FTC delivers major blow to spam facilitator ISP

A company, most prominently operating as Triple Fiber Networks (3fn.net), got a rude awakening from the FTC last Tuesday. http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2009/06/3fn.shtm. The data center was not shut down; their bandwidth providers were petitioned to turn off the "internet spigot," effectively leaving the servers running with no way to get to the rest of the digital world.

Turns out, the company is not only allowing/tolerating spam bots, child porn hosts and online scammers to operate from its datacenter, 3FN has been actively positioning and advertising themselves as a premium solution for such dirtbags. Their ads have been spotted on several identity theft and other community sites where "high-risk hosting" services may be sought. These guys were pretty seriously nasty, and it's nice to have them out of the game.

Here's the government filing PDF. Actually, not too heavy reading, and some very interesting little tidbits of information collected to get the court order to shut down. http://www.ftc.gov/os/caselist/0923148/0906043fncmpt.pdf

The other side of the coin is that this move seems to have shut down many legitimate sites. One example I can cite is: http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/columns/free_software_magazine_caught_3fn_shutdown_crossfire. Thankfully, it looks like they landed on their feet OK. I know of other companies, and indeed entire web hosting companies (legit ones - yes) whose sites were hosted through 3FN. Some of these legit business sites have been dark since Tuesday, as their owners seek to retrieve their data and quickly move the sites over to another host.

I'm not sure what the alternative was, and certainly "the perps" needed to be taken down suddenly and without detection, but I must wonder whether another substitute/temporary host could have been arranged beforehand to avoid the downtime for legit operators. The ingenuity and creative thinking involved in web sites these days always amazes me; seems like it could have been employed to help alleviate some of the pain.

The ne'er-do-wells will of course also move their sites, but if this move sends a message about what the US will tolerate to happen on our turf, this is a victory for the good guys. Overall, I think we've done more good than harm here.

9 Tips for running a better webinar

I'm on so many technical and business webinars, I thought I'd give my little Top 9 list of do's and don'ts for delivering one.

• Callers muted!! I cannot tell you how many times some goofball talking in the background, combined with the host's inability to isolate and/or remove that line has led to a completely ruined webinar.
• No phone bridge if you don't need one. If you don't need to have people talking, don't force them to call a phone number - deliver the audio online with the video and don't make people take that extra step. Some webinars I've been on will offer the phone bridge, but it's only for people who want to comment - fine. People can give themselves the option of calling in if they think they might need to chat, versus people like me who are always listeners-only with questions afterward offline. Unnecessarily requiring a phone bridge will lose some participants.
• Communicate beforehand. Remind them at least twice (one of which being within 2-4 hours of the start of the webinar). Can't tell you how many webinars I've casually signed up for and then never attended because I forgot and was never reminded, or only reminded once, days in advance and forgot the day-of.
• Communicate during. A good alternative to phone bridges is to just allow viewers to comment-and-question in a little chat box right in the viewer. The talker needs to have someone monitor this while they're speaking, otherwise they will miss questions.
• Communicate afterward. Webinars also *must* publish a replay. Basic stuff, but some do not. I missed the webinar, and now I get no info? We're all losers in that equation. Publish the replay, and make it easy to get to (no convoluted logins, please!).
• Keep the thread going. Either on the replay page (via a comments section), or in an actual billboard/forum-type posting area, allow people to anonymously (again - without &$%^#%# login requirements) comment on the webinar and discuss the topics. This gives the moderators the ability to easily publish answers to "I'll have to check on that" questions, and for offline-question-askers like me to ask and get answered.
• Slides work and applications transfer nicely. It's awkward having to divert our eyes from someone's half-naked son on their desktop background as they close their PowerPoint deck so they can move over to the video player. It's called a hyperlink - embed it in your PowerPoint slide, test it and use it. *Click* and you're playing video. Video finishes, and you're back on the slide deck. No half-naked sons.
• Time wasting. People either with their decks out of order ("This is someone else's slide deck that I'm using, so I'll skip around a little") or otherwise not able to deliver succinctly are wasting that time *multiplied by* the number of viewers on the webinar. This kind of behavior tells me this is not very important to you to get right . . . so it's probably not worth my time either!
• Have I mentioned no logins? You will probably have to require some kind of login or authenticating link, but then everything else should be free to do whatever without having to jump through more security hoops. You're providing information and mainly filtering out bots, not guarding Fort Knox. If you're collecting info for marketing purposes, do it as non-invasively as possible.