Webmasters: How To Make Money With ADF.LY

Posted: 10th March 2013 by TheGeekPost in Webmasters
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Running your own website is not only time consuming, but can also be quite expensive. With the increased demand in streaming HD video, music, and high resolution pictures, many webmasters are getting crippled with the rising costs of storage space & bandwidth.

Well today I’m going to show you a way to get your visitors to pay you back for just about ANYTHING you post on the web, Adf.ly. Adf.ly is not a scam, or a get rich quick money making scheme. It is a proven marketing technique that uses URL shorteners, and if used right, can make you a ton of money. I have been using ADF.LY for the past 2 years and it has definitely helped keep my web hosting costs under control.

To get started, sign up for adf.ly

Then once logged in, enter the address you want to shorten and click “Shrink”:

Then, copy the shortlink, and start posting it on the web:

Every time a user clicks on your shortlink, you’ll earn money based on the country they are located in. You can check out the pay out rates for each country here

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Password Hacking: Is Anyone Safe?

Posted: 21st February 2013 by TheGeekPost in Guest Posts
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The collective group of hackers who call themselves ‘Anonymous’ has today admitted to suffering an embarrassing breach of their own Twitter account, having been hacked by the lower profile group known as ‘Rustle League.’

There have been a number of high-profile hacks publicised in recent weeks, in addition to those on Twitter groups such as the New York Times have admitted to having had their security breached in recent weeks. Today’s admission is perhaps the most alarming, however, as there is definitely cause to ask if even a hacking group aren’t safe, what hope is there for the rest of us.

Businesses and individuals are becoming increasingly wary when it comes to their security online. Whether it is through the passwords they use for social media and other services, or the way in which things such as VPS hosting and cloud-based software is potentially an easy target. We looked at the potential impacts of this recent spate of data breaches and hackings, and asked whether there is any way to put a stop to it?

Scared Businesses

Across the world, businesses are already wary of what they do online, especially in terms of cloud services, and these events are not going to anything but make them feel justified in that respect. If nothing else, the attacks will further motivate technology developers to continue making their products better and more secure, especially those in growth markets, such as those we mentioned earlier in VPS and cloud services.

However, a continuation of these throughout the year could well see businesses decide to shun the cloud and other platforms until they are able to be 100% confident in the security measures put into place.

Developing Policies

A school of thought holds the opinion that if someone wants to hack something, they will do. However, to say solely that “we have been victim of a cyber-attack or hack” would be an incredibly naïve and borderline stupid thing to do.

Yes, there are concerns around cloud security and reliability, but surely one thing we should all be doing, businesses and individuals, is looking within ourselves at what we could do better to reduce the risk. For businesses, this is likely to mean reviewing the services they use, the employees that access information in risk areas, and the data protection policies that they have in place. On an individual level, it is likely to go no further than changing passwords and making sure that we don’t have the same one across 20 sites.

If anything positive comes from hacker attacks, it is that people will be forced to think much harder about what they do online, especially when it comes to personal information.

The Future

While it is wrong to resign ourselves to a future dominated by similar stories, the truth is that as long as there are people who are ‘there for the taking,’ hackers are going to take the opportunity to embarrass them. The game of cat and mouse that exists in terms of “you develop a new security system, we find a way to hack it” is set to continue for many years to come, and will likely influence both individuals and large businesses around the world.

Author Bio: Jaguar PC provides 24/7 Professional Support with Daily Backups for their managed VPS hosting service.

TomatoUSB: Selective Routing When Using OpenVPN Client

Posted: 2nd February 2013 by TheGeekPost in Networking, Tips & Tricks, TomatoUSB
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I recently switched from DD-WRT to TomatoUSB and couldn’t be happier! It’s fast, stable and offers an immense amount of features, not to mention the support community is great! If you’re like me and use a VPN service to access certain video streaming resources not available in Canada (I won’t mention any names here! ;)) you’ll probably find that once you enable the OpenVPN client on your TomatoUSB router, your port forwards from the outside stop working. This can be quite an inconvenience if you have an FTP or Web server you need to access from the outside.

Today I will show you how to configure selective routing on your TomatoUSB enabled router connected to an OpenVPN client. The way this script is designed is by default ALL traffic from hosts on your network flows through the VPN EXCEPT the IP addresses of the hosts you define.

Login to your router and click the VPN Tunneling and then Client. Verifiy that “Start with WAN” and “Create  NAT on Tunnel” are both Checked.

TomatoUSB

Then click the “Advanced” tab and verify that “Redirect Internet Traffic” is Checked

TomatoUSB

Now we will configure the WAN Up Script. Click “Administration” and then “Wan Up”

TomatoUSB

Now paste the following script in your WAN Up Script

# This script configures “selective” VPN routing. Normally Tomato will route ALL traffic out
# the OpenVPN tunnel. These changes to iptables allow some outbound traffic to use the VPN, and some
# traffic to bypass the VPN and use the regular Internet instead.
#
#  To list the current rules on the router, issue the command:
#      iptables -t mangle -L PREROUTING
#
#  Flush/reset all the rules to default by issuing the command:
#      iptables -t mangle -F PREROUTING
##
# First it is necessary to disable Reverse Path Filtering on all
# current and future network interfaces:
#
for i in /proc/sys/net/ipv4/conf/*/rp_filter ; do
  echo 0 > $i
done#
# Delete and table 100 and flush any existing rules if they exist.
#
ip route flush table 100
ip route del default table 100
ip rule del fwmark 1 table 100
ip route flush cache
iptables -t mangle -F PREROUTING

#
# Copy all non-default and non-VPN related routes from the main table into table 100.
# Then configure table 100 to route all traffic out the WAN gateway and assign it mark “1″
#
# NOTE: Here I assume the OpenVPN tunnel is named “tun11″.
#
#
ip route show table main | grep -Ev ^default | grep -Ev tun11 \
  | while read ROUTE ; do
      ip route add table 100 $ROUTE
done
ip route add default table 100 via $(nvram get wan_gateway)
ip rule add fwmark 1 table 100
ip route flush cache

# By default all traffic flows through the VPN
iptables -t mangle -A PREROUTING -i br0 -j MARK –set-mark 0

#  All traffic from particular computers on the LAN will use the WAN
iptables -t mangle -A PREROUTING -i br0 -m iprange –src-range 192.168.1.10 -j MARK –set-mark 1

The script above will give you basic routing capabilities to pick which tunnel hosts on your network will flow through. If you want to get a bit more advanced, take a look at some of the examples below:

# Ports 80 and 443 will bypass the VPN
iptables -t mangle -A PREROUTING -i br0 -p tcp -m multiport –dport 80,443 -j MARK –set-mark 1

# All traffic to a specific Internet IP address will use the VPN
iptables -t mangle -A PREROUTING -i br0 -m iprange –dst-range 216.146.38.70 -j MARK –set-mark 0

# All UDP and ICMP traffic will bypass the VPN
iptables -t mangle -A PREROUTING -i br0 -p udp -j MARK –set-mark 1
iptables -t mangle -A PREROUTING -i br0 -p icmp -j MARK –set-mark 1 

# Spotify explicitly uses the VPN
iptables -t mangle -A PREROUTING -i br0 -m iprange –dst-range 78.31.8.1-78.31.15.254 -j MARK –set-mark 

Written By: Amardeep Juneja

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The Future Advanced Payment Systems Online

Posted: 1st February 2013 by TheGeekPost in Guest Posts
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Technology and industry often go well together. Educational and medical institutes are often slow to make the transition to the latest in technology, but businesses and banks are often at the forefront of using the latest technological developments. Those who have been paying bills for the past 10 years have noticed a dramatic shift in the amount of options available for paying bills; automatic bill payment methods are common, and most bills can be paid easily online. Further, the shift from cash to credit and debit cards has accelerated recently, and some countries are even attempting to move to a so-called cashless society. While paying bills has become considerably easier in recent years, there are still techniques that can be used to make bill payment even easier in the future. Here some of the technologies that will likely come to consumers in the near and distant future.

Smart phone payments

Smart phones are almost ubiquitous today, and cheaper devices will likely extend the popularity of these devices into all demographics. Because these devices can be tied to bank accounts and credit cards, some companies are beginning to use them as tools for paying bills. While this is only an incremental improvement over paying bills with a computer, it will allow people to pay their bills while waiting in line, waiting to pick the kids up at school or any time where they have a few free minutes. In addition, smart phones can be used to provide information about automatic payments that will be deducted from a bank account or credit card. Some companies and financial institutes can already take payment through smart phones, and this trend can be expected to accelerate in the coming years.

Fingerprint authentication

A number of chips that can read fingerprints have been developed and brought to the market in recent years, and the cost of this technology continues to drop. These systems have proven to be reliable, and circumventing fingerprint security is more difficult than cracking a password or bank account. Fingerprint authentication may become standard in banks, and they can even be used at point-of-sale locations to allow people to pay without having to pull out a credit card or cash. Some are predicting that smart phones will soon contain tools for authenticating fingerprints as a means of providing security. If this occurs, businesses, banks and other financial institutes will feel more confident using smart phones as payment authentication devices. As a result, the transition to smart phone payments may accelerate considerably if these devices become standard in the future.

Brainwave payments?

While it may seem unrealistic to those unfamiliar with latest in brainwave technology, there are now devices capable of reading brain activity with a fairly high resolution. There are still several technological hurdles that may limit this technology, but most experts believe that advanced detection products will be able to make the reading of brain waves reliable and accurate. If these devices can be miniaturized and produced cheaply, which many believe they can, they may become standard parts of point-of-sale locations, banks and other institutes that accept payment. If this occurs, customers can have essentially uncrackable passwords that will provide the ultimate in security. In the past, GPS devices were deemed too expensive to be part of consumer devices, but this has been proven false by the ubiquity of GPS chips in smart phones and other devices. This may occur with brainwave detectors as well, and people may be able to use their thoughts as authentication for various activities. While this is speculative, incremental improvements to brainwave detection will be able to accomplish this goal.

As societies around the world move away from cash, engineers are trying to devise new methods of making payments that require as little interaction as possible. Further, they will help improve the security of payment technologies, which will help prevent accounts from being hacked and fraudulent activity. While it is always difficult to predict the future of technology, there can be little doubt that many of these new technologies will come to consumers in a big way. Fortunately, these new devices should be able to provide security that other technologies cannot match, and the process of paying bills will become substantially easier and safer in the future.

Written By: Evelyn Elkin

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How Valuable Is Mobile Technology To Your Business

Posted: 21st January 2013 by TheGeekPost in Guest Posts
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 The growing importance of mobile technology in our contemporary world is obvious. Not only does it makes people’s lives easier by converging different tasks in one single device such as a laptop or a Smartphone, but it also helps to optimize time with the help of different software and applications. This works for both our personal and professional lives. Businessmen from companies of all sizes have been adapting their workplace to fit new gadgets and gizmos, with the intention of being more flexible, fast and efficient. So when thinking about strategies for helping start-up companies to take off, mobile technology should be considered as a great starting point. Let’s go through some of the benefits which mobile technology can give to small businesses and start-up companies.

 

Portability

 Mobility is all about freedom and, of course, portability. Latest laptops allow users to experience absolute mobility: you can travel on and about and still remain connected to the latest market trends. For start-up owners this can be a great attribute for a couple of reasons.

First of all, in the majority of cases, newly born companies have limited funds. So being able to work from home without having to pay for an office space can be of great help.

Secondly, most IT manufacturers are developing cloud computing systems which allow documents to be accessed from everywhere with the help of various devices, such as smartphones, pcs, and tablets. This decreases the storage cost, and enhances the communication flow, as files can be sent, received and modified in one embedded platform.

 

Worthwhile usage

 Technology can help to optimize time and make daily tasks and work processes more efficient. According to a report ran by the Small Business & Entrepreneurship Council in 2011, mobile apps can help small business owners save an average of 5.6 hours per week. However, start-up and small businesses owners must make their research before choosing right technologies which will actually help their companies to evolve. John Antunes, a director of small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) operations at SAP told BBC: “Whatever technology SMEs invest in, whether it’s new cloud capabilities, analytics or mobility solutions, it needs to be able to grow with the business, providing functionality you will need both now and in the future.”

With that in mind, it is important to be very careful regarding what are the best solutions for your start-up. Proper technologies would help your business to prosper and help you to achieve even better results.

To sum up, if time is money then mobile technology is a perfect fit. Even if it is a big investment in the beginning, the day to day activities will show how it will pay off since work will be faster, more efficient and more integrated.

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Advanced Ranking Strategies with WordPress

Posted: 18th January 2013 by TheGeekPost in Webmasters
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Nowadays, there are a lot of WordPress posts awash within the high speed Internet world on how people can optimize their websites to be friendly to search engines. Yet if this is the only strategy you know, then you will not get far ahead from anyone else.

As of the moment, it may be true that there are a lot of websites that factor in the design and structure too much and that this is what’s holding them back. An SEO optimized WordPress site does sort this one out in principle.

You may have noticed by now that the SEO you have for your website is also what you write in it and that you cannot rank without having some form of content that is relevant to the website. That is why just like a race car that does not have a driver, so is adding content to an optimized WordPress site is not going to be enough if there is not one user there to steer it.

Designing Your Content to Target Your Niche

If you are planning to utilize keywords that are not even halfway competitive against others, then it would seem pointless to just display it all out in a killer blog post and hope for the best that it will rank. It won’t.

There are several advantages present that WordPress has over other static sites when it comes to SEO. It is through its continuous usage that the attributes have been leveraged to have performance that is better for the site within the search engines.

There is a powerful ball linking structure internally within WordPress that will auto link the new content of users together in a way that the static websites just do not have a chance to compete with through categories and tags, including related post links and trackbacks. Aside from that, WordPress also launches its new content more powerfully within the search engines as it is profiled as one of the reputable blog sites by Google and is thus included within the faster blog search index.

It is vital that you understand your target searches as you will need to have a sense as to where you are and the location on where you need to be. That is why if you are considering various keywords to use within your approach, do some searches in the search engines and take a look at the different results that you will get.

Written By: Kenneth Javellana

Author Bio:

Kenneth Javellana is a writer on technology, business and the Internet at Broadband Expert. Whenever he has free time to spare, Kenneth writes for other blogs with regards to his favorite niches and shares it with their readership.

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5 Tips to Improve WordPress Security

Posted: 18th January 2013 by TheGeekPost in Tips & Tricks
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As the most popular content management system on the internet, WordPress paints a wide target for those with malicious intents. The WordPress team does a pretty decent job at detecting and responding to new threats, but they can’t possibly protect you from every threat out there. Here are five tips that you can use take matters into your own hands and improve the security of WordPress.

1. Install Login Lockdown

Login Lockdown is a simple, free plugin that protects your blog from brute force password attacks. This plugin detects (and records) the IP address of people that enter an incorrect password in the wp-admin area. You can change the settings to lock out IP addresses that enter the wrong password multiple times. Lockout durations can be for as short or long as you want.

You can install Login Lockdown by logging into your WordPress admin, hovering over “plugins” and then selecting “add new.” Search for “Login Lockdown” inside the search box and follow the instructions to install the plugin.

2. Always Update WordPress

Seriously, there’s no reason to fail on this. WordPress updates are free, you get a big notice when they are available and installing them requires nothing more than a few clicks of the mouse. WordPress updates add security features and fix security exploits.  Any time you get that update notification, go ahead and update.

3. Change Your Admin Username

The default login name for new WordPress installations is “admin” and few people bother to change that. If you use the default name with WordPress, you cut the workload of any password cracker in half. You can change this setting the first time you install WordPress. If you already have WordPress installed, you can change the admin username with the following steps:

  1. Log in to “phpMyAdmin” from your host’s backend
  2. Select your WordPress database
  3. Inside there, choose the users table and select browse. This table is usually named something like wp_users
  4. Choose “admin” and then “edit.” Change the name to whatever you want.
  5. Remember, you can change the display name in your WordPress dashboard. So if you pick something random like “adk83280s” for your WordPress login, you can still have it show up as “Admin” when you publish content.

4. Change and Improve Your Password

Your WordPress password should be gibberish that you can’t find in any dictionary. Use a combination of words, letters and symbols in your password. Basic brute force attacks simply go through a long list of words from a dictionary and try to crack your password by running through every single word in the list.

I use a program called RoboForm to manage all of my passwords. All I have to do is type in a master password and then RoboForm can automatically fill out passwords at my most visited websites. This allows me to use complicated, unique passwords for every website I visit. I have one password for my WordPress account, one for my file storage account, one for my e-mail and so on. At the very minimum, different passwords can contain the damage if one password is cracked.

5. Go Easy on Plugins

Use as few plugins as you can manage. I know plugins can be huge time savers, but they also make your website more vulnerable to hackers.  The fewer plugins you use, the safer you are. If you do decide to install a new plugin, do a little research on Google first to see what other people have said. Odds are someone has already tried that plugin and had something to say about it.

About The Author:

Wes Burns is a webmaster and blogger for an online storage website. He writes about tech news, online storage deals and computer security.

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How To Activate Windows 8

Posted: 15th January 2013 by TheGeekPost in Tips & Tricks, Windows 8
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Activating Windows 8 is not as simple as Windows 7 or Vista was. Today I’ll show you the process for activating Windows 8.

Open a command prompt using the “Run As Administrator” option.

Enter the following command:
slmgr.vbs /ipk XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX
(where XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX is your product key)

Press Enter and Windows will Activate!

Written By: Amardeep Juneja

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Windows Server Print Spooler Service Keeps Crashing

Posted: 15th January 2013 by TheGeekPost in Tips & Tricks, Windows Server
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Troubleshooting Print Spooler errors on Windows Server can be a nightmare. One of the most common reasons why the Print Spooler service will constantly crash is a corrupted spool file.

print spooler crashing

Today I will show you how to clean up any temporary/corrupted spool files.

First, try restarting the Print Spooler Service. If it still keeps crashing, stop the Print Spooler service, set it to “Disabled” and lets take a look at the spool files waiting to be sent to the printers.

Browse to C:\Windows\System32\Spool\Printers

Move all SHD and SPD files from here to a temporary folder.

Now enable and start the Print Spooler Service. If the issue was caused by a corrupted print spool file, the service should no longer crash. If you see the Print Spool service still crashes, you most likely have a corrupted print driver!

Written By: Amardeep Juneja

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