make the most money.

That’s just scratching the surface…

What all this ultimately means for you is that marketing your business with videos is going to be much, much easier.

And you’ll make a ton more money while having more time to do what you love.

Anyways…

Josh is also going to demonstrate the amazing power of his creation in this series.

So go see how video marketing has evolved.

Talk soon,

Danny

Some customers have reported that Microsoft Vista does not work like Windows XP, 2000 and 95 have with e-mail and the web. We picked up this solution from the web to turn off a networking feature of Vista which seems to cause some of these problems.

• Go to Programs>Accessories, right-click on Command line (cmd) and run as administrator.
• At the prompt type:
  netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=disable

Credit goes to: http://claydawg.helpdesk.olemiss.edu/?p=125

From time to time we have customers who keep getting the same e-mail message over and over again. One of the causes of this phenomenon is the result of the way that some e-mail clients operate. Users experiencing this problem find that they get repeats of some of the e-mails that are in their in-box, but don’t get new mail.

This problem is caused by the way the e-mail client works. Many of them follow the following simple recipe:

1. Download all e-mail from server
2. Delete or mark as read all seen mail items from server

This method works fine nearly all the time, except if the transfer is interrupted. If the recipe fails at any point then you keep getting messages you have seen. A temporary fault, such as a broken connection or congestion Unfortunately, if the transfer fails because the e-mail client gets confused by the content of the messages then the problem cannot be resolved by the e-mail client.

If the messages keep repeating you can use webmail to delete the messages you have already seen.

This code is intended to be used to improve the user experience by avoiding submitting mistakes in a credit card number. Naturally the cgi will have to submit the data to your credit card processor or bank to ensure that the card has been issued, not recinded and has available funds.

An example of its use follows:

The example uses the following HTML code:

<form>
<input type="text" name="Card #"  onChange='checkCC()' size=20>
</form>

The following code should be included in the document header

<script type=text/javascript>
function checkCC(){
   var ccnum = document.forms[0].elements["Card #"].value;
   var month = 0;
   var year = 0;
   var checksum = 0;
   var factor = 0;

   // do checksum validation on credit card number and
   // reformat so it is easy to read by a human
   ccnum = ccnum.replace(/[^0-9]/gi,"");
   if(ccnum.length < 16)
   {
      alert("Please enter a valid credit card number");
      document.forms[0].elements["Card #"].focus();
      return false;
   }
   if(ccnum.length %2 )
   {
      factor = 1;
   }
   else
   {
      factor = 2;
   }
   for(x=0; x< ccnum.length; x++)
   {
      digit = ccnum.charAt(x);

      if(digit * factor > 9)
      {
         checksum += (digit * factor) - 9;
      }
      else
      {
         checksum += digit * factor;
      }
      factor = (factor%2)+1;
   }
   // reformat with hyphens every 4 chars
   document.forms[0].elements["Card #"].value =
      ccnum.replace(/([0-9]{0,4})([0-9]{0,4})([0-9]{0,4})([0-9]{0,4})/,
      "$1-$2-$3-$4");
   if(checksum % 10)
   {
      alert("The card number you entered is not valid.\n"+
         "Please try again...");
      document.forms[0].elements["Card #"].focus();
      return false;
   }
   // VISA is 4xxx xxxx xxxx xxxx
   // MC is 5{0-5}xx xxxx xxxx xxxx
   // BC is 56xx xxxx xxxx xxxx
   if ((ccnum.charAt(0)) == 4 || (ccnum.charAt(0)) == 5) {
      return true;
   } else {
      alert("We only accept VISA, Mastercard and Bankcard.\n"+
         "Please use one of these cards to pay your account.");
      document.forms[0].elements["Card #"].focus();
      return false;
   }
   return true;
}
</script>

A typical application would be to generate an mailto link on a web page. As spammers often scrape web pages to find e-mail addresses, encrypting the e-mail address raises the bar, requiring the spammers to execute the page’s Javascript to find the e-mail address.

To use the generator enter your key and plain text into the fields below and press the encode button. Copy the code generated into your web page. Ensure that the decode function is contained within the head section of the page.

<script type=text/javascript >
function decode(k,s)
{
	var o = "";
	for (var i = 0; i < s.length ; i++)
	{
	       var c = s.charCodeAt(i);
	       c = c - k.charCodeAt(i % k.length);
	       o = o + String.fromCharCode(c);
	}
	document.write(o);
}
</script>

The remainder of this article addresses the technical limits on the performance of broadband connections

Technologies

The following graph compares the speeds of ADSL, ADSL2 and Canopy Wireless technologies at various distances from the exchange or basestation.

ADSL 1

For many years in Australia there has been an artificial restriction on the bit rates allocated to ADSL uploads and downloads. It is for this reason that ADSL was sold in the speeds:

• 256k/64k
• 512k/128k
• 1.5M/256k
• 512k/512k

The best explanation for this restriction that we have heard was that in an inexperienced market this allowed consumers to buy a known quantity. In reality, the lines provided speeds in excess of these limits on some sites and a little less on other sites. If it was significantly less then the service would not be provided.

When the restrictions are lifted if you are in a good position ie. close to an exchange with little noise on the line you will now be allowed to transfer up to 8Mb per second. What you actually get is still limited by congestion, over sell and the ratio of upload and download speeds.

ADSL 2/2+

ADSL 2/2+ is capable of significanty greater speeds than ADSL 1, but these speeds fall off rapidly as the distance from the exchange to your modem increases. This is particularly a problem as wires rarely go in a straight line, people across the road from each other can be on different exchanges or on the same exchange but with 100s of meters of line lengths difference. We know of at least one case where the wires go down one side of a cul-de-sac, around the turning circle and then up the other side!

One unfortunate characteristic of ADSL 2 is that although the gap between ADSL 1 and ADSL 2/2+ speeds diminishes as distance increases. Thus a change from ADSL 1 may not increase the speed much at all.

As there is little experience with ADSL 2/2+ in the Australian market and Australia uses a slightly smaller diameter of telephone line, the impact of noise and Australian cabling standards on theoretical distances are not well understood. Thus where we have used known reliable figures for ADSL 1 in the real world, we are relying on somewhat more rubbery figures for ADSL 2/2+ which may be somewhat overstated.

Wireless

There are a great number of wireless technologies used to deliver Internet. They have an advantage over ADSL in that any distance dependent performance is measured as the crow flies (straight lines from the base station) rather than as wire meanders (around obstacles and through conduits underground). All of these technologies are dependent on the level signal strength and noise in their transmission band. Some of these technologies are dependent on the number of subscribers on a particular base station. A knowledgeable wireless subscriber should be able to discuss issues arising from these considerations and how they are prepared to cope with changes in environment.

Other Technical Traps

Download Speed to Upload Speed Ratio

The majority of data shifted over the Internet uses TCP/IP. This protocol works by dividing your message up into small parts and then transmitting the parts to the receiver. To make sure each part gets to the other end the reciever sends back occasional messages saying which parts have arrived. These ACK messages limit the performance of the sender as an ACK message must be sent for each group of packets sent. Thus download speed depends on upload speed.

The theoretical limit is about 3% for big TCP transfers. Thus for every kb of upload you need at least 3b of download. This is in fact the best case and would only be achieved when moving very large files, such as music or movie files. In practice we use a 10% figure. If you are only doing web then 1/7 is closer to the mark. Thus to support an 8Mb download speed you need in theory 240kbps uplink, but in practice between 400kbps and 1.1Mbps uplink. Interleaving traffic will change these results somewhat but for a single connection they should give a rough guide.

Many of the faster offerings do not have an appropriate ration of upload speed and download speed to support full speed downloads for typical users.

End-to-end speed versus Line Speed

In practice most users really care about how fast they can fetch a file or get an e-mail. Delivering the internet is actually a collection of links in a chain. Improving the strength of a link in the chain only matters if it is the weakest link in the chain. Unfortunately, line speed doesn’t dominate all internet activities.

Factors such as congestion and over sell limit the capacity of Internet transmissions in many cases. In the case of congestion in the service providers’ network improving the speed of its customers ADSL connections could make things slower unless the supplier increases the size of their connection to the Internet. In some cases what happens is that access to services provided by the service provider become super fast (fetching e-mail, for example) but the customers see no other benefit.

Symmetric Services

Applications which produce data for use by other sites, such as remote desktop and webservers, require more upstream speed than downstream speed. Currently this demand is best met with symmetric technologies such as SHDSL or fibre (and some wireless offerings).

Conclusion

At Clarinet we are happy to discuss with our customers about what they need and what they can afford so that they end up with an appropriate solution for their requirements and means. We have been in the business of providing Internet for over a decade and never want our customers to feel cheated when upgrading. We encourage people to look beyond the big numbers in the headlines of adverts to work out what they are really getting and then to determine if they are getting value for money.

Splitters

Splitters typically have 3 labels: ADSL, Phone and Line. To use a splitter you connect your telephone devices (eg phone, fax or answering machine) to the connection labelled phone, your ADSL modem to the ADSL connection and the line to the wall socket. If you have other telephone wall sockets in the property on the same telephone line you will need to plug in filters between the phone and the wall socket.

In addition to the user installable spliter in the photograph above, you can have a central splitter (see right) installed by a telephone technician. A central splitter is installed on the telephone line before the first phone point in the property. Thus the central splitter protects the all the phone exensions from the ADSL signal. A new phone point is wired into the central ADSL splitter specifically for the ADSL modem. The ADSL modem will not work on any other point in the property.

Central Splitters are sometimes used when user installable splitters and filters do not result in a reliable ADSL connection

Filters

Filters typically have 2 labels: Phone and Line. To use a filter connect your telephone devices to the phone side of the filter and plug the filter into the wall socket. Never filter the signal going into your ADSL modem as this will result in a slow, unreliable connection. Never install a filter backwards as the results are unpredictable.

If you need to plug your ADSL modem into the same wall socket as a telephone, use a telephone double adapter:

1. plug the telephone double adaptor into the wall socket
2. plug the ADSL modem into the double adaptor
3. plug the filter in to the double adaptor; and,
4. connect the telephone devices to the filter.

Some final hints

Just because it fits together doesn’t make it right! It is very important to read and identify the labels on splitters and filters, because the plugs and sockets can be connected in many different combinations only one of which actually works.

If your phone lines look like a rat’s nest of extension cords, it can help to clean them up before trying to put the filters or splitters in place. Althought it often works, it is not recommended to install your ADSL modem on a telephone extension cord.

Feeling annoyed at getting 1 or 2 inappropriate messages in your e-mail box each day? Is real mail being squeezed out by spam? Spare a thought for the service providers who have already thrown away 50 percent of e-mail sent because they are obviously spam.

Clarinet Internet Solutions is a small ISP located in Melbourne Australia. Like other ISPs we have to deal with large quantities of e-mail a large proportion of that e-mail contains Unsolicited Commercial E-Mail (UCE) and malware. In this article we explain some of the strategies we employ to keep our customers sane and safe.

Introduction

Fighting spam, for the service provider, consists of mounting a defence from a series of ongoing attacks. Some of these attacks are new, but the vast majority are repeats of strategies that worked some time in the past. In the case of old strategies, we can respond quickly and effectively because we already have mechanisms in place; new strategies tend to succeed for a time because we have to engineer a solution.

Service providers have a number of weapons in their arsenal including:

• Greylisting
• Black lists
• Forward and Reverse DNS checks
• Mail filtering
• Spam traps

In addition the final recipients of e-mail can use:

• Personal Virus filters
• Personal Mail filters
• Learning mail filters

Before discussing the defences against spam it is useful to understand the enemy.

Spam, Scams, Phishing, and Malware

Over half of the e-mail arriving at Clarinet’s mail servers is unwanted by the final recipients. This e-mail is commonly known as spam. However, it is more useful to classify this e-mail into a number of sub-types based on the objectives of the sender:

Unsolicited Commercial E-mail (UCE)

Senders of this type of e-mail want the recipients to buy an item. These messages contain an offer for goods or services and some instructions for ordering them. This type of e-mail always contains one piece of information that identifies the sender, otherwise there is no way for them to collect the orders. UCE works because e-mail is cheap to send so even very low response rates result in a profit. Strictly speaking the word spam just applies to this type of e-mail, however, its casual usage has increased to cover any unwanted e-mail.

Scams

Although P.T. Barnum didn’t coin the expression “There’s a Sucker Born Every Minute”, the Internet is rife with schemes that assume this is true and are designed to separate people from their money. These schemes often promise riches in exchange for little effort if the recipient will just provide a little money or access to their bank accounts. Once again the low cost of sending out e-mails makes it cost effective to find the relatively few respondents.

Phishing

Phishing attempts to trick the recipient into providing personal information, typically usernames, passwords and bank account details to the sender. These schemes are quite sophisticated in that they often exactly reproduce the look and feel of a genuine communication from a bank or service provider.

Malware

Viruses, bots and spyware are programs which the sender of the message wants the recipient to run:

• Viruses just want to reproduce but may also carry a payload that damages the running computer or installs spyware or a bot
• Bots respond to instructions and can be used to send e-mail or damage the services of other users
• Spyware extracts information from the target computer. This information could include the keystrokes of passwords or the contents of files

The objectives of the sender shape the type of message sent and can help us to disguish between desired and undesired e-mail. For instance:

Malware is almost always an executable program, thus we only need to check executable programs to see if they are a recognised virus, bot or spyware

Spam Defence at the ISP

ISPs practice defence in depth when fighting spam. No single technique is 100 percent effective and as we acknowledge in the section on false positives and false negatives tightening the rules necessarily misclassifies more good e-mail as spam.

Defence in depth consists of layering up various imperfect defences in the hope of gradually whitling down the number of attackers that get through at each layer. In the following sections we will explain the details of each layer in our defensive strategy.

Defences do not stop at the ISP, individual recipients can employ tools that can filter their own mail. These tools can be more aggressive than those employed by the ISP as these tools have a better idea about what interests and definitely does not interest a particular recipient. These tools will be picked up in a later section.

False positives, False Negatives

The difficulty for the service provider is that senders of unwanted e-mails work hard to make them look like ordinary e-mail that the recipients want. The service provider sorts e-mails into groups:

• We definitely think this is spam
• Not sure
• We definitely think this is a desired e-mail

Accidentally putting a desired e-mail into the spam pile is called a false positive and accidentally putting a spam into either of the other categories is a false negative.

Because only the final recipient of an e-mail can truly know whether or not an e-mail is desired there is always a risk of misclassification. For instance:

almost no-one wants to receive a virus in an e-mail message, however, a computer security researcher may have asked a colleague to have send him an example of a new virus for his virus collection.

For any method the rate of false positives is inversely related to the rate of false negatives. Thus tightening the rules decreases the amount of spam, but at the cost of increasing the number of messages that are misclassified as spam.

Greylisting

Greylisting is the most recent addition to our arsenel of anti-spam tools. The concept of greylisting is based on the observation that normal mail servers attempt to re-send mail if they are politely told that the mail server is unable to accept it at this time; on the other hand bulk e-mail tools are designed to send as much e-mail as possible, so when they are told to come back later, they tend not to. The secret to making greylisting not delay all e-mail is to allow mail servers which have successfully retried sending an e-mail to always get through immediately.

There are a number of problems with greylisting:

• Some mail providers have pools of mail servers and messages will only get accepted when a message comes from the same server twice.
• Some mail clients try to talk directly to their destinations and hence don’t retry regularly.
• The first time a mail server is seen its e-mail is delayed.

These problems are principally addressed by identifying valid mail servers and initialising the greylister so that valid mail servers are not delayed.

Greylisting is useful for protecting mail servers from previously undiscovered bulk e-mailers. This mechanism prevents spam getting into the e-mail system. It has the additional advantage of restricting the bulk e-mailers to sending only a small message to the target mail server, this limits the cost incurred by the bulk e-mailer abusing the service provider’s mail server.

Black lists

As sources of spam are identified these are reported to operators of real time black lists. Service providers who subscribe to the black list check each incoming mail server connection against the black list, if it appears on the list the message is not accepted and the reject message suggests that the genuine senders should appeal to the black list to be removed. Spammers don’t get these messages as they tend to conceal their identity by pretending to be users of other systems.

Some black lists also list misconfigured mail servers that can be exploited by spammers for sending e-mails indirectly. These misconfigured mail servers are known as open relays.

Black lists can be highly effective as they can gather information rapidly from many corners of the globe.

Black lists are imperfect too:

• Black lists are necessarily behind the producers of spam: They can only list new sources of spam; and misconfigured mail servers after they are detected
• The quality of the black list depends on the dilligence of the maintainers. Maintainers need to both add new sources quickly and remove incorrectly added sites quickly. A failure to do either of these results in spam getting through or valid e-mails rejected

As with greylisting, black listing only requires a small amount of the message to be recieved before a decission is made, once again limiting the cost of a spammer’s abuse of the mail server.

Forward and Reverse DNS checks

Humans work well with names whilst computers work well with numbers. The Domain Name System (DNS) translates names to numbers and vice-versa. Service providers can check:

• that the site talking to it has a reverse DNS entry ie. has a name associated with its number
• that the name gained from the reverse DNS entry when looked up matches the IP address of the site talking to it

Because forward and reverse IP addresses are often controlled by two different organisations (forward IP addresses are controlled by the owners of the name and reverse IP addresses are controlled by the owners of the address) where they don’t match it is highly likely that the site talking to the server is not intended to be an e-mail server and might be a bot or a bulk e-mailer.

Mail filtering

There are many aspects to mail filtering:

• Pattern matching
• Dangerous attachment type removal
• Virus filtering
• Optical character recognition
• Image statistical characteristics

Pattern Matching

Many spam messages contain sets of words or characters that are common in spam but not common in ordinary messages. For instance a message containing a misspelling of “Viagra” and instructions on how to buy it on line is quite likely to be spam. By allocating points to each of these sets of words or characters, a score can be computed of each message. Messages with high scores can be discarded and messages with intermediate or low scores are passed on to the recipient.

In addition to matching the content of the message, the headers of the message are examined for features that indicate that part of the message path has been faked or that the message is from a non-existant source. Valid e-mail is very unlikely to have these features hence they attract a high number of points.

Dangerous attachment type removal

Some attachments can be used as vectors for malware or phishing. These attachement types are typically used for scripts and programs. Furthermore, there are some attachments that have no meaning when sent through e-mail. An example of a useless attachement is:

.lnk files that refer to local files are not useful on machines other than the sending computer, unless there is already a file on the same place on the receiving machine with the same contents

Removing attachments because they might contain something bad protects customers from new malware for which signatures have yet to be generated, but also generates resentment from knowledgable users when harmless items have been removed.

Virus filtering

Attachments are unpacked and scanned. The scanner checks for signatures in the files and if it matches then the the e-mail is rejected.

Virus filtering has two flaws, both minor:

• Like pattern matching, virus scanners are always playing catchup with the virus writers. It takes time for a new virus to be analysed and a signature created and distributed. During this window viruses can spread.
• There is a very small chance that a virus signature will match a file that does not contain a virus. This would lead to the e-mail being rejected

Optical character recognition

The effectiveness of pattern matching has driven some spammers to avoid using words so they send pictures instead. By running these pictures through an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) program and applying pattern matching to the output it is possible to detect spam features in the pictures.

Image statistical characteristics

In the continuing war between spam senders and ISPs. The spammers have discovered that distorting their images and ading speckles and other “noise” to their images reduces the effectiveness of OCR. However, some statistical properties are still more common in spam images than in other images. These include measures of the information density of the image (the number of bytes required to represent a pixel) and that spam images tend not to have extreme aspect ratios (spam is rarely a few pixels high and a screen wide unlike section separators). Although these measures are not definitive they can be used in combinations with other measures to improve detection.

Spam traps

A spam trap is an e-mail address which never gets sent real e-mail. Thus any message in the spam trap must be spam. These messages are matched against other e-mail messages sent to the system and any message that matches significantly is rejected.

Spam Defence at the Recipient

Because only the final recipient of an e-mail can be the true arbiter of whether the mail is desired or not, personal anti spam tools can can make better choices for the individual than tools at the ISP.

Personal Virus Filters

Every e-mail recipient should have an up to date virus scanner on their computer. The chances are high that the virus scanner will be different to the ones used at the ISP providing defence in depth for their PC. Also by scanning your own files you get a second chance to catch viruses which have slipped through the service providers virus scanners.

Personal Mail filters

There are many commercial products that filter e-mail that you can run on your own machine. Some of these are built into e-mail viewers.

Learning mail filters

There are a class of e-mail filters that can learn about an individuals preferences. These tools are taught a user preferences, by marking the mail as spam or desired e-mail. Various mathematical models can be used on the collection of good and spam e-mail. When a new e-mail is presented, the model is applied, and the model marks the mail as either good or spam. Some models include:

• Bayesian Analysis
• Linguistic Analysis