BIZ-BANANA.COM

Despite trying my best to steer my readers away from things like “get-rich-quick” schemes and thinly veiled pyramid scams, it seems that a lot of my efforts are in vain.

I’ve received a few e-mails recently from people who are pretty desperate to make money in a hurry and it is hard to have to disappoint people looking for help that I am unable to provide.

There are NO quick shortcuts to creating a successful business – online or otherwise – and that’s the blunt honest truth. Unfortunately, some people will only learn that lesson the hard way and cost them time, money and much heartache.

I’ve been through that particular mill before myself so I feel I’m qualified to talk from experience. The idea behind B-B is to help YOU avoid getting caught with the same sort of thing.

I’ve had very little traffic since B-B got going again. Most of it comes, believe it or not, from Google and Yahoo! In my book, they are the really important ones.

Quite a few of my pages rank pretty highly with both engines. I don’t know how long I’ll keep those positions but do a search at Yahoo.co.uk for the following keywords and the respective results:

• 'Virtual Assistants' -- Page 1 Line 8 out of 433,000 pages
  
• 'Homeworking' -- Page 1 Line 7 out of 98,100 pages
  
• 'Freelance proofreading' -- Page 1 Line 7 out of 98,800 pages
  
• 'Envelope stuffing' -- Page 1 Line 8 out of 208,000 pages.

I’ve just put the finishing touches to a report of my own experiences on the subject, which finally brings ME some satisfactory closure.

If you think YOU might be tempted to try this type of scheme, click on the link below and you’ll quickly decided that it won’t work, CAN’T work – EVER!

The envelope stuffing scam

Even if you've read the report before, check out the final twist in the tale!

I Spy
back to headlines

Last time, I posted an article on Spyware and how it affects the Internet community.

Although the focus of BIZ-Banana concerns workable home business ideas, I thought you might be interested in the articles below, which came courtesy of the PC World.com newsletter.

You might not think this is relevant to a UK audience because it only applies to the State of Utah in the United States, however there may be far-reaching consequences if other States decided to opt the same stance. Like everything else from the United States, it may eventually end up here.

Next: Outlawing Spyware.

They say the best things in life are free, but it usually does not apply to ‘free’ software.

What you normally get is a cut-down or shareware version of the program that you need to pay for to get the full product, or you DO get the fully functioning version in the form of a time-limited trial (say 15 days) and after that period expires the program no longer works.

Of course, all of this is perfectly normal practice, with benefits to both the author of product and their prospective customer. The software developer gets to showcase the product; the customer gets to try the program before making their OWN informed decision on whether or not to buy the full-blown version.

Enter Patrick Kolla and his ‘Spybot Search and Destroy’ program, which introduces a new model (new to me, anyway).

Patrick’s program is widely recognized as being one of the best in its class. And, oh by the way, it’s COMPLETELY FREE!

To help fund upgrades and further development of Spybot, his company, Safer Networking Limited is dependent on donations from users of the program. Whether or not YOU choose to make a donation, of course, is entirely up to you!

Click on the link to read the PCW interview with Patrick and then download this essential free program. I have not yet had a chance to fully explore Spybot but from what I have seen so far it looks pretty impressive. Will I be making a donation? I’ll let you know!

Three Minutes With Spybot’s Patrick Kolla

As a postscript on that subject, here are some more free downloads. Spybot heads the list with nearly two million downloads so far. so it’s ‘no-brainer’ as they say. Browse the rest of the list and you might find something else useful

Free Internet Utilities: Kill Spyware, Pop-Ups, and Home Page Hijacking

Your virus is in the e-mail
back to headlines

One of the perils of being a webmaster is that I’m continually bombarded by SPAM e-mails. When I started the site in 1999, e-mail viruses were a comparative rarity, but now that age of innocence is gone forever.

Even though the site in its present incarnation has very little traffic right now, it seems that I’m being attacked from all sides. Once I put some e-mail links to let people know that B-B was still alive and kicking, it didn’t long for the vampires to move in.

Since I last posted to this page, I’ve contracted a nasty blighter called the ‘W32.Blaster.F Worm’ and getting rid of it was not the easiest thing in the world to do!

The long and the short of it was that I ended up having to haul my PC to my local computer shop (four miles away) and even the experts had a job getting rid of the pesky thing.

At various times I’d tried early versions of both Mcafee and Norton Anti-virus programs but the newest breed of ‘nastyware’ as I call it meant that my old, out-of-date software could not longer cut it.

After that rigmarole, I figured it was high time I re-evaluated my security – before it happened again!

I made a snap decision to buy Norton Internet Security 2004 directly from the Symantec website. Now that was a bad decision, but not for the reason you might think. After paying for the program and downloading it, I decided to purchase a backup CD, just in case.

You know what they say about horses and stable doors…

All in, it cost me about £70; and that’s where the bad decision comes in!

Instead of giving it the old knee-jerk reaction, what I should have done was shopped around for a better deal.

Turns out you can buy it from Amazon.co.uk at nearly half-price! Doh!!

Another thing I noticed, to my horror, was that the reviews were generally scathing with only a few exceptions who thought it was excellent. Thankfully for me, my opinion of the product lies within the latter category.

I can’t say I particularly recommend it, though, because obviously a few people have had problems. For myself, I have to say that I’ve had absolutely no problems and, so far (touch wood!) every intrusion has been detected and safely eliminated.

Since then I’ve been investigating a couple of other alternatives at Amazon, namely:

McAfee Internet Security 6.0 -- With a similar set of mixed reviews as the Norton software.

Steganos Security Suite 6 -- Plenty of information in Yahoo.co.uk

And the one that started me on this particular journey.

Norton Internet Security 2004

For a free security check, click below to see if your computer is at risk

http://security.symantec.com/sscv6/default.asp?productid=symhome&langid=ie&venid=sym

http://uk.mcafee.com/virusInfo/default.asp

I’m only able to give a few examples here and my own personal experiences hardly serve to make me any kind of guru on the subject. One thing I do know; I’ve learned a heck of a lot more about dealing with online threats to MY computer. What ever you do, make sure YOUR computer is well protected from attack.

There are dozens, possibly hundreds, more security options – many of them free – but I’ll let YOU find them for yourself.

Next time
back to headlines

That about wraps it up for now.

Next time I’ll tell you about where BIZ-Banana goes from here and, among other things, we’ll resurrecting our once popular newsletter.

To show our commitment to this site and its future, I’ve been spending oodles of cash on new software primarily aimed at attracting visitors to B-B.

You can help, too, by telling your friends about us on and offline – but, as I keep harping on – definitely NO SPAM!

Drop me a line about any of the above (or anything else for that matter) John@biz-banana.com