The Win Report

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Mobile Wireless Broadband is the current name applied to describe a diverse forms of devices that provide you with the most modern faze located in technology, this is wireless high speed mobile internet access without the wires & without a fixed line connection. Wireless internet broadband gives you the convenience to use your I book where ever you yourself are staying. All you are required to do is put in your universal serial bus modem & off your able to go, painless wireless everywhere you are. There are loads of terrific various offers to go for with many types of companies. The providers are O2, Vodaphone, and Orange. These providers have all taken the lead in providing wireless internet, although these mobile phone networks have at first focused on marketing the service to mac book users. Compare Orange Broadband deals and save money with Compare Broadband UK.

Wireless has turned out to be highly fashionable & almost three million UK internet customers nowdays connect wirelessly to the mobile broadband at work. All this is a number that always mounting as loads of customers get wise to both benefits of wireless broadband internet. Broadband uses high speed mobile internet access this because it frequently has a high rate of data transmission. Not only is it 10 to one hundred times speedier than a dial up account it doesn’t tie up the telephone line so you can make & receive calls as usual while you yourself use the Wireless Broadband You will pay a flat monthly fee for all time on connection and so there is no need to dial one hundred to get online, all we have to do is turn on the computer and you’re connected.

The Threat Is Real

In 2004, 9.3 million Americans - or one in every 23 adults - were victims of identity theft. The dollar cost impact is gargantuan. Identity theft crimes tallied $52.6 billion in costs in 2004. This amounts to almost $200 for every man, woman, and child in the U.S. In five years, federal officials say people will be more likely to be a victim of this crime than not.

Identity theft wreaks significant damage on its victims. Out of pocket expenses related to identity theft have risen to $1,495, up from $808 in 2002, plus $16,000 in average lost wages. The average recovery time has spiked to 607 hours, up from 175 hours in 2002. While personal liability is low in the majority of cases, 16 percent of victims were forced to pay an average of $6,440 to cover thieves’ purchases. And victims remain vulnerable for the rest of their lives. Identity thieves are likely to use stolen data months or years later.

Online shoppers and banking customers are reducing their cyber activity because of privacy fears. A June survey found 40% of shoppers and 28% of online banking users are cutting back, Gartner said e-commerce revenue growth will slow by 1-3% by 2007 unless customer fears are alleviated. Nearly 40% of the banks participating in the American Banking Association’s 2002 survey on fraud ranked identity theft as the No. 1 threat to the banking industry. Over 1 million consumers have been tricked into divulging their personal information to email fraud alone, with financial losses totaling nearly $1 billion. Al-Qaida cells even use identity theft to raise money. Imam Samudra, mastermind of the 2002 Bali bombings that killed over 200 people, wrote a jailhouse manifesto about funding terrorism through identity theft and computer fraud.

Despite years of media coverage and frequent dire warnings by consumer protection groups, identity theft is the fastest-growing crime in the United States. Identity theft has been the #1 complaint to the FTC for the last 3 years in a row - by far. Last year, identity theft represented 43% of all the complaints placed with the FTC. There have been at least 104 serious “data incidents” in the US so far in 2005, compromising the records of more than 56.2 million individuals. And a worldwide criminal identity marketplace has now matured. Credit card numbers, SSNs, and other personal data are commonly traded and sold in huge numbers.

Employers Have A Major Stake

The #1 underlying source of identity fraud is theft of employer records. 51% of all identity thefts occur in the workplace; usually perpetrated by people hired to perform low-level tasks, such as data entry. About 90% of business record thefts involve payroll or employment records; only about 10% are customer lists. Most businesses think of client records as the most valuable, but payroll records are more often what’s stolen, with increasing frequency.

On June 1, 2005, a new provision of the Fair Access to Credit Transactions Act (FACTA) goes into effect. It says that any employer whose action or inaction results in the loss of employee information can be fined by federal and state government, and sued in civil court. An employee is entitled to recover actual damages sustained if their identity is stolen due to your inaction, or statutory damages up to $1,000 per employee. Employees may also bring class-action suits against employers for actual and punitive damages. In addition, federal fines of up to $2500 per employee, and state fines of up to $1000 per employee may also be levied.

A recent case in Michigan highlights another source of corporate liability. In the 2005 case of Audrey Bell et al vs. AFSME AFL-CIO Local 1023, the Michigan Appeals Court affirmed a jury award of $275,000 to AFSME members who had sued the union for failing to safeguard its members’ SSNs. It recognized a “special relationship” between the union and its employees, including a duty to protect them from identity theft by providing safeguards to ensure the security of their “most essential confidential identifying information, information which could be easily used to appropriate a person’s identity.

The Bell case has national implications for employers. Arizona, California, Illinois, Texas, and other states have statutes that require an employer to restrict the use and disclosure of SSNs. While not as broad as Michigan’s, they support the view that a “special relationship” exists between an employer and an employee whose data is stolen from the employer to commit identity theft. Even in jurisdictions with no statutes restricting employers’ use or disclosure of empoyee SSNs, the tide of legislation on identity theft may be sufficient to support a finding of the necessary “special relationship”. The Wall Street Journal recently predicted that there will be a flood of lawsuits by both consumers and businesses because of identity theft issues.

Employers also suffer other significant costs when their employees experience identity theft. Conservative calculations based on recent reports indicate that an employer with 1000 employees, who make an average of $40,000 salary per year, can expect to incur costs of well over $600,000 per year. Identity theft also threatens enterprise security, enabling corporate espionage and fraud, and theft of hard assets and intellectual property. Large scale or frequent identity thefts also results in significant negative publicity, impacting sales, partnerships, and employee recruiting and retention.

Protection As An Employee Benefit

The only solution that provides an affirmative defense against potential fines, fees, and lawsuits is to offer some sort of Identity Theft protection as an employee benefit. An employer can choose whether or not to pay for this benefit. The key is to make the protection available, and have a mandatory employee meeting on Identity Theft and the protection you are making available, similar to what you probably do for health insurance. They may either elect or decline to have identity theft coverage.

If the employee has coverage, but becomes a victim, the employer gains: the employee will spend less time and money, and experience less frustration in restoring their identity. If the employee declines the coverage, and later claims their identity was stolen as a result of you or your company’s actions, the employer has signed proof that they attended the presentation and declined the coverage.

Identity theft protection employee benefits are a trend because employers are looking for ways to lower their costs. It’s unique, it’s hot in the marketplace, and it’s inexpensive. A growing number of companies are offering identity theft coverage as an employee benefit, in part to reduce lost time when a worker becomes a victim. Greg Roderick, CEO of Frontier Management, says that his employees “feel like the company’s valuing them more, and it’s very personal.” Matt Oros, CEO of Benelogic, adds “I think it’s a tremendous value to protect someone’s name. It is like a soft pillow at night that you can lay your head on and know that you’re going to have an advocate.” And Donald Harris, head of IHRIM’s Special Interest Group on Privacy & Security points out: “Privacy is like diversity in this regard: Done the right way, each involves respecting and empowering individuals, and reaping the business benefits that this can bring, rather than acting primarily to avoid risks and legal problems.”

Do Your Homework

Caution - there is a significant difference between the programs that are available. Many new programs are now appearing on the market, to take advantage of the fear and confusion around identity theft. Many of them are very overpriced, and many do not provide the kind of protection necessary to really reduce risk, or to cover losses and speed recovery in the event of an identity theft incident.

Peter has been a leader in HRIT and “workforce effectiveness” for almost two decades. Prior to his current role as CEO of The Identity Guardian, he was Director of workforce solutions practices at KPMG Consulting and Siebel Systems, the co-founder and CTO of Cipient Networks, and a long-term strategic advisor to major HR outsourcers, enterprise application vendors, and other Fortune 500 firms. He also managed HRIS teams at Disney and FHP, and was Manager in KPMG’s Peoplesoft practice. Peter is an acknowledged expert on enterprise systems, identity theft, and workforce services, and brings this unique combination of expertise to this critical and timely topic.

The Identity Guardian provides in-depth corporate training and program development services, as well as a comprehensive and low-cost identity theft benefit program. For more information, visit our website at http://www.theidentityguardian.com, call us at (888) 7-ID GUARD, or email us at sales@theidentityguardian.com.

For most marketers RSS metrics are still a gray area, although in fact RSS is completely measurable, even more so than e-mail.

As complexity grows with added capabilities, we’re only taking a look at the absolute basics of measuring your RSS feeds today. These are the basics you can implement immediately to see how you’re doing, and then gradually move on to more complex analyses.

As always, the key point is just to get started and then move on from there.

1. THE REASONS FOR MEASURING RSS

The most basic reasons for measurement are quite simple:

A] How many people are subscribing to my RSS feed? Is the number increasing or decreasing?

If the number of readers is decreasing, it’s a sign that your content is not meeting the needs of the target audiences your site attracts, consequently meaning that you need to consider improving your content strategy.

Optimization possibilities include: –> More practical how-to articles –> Different content topics –> More “personal voice” –> Greater publishing frequency (more frequent posts) –> Less frequent posts –> Longer or shorter posts –> More news coverage within your industry –> Etc.

Also, based on your readership you’ll be able to calculate your “readership –> purchases” conversion rate, if you’re using your site to sell products online. The simple formula to calcuate this is “the number of orders / number of readers * 100″.

B] Are my subscribers actually clicking on the content items in the RSS feed?

If you find that your subscribers are actually opening the feed, but not clicking on individual content items it’s a clear sign that either your content item headlines need to be improved, made more attractive, or that the actual content is not strong enough to entice readers to clickthrough.

Knowing your feed-to-website clickthrough rates will also enable you to introduce gradual changes in your content strategy and actually see how they improve or hurt your key success metrics.

These two questions are of course only the most basic, but will enable you to build on them in the future and start developing more advanced measurement & optimization procedures.

2. THE TOOLS

Now that you know what you’ll start tracking you’ll need appropriate tools to actually help you measure your RSS feeds.

If you’re using any of the more advanced RSS marketing & publishing solutions (http://www.simplefeed.com, http://www.nooked.com, http://myst-technology.com, http://www.rssautopublisher.com, http://www.press-feed.com/, http://www.market-soft.com/bypass/, http://www.silverpop.com), the key metrics will already be provided to you out-of-the-box.

If not, you’ll need to use a specific service just to conduct your measurements. For small-business marketers, the best choices are http://www.feedburner.com or http://www.pheedo.com, which come at no charge for the basic toolset.

Using them is quick and simple: just go to their site, register for a free account, enter your existing RSS feed URL, start promoting the new RSS feed URL (given to you by the service) on your site, instead of the one you are using right now, and start measuring.

But be careful! These two RSS measurement solutions actually create a new RSS feed URL for you, which is hosted on their own server, meaning that you only want to use it to generate “real” subscribers, and not actually submit the feed to any RSS search engines and directories. If you do so, some of the SEO benefits of RSS will unfortunatelly be wasted.

Copyright 2005 Rok Hrastnik

Learn how to take full marketing advantage of RSS and get all the expertise, knowledge and how-to information for implementing RSS in your marketing mix, from direct marketing, PR, e-commerce, internal communications and online publishing to SEO, traffic generation and customer relationship management. Including complete interviews with more than 40 RSS marketing experts. Click here now: http://rss.marketingstudies.net/book/

Each day we all face the same challenge. Spam. It doesn’t matter if you’re a home computer user or the head of IT for a multinational limiting or totally preventing the distribution of junk email to your computer(s) is now a daily chore.

The sheer frustration that spam causes combined with the number of lost man hours adds up to junk email being a very real problem for all involved. You have to filter through all the junk to find your own personal or work email. This on its own is annoying enough. When you consider the security risks from spyware, trojans, diallers and attempted identity theft spam becomes much more than just an annoyance - it becomes a minefield for any computer user.

So what can you do to block spam? The first step each user should take is to simply limit the number of people who know your personal email address. If you have a work email address then just use it for work. For home users only distribute your email address to people you know and trust. This simple move can cut your spam problems by 50%.

But what about all those online forms I need to fill in? No problem. Use a free email service like Hotmail or Gmail for this purpose. Treat it as a throwaway account that you can use as a buffer between your true personal email address and the rest of the world. Let it fill up with junk email and then just login once a week and delete everything you see.

Your password. It’s amazing how many people set the password for their email account to abc123 or something similar. These passwords are incredibly easy for spammers to guess and would give them easy access to your mail account. The password for your email account should follow corporate standards of being 6 - 8 characters long and be alphanumeric (a mixture of numbers and letters). Make it longer if you can. Using a weak password is just asking for trouble.

If you’re already receiving a ton of spam then you’ll need to invest in a spam blocker. There are free spam blockers you can download and also also their paid equivalents. A great spam blocker can cost you as little as $30 and you’ll see an immediate reduction in the amount of spam you’re receiving.

Over and above installing software on your computer (especially for Mac users as your choices are limited) you could sign up for one of the web based challenge response spam blockers like Mailblocks or SpamArrest. Both of these services are ideal for somebody who’s on the move a lot. Also because they’re web based there’s no software to install so they’re perfect for Mac or PocketPC/Palm users.

Taking a pro-active anti spam stance is the next step. If you get junk email from people then check the mail headers and report any offensive email to the hosting company or ISP involved. Never, ever reply to spam directly. This simply confirms to the spammer that your email address is active. Also never click on any hyperlinks in any junk email - this again confirms your existence and can lead to a virus being downloaded directly onto your PC. Filter the spam, report the abusers, delete the remaining junk email.

Spam can be stopped. Not by some corporate giant or genius programmer. It can be stopped by each of you individually. Spammers rely on the widespread availability of email addresses and for people to reply to these emails or click on the links within the emails. The sooner people stop reacting emotionally to spam and simply filter, report and delete the offensive mail itself the sooner the lucrative market of bulk email will dry up for the spammers.

Spam. You’ve all heard of the crazy pink meat in a can, but what’s it got to do with the Internet? Well, it’s also the namesake for a major problem in the World Wide Web-unsolicited junk email. Problem! We’re talking serious pain in the butt both as a waster of time, space, and money. It is estimated that around half of all email received on the Internet is this sneaky illegal attempt at selling fake consumer goods, pornography, and a whole plethora of ‘helpful’ services. It’s taking up half of all email on the Earth, and it’s costing businesses’ billions in wasted time, as well as filling personal email accounts to the limit so important messages aren’t received. It seems everywhere there’s a leap in technology for humanity, there’s also a group of people who want to stretch the realm of criminal activity to another level.

The good news is that as it’s such a prominent problem, the ‘good guys’ have made it a main priority on their ‘To do’ lists. Software has been created to block Spam and is being updated constantly. Recently Bill Gates, richest human on Earth and self-made mogul of software masters’ Microsoft spoke of his aim to eliminate Spam by the year 2006. Obviously a lot of people would be quite appreciative if they could achieve this goal.

Supposedly most of the billions of junk emails originate from about 200 people who are intelligent enough to cover their tracks. They have multiple ways of finding out email addresses and then sending thousands upon thousands of unwanted messages to you and I. It usually costs them next to nil so if even one low-quality product sells they receive a profit. That’s why they do it; just another greed-induced means of getting rich quick without working for it like the rest of us.

Well, there’s a couple main ways of dealing with the Spam dilemma. The main one, and most easy, is to just delete the messages or empty your folder (after moving desired messages to another folder) straight off the server without downloading or ‘looking’ at the messages. This gives the ‘evil’ sender the knowledge that you’re not reading the mail and therefore the traffic you receive goes down dramatically.

Another way to block the Spam is to use software like Magic Mail Monitor (http://mmm3.sourceforge.net/) or Mailwasher (http://www.mailwasher.net/), which work well at destroying the unwanted, pink, tasteless, unworldly email meat by showing you the mail straight from the server without downloading it.

So, show the criminals you’re aware and not ignorant and take the first steps to bringing the Spam Empire down. Protect yourself and eventually the Spam will go where all filth is destined, into the trash.

About The Author

This article is written by Mr.Jesse S.Somer who writes for M6.net.