Conceptualist.com, By Sahar Sarid

Readings for February 13th, 2008

Published on 2008-02-13 12:15:37 0 Comment Edit
URL: http://www.financialpost.com/story.html?id=303908

Jeff Taylor, the Internet entrepreneur who brought job classifieds to the Web by launching Monster.com, sees obituaries as the next frontier.
Looking to capture that potential, Mr. Taylor is introducing Tributes.com, a "MySpace" for obits, tributes to loved ones and support for those grieving.
"The Internet is transforming the way people grieve," said Mr. Taylor. "And the Obituary classifieds are the last laggard classified section that has yet to make a meaningful transition from print to online."
Indeed, help-wanted, real-estate and car ads -- long a cash-cow monopoly for newspapers -- have all migrated to the Internet.
Obituaries have been the lone holdout because their audience -- mainly the oldie set -- hasn't always been as Internet-savvy as the tweens, teens and 20- and 30-somethings who are increasingly more inclined to get their news and information online and flock to sites like MySpace and FaceBook. But that is changing dramatically as the Baby Boomer generation -- the 78 million Americans born from 1946 to 1964 -- gets older.

Source: Financial Post

As the leader in the Funeral industry online with FuneralHomes.com and related businesses, later today or tomorrow we are releasing our own memorial platform. More info soon.

Sahar

EONS Tributes: Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who taught beatles meditation, dies at 91

Published on 2008-02-13 11:40:21 0 Comment Edit
URL: http://obits.eons.com/national/feature/international/23700

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, a guru to the Beatles who introduced the West to transcendental meditation, died Tuesday at his home in the Dutch town of Vlodrop, a spokesman said. He was thought to be 91 years old. "He died peacefully at about 7 p.m.," said Bob Roth, a spokesman for the Transcendental Meditation movement that Maharishi founded. He said his death appeared to be due to "natural causes, his age." Once dismissed as hippie mysticism, the Hindu practice of mind control known as transcendental meditation gradually gained medical respectability. He began teaching TM in 1955 and brought the technique to the United States in 1959. But the movement really took off after the Beatles attended one of his lectures in 1967. Maharishi retreated last month into silence at his home on the grounds of a former Franciscan monastery, saying he wanted to dedicate his remaining days to studying the ancient Indian texts that underpin his movement. "He had been saying he had done what he set out to do," Roth said late Tuesday. With the help of celebrity endorsements, Maharishi -- a Hindi-language title for Great Seer -- parlayed his interpretations of ancient scripture into a multi-million-dollar global empire. His roster of famous meditators ran from Mike Love of the Beach Boys to Clint Eastwood and Deepak Chopra, a new age preacher.

Source: EONS

Business First: New ownership for Appraisal.com

Published on 2008-02-13 11:30:38 1 Comment Edit
URL: http://buffalo.bizjournals.com/buffalo/stories/2008/02/11/da...

Appraisal.com has been acquired by a property data company in Phoenix.
Zaio Corp. announced late Tuesday it had acquired the technology assets and domain name of Appraisal.com. According to a prepared release, no stock or deferred fees were granted in the cash deal, which closed Tuesday.

Appraisal.com is a national provider of real estate appraisal software and Internet-based infrastructure for appraisers and appraisal users. The company had grown in recent years since moving in 2004 to 620 Main St. in downtown's Theater District. A source said the company began declining last summer, when founder and president Mark Yellen was asked to step down.

Source: Business First

Dark Reading: DNS Inventor Warns of Next Big Threat

Published on 2008-02-13 11:25:48 0 Comment Edit
URL: http://www.darkreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=145663

It's just a matter of time before a big breach occurs from corrupted DNS resolution, says Paul Mockapetris
The industry is just one multi-million-dollar corporate data breach away from waking up to the serious and often-silent threat of corrupted DNS resolution servers, says DNS inventor Paul Mockapetris.
Mockapetris -- who is also chief scientist and chairman of the board for network naming and address vendor Nominum -- says the recent research on corrupted DNS resolution servers by researchers at Georgia Tech and Google demonstrates yet another way the bad guys are attacking DNS to infect users. (See Hacking a New DNS Attack .)
Researchers David Dagon, Chris Lee, and Wenke Lee of Georgia Tech, and Google's Niels Provos, dubbed the new threat "DNS resolution path corruption,"? where malicious DNS servers provide false information in order to send users to malicious sites. The researchers officially presented their findings today at the Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS) in San Diego.
In their study of DNS resolution, they found around 17 million open-recursive DNS servers on the Net, and discovered that about .4 percent, or 68,000 of them, are performing malicious operations by answering DNS queries with false information that sends them to malicious sites. About 2 percent are returning suspicious results, they reported.
"This report demonstrates that people are getting lured out to dark alleyways of the Internet. The actual damage isn't documented here, but it will be"? somewhere when someone loses the first $10 million to $100 million to this type of attack, Mockapetris says.

Source: Dark Reading

Domain Name Wire: Yahoo's Arbitrage Bomb: One Day Later

Published on 2008-02-13 10:15:48 6 Comments Edit
URL: http://domainnamewire.com/2008/02/13/yahoos-arbitrage-bomb-o...

Reaction to Yahoo's decision mixed, but one thing is clear: a lot of people will be affected.

One day after Yahoo (YHOO) dropped a bombshell that it would no longer accept arbitrage traffic to its advertising feed, the reaction has been swift and loud. I've been monitoring domain forums and this is what people have to say:
"well"back to working for a living""?

"I'll need to get back to SAP consulting. I've kinda forgotten some of my transaction codes""?

"Quit whining+being lazy and start developing your domains TONIGHT you all" (this goes to myself too.)"?

"MSN and google just lost minimum of 15k a month from me and yahoo just lost the revenue on the back of the traffic I was sending through parked."?

"No more xx,xxx$ a month"?

"Many people like me were doing arbi for a living making my 15k a month and to say my traffic was trash is just plain silly. A TQ score of a 10 seemed to be ok with yahoo and parked and since parked only allowed traffic from google and MSN then I assume it was good traffic. There is a lot of people this is going to have an impact on and yahoo has no idea how much. My opinion is this is being done as a direct threat on GOOGLE and MSN in a self survival mode."?

"I think it's going to be BIG losses actually. I'm going to call my broker on Friday morning"time to get that Google stock i always wanted"?

Of course, not everyone is upset. A number of people have come out supporting Yahoo's decision, suggesting that arbitrage traffic isn't as good as type-in traffic. If you believe that direct navigation traffic converts better than search, then this would be true.