twogaam

Feb 02 2016

Live365.com dies due to new government regulations

Here at Two Guys and a Mouse we try and stay out of the political arena. But today, it is with a sad heart that we discovered that our favorite internet radio station Live365.com has closed it’s doors due to…..wait for it…………………..government regulations. Shocking I know.

Live365 is now preparing to completely shut down at the end of January, thanks to a rise in rates set by US Copyright Royalty Board.

The internet radio streaming platform is blaming the recent webcasting rates for their closure, as they were reliant upon the previously-established, lower rates for small broadcasters. The new small webcaster rates for 2016-2020 will require a minimum annual payment of $2,000 for webcasters earning less than $50,000 a year. There is also a $500 annual micro-caster rate schedule for those earning under $5,000 in revenues, lower than $10,000 in expenses, and fewer than 18,000 listener-hours per year.

Live365 was launched in 1999 in California, and an early pioneer in the streaming radio space. The streaming platform features a wide range of 5,000+ internet radio stations covering various music genres as well as news and talk stations. “These stations are the hard work of real human beings who use Live365 to share their vision with the world,” said Dean Kattari, director of broadcasting for Live365.

“It’s a home for musical discovery because many of these stations play emerging artists that terrestrial stations are reluctant to take a chance on. It would be a great loss for this to all go away”.

After the ruling, Live365 management were reportedly looking for new business partners in order to move forward. Those efforts proved unsuccessful, and the company quickly lost investors. The platform has already moved forward with the closure and sources have revealed that the company has already laid off most of its staff.

The management of Live365 said in an email to its members, published by BetaNews, that the service will shut down on January 31st. “We are sad that we are closing our doors at the end of this month,” the company shared.

via: DMN

Jan 28 2016

Why We Use WP-Engine

We use and love WP-Engine for all of our hosting needs. Here’s why:

Via Wpmudev:WP Engine was founded in 2010 by Jason Cohen to fill the managed hosting void just before it started to become extremely popular. During those five years, the company opened three branches (San Francisco, San Antonio, and London) in addition to the original Austin- based location.

The company has raised more than $18 million in funds from venture capital and angel investors over the years, including Automattic.

WP Engine puts customer care and corporate culture front and center and has done so consistently, right from the beginning. In the company’s very first blog post announcing WP Engine, one of the first things mentioned is:

“Talking to potential customers from day one has been our highest priority.”

The About page includes quotes from five senior staff members and every single one is about doing their best for customers. There’s no mention of speed or security. I find this refreshing because I think that it should be a given that a company does the best that it can for its customers.

This people-centric view has earned WP Engine awards, including the best places to work in Austin. The company has a beautiful office in downtown Austin, a chef, unlimited time off and all the traditional company perks.”

First Impressions

In putting together this review and others in this series, I tried to look at each host’s website through the eyes of a moderately experienced user – someone who knows the difference between VPS and shared setups, but not a programmer or someone intimately involved in hosting details.

To be honest, it’s difficult to gauge a host by the information on their site. Just like its competitors, WP Engine has plenty of filler text that essentially means nothing. For example:

“With a full-time engineering staff and dedicated labs team, we’re defining the bleeding edge of WordPress technology. Unlock your brand’s full potential by leveraging our innovations.”

I’m personally not interested in this sentiment because a host should have full-time engineering staff. I have no idea what “dedicated labs team” means, and the general user doesn’t know about or care for innovations (or buzzwords). You want a fast and secure site and how this is done is of no consequence to the average website owner.

I was not too impressed with the stock images and videos used on most pages (even if these are actually from WP Engine’s offices). I would much rather see something more down-to-earth as this would strengthen my belief in the company’s user-centric attitude.

All that aside, what actually matters is: Can I easily find the information that I want and is it presented in an easy to understand fashion? On that count WP Engine does well.

The layout of the Personal plan for WP Engine

The website could be better from a visual point of view, but I have a feeling that it was built following research guidelines, and it may well be optimized for the average user, which is not me. Information was easy to find and clear, apart from some minor points.

I had a bit of a chuckle at the text “Risk-free for 60 days,” which immediately prompted me to think that after 60 days they introduce some risk. Perhaps prepending the sentence with “Try” would help clear things up.

Plans and Pricing

I like that they have three well-defined plans and the fact that you can add modules for extra functionality is not pushed up your nose right away. If you scroll down you can compare all plans, which is where the word “shared” made me raise my eyebrows a bit. You have to find the not-so-obvious Our Infrastructure page to find out that this is actually a VPS environment, so it’s all good.

The Personal package is $29 a month, which is a pretty fair deal I think. It does only give you one install, but for many people that’s all that is needed and you can buy upgrades of course.

The next tier up is called Professional, which allows for 10 installs and 100K visits. It sets you back $99 a month, which is building up to be a sizable amount, but if you have 10 installs and you come near filling your 100K quota you’re probably making it back a few-fold at least.

The largest non-custom tier is Business which costs a considerable $249 a month. It gives you 25 installs and 400K visitors. This is a sizable investment but as long as website speed and security are never an issue I would have no problem forking this kind of money over. At 400K visits, you should have bigger things to worry about on your site anyway.

WP Engine is not the cheapest option out there if you want more than one install but it’s nowhere near the most expensive either. There are three tiers which, are best summarized using the company’s own comparison table.

WP Engine's current pricing (September 2015) — WP Engine’s current pricing (September 2015)

They also have Enterprise levels which I’m sure will cost an arm and a leg, but if you need that much volume, you probably have some arms and legs to give.

You can pay a little extra for more visitors and installs and I recommend you do some maths before you go for higher tiers. As I mentioned earlier, all things equal, you would need to pay an additional $70 in overages before it would make sense to switch from Personal to Professional. You should keep this in mind when choosing a plan.

Overall, I think WP Engine’s pricing is reasonable. It caters for newcomers with a low-end plan while accommodating larger sites with its more expensive options.

Getting Started

The sign-up process was very pleasant. It’s extremely straightforward – once you choose a plan you fill out your details, click continue and off you go. I don’t know if this is standard practice or just laziness from my bank, but my card was charged about two days after my signup. If this is standard practice, it did help speed up the registration process and no doubt also helps cut back on refund times for mistakes and quick trials.

The setup complete email took about 5 minutes to arrive, at which point I had a ready WordPress installation to use. The only cloud in the sunny process was that WordPress 4.3 had been out for eight days but WordPress 2.4.2 was the installed version. One-click upgrading was available, but I would have been much happier to see 4.3 in action already.

All-in-all, I enjoyed the setup process and the fact that I had a workable website within 5 minutes. Apart from the WordPress version issue – which is negligible – I was very happy with this part.

Ease of Use

As a regular user you probably won’t be logging into your host’s panel every day, but when you do need to, you want to get where you want to go as efficiently as possible and have the most important information at your fingertips.

The Dashboard

The admin area for WP Engine customers is well-thought out and a breeze to use. The initial view displays a bit too much clutter for me, but I understand the need to share this information. The most important information – installations and plan status – takes center stage, which is what really matters.

The one confusing area I found was that the “Installs” top level menu doesn’t take you to a page listing your installs, rather it shows you your first installation’s details and allows you to switch between the others with a dropdown. This was not immediately obvious to me but it does make sense once you get used to it.

The installation detail page shows statistics, version information, and FTPS access details. It also lists a bunch of sub-sections like CDN, backup points, Git push, SSL, domains, utilities and more.

I had one “wow, this is awesome!” moment in the admin when I was looking at the backups for a site. I pressed a link which read “What is included in the backup points?” An in-place presentation opened up with a pleasant voice over and a pointer that used my actual backups and on-screen controls to tell me what’s what – awesome!

In a nutshell, the admin area is super easy to navigate. You can find what you need easily, especially with access to installation sub-sections from the initial dashboard view. The one downside is that it isn’t responsive. I’m sure that 99% of the time people access this page on large enough monitors, but in this day and age, even admin screens should be responsive, just in case I want to check server status and some basic stats on my mobile.

Creating New Installs

Creating a new installation is so easy I can’t even write a proper paragraph about it. Click the “New Install” link at the top of the admin area, fill out a short modal window and you’re done. You’ll get a ready to go email in a couple of minutes and you can start setting things up then and there.

As you can see, sites can be completely copied (or just their setup), which was a huge help for me while doing some comparative testing.

Features

WP Engine offers a bunch of features, although nothing that would make a developer jump around in excitement (except, perhaps, for the Git push feature).

You can do things like:

Set up a CDN
Add redirect rules from the WP Engine admin
Create and restore backups
View error logs
Set up Git push for Git-based deployment
Set up SSL

Add password protection
Reset file permissions
Enable/disable the cache
Migrate your site
Use phpMyAdmin to fiddle around in your database

While the list isn’t huge, it’s solid and I’d like to point out the usefulness of two particular items.

The backup feature is as easy to use as everything else on the admin. You can see daily backups, in addition to backups that were created due to specific actions, like updating the core. This gives me peace of mind and the knowledge that a rollback is just a click away.

The Git push feature allows you to deploy your whole application with the use of Git. WP Engine has a great tutorial about what this is and how it works. For developers, it allows you to set up your application on WP Engine – or anywhere else – extremely easily, and in a modular and team-friendly way.

Support

Since all web hosts have some sort of limit on resources, my standard pre-sales question was: what happens when my quota runs out? In the case of WP Engine, I asked what happens if I grab a personal account and my visitor count spikes above the 25,000 limit?

A live chat window contacted me automatically on the Plans page of the WP Engine website so it seemed like there was someone there already. I said “hi” and got an answer within a minute.

It turns out WP Engine charges you $1 for every 1,000 visits beyond your limit. This is not a tragedy, but it would have been nice to see this somewhere on the Plans page. The representative also mentioned that upgrading to the professional plan was, of course, a possibility.

This prompted me to be a bit evil. The personal account costs $29/month, the professional one costs $99. That’s a $70 difference, which means I could purchase 70,000 visitors before it’s financially advisable to switch to the professional account (all other things equal). So I asked when he would recommend making the change. The support person said that he would recommend it anywhere above 30K visitors, which is completely wrong, of course, and this irked me a little.

On the other hand, support was lightning fast and apart from that nasty hiccup, they did just fine answering me. If you prefer, you can get in touch with them via email, phone or even regular mail if that’s your thing.

Speed

As this review is focusing on customer experience rather than speed, I won’t get into a super-deep speed review because there are just so many factors here that it would be unfair to judge any company based on casual tests.

I installed three websites:

Vanilla Twenty Fifteen theme filled with demo content – 1.49Mb, 53 requests
WooCommerce shop running on Twenty Fifteen, Shop Page – 0.479Mb, 55 requests
Out of the box Avada installation using the Cafe demo – 24.3Mb, 134 requests

When uncached, vanilla Twenty Fifteen will load in about 3.2 seconds. The WooCommerce shop loads in around 1.9 seconds and the Avada demo loads in 8.1 seconds.

When cached, vanilla Twenty Fifteen loaded in around 1.2 seconds, the WooCommerce shop took a hair over 1 second, and the Avada Cafe demo clocked in at 2.8 seconds.

More important than my own test is the community opinions of WP Engine. The company’s hostingreviews.io page shows that users are more than content with the speed. On average, 52% of all users mentioned their host favorably when talking about speed. A whopping 93% consider WP Engine to be fast, which is great!

Nov 12 2015

Get A Glimpse Of The Cyber Threat Landscape For 2016 And Beyond

Cyber Attacks will continue to affect you, your life and you business.

Now I’m not trying to be a downer here, but cyber-warfare and cyber-security will continue for the rest of our lives and we all have to aware and prepared to do business in this brave new world.

hacked.com: Cyber-criminals won’t be letting up their attacks on hardware and firmware in 2016, and the security industry will be working harder to meet the growing challenge. According to the recently released McAfee Labs Threat Predictions Report, threats will expand to virtual machines, wearables, and other surfaces. The report explores developments in the cyber threat landscape and assesses threats expected in 2016 through 2020.

The report includes opinions from 33 Intel Security thought leaders and is designed to help organizations address threats as they currently exist and will change in the future, said Vincent Weafer, vice president of Intel Security’s McAfee Labs.

Coming In 2016

The 2016 predictions covers threats from ransom-ware, infrastructure attacks, attacks on automobile systems and the sale and warehousing of stolen data.
• Hardware: Attacks on hardware and firmware will continue while the market for the tools that facilitate them will increase. System firmware tool-kits could target virtual machines.
• Ransom-ware: Ransom-ware is a growing threat that could anonymize payment methods and networks. More inexperienced cyber-criminals will use ransomware-as-a-service.
• Wearables: Most wearable devices store only small amounts of information, but cyber-criminals could target them to undermine the smartphones that manage them. The industry will have to protect attack surfaces like networking and wi-fi software, operating system kernels, memory, user interfaces, storage systems and local files, web apps, virtual machines and security and access control software.
• Employee systems: Attackers are likely to target organizations through their employees, including their home security systems, to access corporate networks. Organizations will have to stay vigilant by implementing new security technologies, create effective policies and hire experienced people.
• Cloud services: Attackers could exploit vulnerable security policies that protect cloud services. These services could undermine business strategy, financials, portfolio strategies, next-generation innovations, employee data, acquisition and divestiture plans, and other data.
• Automobiles: Connected automobile systems that lack security capabilities will be potential scenarios for exploitation. Automakers and IT vendors will partner to provide standards and solutions to protect attack surfaces like engine and transmission engine control units (ECUs), remote key systems, advanced driver assistance system ECUs, passive keyless entry, USBs, OBD IIs, V2X receiver, smartphone access and remote link type apps.
• Warehouses of stolen data: The dark market for stolen, personally-identifiable information and user names and passwords will increase in 2016. Big data warehouses that link together stolen, personally-identifiable information sets make combined records more valuable to attackers.
• Integrity attacks: Selective compromises to systems and data mark one of the most significant new attack vectors. Such attacks seize and modify transactions or data to favor perpetrators. An attacker can change direct deposit settings for a victim’s paychecks and direct the deposit to a different account. Cyber thieves could steal millions of dollars in an integrity attack in the financial sector in 2016, McAfee Labs predicts.
• Sharing threat intelligence: Enterprises and security vendors will increasingly share intelligence. Legislative action could allow governments and companies to share threat intelligence. Best practices in this area will increase, allowing success metrics to emerge and quantify protection improvement. Threat intelligence cooperatives among vendors will grow.

Looking To 2020

Looking to 2020, McAfee Lab explores how threat actors will change, how their behaviors and targets will shift and how the industry can meet the challenges.
• Below-the-OS attacks: Attackers could seek vulnerabilities in firmware and hardware as operating systems and applications strengthen against more conventional attacks. Attackers could access resources and gain control of administration and control capabilities, giving them broad control.
• Detection evasion: Attackers will target new attack surfaces to avoid detection. Difficult-to-detect styles will include encrypted infiltrations, file-less threats, exploits of remote shell and remote control protocols, sandbox evasion malware, and below-the-OS attacks that target and exploit BIOs, master boot records (MBR) and firmware.
• New devices and attack surfaces: There has not been a surge in wearable and IoT attacks, but by 2020 there could be install bases of such systems that reach penetration levels substantial enough to attract attackers. Virtual solution providers and technology vendors will seek to establish safety guidance and industry best practices. They will also build security controls into device architectures.
• Cyber-espionage goes corporate: The dark market for hacking services and malware code could allow cyber-espionage malware to find use in corporate and public sector attacks for market manipulation and financial intelligence gathering to favor the attackers.
• Privacy challenges and opportunities: The value and volume of personal digital data will expand and attract cyber criminals. This could lead to new global privacy regulations. Individuals will seek and gain compensation for sharing data. A market will develop from this “value exchange” and it could change the way individuals and organizations manage digital privacy.
• Security industry response: The industry will create more effective tools to correct and detect sophisticated attacks. Behavior analytics could evolve to identify irregular actions that could indicate compromised accounts. Shared intelligence will likely provide better and faster protection capabilities. Cloud-integrated security could enhance control and visibility. Automated correction and detection technology portends the ability to protect enterprises from common attacks and free IT security staff to focus on the most critical security incidents.
Organizations Must Take Action

To succeed in preventing future threats, organizations have to see more learn more, detect and respond faster, said Weafer. Organizations have to fully utilize all human and technical resources available to them.

Readers can access the full report here.

Oct 16 2015

Sharing all your personal info online? Prepare to be hacked

Hackers Love Your Social Media Shares. Here’s Why.

Hi, I’m Todd and I’m a privacy fanatic. There I said it. Some friends and family think I’m a “bit off” as I preach/cajole/rage/plead with them to get serious about their online sharing habits and what it means to their privacy and security. It’s part of our brave new world and the hackers are getting better at this game every day.

Hey, but don’t listen to me. This article nails it perfectly in describing [in layman’s terms] some of challenges with Social Media and what it means to hackers with our obsession with sharing every single of your life.

Hongkiat.com: Social media has become an indispensable part of our modern lives. You are most likely more connected to more online social circles now than ever before. The problem here is that you love to share, perhaps even a little too much. Yes, we were taught that sharing is caring, but oversharing will lead to privacy and security breaches.

Experts have been warning about the risks of this exaggerated information broadcasting for years. There are countless stories about how Facebook activity, for example, has caused major upheaval and destruction to people’s lives from losing employee benefits (due to beach photos shared on Facebook), to losing jobs (for a variety of reasons).

But the threats from social media aren’t limited to just bosses, potential employers and insurance companies. Hackers also prey on social media pages and use the information they find there for their own benefit. Below we discuss some of the data that hackers are after, and what they do once they have it.

When you sign up to receive services from banks, telecom companies and government agencies (among others), you need to authenticate your identity. Online, this is done by providing a username and password, or sometimes a one-time code that is sent via text message to the user’s mobile device. [x_pullquote type=”right”]Be vigilant to what you are sharing online and become familiar with the consequences of such information sharing.[/x_pullquote]

On the phone, users generally authenticate their identity by answering personal questions. In the United States, authentication questions usually include the customer’s Social Security Number, date of birth, and mother’s maiden name, but may also include the name of your first pet, the elementary school you attended, or any other random information.

How hard do you think it is for hackers to come up with this sort of information about you? Well, when you’re constantly plastering pictures, dating statuses and your plans for your kids’ next birthday party on your social media pages (not to mention explicitly sharing your date of birth), you’re basically handing over your personal data directly to hackers on a silver platter.

So maybe at least your mother’s maiden name will remain private, right? Probably not. If you connect with family members online, the information on mom’s profile page is there for all to see. Figuring out that Karen is your mom’s middle name doesn’t even need serious hacking skills.

Making Educated Guesses At Your Passwords

Hackers may attempt to crack your password by systematically trying a huge number of potential passwords (a method known as “brute force”) until the right one is found. This is one of the reasons why consumers are encouraged to choose a sophisticated password with lower case, upper case, numbers and special characters – to thwart such password-guessing scripts.

To improve the chances of actually finding the right password and to reduce the number of time it takes to do so, hackers use something called a “dictionary attack.”

A dictionary attack means that the script isn’t guessing just all possible strings (including completely random letters), but is instead using various words from a dictionary. The attack is effective considering that most users don’t choose their passwords randomly, but apply familiar words and names that are easy to remember.

As depicted on shows like Mr. Robot, social media can help hackers collect words for their dictionaries. Names of pets and family members, your birthday, your kids’ birthdays and your anniversary can be easily extracted from your social profiles and added to the hacker’s dictionary.

These personal details more often than not make their way into passwords making this yet another case where the hacker doesn’t even really need to work very hard at all.

Why stop at the mere individual when there are huge organizations just itching to be hacked?

While hacking into an organization’s internal network may require actual hacking sophistication and serious technical know-how, the root of the organization hacking job is not so different from the personal one: organizations and large companies also host social media pages, and they are also guilty of oversharing.

One of the most common methods used to attack organizations is to send employees emails that contain malware. Once the employee opens the attachment, their corporate computer gets infected by malware which opens a “back door” that allows the hacker to get into the organization’s internal network through the infected machine.

Naturally, some employees in the organization will be easier targets than others. For example, system administrators, the people who run and manage the entire IT network, will generally act as larger targets. If their computers get infected, hackers would then receive the keys to the kingdom and access the entire IT infrastructure.

By this point you can probably guess where the hackers begin this entire enterprise – via social media. Social networks can be used to identify the exact type of high-value employees needed for this mass infiltration.

By looking for people who hold certain positions in the target organization, the hacker can virtually handpick the employees that should receive the malware. Since most organizations follow a specific email address “scheme” (for example, the email address of an employee would be their first name, dot, their last name, at, the organization’s domain) the hacker can deduce the employee’s email address simply based on their name.

Social media can also help hackers write the email message that they’ll send to the employee with the malware. If the employee posted on their social media page that they are going to a certain conference, for example, the email message could masquerade as a message from the conference organizations. This way, there’s a higher chance the employee would not suspect the authenticity of the attachment, and open it.

Arm Yourself With Information!

There are many more risks posed by social media that involve a more proactive, social engineering approach by the hacker. We haven’t even broached the subject of what hackers can do when they actively approach a user with a fake profile or fake aviator or send out phishing attacks through those platforms.

Considering just how much social media has been embedded into your life, it would be wise to familiarize yourself with these threats. Be vigilant to what you are sharing online and become familiar with the consequences of such information sharing.

I know that you have read all of this before. Nothing new here. It’s just like backing up your files. Everyone knows that they are supposed to do it, but most people do not perform a backup, thinking that “It will never happen to them: Uh-huh…

You’ve been warned time and time again. Don’t come crying the blues when you get hacked. Just keep posting everything….

Sep 23 2015

Ad Blocking Explained

By most accounts, more and more people are automatically blocking the ads in their browser.

Of course, people have been blocking ads forever. By ignoring them.

Fifteen years ago, when I began writing about Permission M arketing, I pointed out that when ads are optional, it’s only anticipated, personal and relevant ones that will pay off.

And advertisers have had fifteen years to show self restraint. They’ve had the chance to not secretly track people, set cookies for their own benefit, insert popunders and popovers and poparounds, and mostly, deliver us ads we actually want to see.

Alas, it was probably too much to ask. And so, in the face of a relentless race to the bottom, users are taking control, using a sledgehammer to block them all. It’s not easy to develop a white list, not easy to create an ad blocker that is smart enough to merely block the selfish and annoying ads. And so, just as the default for some advertisers is, “if it’s not against the law and it’s cheap, do it,” the new generation of ad blockers is starting from the place of, “delete all.”

Ad blockers undermine a fundamental principle of media, one that goes back a hundred years: Free content in exchange for attention. The thing is, the FCC kept the ad part in check with TV, and paper costs did the same thing for magazines and newspapers. But on the web, more and more people have come to believe that the deal doesn’t work, and so they’re unilaterally abrogating it. They don’t miss the ads, and they don’t miss the snooping of their data.

This reinforces the fundamental building blocks of growth today:

The best marketing isn’t advertising, it’s a well-designed and remarkable product.
The best way to contact your users is by earning the privilege to contact them, over time.
Making products for your customers is far more efficient than finding customers for your products.
Horizontally spread ideas (person to person) are far more effective than top-down vertical advertising.
More data isn’t the point. Data to serve explicit promises is the point.
Commodity products can’t expect to easily build a profitable ‘brand’ with nothing but repetitive jingles and noise.
Media properties that celebrate their ads (like Vogue) will continue to thrive, because the best advertising is the advertising we would miss if it was gone.

Media companies have always served the master who pays the bill… the advertiser. At some point, the advertiser will wake up and choose to do business in a new way, and my guess is that the media that we all rely on will change in response. But in the meantime, it seems as though many online consumers have had enough.

via: SethGodin