iEstates.com

In  a report is published by McAfee, they urge internet users in the wake of phishing and malicious email to forgo clicking on links and start to type in the address they want to go into their browser.

The question is will this notice by Mcafee if it catches on get surfers back into the habit of direct navigation?

Here is the full report:

“”You Name It–Spammers Have Faked It

Name any famous or popular website, they all seem to have become the prime targets on spammers lists. Researchers at McAfee Labs have seen an increasing trend wherein famous websites like Amazon, Ebay, Youtube, WordPress, Wikipedia, Godaddy, Eventful.com, and many more are abused by spammers to provide a legitimate appearance for the email and ultimately have them delivered to the user’s inbox.

These spam messages are drafted in such a manner that they appear to be legitimate on first view. All these emails have a look and feel as that of a legitimate message from one of these popular sites. A novice user could have easily fallen prey to these emails if the user would have judged the message by its appearance. Appearances can be deceptive and so the spammers have taken advantage by faking messages of well-reputed websites.

Let’s examine a couple of common spam messages of these types.

These types of spam have one important thing in common. All links in the email–Help, Product Info, Copyright Tips, Terms of Use, Legal Agreement, Customer Support–have the same URLs associated with them, with an html or htm extension. This looks quite odd; generally these links have a different URL.

Clicking on any of the links redirects to pharmacy websites, but before that we see a web page displaying “WAIT 4 SECOND…”  or  “PLEASE WAITING 4 SECONDS…”

Play it safe by typing the domain name directly into the browser rather than clicking URLs in mails that might be forged.”"

So what do you think?

One of the great things about traveling is the opportunity to meet people that live and work in different parts of the world.

On our recent trip to Brussels for the ICANN meeting, we do what we always do, talk to the local shop owners, taxi drivers, people that are sitting next to you in restaurants,  about world events, their country, their way of life.

We chatted with one middle aged Gentleman for a few hours.  He grew up and lived in Brussels his whole life.

Soon the subject of our discussion turned towards taxes.

I ask him what income tax rate he was paying.

“I pay 58% and I’m proud and happy to do so.”

He went on to explain why he had no problem with paying 58% tax:

Our medical care is paid for.  If I,  my wife, or our children get sick or need surgery, we don’t have to pay for it.  Prescriptions, doctors, hospitals they are all free.

Schools and university are free.

The parks and streets are clean.

The police are helpful and are not corrupted.

The country supports the arts, which are very important and it keeps all of the historic and important buildings in excellent condition.”

Not once did he bitch or complain about his 58% tax rate.

He did say he, like most middle or lower class people in Brussels, he had to work 2 jobs to live.

He claimed to work 2 jobs, 7 days a week, totally 350 hours a month.

“If I only worked one job I would not have enough money in my pocket after taxes to pay my mortgage.”

So although he said “All I do is work”, he said he was happy.

I love my jobs, I love what I do, I live in a beautiful place, I have a great wife that I love, I have great friends, what more could I ask for”.

I have a small apartment but there are a ton of parks so why do I need a garden?  If I want to walk in the park or have a bottle of wine, I just go to one of the parks.

Like many in Europe he saves money by having just a small car for long trips but uses a bicycle or a motor scooter to go to work, run his errands and do his shopping.

Of course Income tax isn’t the only tax that people in the EU pay.

Most items that are purchased are subject to a value added tax or VAT which is basically a national sales tax of 21%.

Hotel rooms and  restaurants bills also include the VAT.

I’m sure there are other fees and taxes the government collects as well.

This gentleman was most proud of his country.

We also met a couple from Norway who told us that they just had a baby a couple of months ago, and the mother gets as a matter of right gets a year off with full pay and benefits after the baby is born and the father gets 13 weeks off with full pay and benefits.

I asked them how many more children they were planning on having.

They said 4.

They were most proud of their country.

Which brings us to July 4th.

If your an American be proud of your country.

Wishing you and your Family a Great Holiday weekend.

As you have no doubt read today, Google “in the spirit of greater transparency”, disclosed the revenue share it was paying its adsense publishers.

However as anyone in the domain business can tell you the revenue share is irrelevant because of smart pricing.

Google has refused to give anyone their quality score or any information as to how smart pricing affects their account.

Yahoo clearly lets publishers know there Traffic Quality score on a 1-10 scale and they update the number frequently.

Google, without telling your publishers what their quality score is, there is no transparency.

If the revenue share of “X” is reduced by an unknown and undisclosed factor “X-”,  unless you know what that factor is, you really know nothing.

Google is just giving you 1/2 of a mathematical equation.

This mysterious quality score allows Google at the end of the day allows them to pay you whatever they want, regardless of “revenue share”.

Where was that information in Google blog post?

Microsoft just launched Docs.com, in Beta.

The site that allows you to “discover, create, and share Microsoft Office documents with your Facebook friends. Built using Microsoft Office 2010, Docs for Facebook lets you work from just about anywhere with the familiar Office experience.”

Its certainly a great domain name, nice to see Microsoft using a great domain to promote this product.

A huge show for all things Internet hits New York on June 7th-14th.

Internet Week, is a week long show attended by all the Major Internet companies including Google, Yahoo and Microsoft which is capped off on Monday June 14th by the Webbie Awards gala.

The Webby Awards will honor Vinton Cerf with a Lifetime Achievement Award.

Talk about a well deserved award.

The show has events, meetings and parties all over the city all week long.

On the domain front, .CO is a sponsor.

If your going to be in New York you might want to check out the show as passes start at only $10.

In the Moniker showcase auction ending today, the domain name Quotes.com has a $1M bid.

While the domain has not hit reserve at $1M, it maybe one of those domains that sell shortly after the auction as Slots.com did last week.

If so it would mark the 3rd Million dollar sale for Moniker in just about a week, giving a real shot in the arm to the industry.

We will keep you updated

Sedo.com released its 1Q Domain Market Study for the 2010 yesterday.

Some of the highlights:

Sedo, saw an 18.6% increase in the number of sales in 1Q 2010, compared to Q4 2009.

“Overall, 11,942 domains changed hands for $23,177,253″.

“This marks Sedo’s highest quarter for domain sales since 2008.”

“.com remains the most popular top-level domain extension, accounting for more than 42% of all sales on the Sedo marketplace and 76% of all gTLD sales”

Nice report and good to see domain sales still humming along despite the prolonged recession

We ran two polls over the past couple weeks, one for the auction of Slots.com and one for the Domainfest Live auction.

You guys suck.

Out of 196 votes on the Slots.com auction only 13 of you correctly predicted that the domain would sell between $5M-$7.5M and only 22 predicted the domain would sell for over $5M at all.

Yikes.

For Domainfest over 25% of you didn’t think any of the $100K+ reserve domains would sell.

2 did.

To your credit, of those of who voted for any domain to sell at DomainFest, the majority, 37, voted for dating.com and in second place came boardgames.com selected by 15 of you.

Now there was a bunch of you who got both the slots.com and Domainfest auction wrong.

Here are the names and e-mail address of all those who got it wrong:

Ok just kidding, voting as always remains anonymous (but I know who you are).

Thanks for playing and look for a new poll soon.

While the live auction from DomainFest Ft. Lauderdale is still going, so far two of those category killer domains have sold.

Dating.com just sold for $1,750,000 and BoardGames.com sold for $450K a little while ago.

The bidding got as high as $2M on Jeans.com, but no sale.

You can see the final results of our poll, which I closed for voting right before the auction started.

So far you guys picked out the two domains that sold (of course not counting the 37 of you that thought none would sell)

We will be back later

The Social Security Administration publishes an annual list of the 1,000 most popular baby names for boys and girls and just released its list for 2009.

It may not surprise you to learn that every matching .com for each of the 1,000 most popular boys and 1,000 most popular girls is taken.

The most recently registered domain, by creation date was Jazlynn.com, which has a creation date of March 10, 2010.

Interesting to note that out of the 2,000 domains, only 52 have a creation date after 1/1/2005 and almost 1,600 of them have a creation date of before 2000.

Over 400 have a creation date before 1995.

The oldest domain on the list, Ray.com registered way back in 1986.

Of the 2,000 domains, We own 101 of them.