Recently in Privacy Category

Trulia's Web Ranking Strategies Come Under Fire

| No Comments | No TrackBacks

"Florida":

There is much controversy these days in the real estate blogging world about the overly aggressive link strategies employed by Trulia.

Galen Ward, co-founder of Estately.com, a Seattle real estate brokerage, first brought to light the ongoing conversation about Trulia's questionable optimization techniques in an article at BloodHound Blog. The article raised many eyebrows and started a flurry of criticism and the birth of a massive campaign titled Trulia Awareness to educate unsuspecting non-internet savvy agents and broker/owners that Trulia may be a modern day version of the Trojan Horse.

Most internet savvy companies would not accept, even as trade, supplying content for another company's website for traffic and exposure when the receiving company does not give credit back to the original source of content by hoarding page rank.

They might be better served by hiring SEOs and investing in their own websites and arming them with the very tools necessary to give the consumer what they want, and compete directly with the competition for their share of internet traffic.

The crux of the controversy is that Trulia receives its content in the form of real estate property listings from trusted partners (i.e., real estate agents and real estate companies) and displays these listings on their real estate site. Through a clever process, Trulia employs technical maneuvers such as "nofollows," temporary redirects, etc., which essentially makes the original source of the information invisible to Google, thus allowing Trulia to outrank the original source in the search engines.

One person's promotional strategy is likely another's link spam.

Clickjacking

| No Comments | No TrackBacks

Gregg Keizer:

Last week, a pair of security researchers spread the news that a new class of vulnerabilities, called "clickjacking," puts users of every major browser at risk from possible attack.

Robert Hansen, founder and chief executive of SecTheory LLC, and Jeremiah Grossman, chief technology officer at WhiteHat Security Inc., spilled some beans last week after they gave a semi-closed presentation at OWASP AppSec 2008 in New York.

Maybe because of the catchy name, or perhaps because it's actually serious stuff, clickjacking got some press. But that still leaves open the question: Just how spooky is it? Are we talking run-for-the-hills scary, or is this just another theoretical attack vector? And what should you do to protect yourself?

We have questions, as usual, and fewer straight answers than we'd like.

What is clickjacking? Good question. Getting to an answer, though, is a little tough, since Hansen and Grossman are keeping virtually all details confidential, at least for now. Here's how Grossman put it to Computerworld last Friday:

About this Archive

This page is an archive of recent entries in the Privacy category.

Photography is the previous category.

Recruiting is the next category.

Find recent content on the main index or look in the archives to find all content.