TechCrunch

No ChaChing For ChaCha Guides
Michael Arrington Sun, 07 Sep 2008 10:29:08 -0000
ChaCha used to be a ridiculous human powered web based search engine that's best use appeared to be for killing time when bored. They raised a boatload of money from Jeff Bezos and others and eventually switched to an all-mobile interface. They also began offering their platform to third party marketers. But now there are indications that the company is having cash flow issues, even after a recent pay cut to guides. As before, the information is coming from their poorly-paid and poorly-treated human guides.
Everyone Needs To Calm Down
Michael Arrington Sun, 07 Sep 2008 08:39:06 -0000
I haven't had a lot of time to jump into the fracas this weekend emerging about TechCrunch50 because the team has been busy organizing the conference, working with the Expert Panelists on scheduling issues and spending hours and hours working with the 52 startups that will be launching at the event to make sure their demos properly reflect what they've worked so hard to create. But I do have a few things to say. First, thanks to Chris O'Brien at the San Jose Mercury News who wrote such a great article on TechCrunch and the conference. What a wonderful, positive way to kick things off as we go into the craziness on Monday. He really gets what we're trying to accomplish and how honored we are that these startups have chosen to launch at our event.
Family Tree Wars Continue: MyHeritage Raises Big Round, Shows Impressive Growth
Michael Arrington Sun, 07 Sep 2008 01:30:06 -0000
It's been just a few days after our post on Geni's big growth numbers - and now big news from Israeli competitor MyHeritage. The site has grown from 180 million profiles a year ago to 260 million today, they say. Registered users have also grown, from 17 million to 25 million. Compare that to almost 2 million users for Geni. 230 million photos have been uploaded to the site, which is available in 25 languages and has 5 million monthly unique visitors. Support for ten more language will be released this month. Investors have certainly noticed MyHeritage's stellar growth. The company has raised a new round of funding - $15 million in a Series D round led by Index Ventures and joined by current investor Accel Partners. That brings their total capital raised to $24 million.
ContestMachine: A Product Giveaway Widget For Bloggers
Erick Schonfeld Sat, 06 Sep 2008 21:28:38 -0000
Giving away products can be a logistical pain. For instance, when we give away a T-shirt or laptop, we have to go through hundreds of comments, contact the person, and do a lot of manual processing. A new Y Combinator startup called ContestMachine that just launched makes giving stuff away as easy as putting a widget on your blog. You create a contest widget by entering all the details of the giveaway: prizes, deadlines, rules. Winners can be randomly chosen by ContestMachine or judged by the blogger. It automates the process of creating giveaways, and opens up contests to any blogger or small business who has a Website. The service is free to try out for up to two contests a month, and then charges $9 a month or $90 a year for more contests.
The Big Conference Launch: How to Stand Out from the Crowd
Brian Solis Sat, 06 Sep 2008 20:31:27 -0000
Editor's Note: This post represents the professional advice of Brian Solis who is not formally affiliated with TechCrunch50. If you are a participating TC50 company, resident TechCrunch PR expert Sarah Ross is available to share and review the public relations guidelines with you. It is important to work directly with Sarah to ensure you are in compliance with these guidelines to maximize your PR opportunity while also avoiding disqualification. How do you launch a startup at a big tech conference without getting lost in the crowd? With TechCrunch50, Demo and several other major tech conferences around the corner, this question is on the minds of more than one entrepreneur. How do you create visibility for your startup, and do you need PR to do it, or just a great demo? The coming days and weeks will be filled by some of the industry’s most anticipated, attended and watched conferences. They’re all competing for mind share and they are attracting influential attendees and spectators who will report their experiences and observations far and wide. In the next two to three weeks, over 150-200 companies will vie for attention and precious blog and media real estate. Your story, as wonderful as it is, will need help rising above the flurry of news that will jockey to reach the ears and eyes of bloggers, press, customers, investors, and partners.
The Push To Cure Spinal Muscular Atrophy
Michael Arrington Sat, 06 Sep 2008 19:05:40 -0000
Gwendolyn DeBard Strong was born on October 4, 2007 and was diagnosed with Spinal Muscular Atrophy Type 1 (SMA1) in April 2008. SMA1 is a terminal genetic disease that results in loss of nerves in the spinal cord and weakness of the muscles connected with those nerves. Her parents are asking that you consider signing a petition asking Congress to fund research into a cure for the disease. The NIH has said that a cure is possibly only a few years away. The petition is here. Please read and sign it, and pass this on to others. The goal is 50,000 signatures. If each of you reading this sign now, we'll get to that number in just a few hours. And if you watch the video, you'll sign.

InternetNews Realtime News for IT Managers

KVM vs. Xen vs. VMware. Is it a Hypervisor War?
Competitors weigh in on the open source virtualization market shakeup.
Samsung Buying SanDisk? Rumor Mill Heats Up
That's one way for Samsung to get out of its $400 million yearly royalty payment to SanDisk
Boon Time for Storage Players
Vendors reaping revenue, but the good times won't last forever.

 

Subscribe to Internet RSS feed

ip4r (DNSBL-style) DNS lookups - List, in table form, of blacklists. Includes table with the name of the blacklists, their lookup domains, the IP that is returned in case of a match and a description.

Open Relay Blocking System (SORBS) - Lists Open Relays and Open Proxies (Open HTTP Proxy Servers and Open SOCKS Proxy Servers). SORBS only scans a host when it attempts to send mail to one of the feeder servers.
Meta Description: [ SORBS anti-spam email blocking and filtering system. Tips and tricks for closing open proxy servers, along with useful tips for configuring smtp mail servers. ]

Spam Trap - Provides tools and instructions for maintaining a local real-time DNS blacklist, online spam database, graphs, and blacklists for download via ftp and rsync.
Meta Description: [ Real Time DNSBL, Real Time DNSBL & Spam Trap,Anti-spam: DNS blacklistst, Reputation System, childsafenetwork.org, spam graphics by country of origin,rsync available spam blacklists, blocklists, spam graphics, zombie graphics ]

500 AntiSpam DNSBL - Identifies spam sources - whether intentional or not - at the time they are sending spam. Not before and not after.
Meta Description: [ DNS-based blacklist ]

bl.csma.biz - Spam Blacklist - As a public service, McFadden Associates maintains a free DNSBL blacklist. Anyone sending SPAM into their mail filters is automatically added for a period of thirty days.

Blackholes.us - Publishing a variety of DNS blocklists including entire countries and ISP's.

Blacklists Compared - Weekly reports of DNS blacklists lookups of IP addresses (and reverse DNS lookups) that made SMTP connections to the San Diego Supercomputer Center on that week. Useful for getting a grasp of the size of the various blacklists. Maintained by Jeff Makey.

Blitzed Open Proxy Monitor List - A DNS-based list of machines believed to run insecure proxies. These proxies have been abused in the past to either send spam or connect to an IRC network running a version of Blitzed Open Proxy Monitor.

Blockalert - Provides reports on whether there is recent spam activity within each IP block, especially spamvertised web site addresses. Check if you are sharing your address block with spammers.
Meta Description: [ A window into spam activity based on IP block hierarchy. ]

500 Chinese and Korean Net Blocks - Lists IP blocks of China and Korea for those who want to avoid asian spam.
Meta Description: [ Listings of Chinese and Korean IP address ranges in various formats for assisting spam blocking. ]

Composite Blocking List (CBL) - The CBL is a DNSBL which takes its source data from very large spamtraps, and lists IPs of open proxies and worms/viruses.

Distributed Server Boycott List (DSBL.org) - This list contains email servers which are non-secure and potentially servers with dumb and/or malicious users. It is purely composed of data DSBL receives; DSBL should never send out data by itself.

Drbcheck: Dr. Jørgen Mash's DNS Database List Checker - Lists all DNSbl's (RBL's) and enables users to make a query against all the lists.

Electric Eye Ultimate Banned List - A manually updated and verified online database of spammers. Provides email address and domain blocklist.

Five Ten - Local Black Holes - Blacklist that includes dialup equivalent ip addresses, individual spam sources, netblocks that refuse to remove spammers, bulk mailers that don't require confirmed opt-in, output servers from multi-stage open relay chains and single stage open relays not listed on ORBZ.

Mail Abuse Prevention System - MAPS aims to defend the Internet from spammers by educating ISPs and providing real time blocking lists of known spam sources.
Meta Description: [ MAPS - Stopping Spam at its Source ]

MailPolice RHS-BL - RHS-style lists of domains which have sent spam to MailPolice customers. Currently divided into two lists, bulk senders - domains associated with bulk mail - and pornography - domains associated with sending and hosting pornographic content.
Meta Description: [ Effective spam and virus e-mail elimination. Available for personal and corporate use. ]

Not Just Another BlackList (NJABL.ORG) - Spam blocking blacklist of open relays, dial-ups, and direct spam sources.

500 Open Relay Database (ORDB) - A validated database of mail servers that permit third-party relay. Also in French, Dutch and Danish.
Meta Description: [ ORDB.org - the Open Relay DataBase ]

rfc-ignorant.org - The home for domains who don't play by the rules. A number of lists (at present dsnabusepostmasterwhois and ipwhois) which contain domains or IP networks whose administrators choose not to obey the RFC's, the building block rules of the net.

500 Spam Prevention Early Warning System (SPEWS) - SPEWS maintains a list of known spam sources and spam friendly hosts so that e-mail can be rejected from these problem sites.
Meta Description: [ SPEWS.ORG the internet's Spam Prevention Early Warning System can be used to stop spam, block spam, filter spam, reject spam, deny spam, bounce spam, tag spam, remove spam, anti spam ]

Spam Support Permanent Blocklist - A permanent blocklist of spam supporting web hosts and ISPs.
Meta Description: [ Spam Support Permanent Blocklist ]

500 Spambag.org - Personal (DNSBL) list of abusive networks that the author blocks from sending mail or accessing his web servers.

SpamCop - Blocking List Information - This list contains IP addresses which have been reported to SpamCop as carriers of spam (source of e-mail or verified, open relay). Some of these reports now come from spamtraps (email addresses used strictly to receive spam).
Meta Description: [ Beware of cheap imitations! SpamCop has been protecting the internet community since 1998. Automatically file spam reports with the network administrators who can stop unsolicited email at the source. Subscribe, and filter your email before it reaches your inbox. ]

Spamhaus Block List (SBL) - All IPs on the SBL belong to known spammers, spam gangs, or spam support services. The SBL includes IPs from both the ROKSO database and IPs of spam services listed in the Spamhaus database.
Meta Description: [ The SBL ('Spamhaus Block List') is a list of IP addresses of known spam gangs and spam services. The SBL is broadcast in realtime to a network of mirrors for the purpose of limiting spam email from those IPs. ]

Spamikaze - Automated spam blocklist system, designed to block spam at the SMTP level.

Spamware Vendor List - List of live spamware sites and related links.
Meta Description: [ List of all known spamware vendors and their ISP's ]

The Abusive Hosts Blocking List (AHBL) - Publishes a list of known abusive hosts (open relays, open proxies, spam sources, DoS drones, and more) in various forms including a DNSbl.
Meta Description: [ The Abusive Hosts Blocking List - Protecting E-Mail/Networks/Users From Abuse ]

The South Korea Blocking List - Blocking list to filter out Korean spam.

The Spamhaus Project Register of Known Spam Operations (ROKSO) - ROKSO collates evidence on known hard-line spam outfits that have been thrown off Internet Service Providers over three times.
Meta Description: [ The Spamhaus Project's Register Of Known Spam Operations (ROKSO) Database. ROKSO collates evidence on known hard-line spam outfits that have been thrown off Internet Service Providers 3 times or more. ]

UCE Protect Network - Attempt to generate a free realtime black list of spammer IP numbers.
Meta Description: [ Spammers worst nightmare became true. Spammers wich send email to our Spamtraps blacklist their IPs in real time. If you are maintaining one or more Mailservers, UCEPROTECT® is the best Solution for you. Our global BLACKLIST can be downloadet for free. ]

Whois-Details for Blacklisted Spam Domains - List of domains that have been advertised via spam, with name server, registration date, registrant. This list is updated daily.