By Justin Lee, theWHIR.com
October 15, 2008 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- The Federal Trade Commission announced on Tuesday it has shut down what it says is one of the world's largest spam operations, which includes a network of spammers from the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, China, India and Russia.Authorities were bombarded by more than 3 million complaints concerning a barrage of emails they received soliciting various drugs such as male-enhancement pills, prescription drugs and weight-loss pills.IT security researchers notified the FTC that the spamming issue was spiraling out of control, and at one point, the spam network in question accounted for nearly one-third of all the world's spam.The news comes less than a week after the release of MessageLabs' recent report which discovered a brief plunge in spam following the shutdown of ISP Atrivo/Intercage, which hosted many malware and cyber criminal websites.The defendants are Lance Atkinson of Australia, and Jody Smith of Texas, as well as the four companies they control, which include Inet Ventures, Tango Pay, Click Fusion and TwoBucks Trading. Atkinson is being held responsible for all product claims, while Smith is liable for claims made for the pharmaceutical products, the FTC said.The defendants built their network by enlisting spammers around the world to send billions of spam emails that led consumers to websites operated by an affiliate program dubbed "Affking." The FTC said the alleged spammers used false subject headers to mask the contents of the emails, did not include an opt-out link and did not supply a physical mailing address, which all violate the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003.The defendants also used spam to promote prescription drugs, which claimed the medications stemmed from a legit US-licensed pharmacy that sell FDA-approved generic equivalents of Levitra, Avodart, Cialis, Propecia, Viagra, Lipitor, Celebrex and Zoloft. But the FTC said the defendants sold drugs that were shipped from India, and not supplied by a US-licensed pharmacy.The FTC adds that when its undercover employees attempted to make pharmacy purchases, they were not required to produce any proof of prescriptions, and the drugs they received lacked both dosage information and doctor's instructions.The commission also added that the defendants made false claims about credit card information security and other data needed to purchase the drugs.
Read Back Issues of WHIR Magazine
October 2009 - Web Hosting's All Star Team
This has been, for us, one of the most interesting, exciting and challenging build-ups to an issue of the magazine yet, Web Hosting's All Star Team. The balloting process was our first experiment with a kind of user participation we're planning to do a lot more with in the months to come. We had thousands of ballots submitted, with hundreds of write-in suggestions and a demonstration of user engagement that has us feeling super positive about the project.
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July 2009 - What am I Worth?
One of the interesting luxuries of working on a project like the printed WHIR magazine is that it allows us to play with things like our point of view from one issue to the next. In recent months we've been giving added attention to the kind of practical and applicable advice aimed at smaller hosts and resellers. This issue carries on with that point of view, asking, in our cover story, "what am I worth?" It's a complicated question without a clear-cut answer.
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May 2009 - The Blueprint for a Small Web Host
I was a little surprised by how difficult it became to see this idea through. We set out to assemble a blueprint for a small hosting business, but butted up pretty quickly against the general impossibility of covering all the territory that was out there to be covered. The basic constraints of a printed magazine, and the less-than-infinite amount of time we had available forced us to face the fact that we could never produce an exhaustive guide to starting a hosting company.
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