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Staying Computer Safe while Searching for Freebies on the Net Who doesn’t love the idea of getting something for nothing? Free stuff can bring a smile to anyone’s face, and the Internet is destination number one when you are looking for cash in on a few freebies. The downside of free stuff online is that if you aren’t careful, the free item could end up causing plenty of headaches and heartaches, not to mention a lot of cold, hard cash. If you want to score with free stuff online, make safety your number one priority by following these tips. First and foremost, treat your personal information like its cash. That might sound a little dramatic, but anyone who manages to steal your identity online is after one thing, and one thing only, your money and any addition money they can grab by cashing in on your credit. Protecting your name, address, credit card number, bank account number, phone number, social security number, and so on and so forth when you are registering for free offers is the first step to making sure you don’t get hustled when you’re just trying to enjoy a good freebie. That means that if you are asked for some personal information that you don’t feel comfortable handing out, let the freebie go. Likewise, make sure the site from which you are getting your free stuff has a privacy policy and that you know it, understand it, and can live with it. Speaking of that site that is handing out the free goods: just who are these people? If you were walking down the street and a shady looking person said they would give you a free DVD player if you followed them, chances are you would run the other way. Online, it is hard to tell the legitimate people from the people looking at you like a free lunch, but there are a few red flags you can look out for. Does the website look like it was thrown up in about 5 minutes, full of clip art and bad spelling? Is it hard to find information about where the website is registered, or where the business the website is supposedly promoting is registered? If the website purports to be affiliated with a certain brand you know, does it really look like it is, or does the logo look different/colors look off? If you can’t get a reasonable feel for who are dealing with online, don’t deal with them. Red flag number one? Asking for too much personal info should send you running. Another way to protect yourself is to build a virtual fortress around your computer. The net is filled with people who know how to walk right into your virtual home – your computer – and flip through everything you have on there, taking whatever they want. Many of these kinds of hackers draw you in by creating phony freebie websites. The way to keep them out is to keep your computer on lockdown. Make sure your firewall is stronger than you think it needs to be, and make sure it is always updated. Also, make sure you have antivirus software on the patrol for you and that you keep this software updated as well. Last but not least, keep those passwords in the vault, and make sure they are extra strong. No freebie website has any reason to ask you about the passwords for your accounts so don’t give them away – and don’t give them to anyone else online for that matter. Also, if you’re using your birthday or child’s name as password, don’t. Sure, it isn’t as easy to remember, but your password should be a random word and contain a collection of numbers and symbols as well. This will give you the extra layer of protection to make sure your online house is in order when you cash in on the freebies.

Free Anonymous Phone Number and Voice Mail through JC Connect Do you wish you had access to free anonymous phone numbers and voice mail for your business or personal use? The web offers many freebies, including access to these types of services. Most of the time, you just have to know where to look. Here are some services, including the well-known JC Connect, which provides users with free, fast and accessible service to these types of services. Get Fast and Free Access to Business Services with JC Connect What is JC Connect, and what can it do for you? JC Connect free service is the web's longest-running service in terms of providing its users with free phone numbers. You can use these free incoming phone numbers in order to receive fax and voice messages. This service is still widely known by its old name, JFax, but now it is officially recognized as JConnect Free services. This well-regarded service offers their free services at no cost to you. The service also requires very little personal information from its uses. All you need to provide in order to use its services include your name, email address, gender, age and your zip code. After signing up, you will receive a unique phone number. Use this unique phone number in order to forward messages. These messages are well-compressed image and audio files. You can forward these messages to your email in-box. Because these services are free, the company requests that users limit their usage to a certain number of messages at a time. This is a good site if you don't have easy access to a fax machine. Need Free Web Space for Your Business? Another tool that most small businesses need is free web space. Freeservers is a popular web service that provides users with 20 MB of free website space. The site has become well known for its complete suite of tools and features. Some of the features that this free service boasts include easy-to-use web design templates, FTP upload and many other web-based tools. You can also program your account so that emails can be sent directly to your domain. There are also many free web traffic analysis tools, including daily and weekly breakdowns of all your site's traffic. You can actually see how many people have viewed your website on a daily basis. Freeservers does require users to display a non-obtrusive banner ad on their website pages. Free and Easy Tools for Keeping Up With Your Portfolio Are you looking for a free and easy way to keep tabs on your portfolio? Here is a website that allows you to do just that. Company Sleuth is a website that helps you keep track of your investments. You simply sign up and enter the ticker symbols for the companies and corporations that you want to watch, and let the site do the rest. What sort of information will come your way once you have signed up? Once you have signed up, the site will cull information from news sites, investor forums, press releases, job listings and even official SEC document in order to give you the latest information on the companies you want to keep an eye on. Want to Test Your Website? If you want to test the mettle of your own website and its servers, NetWhistle is there to do just that. This service tests the reliability and strength of your domain's website. It will check to see if your website server is up at intervals. This service will create a log and notify you immediately if there is a problem with your website. You will also receive a handy weekly report card.

Web Hosting - DNS, How The Internet Keeps Track of Names The way computers communicate is, in a way, very similar to something very familiar: the postal system that delivers letters and packages. Here's how... The Internet is just what the name suggests, a large inter-connected set of networks. But those networks are pointless without the one part that forms what is called their 'end-nodes', otherwise known as computers. Those computers often need to share information because the people who use them want to share information. But, in a system where there are millions of separate computers, how can you enable them all to communicate? One very important feature of that solution is performed by something called DNS, the Domain Name System. Every part of a network that is going to send or receive information is assigned an IP address. That's a numeric identifier that uniquely specifies a particular 'node', such as a computer, a router that directs traffic or other component. They look like this: 209.131.36.158 But those numbers are more difficult for people to remember and work with. They also aren't very attractive from a marketing perspective. So, a naming system was layered on top of some of them, mostly the computers involved, though routers have names, too. But once you have a system that associates a unique IP address to a given name, you need some way of keeping track of all of them. That's carried out by several different pieces of the system: Name Registrars, DNS Servers and other components. The Name Registrars, overseen by IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) and other international bodies, provide and keep track of domain names. When you register with GoDaddy or any of a hundred other intermediate companies, ultimately that information makes its way into a number of specialized databases stored inside DNS Servers. A DNS Server is the hardware and/or software that tracks and forwards the IP Address/Domain Name pair from one place to the next. In many cases, there are a number of them between your browser and the remote computer you want to share information with. Suppose you request information from, say, Yahoo's site by clicking on a link on their site. DNS resolves (translates) the name of WHO IS making the request and OF WHOM, to addresses, then passes the request through the network to the requested IP address. The requested data is then passed back through the mesh of network components to your computer and displayed in your browser. Whether the communication is between a desktop computer and a server somewhere, or between one server and another, the process is essentially the same. DNS servers translate names into IP addresses and the requests for data are forwarded on. In some cases those DNS servers are part of a specialized network computer whose sole job is to do the translation and forwarding. In other cases the DNS software may reside on a server that also houses a database of general data, or stores email, or performs other functions. But however complicated the chain or the parts, the basic process is simple. Translate the name to an address, just as the postal system does. Whether international or local, your name is associated with an address, and the deliveries are made to the address, then forwarded to a particular name.