I read an article on the New Straits Times Online yesterday on DNS poisoning and it mentions that it is a step up from phishing. While we have a slight control over email phishing and all we have to do to safeguard our information is not to simply click on any link that come in via email, Private Message or Instant Message, for DNS poisoning, many people would unsuspectingly surf on replica websites because the DNS servers have been changed by hijackers. That is certainly scary and dangerous, isn’t it?

Also, I am glad to be reminded that free public wi-fi is great, like the Penang state-wide wi-fi project that I mentioned in my previous post, we really have to be extra careful using free wi-fi which is not password locked. Never use free wi-fi to surf financial websites or websites that require you to disclose personal and sensitive over the web. You would be better off performing internet banking or online transactions in a secure environment like your home.

I was happy to read about Penang’s state-wide wireless internet connectivity project a couple of days ago. It’s great news even though I am not in Penang and may never get to enjoy it but I love the concept and I think that it’s awesome to have access to free wireless internet connectivity wherever one is within the State.

Perak also had such a project before but it was not successful. I do get to connect to the free wifi but I never get to do anything with that connection. I don’t know why. Perhaps it’s due to congestion or maybe they require specific setting or something.

Anyway, yesterday, the Chief Minister of Penang mentioned that if such a project of state-wide wireless internet connectivity is harmful to health, he will scrap the project. So my question is if wireless internet connection is harmful to health. That is certainly news to me and I am concerned because my home is wirelessly connected too.

As the owner of an online business, internet advertising is one of the ways I drive traffic to my ecommerce site. If you have a similar business or are offering a service or have a resourceful blog to promote, I am sure you are facing the same problem that I faced; signing up with individual advertising websites, creating various advertising text or banners and then publishing them one by one, most of the time going OVER budget.

Just now, I was introduced to this advertising service that is called AdPropel that many small and medium business owners have found extremely useful in the internet advertising campaigns.

AdPropel is like a central control panel where users can create advertising campaigns with guided instructions and then publish the advertisement that has been newly create in a list of internet advertisers. In short, AdPropel provides a place for users to easily manage their ad campaigns, from the creation of ads to budget management, tracking, managing and most of all, easily seeing if a particular ad campaign is successful or not, and what changes could be made to rectify the shortfalls.

AdPropel has created a simple and hassle-free, and most of all, user-friendly internet advertising solution and interface. Most of all, their “pay as you go” internet campaign advertising model is most welcome as it reduces the risk of buying web advertising. AdPropel also has an advertising calculator which you could use to calculate your budget for internet advertising and to see if this is what your business needs.

Did you know that more and more businesses are now dependent on web advertising instead of other conventional media advertising like print media? If you have a business that you are currently advertising, you should check out AdPropel, a one-stop advertising solution that makes it easy for businesses on a tight budget to reach as many people as possible via various web advertising streams.

Yahoo! has decided to open a South-East Asia chapter of its developer network. This will be a pleasant welcome to the developer community in the region as they have felt left out and had to join other larger developer communities all along. Further to this new development, Yahoo! hopes to offer a platform for developers in the region to showcase their talent.

I personally feel that this is a step forward to the IT industry in the region. I may not be directly involved but I do have a few friends in the industry and they tell me that there are many things lacking here in Malaysia and one of them is a developers’ network.

I am not sure how this step will shape the future of software/application programming but I know that many people, users, will benefit from this in the long run.

I read with interest the launch of Symantec’s latest anti-virus and computer security products Norton Internet Security 2009 and Norton AntiVirus 2009 which has been rebuilt and reengineered for speed and performance.

I wonder why it took them this long to see that their products, though good and offer the kind of protection that internet users need for their computers, has been so damn slow that many of my friends and I would rather use some other anti-virus and computer security products. This does not necessarily is because of the cost, you know?

Sitting in front of the computer for extremely long hours, you can be sure that i would like to accomplish tasks as fast as possible and I do that by multi-tasking. This is not always possible when bogged down by resource hogging programs which takes a while to fully load and respond. Talking about anti-virus software, I really do not mind about the daily updates because I know that it is essential for a safe web environment. However, I would be very thankful if anti-virus programs could update in the background smoothly without affecting the performance of the computer.

I can’t wait to try out the new Norton to see if they are really so much improved.