Image courtesy: roughdrft

If you are an online merchant, you will definitely use a shopping cart application. If you have an online store and willing to earn money using a shopping cart software, I’m going to explain about a good ecommerce software which does more than any other in the market.

This software is called “Ashop”. It is a hosted shopping cart software which you will not want to worry about hosting and complex configurations. The significant aspect of this software is the offering of test drive and 10 day trial. Which you must do before buying any software or an internet service. If you are not confident about it, definitely you can save some money. Following are the main features that I belive which stands out from other shopping cart software.

World class easy, no installation set up & Hosted

This is the most significant feature. This will ease your stress on installing it in your server and definitely save some money if you hire a person to do this.

Use your own domain

You will not have to do much. Just few basic configurations and then you are ready to go.

128 bit SSL security on admin and checkout

This will build the customer satisfaction and trust on your products.

24 hour live support from admin panel (Monday to Friday)

Another very good feature for a general person.

Email accounts on your own domain

This will improve the recognition of your business.

No plugins or programming required

This is the best ever thing. You don’t need to be a programming guru and spend money for a guru.

Build a complete online store product and information pages

You can customize your products here.

Web based store administration

You can select what to sell, what not to sell and the stock status.

Free tech support (phone, email, online chat)

This is a must have feature where many software don’t have.

No graphic design skills required

You need not to be a graphic design guru and you can also save money if you are not a guru.

No HTML knowledge required

You will save money by not hiring a guru.

Rich Text (WYSIWYG) Editor with custom HTML section

Free ecommerce software user manual, tutorial movies and knowledge base

A good way to learn it. Tutorial movies are very effective.

Free upgrades for life

Many software charge for upgrades.

Multilevel password restricted admin entry

This will ensure that no one will hack your account.

These features are only few of this software which has more than 100 features. If you are interested, have a visit to the site Here and check all of them. And you can also try the demo and the trial. I wish you good luck on your business.

click here to read more

Image courtesy: striatic

Do you know that everything you do on your computer can be traced? Think what will happen if that information is stolen from you and use them against you. Actually all of your privacy is in your computer which shows almost all of your life secrets. It is better to clear them regularly. But you will need a special mechanism to do that. In this post, I will explain you about a new software which does all the personal data removal work easily. It is not a free software but worth buying it when considering the importance of it. The vendor provides a 60 day money back guarantee.

The software is called “High-Tech Win system and History Cleaner”. This will erase your computer’s data related to your privacy. The following is an extract from the vendor’s website which explains the troubles you will face if you don’t clear those data.

Think about it… every document you’ve ever read, every photo you’ve ever viewed, every word you’ve ever typed in a chat room…. even every website you’ve ever visited are all permanently stored on hidden files in your computer which can easily be recovered with easy to get software. You’ve heard the stories - they happen every day. People in trouble, marriages dissolved, jobs lost… lives ruined. And all because of content found on computers that the user thought was gone forever. Why is this happening so often?  Because now it’s easy to access information on computers that the user thought was completely & permanently erased.

Right Now, Your Computer is Your Worst Enemy!

Most people are shocked when we tell them that every single thing you do on your computer is permanently stored in hidden files on your hard drive. And everything you’ve ever done can be traced using the right software - every document you’ve written or read, every picture you’ve viewed or downloaded, every website you’ve ever visited, even every word you’ve ever typed in a chat room. They are all still on your computer - hidden in secret files that are accessible using software that can be downloaded off the Internet!
Most believe that they can eliminate their data by
the following methods:

 Moving items to recycle bins
 Deleting files
 Deleting cookies
 Erasing Internet histories
 Emptying cache

Please don’t think using any of these methods permanently erases what you’ve done or what you’ve looked at. Even formatting your hard drive will not get rid of these hidden files.
If your computer were examined today, the evidence would still be there…and to make matters worse, the person examining your computer could even tell that you were trying to delete these files….just like you had something to hide!

If you buy it, you can do the following things.

You will be able to clean

• Unknown to many, the Windows and browsers       maintain hidden files and registry settings
  related to all your online and offline activity.
• Files - Temporary and Cache
• Network and Connection History
• Erase Internet Explorer Cache Files
• Erase Internet Explorer Browser History
• Erase Internet Explorer Cookies
• Erase Internet Explorer Address Bar History
• Erase Internet Explorer Index.dat Files
• Erase Internet Explorer AutoComplete Memory
• Erase Windows Recent Documents History
• Erase Windows Start Menu Run/Find History
• Erase Windows Recycle Bin
• Erase Windows Temporary Files Directory
• Erase Windows MediaPlayer Recent File List
• Mozilla, Firefox, Netscape, AOL, Opera, IE
• Select which cookies you want to keep
• File Shredder - Secure delete folders & files
• Cleaning Free Disk Space - FAT/FAT32/NTFS
• Free space on your Hard Drive!
• Speed up your computer!
• and much more…

Also, you will not need to install a system cleaner in your PC. Here’s the vendor’s description about the software.

Introducing System Cleaner

System Cleaner is a powerful newest software program available today. System Cleaner is the best technologically advanced software for permanently and completely erasing hidden PC files and all the data and information you choose.

System Cleaner quickly and professionally deep cleans your computer of ’sensitive material’, leaving you with a clean, like new PC. The program is extremely convenient and user-friendly!

No installation needed! You don’t need to install “System Cleaner” on your PC. The Program runs from a single .EXE file! That means you can run the software from: File (run command field), CD, Floppy, your flash memory card etc… perfect for those who work on public computers or office network!

How Does it Work

System Cleaner works like an electronic shredder on your PC. Working deep below your Windows operating system.
System Cleaner employs the exact same sector analysis technology. After identifying and analyzing the unwanted data hidden in your drives, System Cleaner destroys it with proven methods.

Even the best Laboratory Analysis with electron microscopes is no match for System Cleaner’s formidable display of new, innovative, World-Leading data destruction technologies.

And again, nothing is erased unless you absolutely want it erased.
The program runs a simulation of the items to be deleted and only when you are absolutely sure, System Cleaner obliterates the data you want destroyed.

Don’t be “Caught” without System Cleaner

No one can ignore the incredible benefits of System Cleaner. The program is a must have for everyone concerned about
their privacy & their computer’s performance. Remember, you are responsible for everything on your computer.

System Cleaner is a comprehensive software program with an array of cleaning options and uses. This is software that you simply cannot be without.

You’ll be amazed at the improvements of your computer from day one. System Cleaner will overwrite all of your free disk space. This enhances your system’s performance and eliminates the possibilities of any data recovery.

You will also get 5 very important free bonuses with this software. You can find more details about those bonuses in the vendor’s site. And if you are not satisfied with the product, the vendor offers 60 days money back guarantee. If you are interested, Have a look at it in the vendor’s site.

Image courtesy: SeeSchloss

With the evolution of peer-to-peer network technology, various types of downloads have become the major traffic on the internet. Actually most of these downloads are illegal. I will not comment about these illegal downloads as I personally feel that there are both pros and cons in these downloads for a general person. Nowadays, torrents have become the major source of these downloads. There are various torrent client software like BitTorrent, BitComet, BearShare, uTorrent, ABC, BitLord etc. internet users around the world use these software to download movies, music, videos, software(most of them are illegal ), software cracks, e-books and many more. As same as other areas in the internet, there are many very bad crooks playing with these torrents for their benefits and with the intention of harming the general people. These people take their chance when a torrent user does a small mistake. A very small mistake is enough for them to make a big damage. Therefore I will explain some factors about these torrents downloads in this post, that you must consider when you download from torrents.

In the early stages of the torrent downloads, most downloads were reliable and convenient to download. But the situation has been changed drastically. Most of the torrents are being used for the marketing and damaging purposes. Many torrents ask for passwords after fully downloaded. And they ask to visit a certain website and register there. Even you register there; you will not get the password. You will have to enter your email address when you register. Then you will receive various unwanted emails from various websites. My advice is not to register on those websites. You can find a good torrent which suits your requirement in somewhere else. If you need to get the password don’t use your general email address. Use a newly created one.

Some torrents apparently don’t ask for any passwords or serials. And they will work perfectly. But they will install spyware and malware. The worst case is that they can spread a very bad virus with the torrents which finally results a breakdown of the physical or the operating system. Therefore you must install a good antivirus software before start downloading from torrents, which also has a spyware and malware detection mechanism. I recommend Kaspersky even though it is little higher in price. The cost you will have to bear without a good antivirus will be definitely much higher compared to the cost for the antivirus .

Some downloads are illegal and you have to consider about them if your country has very strict regulations on illegal downloads. My advice is to always look for the ratings and comments on every torrent before downloading. These comments and ratings will definitely give you a reasonable idea about the torrent. Then you can decide whether download it or not. And always put comments and ratings according to the result you get from your downloaded torrent. Because then you can help other torrent downloaders by preventing from bad torrents and showing what are good torrents.

I hope that you got something to think about torrents downloads. If you have anything to add, please add them as comments. Because your experience will be valuable for all the people who read this blog post.

Image courtesy: mathowie

The seed for this post was an email I received yesterday. I’m a verified PayPal user using a Gmail address for the login user email address in PayPal.com. I haven’t made any transaction through PayPal within last 3 or 4 months. But I received an email to my admin email address of this website (admin@best-internet-guide.com if you are willing to contact me and don’t know my email address :-)), informing me that I have made a payment to a person having a PayPal login email id digishopbay123@macintosh.com and asking to click a link to dispute the transaction. The email I received is given below.

From: service@intl.paypal.com [mailto:service@intl.paypal.com]
Sent: Wednesday, February 20, 2008 4:50 PM
To: undisclosed-recipients:
Subject: Dispute Transaction

Dear PayPal Member,

This email confirms that you have sent an eBay payment of $47.75 USD to 

digishopbay123@macintosh.com for an eBay item. 

———————————–

Payment Details

———————————–

Amount: $38.75 USD

Transaction ID: KSUGS10992LAKLLX0909

Subject: Pioneer Cd Player 138

Note:

If you haven’t authorized this charge ,click the link below to dispute transaction 

and get full refund

Dispute transaction (Encrypted Link )

*SSL connection:

PayPal automatically encrypts your confidential information

in transit from your computer to ours using the Secure 

Sockets Layer protocol (SSL) with an encryption key length 

of 128-bits (the highest level commercially available)

———————————–

Item Information

———————————–

eBay User ID: multimediacdplr

—————————————————————-

Michael Rotenberg’s UNCONFIRMED Address

—————————————————————-

Michael Rotenberg

879 Markenson  St. 

76649 Iredell, TX

United States

Important Note: Michael Rotenberg has provided an Unconfirmed Address. If 

you are planning on shipping items to Michael Rotenberg, please check the 

Transaction Details page of this payment to find out whether you will 

be covered by the PayPal Seller Protection Policy. 

—————————————————————-

This payment was sent using your bank account. 

By using your bank account to send money, you just:

- Paid easily and securely

- Sent money faster than writing and mailing paper checks

- Paid instantly — your purchase won’t show up on bills at the end of 

the month. 

Thanks for using your bank account!

—————————————————————-

Thank you for using PayPal!

The PayPal Team

PayPal Email ID PP980

I was confused by hearing that I have made a payment which actually I didn’t. 

I was little curious and felt the scent of another probable scam. 

Therefore I thought to click that link and explore about this. 

The link which was asked to be clicked was having the URL given below.

http://mail.moraga.ca.us/users/manager/www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr.php?

cmd=_flow&SESSION=60-SQEaP_wWvhPmjul-DllC5OkU8dzThCY4mF5LzvZxGdMv

LhBSjCflCmUW&dispatch=5885d80a13c0db1f02baca35d810c8ec1c019f6b4e949c

a66922b381ebbdcb08

It starts with http://mail.moraga.ca.us which is not http://www.paypal.com or a sub domain of paypal.com (Ex:http://dispute.paypal.com). My assumption was correct and I thought to explore further. When I clicked that link, I was taken to a webpage which I was stunned to see. It is added below.

It is identical to the real paypal.com home page except the URL. An average person will definitely click that link as he/she hasn’t made that transaction and visit this webpage. And he/she won’t notice that even though the home page is identical but the URL is different. Actually most of us don’t look at the URL of a familiar website. As I mentioned above, my real PayPal email (xxxxx@gmail.com, I will send you my real PayPal email address if you like to make a donation for me ), is not the same one which I received this email. Next part is the most interesting.

I wanted to check the mistakes these dangerous cheaters have done. Therefore I opened the real paypal.com webpage also. First I hit the submit button without entering the user email id or the password. A popup message box appeared as shown below.

Then I checked the same scenario with the real paypal.com website. It took me to another page and showed an error message which was embedded in the webpage (not a message box). The error message shown is given below.

You must enter both your email address and password. Please try again.

Then I hit the submit button only with the user email id. The fake PayPal website showed another error message box as shown below.

When I did that with real paypal.com, it gave the same error message mentioned above. If you noticed, you will find the title of the fake error message boxes have a URL http://mail.moraga.ca.us not something like http://dispute.paypal.com.

Then I added the email address a@a.com and password as 11111, which both are fakes. Surprisingly I was successfully verified and taken into another webpage which asks my credit card details to verify my payment and refund. That page is shown below.

If you don’t provide your real credentials to the real paypal.com, you will not be allowed to proceed further. My assumption was becoming a reality. I didn’t add my credit card details. Then I logged in to the real paypal.com with my real credentials and checked whether there are any pending dispute transactions. I couldn’t find any and I also checked all my transactions. But I couldn’t find any transaction related to that email address. I thought to do some research on this. But it didn’t take a long time as I found some information from the paypal.com site itself. They have mentioned about phishing emails and asked to report about those types of messages to an email address (spoof@paypal.com).

I forwarded the email received explaining everything as mentioned above. They replied me indicating that it is a phishing message. I have added the reply below.

—–Original Message—–
From: spoof@paypal.com [mailto:spoof@paypal.com]
Sent: Wednesday, February 20, 2008 6:21 PM
To: Sampath Wijeratne
Subject: RE: Q510 - Thank you for your email to PayPal (KMM95898866V11853L0KM) :kf1

Thanks for taking an active role by reporting suspicious-looking emails.

The email you forwarded to us is a phishing email, and our security team

is working to disable it.

————————-

What is a phishing email?

————————-

Phishing emails attempt to steal your identity and will often ask you to

reveal your password or other personal or financial information. PayPal

will never ask for your password over the phone or in an email and will

always address you by your first and last name.

Take our Fight Phishing Challenge at

https://www.paypal.com/fightphishing to learn 5 things you should know

about phishing. You’ll also see what we’re doing to help fight fraud

every day.

————————-

You’ve made a difference.

————————-

Every email counts. By forwarding a suspicious-looking email to

spoof@paypal.com, you’ve helped keep yourself and others safe from

identity theft.

Thanks,

The PayPal Team

_______________________________________________________________________

This email is sent to you by the contracting entity to your User

Agreement, either PayPal Inc, PayPal Pte. Ltd or PayPal (Europe) S.à

r.l. & Cie, S.C.A. Société en Commandite par Actions, Registered Office:

5th Floor 22-24 Boulevard Royal L-2449, Luxembourg RCS Luxembourg B 118

349.

_______________________________________________________________________

I hope that everything is clear for you now. Millions of PayPal users might have been trapped into this when you are reading this post and they might have lost millions of Dollars. I thought that informing others by posting this post will at least save some of their money. If you don’t believe what I mentioned here, just visit that URL and enter a fake user email address and password. You will experience the same what I experienced. But NEVER add your credit card details. If you think that this will be interesting for your friends, click the topic of this post. Then you will be allowed to tell a friend about this by sending an email. I will come with another interesting topic like this with the next post.

Rank of a website directly shows how important the website is and the frequency of the people who access it. There are many websites dedicated to rank every website in the internet according to various ranking formulas and algorithms. Therefore the rank of a website definitely varies from a ranking organization to another. But there are mainly two organizations to find a reasonable rank value where most of the people around the globe trust. As I promised you in the earlier post, I will explain how to find the rank of your website or another website using these two organizations. It is very important to find the rank of another website when you plan to purchase a good or service (for SEO, to register in paid web directories and to publish press releases).

The first rank I recommend is Google. The Google’s ranking algorithms are so complex and changing time to time. It is the most respected in the Internet as far as I know. There are many websites who shows the Google page rank of a website by asking to enter the URL of the website. But we can’t be 100% sure about their accuracy. My advice is to download the freely available Google toolbar for your web browser (offered for Firefox and IE). After downloading and installing it, restart the web browser. You will find the Google toolbar attached to your web browser as follows.

Now you are ready to find the page rank of any website you prefer. All you have to do is, go to the website you like to find the page rank. After it is fully loaded look at the small horizontal box in the Google toolbar as follows.

If Google has started ranking for the website you accessed, the box will appear activated and if the website has a rank > 0, it will be displayed in green color. When you take your mouse over it, it will show the page rank as a fraction of 10 (Ex. 1/10, 2/10 to 10/10).

Oops! I forgot to tell you about the Google rank range. Google rank starts from zero and ends with 10. If the website has a rank 10, it is the best (I couldn’t find a website ranking 10 up to now.). If the above mentioned box in the Google toolbar is inactive, most probably the website is new. Otherwise it is not publicly listed. You have to e careful when you pay for these kinds of websites. My personal advice is to find a website which has a rank greater than or equal to 5, if you plan to pay for a good or service offered online.

The other most respected ranking organization is alexa.com. It is more informative than the Google toolbar. But the ranking algorithm and criteria is different from Google. The websites having higher ranks in Google also have higher ranks in alexa.com normally. Therefore any respected and trusted website will have similar rankings in Google and alexa.com. Those ranks will not be the same. But both will show higher ranks for trusted and famous websites. Alexa.com shows a graph of website traffic for any website which is among the top 100,000 websites. It also shows the number of visitors from each region/country. And there are many other statistics displayed. With alexa.com, you also have the facility to compare traffic of multiple websites up to 5. This is a very good feature provided there if you are in a situation where you have to make a choice from multiple numbers of websites. I used this technique to find my webhost as I had to make a decision to choose a web hosting company from multiple websites.

If the website you wanted to find the rank shows higher ranks in both Google and alexa.com, you can trust it. I advise you to find traffic details of it using alexa.com ranking as it will show you the recent progress or decline of traffic of that website. Always try to choose a website which has a steady traffic. It is better not to choose new websites for your payments.

Now you know how to find the rank of a website and sometimes you might find the page rank of this website :-). You won’t be able to find a higher rank as this is a new website. But I hope that you will trust me on the future information that I’m going to provide freely. In the next post, I will move back into SEO and I will explain you about the most common SEO abusing methods which will affect your website badly.