Month: January 2007

It is often hard to find an affordable website designer, especially if you are a small to medium sized business. Artist's Cafe specializes in web sites for small businesses, designers, and entrepreneurs.They tout affordable rates in the $2-3k range, and advertise themselves as having very creative, passionate and artistic designers.

One issue will going with low-cost website designs firms, in my experience, is the number of design concepts the firm will produce for you. This firm says they provide 4 unique conceptual designs for every new client so they can choose from the options. Once the the client chooses a design direction, Artist's Care will iterate 3 times through the design process to produce the desired outcome. I find this to be a refreshing and reasonable process for web design.

Learn more at http://www.artistscafe.com.

Not protected by antivirus software? With both free and commercial solutions available, there is little reason not to protect yourself.

A nice, free solution is Clamwin. You can even run it on a USB thumbdrive by downloading it from PortableApps.com.

Not sure about using freeware to protect your computer? For commercial solutions, there is nothing better than Norton Anti Virus 2007. Norton will protect your computer from Viruses, Spyware, Trojans and Worms. It automatically detects and removes Viruses, rids your computer of unwanted Spyware, and scans Email and Instant Messaging attachments for Virus threats. Learn more about Norton on this site.

Whether you choose a free or a commercial solution, remember to practice safe computing!

Internet Explorer continues to lose ground:

The downward trend took Internet Explorer to its lowest market share percentage for the year at 79.64 percent. Internet Explorer's loss turned into gains for Safari and Firefox. Safari ended the year at 4.24 percent, and Firefox came in at 14 percent. Source

When Vista launches, look for IE's market share erosion to slow however.

Spam message volumes have doubled over the past 12 months; situation is worsened by the recent emergence of image spam. The BorderWare Security Network has reported that image spam currently accounts for at least 35% of the overall spam volumes and this trend is on the rise. BorderWare data indicates that there are more than 25 image spam campaigns under way at any given time.

Image spam is a technique where the spam message consists of an image and a small amount of text that looks like it is 100% text-based, when in fact it is an image that looks exactly like a regular email message. In addition, while all image spam messages may look the same to an end-user, spammers have programs to automatically create each image to have slightly different coloration, speckle patterns, or fonts. This causes messages to appear unique when received and processed by spam filters. The randomness of the images and the message contents make image based spam difficult to classify. Current filters used to prevent image spam including OCR and fingerprinting are not effective to protect against today’s image spam threats. Source

To help defeat these attacks, BorderWare's Intercept™ Image Analysis is one technology you can use to stop image spam. Intercept Image Analysis is an image classification technique, to be used in addition to the existing and effective threat detection techniques to specifically combat image spam. Learn More

Gickr.com lets you create animated GIFs quickly and easily using images from your Flickr account. You can also individually upload images to Gickr that you want turned into an animated GIF.

No software to install, and free.