Saturday, June 6, 2015

Netiquette IQ presents 15 Email Statistics That Are Shaping The Future

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Even email is rapidly undergoing changes brought on by technology. Good Netiquette has and always will have a place in electronic communications. Contrast this to the role of etiquette in the evolution of society. Netiquette embodies respect and consideration as well as ethics. All of these are, in my opinion, critical in a changing and expanding world.

We should all embrace Netiquette as a means of keeping depersonalization from penetrating into our methods of interaction. Let's keep this in mind as we adjust and embrace new trends as listed in the article below.
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Convince and convert.com by Jay Baer

15 Email Statistics That Are Shaping The Future

I just finished an invigorating panel discussion at the Marketing Profs Digital Marketing Mixer. Moderated by Aaron Kahlow from Online Marketing Summit, the session was titled “What Your Customers Really Think of Your Email Program.”

I was joined on the panel by Katrina Anderson of iPost, and Annie Kinnaird of Emma. Stephanie Miller of ReturnPath was the brains behind the format.
The idea was to wade through the ton of email data being published seemingly every day, and focus on the really juicy stuff – subscriber studies – that’s impacting how the email marketing industry is evolving.

Which of These Email Marketing Stats Scare You Most?

1. 21% of email recipients report email as Spam, even if they know it isn’t
2. 43% of email recipients click the Spam button based on the email “from” name or email address
3. 69% of email recipients report email as Spam based solely on the subject line
4. 35% of email recipients open email based on the subject line alone
5. IP addresses appearing on just one of the 12 major blacklists had email deliverability 25 points below those not listed on any blacklists
6. Email lists with 10% or more unknown users get only 44% of their email delivered by ISPs
7. 17% of Americans create a new email address every 6 months
8. 30% of subscribers change email addresses annually
9. If marketers optimized their emails for image blocking, ROI would increase 9+%
10. 84% of people 18-34 use an email preview pane
11. People who buy products marketed through email spend 138% more than people that do not receive email offers
12. 44% of email recipients made at least one purchase last year based on a promotional email
13. Subscribers below age 25 prefer SMS to email
14. 35% of business professionals check email on a mobile device
15. 80% of social network members have received unsolicited email or invites
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 Good Netiquette And A Green Internet To All!
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Great Reasons for Purchasing Netiquette IQ
·         Get more email opens.  Improve 100% or more.
·         Receive more responses, interviews, appointments, prospects and sales.
·         Be better understood.
·         Eliminate indecision.
·         Avoid being spammed 100% or more.
·         Have recipient finish reading your email content. 
·         Save time by reducing questions.
·         Increase your level of clarity.
·         Improve you time management with your email.
·        Have quick access to a wealth of relevant email information.
Enjoy most of what you need for email in a single book.

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**Important note** - contact our sister company for very powerful solutions for IP management (IPv4 and IPv6, security, firewall and APT solutions:

www.tabularosa.net

In addition to this blog, Netiquette IQ has a website with great assets which are being added to on a regular basis. I have authored the premiere book on Netiquette, “Netiquette IQ - A Comprehensive Guide to Improve, Enhance and Add Power to Your Email". My new book, “You’re Hired! Super Charge Your Email Skills in 60 Minutes. . . And Get That Job!” will be published soon follow by a trilogy of books on Netiquette for young people. You can view my profile, reviews of the book and content excerpts at:

 www.amazon.com/author/paulbabicki

 If you would like to listen to experts in all aspects of Netiquette and communication, try my radio show on BlogtalkRadio  Additionally, I provide content for an online newsletter via paper.li. I have also established Netiquette discussion groups with Linkedin and Yahoo.  I am also a member of the International Business Etiquette and Protocol Group and Minding Manners among others. Further, I regularly consult for the Gerson Lehrman Group, a worldwide network of subject matter experts and have been a contributor to numerous blogs and publications. 

Lastly, I am the founder and president of Tabula Rosa Systems, a company that provides “best of breed” products for network, security and system management and services. Tabula Rosa has a new blog and Twitter site which offers great IT product information for virtually anyone.
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Friday, June 5, 2015

Netiquette For Malware Detection And Capture Via Tabula Rosa Systems' Flagship Product, Attivo Networks


Attivo Networks is a flagship product for for our sister company, Tabula Rosa Systems. It is a compellingly powerful product to detect malware which has entered a network.The following are three major areas which malware seeks to exploit and how the Attivo appliance completely resolves them.

WEB SERVICES EXPLOITS
            
• Attacks take advantage of WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, etc.
• Attackers used web servers to mount remote code injection attacks that penetrated the company’s data centers
• Once in, they moved freely around the data center until they find and steal the data
 
• BOTsink Virtual Appliance deployed in the data center 
• Engages attacker during their discovery and lateral infection phase (as they probed and scanned the network looking for high value targets).      
• Prevents attack’s propagation, identifies breach source and generates a signature for IT to stop attack before data could be stolen

STOLEN CREDENTIALS
           
• Zero-day attack • Endpoint security solutions has no signature or attack pattern to look for
• Will not be able to stop attack from mining the endpoint for the valuable information  
• One of the hardest attacks to stop
• Malware injected into a “trusted” system owned by an employee, contractor or 3rd party vendor
• Attackers mine the device for IP addresses of servers to attack
• Use legitimate login credentials to get onto targeted servers
  
• BOTsink Solution plus Information Relay Entrapment System (IRES) is an ideal combination against stolen credential attacks 
• BOTsink Solution will discover attack at the earliest stage, denying attacker time to mount a successful data exfiltration attack    
 • Mounting attack to steal data or access other, more interesting servers.
        
ENDPOINT AND PERSONAL (BYOD) DEVICES
        
• Zero-day attacks
• Zero-day attack
• Unknown and undetectable by solutions that rely on known attack signatures and patterns to identify an attack.
• Adobe flash zero-day exploit
• Skelton malware
  
• BOTsink and IRES Solutions catches a BOT or APT that uses scanning and reconnaissance tactics will be caught 
• BOTsink Solution catches the infection early in its lifecycle to prevent its propagation 
• Captures full forensic information to help minimize remediation efforts    
• Java zero-day exploit
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 Good Netiquette And A Green Internet To All!
  ==============================================

Great Reasons for Purchasing Netiquette IQ
·         Get more email opens.  Improve 100% or more.
·         Receive more responses, interviews, appointments, prospects and sales.
·         Be better understood.
·         Eliminate indecision.
·         Avoid being spammed 100% or more.
·         Have recipient finish reading your email content. 
·         Save time by reducing questions.
·         Increase your level of clarity.
·         Improve you time management with your email.
·        Have quick access to a wealth of relevant email information.
Enjoy most of what you need for email in a single book.

=====================================================
**Important note** - contact our sister company for very powerful solutions for IP management (IPv4 and IPv6, security, firewall and APT solutions:

www.tabularosa.net

In addition to this blog, Netiquette IQ has a website with great assets which are being added to on a regular basis. I have authored the premiere book on Netiquette, “Netiquette IQ - A Comprehensive Guide to Improve, Enhance and Add Power to Your Email". My new book, “You’re Hired! Super Charge Your Email Skills in 60 Minutes. . . And Get That Job!” will be published soon follow by a trilogy of books on Netiquette for young people. You can view my profile, reviews of the book and content excerpts at:

 www.amazon.com/author/paulbabicki

 If you would like to listen to experts in all aspects of Netiquette and communication, try my radio show on BlogtalkRadio  Additionally, I provide content for an online newsletter via paper.li. I have also established Netiquette discussion groups with Linkedin and Yahoo.  I am also a member of the International Business Etiquette and Protocol Group and Minding Manners among others. Further, I regularly consult for the Gerson Lehrman Group, a worldwide network of subject matter experts and have been a contributor to numerous blogs and publications. 

Lastly, I am the founder and president of Tabula Rosa Systems, a company that provides “best of breed” products for network, security and system management and services. Tabula Rosa has a new blog and Twitter site which offers great IT product information for virtually anyone.
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Netiquette IQ Quote Of The Day For 6/5/2015



The Internet has made it much more effective and cheaper to spread propaganda.
Evgeny Morozov
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 Good Netiquette And A Green Internet To All!
  ==============================================

Great Reasons for Purchasing Netiquette IQ
·         Get more email opens.  Improve 100% or more.
·         Receive more responses, interviews, appointments, prospects and sales.
·         Be better understood.
·         Eliminate indecision.
·         Avoid being spammed 100% or more.
·         Have recipient finish reading your email content. 
·         Save time by reducing questions.
·         Increase your level of clarity.
·         Improve you time management with your email.
·        Have quick access to a wealth of relevant email information.
Enjoy most of what you need for email in a single book.

=====================================================
**Important note** - contact our sister company for very powerful solutions for IP management (IPv4 and IPv6, security, firewall and APT solutions:

www.tabularosa.net

In addition to this blog, Netiquette IQ has a website with great assets which are being added to on a regular basis. I have authored the premiere book on Netiquette, “Netiquette IQ - A Comprehensive Guide to Improve, Enhance and Add Power to Your Email". My new book, “You’re Hired! Super Charge Your Email Skills in 60 Minutes. . . And Get That Job!” will be published soon follow by a trilogy of books on Netiquette for young people. You can view my profile, reviews of the book and content excerpts at:

 www.amazon.com/author/paulbabicki

 If you would like to listen to experts in all aspects of Netiquette and communication, try my radio show on BlogtalkRadio  Additionally, I provide content for an online newsletter via paper.li. I have also established Netiquette discussion groups with Linkedin and Yahoo.  I am also a member of the International Business Etiquette and Protocol Group and Minding Manners among others. Further, I regularly consult for the Gerson Lehrman Group, a worldwide network of subject matter experts and have been a contributor to numerous blogs and publications. 

Lastly, I am the founder and president of Tabula Rosa Systems, a company that provides “best of breed” products for network, security and system management and services. Tabula Rosa has a new blog and Twitter site which offers great IT product information for virtually anyone.
==============================================

Thursday, June 4, 2015

Netiquette IQ Blog Of Of 6/4/2015 - Internet Propaganda - How Far Can It Go?

Many countries in the world today exert different forms of free Internet access, privacy, expression or deliverability. Almost always they echo the official government policies with varying flexibility. When you read the article below, it may strike you just how deep a country can involve its propaganda to influence their netizens! Let's do all we can to bring the world to a place where any nationality or demographic can have the best truthful content we all should have.
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The photo is of George Orwell
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Beware what you read.(Reuters/Jianan Yu)
Nikhil Sonnad@nkl
December 18, 2014 qz.com

“NOTICE: We request every internet commenter carry out the following task today,” begins an email from the supervisor.

It’s just another day in the propaganda department of Zhanggong, a district in southeast China’s modestly sized city of Ganzhou. Employees and freelancers are paid to post pro-government messages on the internet, part of a broader effort to “guide public opinion,” as the Chinese Communist Party frequently puts it.

The details of these directives are usually hidden from public view. But thousands of emails obtained from the Zhanggong propaganda department by a Chinese blogger—and released on his website—offer a rare view into the mechanics of manipulating web conversation in China at its most local level.

Among the hacked documents are instructions to paid commenters, their posting quotas, and summaries of their activity. The emails reveal hundreds of thousands of messages sent to Chinese microblogging and social media services like Sina Weibo, Tencent, and various internet forums, including working links to the actual posts. All told, they demonstrate the Chinese state’s wide reach on the internet, even at the lowest levels of government.
Zhanggong’s propaganda department comes across as surprisingly large, yet comically unsophisticated. To get a sense of its inner workings, Quartz examined emails related to a single event: an online Q&A with the local Communist Party secretary earlier this year. What we found was a Potemkin online village of adoring citizens posting favorable messages and easy questions—all manufactured by the propaganda department.

Ganzhou’s urban population is roughly 1.9 million, according to the latest government figures, making it a relatively small city by China’s standards. Zhanggong district is Ganzhou’s administrative center and home to about 460,000 people.

 “There are at least 5,000 districts this size or bigger,” said Qiang Xiao, editor of China Digital Times (CDT), a news site affiliated with the University of California Berkeley that first reported on the emails.

Despite its small size, Zhanggong employs nearly 300 wangpingyuan, or “internet commentators,” according to the emails.

People in China have long known that internet mercenaries are paid to post comments that laud government officials and attempt to influence public opinion. These commenters are widely known as as the wumao dang, or “50-cent party,” a reference to a 2010 editorial in the state-run Global Times that said commenters are paid 50 cents renminbi per post. During large protests or large-scale government screw-ups, it’s not hard to identify posts by wumao trying to influence the conversation.

“What I didn’t expect to find is that there are now wumao in virtually every department,” said Xiaolan, the blogger who obtained and released the emails. “I was really shocked.”
 “Generally the passwords for government departments are the name of the department followed by ‘123456’ or something like that.”  

Xiaolan—he only goes by that name—communicated with Quartz through encrypted chat messages. He said he was able to hack into Zhanggong’s propaganda department’s email account the easy way: by guessing the password.

“Generally, the passwords for government departments are the name of the department followed by ‘123456’ or something like that,” Xiaolan said. In this case, the mailbox password was “xcb123456,” with “xcb” representing the first letter of the romanization of each character in 宣传部—”propaganda department.”

“The most complicated passwords,” Xiaolan said, “are like name of department plus phone number.”

Ask me anything non-controversial
Shi Wenqing, an affable 60-year-old, was appointed secretary of the Ganzhou branch of the Communist Party—a position akin to mayor—in 2011. He sits on Zhanggong’s standing committee, giving him considerable sway over local politics.

He also appears to be a propaganda innovator. In April, Shi convened a meeting of his fellow party members in Ganzhou on improving their “system of propaganda thinking and culture.” An official report (link in Chinese) says, “Under Shi’s encouragement, attendees broke convention, and skipped small talk and discussion of personal achievements to get right to the point naming problems and offering solutions.”

Whether any of that is true, it shows that Shi wants to present himself as a fresh thinker to his superiors in the party.

The email mentioned at the top of this story suggests another way Shi tries to do things differently: He holds occasional “internet exchanges,” taking to television to answer questions posted on a forum run by a local news website. Shi is personable and polite, frequently beginning his answers with something like, “Thank you, my internet friend, for asking this question!”
But this is not like an Ask Me Anything session on Reddit: During Shi’s town halls, people are paid to post comments that make him and the government look as good as possible.

Guiding public opinion

The internet exchange Quartz examined took place on January 16, 2014, with the online discussion hosted by Ganzhou Net, a local news portal managed by the propaganda department. (The full video of the interview is available online, in Chinese.) In its email announcing the Q&A to wangpingyuan, the department told each of them to post in the forum at least once, suggesting seven “discussion points” to focus on in their comments. Here’s one:
It’s almost Chinese New Year, but it seems like taxis are far more orderly than in past years. Also, taxi drivers are using their meters more reliably and the service is just generally better. Let’s keep it up!

Paid commenters tend to paste these suggestions word-for-word to meet their quotas and move on, and that’s what many of them appear to have done in this case.

Quartz compared the propaganda department’s discussion points to the full text of all the forum posts, and found that four of the seven were posted exactly as suggested at least once. The fourth, translated above, appears verbatim three separate times in the forum, each from an anonymous user. The first—about a new policy “giving Ganzhou wings”—was posted 17 times.

“These commenters just write their work report, send it, and are finished,” said Xiao, the CDT editor. “Their tasks are totally mechanical.”

Not all paid comments are copy-and-paste jobs, however.

In 2012, Chinese artist and dissident Ai Weiwei offered to buy an iPad for any wangpingyuan willing to answer questions about their work. Asked if they ever take liberties with their posts, the commenter who spoke to Ai said, “When transferring the attention of netizens and blurring the public focus, going off the topic is very effective.”
 #PartySecretaryFaceToFace# I firmly believe Party Secretary Shi can lead Ganzhou to a better tomorrow. (Tencent Weibo) 

Indeed, subtle comments are probably more effective than verbatim copies. “The netizens are used to seeing unskilled comments that simply say the government is great or so and so is a traitor,” Ai’s interviewee said. “They know what is behind it at a glance. The principle I observe is: don’t directly praise the government or criticize negative news.”
That commenter looks to be more nuanced than most: In Zhanggong, barely anyone observes this principle. The text of an email sent to the propaganda department from Zhanggong’s Dongwai subdistrict shows three comments that are unmistakably intended cast Shi and the government in a positive light (translated here into English):


Dongwai subdistrict posts from January 16, 2014:
1. (Link to post on Tencent Weibo) Party Secretary Shi is an exemplary Party Secretary! The people of Ganzhou support you!
2. (Link to forum) I really admire Party Secretary Shi, what a capable and effective Party Secretary! I hope he can be the father of Ganzhou for years to come.
3. (Link to forum) Hello Party Secretary Shi! I really admire you, you are so bold and effective in your work, honest to the people; our great Party Secretary! You have my support.


Pro-government sentiment is not limited to the Ganzhou Net forum, as the post from microblogging service Tencent Weibo above shows. Another email, sent to the department from the Jiefang subdistrict on January 20, lists 127 messages related to Shi’s “internet exchange.” They were posted on the Ganzhou forum, Tencent Weibo, and Sina Weibo, the country’s largest microblogging site. Here is a sample:


6. #PartySecretaryFaceToFace# I firmly believe Party Secretary Shi can lead Ganzhou to a better tomorrow. (Tencent Weibo)
17. #PartySecretaryFaceToFace# The government works so hard, and the results are easy to see. The happy people give our compliments. (Sina Weibo)
80. The greatest achievement we’ve seen since Party Secretary Shi took over has been securing national support for Ganzhou’s revival plan. Advantageous new policies await us, and we thank you! (Sina Weibo)
109. Party Secretary Shi’s dialogue with internet users is the embodiment of connecting with the people. It’s commendable how he is taking in the views of the public. (Tencent Weibo)


In addition to posting directly, commenters use accounts that repost the right kind of messages, like a retweet on Twitter.

On January 19, three days after Shi’s interview and just as state news outlets began running stories about it, the department sent an email telling wangpingyuan to repost, “especially on Sina Weibo,” agreeable comments using the hashtag “#PartySecretaryFaceToFace(our translation). It tells each “internet commenter unit” to “repost 200 or more times before 5:00pm on January 21.”

The 200-post quota probably backfired. Most commenters appear to have done the bare minimum needed to fulfill their requirements and send their work report.
For example, one Sina Weibo account used for reposts is “suaisydua”. An email summary informs superiors that the account made 70 related reposts during the specified time. That user’s Sina Weibo page reveals that all 70 reposts happened within 30 minutes of each other. As anyone who has used Twitter knows, 70 retweets in a half hour is not the most effective strategy.

There’s additional evidence that that account is under the government’s thumb. A March 5, 2014, email mentions that suaisydua is “one of 113 Weibo repost participant accounts” that would no longer be used for that purpose. The post history matches up. Beginning the next day, the account stopped its stream of reposts related to politics and Shi, moving on to more mundane topics like the opening of a local play and “12 kitchen-cleaning techniques you didn’t know.”

Some comments are more subtle. One post in the discussion forum, which is also mentioned in a summary email to the propaganda department, expresses love for Ganzhou before sneaking in an endorsement for a controversial urban development project: “Ganzhou has made great strides, it’s a new dawn for us! We’ve even started work on the Rongjiang development project. Ganzhou is adorable and charming.”

This is just a small event in a small town

It’s not clear the degree to which paid comments influence the conversation the way Communist Party members hope they do. Xiaolan thinks it’s bad enough that they “take up space on your computer.” CDT’s Xiao says the paid commenters could be adding noise to the conversation simply to drown out normal people’s desire to converse online.
The Zhanggong propaganda department’s efforts around Shi’s Q&A, at least, reveal an effort that is large in scale but weak on quality.

But urban Ganzhou is home to just 0.1% of the Chinese population. The campaign may not have been particularly intricate, but Shi’s department was able to deploy hundreds of commenters to sway public opinion in his favor. A single event on a single day generated dozens of emails and over a thousand comments on forums and microblogs. There are many Chinese cities bigger than Ganzhou, and each likely has a propaganda department at least as large. Issues of national attention presumably are subject to still more elaborate efforts.
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In addition to this blog, I maintain a radio show on BlogtalkRadio  and an online newsletter via paper.li.I have established Netiquette discussion groups with Linkedin and  Yahoo I am also a member of the International Business Etiquette and Protocol Group and Minding Manners among others. I regularly consult for the Gerson Lehrman Group, a worldwide network of subject matter experts and I have been contributing to the blogs Everything Email and emailmonday . My work has appeared in numerous publications and I have presented to groups such as The Breakfast Club of NJ and  PSG of Mercer County, NJ.

I am the president of Tabula Rosa Systems, a “best of breed” reseller of products for communications, email, network management software, security products and professional services.  Also, I am the president of Netiquette IQ. We are currently developing an email IQ rating system, Netiquette IQ, which promotes the fundamentals outlined in my book.

Over the past twenty-five years, I have enjoyed a dynamic and successful career and have attained an extensive background in IT and electronic communications by selling and marketing within the information technology marketplace.Anyone who would like to review the book and have it posted on my blog or website, please contact me paul@netiquetteiq.com.

If you have not already done so, please view the trailer for my book below. 
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