It’s a Year Since Snowden Leaks – Still Efforts On to Restore Trust on Online

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It has been roughly a year back the truth that US national security agency NSA has been accumulating huge amounts of personal data on American and other international citizens secretly.

This year, a year after Edward Snowden leaked the documents on how and to what extent government has collected huge amounts of personal data, he has become an icon of the movement that demands more transparency from government agencies when they are using Internet technologies for the purpose of surveillance.

However, transparency is just a one-way street in that regard to this heavily corrupted and non-constitutional government. They want to know everything you are doing but they want you not to know how they are spying on you, and are secretive in dozens if not hundreds of other ways.

Dauntless and strident calls for reforms in government government surveillance are coming from the companies that hold large amount of customer and client data on the Web. The compulsions come in the form of threats of prosecution through court orders issued by the Foreign International Surveillance Court. The orders seek the information without intimation of such a move to the customer. This sounds like the Nazi era during World War II. The companies who are responsible for personal data are working over strengthening their security backbone through encryption of customer’s data at least at some key junctions. The move came after NSA managed to intercept customer data flowing between various private data centers of Google.

Bad Panda! Google has changed ranking again: Panda 4.0 and PDL 2.0.

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Millions of websites have began lost their rankings after the update. Has your website affected? Perhaps your ranking went up as others float down?

What can you do to avoid new ranking problems?

According to several recent reports, major sites such as ask.com (competition to google), ebay.com, biography.com and aceshowbiz.com have lost as much as 70% of their rankings on Google. It seems that the content (often automatically server generated) of these web pages is not appetizing for Google’s new ranking algorithms.

How does this affect your web pages?

If your website mainly consists of quite similar pages, it’s likely that your site will be affected by Google’s new ranking manipulations and similarly if the content/structure of your pages has been created automatically or ‘dynamically’.

These algorithms now additionally target webpage spam. If you do not get too spammy with your pages, you shouldn’t have to worry much.

If you want to get long-term results, do not use spammy methods to promote your website. Use ‘white-hat’ methods and play by the rules. Your website’s Google rankings will be much more stable then.

Please contact us for more information: http://4goodhosting.com/seo-services.html

Design Concepts that You should Consider When Designing or Redesigning Your Website

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Are you planning to bring a new design to your website? Or for redesigning and worried of how to start? If so, you need to read this article. In this article, we’ll discuss concepts that you should consider before you design or redesign your website.

When thinking about your website design, sketch regularly

The benefits of sketching is you can note your clients’ requirements accurately.

Sketching helps you organize the content, you can structure the concepts that the client requires and some other aspects related to web designing.

Make a brief blueprint or the algorithm before you start designing the website. It’ll cost nothing and it is very easy – just you need to have the basic knowledge of sketching.

Making a blueprint of web designing is also one of the finest approaches to convey your ideas about the layouts.

By making a blueprint before you start web designing process will give you new ideas.

Sketching also helps you get new ideas instantly and by this, you can save time.

Because Net Neutrality is currently a very important topic…

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Net Neutrality is an Important Topic Today

 

‘Net Neutrality’ is a widely discussed topic today. Therefore, we feel it’s right explain to our customers for more clarity.

 

We found http://www.theopeninter.net/ to be useful. It helps you grasp complex issues easily.

 

Network neutrality implies websites and services should be able to generate equal satisfaction among users across devices: cable, cellular, or via phone connection.

 

Companies such as AT&T, Verizon and Comcast intend to consider each site and service differently so that they can sell their services at different prices to different users.

 

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is proposing a law to frame limits for Internet Service Providers (ISPs). This is likely to result in keeping the Internet accessible to all – without discriminating any websites or services.

 

If the Internet is offered via cable connections and bills, it might become hard to restore as it’s today. We should build completely an independent Internet service. Make sure to inform your friends and family.

 

 

Those who are vigilant and informed strive to Hold Net Neutrality in place during Government Negotiations

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100+ major tech companies have voiced some opposition in defense from a new proposal from Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler that would make concessions to a “pay to play” model of network management; which would allow ISPs to charge companies for preferential treatment.

These new rules, which are supposed to be voted on May 15, are anticipated to make a major stand against “net neutrality,” which is the idea of a level playing field for all: ISPs should treat all data that travels over their networks equally.

The good principled proposal by Wheeler, a former government lobbyist has been opposed in writing by the likes of Google, Reddit, Facebook, Amazon, and others. The proposal reads that the FCC should *not* permit “individualized bargaining and discrimination.”

The Open Internet Order, a prior attempt by the FCC to set forth regulations in favor of net neutrality, was shot down in January by a federal court that stated that it exceeded the FCC’s authority.

Companies to Let You Know When Government Requests for Your Data

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Date posted: May 6th , 2014

An increased number of big tech companies are denying compliance with government with regard to personal data by updating their terms and conditions and other policies.

alarm notification

 

 

News that raises concern

Washington Post has published that many businesses such as Apple, Google, Facebook and Microsoft will be notifying their users when their personal data will be asked by the government. They are changing their company policies to suit this. They would comply with such requests only if a judge or other agencies to do so secretly.

 

Many of the protectors of law are concerned that these moves of the company will intimate the criminals before hand and they will try to destroy the evidence of the crimes committed. The government can loose important information on the case. But they need to know that it is criminal and not just on the part of the government to spy on their citizens seeking their personal information.

Heartbleed Bug: A Vulnerability in OpenSSL Cryptographic Software Library

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What is Heartbleed bug?

A heartbleed bug is one of the biggest and serious threats on the Internet. It’s a vulnerability in popular OpenSSL cryptographic library. OpenSSL is a widely used execution of suite of security protocols known as Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) that helps in encrypting the traffic when surfing the Web.

Each time when you send and receive data online or do online an transaction, there will be chance of sending your data through an SSL. You can check if your sending your data through SSL by a “https” with a green indicator or a lock icon in address bar. Some VPNs (Virtual Private Networks) and email, chat programs will also use the systems that are tied to OpenSSL for transmitting communications and data in a secured way.

Heartbleed bug is terrifying and unique because it allows anyone to access a computer system memory and read all data (including confidential data), which is protected by vulnerable version of OpenSSL software.

 

What effect it causes?

As per, Sam Kottler, a software engineer has worked on numerous open source security and systems management projects (and once worked at Digg), “Anything that you wouldn’t want an ‘Internet bad guy’ to see is Cityfied vulnerable on sites using unpatched versions of OpenSSL.”

Things like banking information, credit card data, passwords and titillating personal photos are possibly vulnerable. Essentially, everything that you do on the Internet.

 

Is my data compromised?

It is purely on site-by-site basis and we can’t say whether your data are compromised or not. Responsible organizations or sites will inform you if they believe that any of your data has been compromised.

From your end, be very careful while opening emails and look out for phishing scams. Keep close attention to notifications from credit card companies, internet services and banks and follow security requests if they make any.

 

Do, I need to change passwords? If it is so, when?

As far as 4GoodHosting servers are concerned, we have fixed the problem. As the software is widespread, it will take some time for fixing the roll out across web.

If you have any queries, you can always easily open a support ticket at support@4GoodHosting.com

 

If you have any questions, you can always easily open a support ticket at support@4GoodHosting.com

Google’s “Disavow links” Tool: Points to consider

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Google’s “disavow links” is a useful tool. It helps you improve the ranking of your website in Google search results. However, there are exceptions: this tool can affect your search results adversely if you do not use it with proper caution. We have listed here a few things that you should know about Google’s “disavow tools”.

“Nofollow links” need not be disavowed
Google’s rankings of a website and other linked pages is not affected by nofollow links. Hence, there is no need for you to add these links in the disavow links file you send to Google.

The Steps to Rescue your Blog (or website) from an Unreliable Web Host

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It can take a lot of time to properly research a web host and there is still a certain probability that you may end up with a bad one. The servers may go offline, it may be hard to reach a human being there, they may let their server get overloaded causing it to slow down , or the company could be bought and sold. For those reasons and possibly many more, you might find yourself having to move your website to a good web host; for example 4GoodHosting. ; )

4GoodHosting to the rescue

WordPress is the most popular blogging platform, is is offered by most web hosts; although there a several other popular choices as well. When relocating your WordPress blog, you will need to go through the following steps. These steps also serve as a general outline for other blogging scripts too:

  1. Make/download a backup of your site/blog, including:
      1. Theme directories/files
      2. Uploads directory
      3. Plugins directory

What you should know about “net neutrality” today.

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The decision was a powerful victory for Verizon, as it ok’d the company’s right to favor some types of internet traffic and services over other packets of data. So for example, ISPs are free to choose to block or slow down websites such as Netflix; or any others at any time. That just sucks rotten eggs, eh? In essence free speech just went to potentially limited speech as it seems.

Although the FCC won’t appeal the ruling, a spokesperson said chairman Tom Wheeler promises to establish new rules that ISPs from charging other companies, like 4GoodHosting?, a fee to get the highest performance speeds. Yet, will that turn out to be an empty promise? Something said to quiet people down for a while about the issue?

The FCC’s new rules will reportedly debut in late spring or early summer of this year.

One of many petition links: http://act.credoaction.com/sign/verizon_netneutrality

Like you, 4GoodHosting supports the free and open ideals of net neutrality.