Personal Debt and Insolvency

The effects of the credit crunch are lasting much longer than some had thought and it seems that the end is still nowhere in sight. “Piles of unopened envelopes, ignoring the phone, constant worry and sleepless nights - these are just some of the symptoms of debt denial” comments Gary Sans of Lanyon Bowdler Solicitors.

Naturally the credit card bills start to arrive from January and you have entered into the New Year burdened with debt as a result of overspending at Christmas time. Each month brings new reasons to hide further under the duvet and simply hope for the best.

You are not alone. The UK debt help market has never been busier, as a massive percentage of the nation’s consumers struggle to cope with their finances.

However serious your debt problems are you need to be proactive in sorting them out. Sitting at home worrying isn’t going to fix anything and neither will denial. If you have serious debt problems then you have to take decisive action.

Gary Sans of Lanyon Bowdler Solicitors comments, “Come January, people find themselves in a situation where previous financial worries are amplified by the bills arriving from the festive season. If you find yourself in this black hole and seem to be falling deeper and deeper you need to seek advice from an experienced debt professional. Lanyon Bowdler has the experience to guide you through this difficult time and help you to see the light at the end of the tunnel”.

Click and Deliver Your Money or Your Name

There is a tendency to label anyone who is in the business of making money out of domain names a cybersquatter, and in the process to regard them as guilty of fast practice verging on the fraudulent. But is it appropriate to regard the growing body of entrepreneurs, known as "domainers", whose livelihood turns on building up large portfolios of domain names, as cybersquatters?. Although some domainers may well be cybersquatters, many of them are not cybersquatters in the sense in which the term is generally understood in the law.Cybersquatters
Cybersquatters register domain names, usually a well-established trade mark, in bad faith to gain some commercial advantage. This usually involves trying to sell it back for an inflated price to a party known to be interested in having the domain name, again usually the trade mark owner. Alternatively, the domain is used to direct traffic to the cybersquatter's own website and away from a competitor's. Worse still, some cybersquatters use the domain to damage the true owner's reputation. Generally though, the difficulties that have arisen between trade mark owners and registrants of certain domain names have been some of the main reasons giving cybersquatters a bad name.
The first-come, first-served system of domain registration, which generally prevails, creates a pressure to be the first to register a domain name. This tends to lead to disputes on the "right" to register. However, simply because you have a registered trade mark or have been using a trade name for a lengthy period does not mean that another person with a legitimate reason for registering the domain and using it in good faith must give it up. One example of this is the Prince Sports case in which Prince Sports were unsuccessful in having the domain www.prince.com transferred to them from Prince Computers in the UK.Administrative procedures to resolve disputes
There are administrative procedures in place so that domain disputes can be resolved without recourse to the courts. This is vital in view of all the problems with jurisdiction that inevitably arise in a global system like the internet. Domains and disputes are managed by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). ICANN manages generic Top Level Domains (gTLD) such as .biz, .com, .info, .name, .net, and .org, and delegates the registration of domains to registrars. There are over 1,500 accredited registrars, each with their own policies and procedures for registering, maintaining and handling disputes regarding domains.
When registering gTLD domains, the Uniform Dispute for Domain Names Resolution Policy (UDRP) is automatically incorporated into the registration agreement. Complaints can be filed with one of four bodies, the largest of which is WIPO in Geneva. Typically filing a complaint temporarily freezes the domain and prevents it from being transferred to any third party until a decision has been reached. The process is relatively quick and reasonably cheap, with decisions given between 30 - 60 days of filing the complaint.
Countries not using ICANN's UDRP may use a different form of dispute resolution. For example, Nominet is the Dispute Resolution System (DRS) used for .uk domains, which like the UDRP is conducted online with no requirement for legal representation. Nominet's DRS is administered by the Centre for Dispute Resolution (CEDR). It will order the transfer of rights of .uk domains, provided you can show that (on the balance of probabilities) you have rights (either "passing off" rights or registered trade mark rights) in the name which are identical or similar to the domain name. Nominet will consider a registration abusive if it creates an unfair advantage or is unfairly detrimental to the complainant's rights.Desirable residences
The domains which have reportedly changed hands for high sums of money tend to be generic names in which it is difficult for anyone to claim trade mark rights. For example, "Business.com" was sold for $7.5m, while "Wines.com" went for $3m and "Mortgage.com" for $1.8m. Misspelled domain name "Voyuer.com" was auctioned for $112,100 at Snapnames (apparently this is the highest sale price ever for a misspelled domain name). Clearly even if these figures are inflated hype, domain names can be valuable commodities, and are of huge importance to e-commerce, and on-line branding.
The prices some generic terms have fetched serve to highlight their attractiveness. Even the owners of famous brands and trade marked names have made good use of generic terms as website addresses.Generic names and domaining
So, generic names are gold for domainers, but names that target a specific audience are also valuable (for example, people looking for information on “eating disorders”). The way in which domainers make money from domain names is not limited to reselling.
Indeed, the business model in the US tends more towards holding domains in a portfolio for web advertising revenue rather than for resale. The function of the domain is then to attract traffic and generate click revenue. The model specifically depends on the 15-20% of surfers who reportedly type a name into a web browser rather than into a search engine. This brings “direct navigation” traffic (as opposed to indirect traffic through a search engine like Google) to the page at which the domain is "parked"(that is the place the domain address arrives at), or to its website if there is one developed, as there sometimes will be.Where the money comes from.
Imagine you are seeking internet information on job openings, and type into your web browser "careerinfo.com", hoping to find a useful site. You would reach a website populated with job-related keywords. The domain owner, (sometimes referred to as a “click farmer”) would collect revenue each time you clicked on one of the featured ads.
The domainer's revenue would be by way of a commission from Google or other search engines. Although the amounts per click may be quite low, for a high volume site the numbers soon mount up to large figures.
The reason the revenue comes from Google or Overture or other search engine is that advertisers enter into arrangements with Google or other search engines to pay whenever someone clicks on their ads. In order to get their links listed high in search results they bid on keywords. So, if the amount being paid per click for a keyword like "career info" were $3.06, then Google or other search engine would keep the entire amount if the click on the advertiser's ad came directly from the results displayed on its own pages. However, as ads are sometimes also sub-contracted out, so that they display on a network of third party sites (that is, domainers' sites), if the click on the advertiser's ad comes from a third party's page or website then Google or whichever other search engine has the primary contract with the advertiser, would share the $3.06 with the click farmer.
Internet marketing firm Marchex Inc reportedly paid $164.2 million recently for a company, Name Development Ltd, which owns a large portfolio of domain names. Marchex estimated that the Name Development portfolio had more than 17 million unique visitors in November.
There are many facets to domain names, and knowledge about how the industry works is useful for businesses seeking to do business online, and choosing domain names. In future articles we will look at pitfalls in speculating on domains, valuation of domains, the UK domainer business, domain disputes, and the pros and cons of using administrative procedures as against court proceedings to retrieve domain names.

Hacking a Computer Specialist

Lots of intellectuals within computer science within Eastern Europe have lots of knowledge and know how. However, they are struggling getting a computer related job. Especially during the recessions or depression going on these days all over the globe, but hits the Eastern Europeans more than anywhere on the globe.
This is a fact that the criminal organizations has and still use to their advantage. Their knowledge is turned into tools within the computer crimes and lots of them are working for organized networks like the Russian mafia.
If a company with online business, whether its sales of products or services or anything else are desperate enough to win a fight towards their competitors, and they are willing to step over the legal boundary, they can pay some few hundreds of dollars for a DDOS attack on their competitors servers.
They are even offered a 10 minutes test to see if their competitor will grind to a halt or not. Or even if competitors would like to look into secret documents stored on their servers? For only a few hundred dollars this is also possible to achieve. You want to check if your girl or boy friend have some secrets stored, like photos or anything else? Just put the money on the table and the secrets are sent to your email if you want it done.
Behind all these services are hackers, those almost mythical figures portrayed in the movies, media as cult figures. We have been shown characters in for instance the classic movie from 1995, where Angelina Jolie acts as the pretty and hip hacker called Acid Burn, and in Matrix movie where the idealistic hacker called Neo is portrayed by Keanu Reeves. These characters are not so far from the reality as we would think. They are around us today, operating in various roles and activities, both legal and illegal.
They are hard to catch.
In August last year, one of the most serious ID theft cases was revealed to us. Eleven persons were caught and taken to justice for having stolen more than 40 million bank cards. The data were sniffed from various store chains in USA and stored on servers in Eastern Europe and sold further to other criminals. The people behind this was one unknown from China, three Americans and one from Belarus, one from Estland and three more from Ukraine.
The attacks comes as we all know, from Eastern Europe were hacking seems to be very common and wide spread phenomena.
So why is this the case? Why are there so many cases related to Eastern Europe? Often the hackers are located in countries were it is difficult to have a effective cooperation with the police authorities. It is of course an advantage to have less chance to be taken when dealing with activities like this.
The level of technologoy know how in these countries are very high, as traditionally these countries have good educational systems which enables people with skills to aspire wthin these areas.Today it is very difficult for these skilled persons to get work in the traditional industry, both in private and public sector, and they need money to earn for a living like anyone else.

The mafias have their own IT departments The education increase in Eastern Europe, but faster than job opportunities and then computer crime will become a way of living for these highly educated people. There are people who have a full time job working with computer crime.