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Report: Google ad inquiry focused on pharmacies

Google Inc. recently set aside $500 million to cover a possible settlement of a U.S. government investigation into the Internet search leader’s distribution of online ads from illegal pharmacies, according to a report published Thursday. The Wall Street Journal said the U.S.

Attorney’s office in Rhode Island and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration have been leading the criminal probe into whether Google improperly profited from ads promoting drug sales by pharmacies or people without the proper licensing. The newspaper cited unnamed people familiar with the matter.

Spokespeople from Google, the FDA and Peter Neronha, the U.S. Attorney in Rhode Island, all declined to comment Thursday.

The Journal’s article illuminates a mystery triggered earlier this week by a bombshell contained in Google’s quarterly filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The SEC documents included a vague reference to a Justice Department investigation into the usage of Google’s automated system for placing ads alongside search results and other content at hundreds of thousands of websites. Google raised even more intrigue by subtracting $500 million from its first-quarter earnings to cover a potential settlement.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin then dodged a reporter’s question about the government investigation at a software developers’ conference presented by the company in San Francisco.

The evasiveness raised questions about how deeply the government might be digging into Google’s ad network, a moneymaking machine that is expected to generate more than $30 billion in revenue this year. Regulators in Europe are already taking a broad look at how Google’s ad system works as part of an antitrust investigation into whether the company’s business practices are stifling competition.

Although this U.S. probe appears to be focused on a narrower issue, it’s still a touchy matter for Google.

Besides sticking Google with a big bill, the inquiry could draw more attention to how vulnerable Google’s automated system has been to the machinations of shady operators.

Google acknowledged the problem in a federal lawsuit filed last fall against dozens of “rogue” online pharmacies that were finding ways to place ads for drugs despite the company’s efforts to prevent the abuses. The individuals identified in the complaint were based in New York, Tennessee and Ohio.

In one of the more common practices, the illicit drug dealers would plug subtle misspellings of drug names frequently entered into Google’s search engine to generate ads alongside the results. For instance, one illegal drug advertiser spelled the anabolic steroid Dianabol as “Diano bol” in Google’s automated system to produce an ad, acording to the lawsuit in San Jose federal court.

Google has obtained court orders banning some of the rogue pharmacies named in the lawsuit and is still seeking injunctions against the others.

“Rogue pharmacies are bad for our users, for legitimate online pharmacies and for the entire e-commerce industry,” Google lawyer Michael Zwibelman wrote in a company blog post on the same day the company filed its lawsuit in September. “So we are going to keep investing time and money to stop these kinds of harmful practices.”

The lawsuit came seven months after Google imposed new restrictions on the kinds of pharmaceutical ads it would accept in the U.S. and Canada. The new rules were supposed to only allows ads from U.S. pharmacies that had been accredited by a special program run by the National Association Boards of Pharmacy. In Canada, the accreditation had to come from the Canadian International Pharmacy Association.

Google’s critics have complained in the past that the company and other websites haven’t been vigilant about policing pharmaceutical ads because they are so lucrative. Drug and health care advertising generated about $1 billion in Internet spending last year and is expected to grow to nearly $1.9 billion by 2015, according to the research firm eMarketer Inc.

Mozilla engineers visit Indonesia to ‘better cater to user needs

Six engineers from San-Francisco-based tech group Mozilla, the developers of the Firefox browser, will meet Indonesian users at the Firefox 4 Launch Party, which will be held in six cities from April 29 to May 7.Viking Karwur, the manager of Mozilla Indonesia Community, said this delegation was twice as large as the delegation to the previous launch party.

The six visiting engineers are director of Asia business development Gen Kanai, Javascript engine engineer Luke Wagner, David Anderson and David Mandalin, Firefox release manager Christian Legnitto and Macintosh developer for Firefox Joshua Aas.
Kanai said the engineers came to be better acquainted with the needs of Indonesian Mozilla users.
“We hope that we will return bringing the results of our study. The study might influence the decision-making process of feature development so that we could fulfill the needs of users,” he was reported as saying by news portal kompas.com.
He added that Mozilla was aiming to develop a version Firefox that could address issues faced by nations with slow Internet connections such as Indonesia.
Indonesia is currently one of the countries with the highest rates of Firefox penetration, with an alleged 80 percent of Internet users browsing the Internet using Firefox.
The Firefox Launch Party has been held in Yogyakarta and Jakarta in the past two days. The party will then move to Bandung, Surabaya, Makassar and Bali from May 1 to 7.

Is the iPad good for your children?

A colleague says he loves his iPad, not only because it helps him with his work, but also because his young children can spend hours having fun with this educational tool. Ever since he has bought the smart tablet, the first thing his kids ask him as soon as he comes home is whether they can play with it (in the name of fairness, I should mention the argument applies to other brands out there in the market).

When asked if it might be too early to let kids play with such a high-tech instrument, this colleague says this easy-to-carry instrument offers unlimited games and educational apps in such a user-friendly way that it stimulates their creativity.
The real reason, which he won’t admit to, is that he has found the iPad to be a perfect cure for his attention-deficit disorder syndrome (ADDS). Never mind the educational and entertainment aspects, and never mind the impact these will have on children. Kids love daddy more than ever because of it.
The bigger question is whether the arrival of the smart tablet, along with other information and communication technology (ICT) products and services, is really good for children, especially in the critical years they are still developing their personalities.
Many parents are understandably concerned about the impact the Internet — and all the content and information that comes with it — has on their children. Many ban their kids from using the Internet all together for as long as they can, while others impose strict controls on when and how long children can remain online.
Others, like this colleague in the office, are quite liberal, seeing the importance of kids growing accustomed to computers from an early age.
The Internet is not quite value-free, and certainly has a major impact on the way children grow up today, probably in ways their parents have never experienced before. But isn’t this the same arguments our parents made when they thought that too much TV was bad for us? Today, some parents are also saying that too much Internet is not good for their kids.
While the downsides of ICT on children’s character formation are well known — potential exposure to unfiltered information and anti-social behavior — the upsides are not as well recognized or understood. They need to be spelled out as we try to determine whether the Internet, and smart tablets, are good or bad for children’s upbringing.
As a writer by profession, I personally welcome the return of the art of writing the Internet has brought about for children. Although it comes fully equipped with audio-visual capability, Internet-based social media compels users to do some amount of
writing. Whether it is a 140-character Twitter, a message in a chat room, Facebook or a blog, you have to write.
The wider the audience you are aiming for, the more careful you will be when putting things in writing. You are putting your
reputation on the line when you disseminate information to the public through social media.
Critical thinking is stimulated, whether in small or large measure, through writing.
The Internet, in Indonesia and in countries where freedom of speech is guaranteed, has also encouraged the young generation to be far more expressive than their elders, who grew up when speech and even thoughts were rigidly controlled by the state.
Indonesia today has one of the highest number of Facebook and Twitter users in the world, thanks to 3G technology, which enables people to access the Internet cheaply through mobile phones.
Young people of all economic backgrounds are now actively participating in debates taking place in the public arena. They may encounter some limitations at school or at home, and they may feel mainstream media has ignored them, but they have found freedom and their voice on the Web.
Unlike their parents, young Indonesians are far more opinionated. Whether or not they are informed opinions is irrelevant here. But through interactions, opinions are formed and re-formed in the market place of ideas far more rapidly than where information does not flow as freely.
The Internet also allows young Indonesians to learn about people in other parts of the vast country as well as in other parts of the world, a privilege that in the past was reserved to wealthy kids. The 17th century English clergyman Thomas Fuller once said that “travel makes a wise man better and a fool worse”. Surely this applies to virtual travel now afforded to most everyone by the Internet.
The Internet allows you to learn not only about people of different cultures and backgrounds, but also provides you with the opportunity to interact with them. Many people acquire values like tolerance and respect of others this way.
Those who approach issues with an open-mind will even find this intellectual stimulation leads to further discovery, not only about the world, but often about themselves and their place in the world.
The Internet — or the smart tablet or other gadgets used today — is only one of many sources influencing children’s character formation. Children also acquire the values that form their characters in later life from other places, like school, the environment they grow up in, and probably most important of all, at home from their parents.
There is no way of telling whether the iPad is good or bad for your children’s character formation, for ultimately it depends on parental supervision. But one thing for sure is that iPad is no substitute for good parenting. Bed time stories are still best told by mom or dad, even if with the help of a smart tablet.

The relation between Internet marketing education and profits

Many people join internet business opportunities online blindly. By this I mean they join everything that promises them fast bucks and then one to two years later are dejected and unhappy at their dismal returns online with regards to their capital outlay in terms of time and money. Thus the most important thing you need to do today is to get a proper education in internet marketing.

The co-relation is clear the internet is all about information and by learning how to package information online you will make more profits from your internet business no matter what you are promoting.

Now before you start running of to purchase a course online from any of the internet marketing gurus you need to know what kind of knowledge you need to pick up. Ask an internet marketer and many answers will come out. This article will highlight some of the more important skills that you can start reading up on. Always figure out first what area of marketing you want to do and focus on that area. Learn how to succeed in one area then proceed to another area to diversify your internet income.

Copywriting The art of direct response marketing online as taught by the Gurus like Dan Kennedy are actually adopted from Direct Response Marketing offline. Before you go and purchase a product from some of the best internet marketing gurus online. A simple solution to this would be to head down to your library and read up all you can on this subject offline. Once you gain a good appreciation of the underlying concepts behind the “headline, the body, the Call to action” then you would be able to appreciate online salesletters much better.

That said, if you have no product that you are promoting at the moment, then copywriting will have no relevance for you. Promoting Affiliate products with sales letters may not be that good as Ken Evoy says if your visitor reads two salesletters in a row, your sales clickthroughs will plummet.

Search Engine Optimization (“SEO”) Once you have a website that has good ad copy, you want to learn how to drive good quality and targeted website traffic to your website. A good website that any aspiring internet marketer can spend time learning and reading from is http://www.seochat.com. A good grasp of SEO can boost your online profits many fold.

Spend time learning the difference between single links and reciprocal links. It may be actually worthwhile sometimes to pay for someone from India to do SEO work for you so that you can spend your time doing other things. Someone recently gave me a quote for US$400 per month to do link exchanges for several websites at a time. This SEO actually could do 500 links in day as he heads a team of workers who live and breathe SEO work in India. Outsourcing can reduce your bills and give you better value if you find the right SEO to work for you.

Niche Adsense Portal Building Some people conclude that they do not want to molly cuddle downlines and do not want to write sales letters. They then start purchasing software which allows you to build keyword specific websites. Satya’s program like Niche Portal Builder and Arnand Morin’s directory Generator are such programs. Google and the other search engines started delisting these websites after a while because of repetitive content. So the solution is to mix rss feeds with these websites. All this is very high level marketing and the best way to figure all of these things out is to go to the various internet marketing forums to read all you can and ask questions.

Internet Business Opportunity The reason why I put this here in the list of things you would want to learn about is that internet business opportunities like internet mlms are good in that they provide you with the sales letters and followup systems. Your focus in these programs to make money therefore is to work on generating good amounts of website traffic to the company given websites.

Such income is residual so that is why internet marketers like Stone Evans promotes his website so that he gets more and more money each month from his online business. Total automation is what you are looking for and website promotion is what you have to learn.

In conclusion, internet marketing is a very wide area, by spending one weekend per topic mention above, you will be able to get a good overview of what area of internet marketing you want to venture into and start making money from that particular area. No one is a generalist, always be a specialist in one area and you will see your internet marketing income skyrocket.
About the Author

Joel Teo is the successful owner of several successful internet business ventures. Click here to learn how you can start your own successful internet business today. http://www.massive-profits-online.com Copyright 2005-2006 Joel Teo the Coolest Guy On The Planet

Personal Technology: Cybergeddon? Tell me about it. Really

Suddenly everyone is talking about cyber attacks, cyberwar, cyberespionage, cybergeddon. Ok, that last one was my own invention.The truth is we should have been talking about this a long time ago. And we should have been forcing companies, governments, organizations to be more upfront about what is going on.

Take the IMF, for example. It disclosed earlier this month that it was the victim of a cyber attack. This is good — that they’re disclosing it, I mean. It’s also good that its sister organization, the World Bank, cut its data links between the two once the attack was confirmed. (Not that this information was released in press statements, or in anything that can be found on the organization’s website.)
But what about a similar reported attack back in 2008? You may not have heard about it, because the IMF denied it happened. As did the World Bank about a similar reported attack a few weeks earlier.
In fact only one news organization, Fox News of all people, reported these attacks, based on emails from and interviews with officials of the two organizations. Fox has stood by its reports despite the denials that anything serious happened.
The point? We now have two incidents, two and a half years apart, about which we know relatively little. Are we supposed to just have confidence that these organizations know what they’re doing? Given that they didn’t seem to learn any lessons from the first — reported — breach, I’d wager they don’t.
They’re not the only ones. Take RSA, a company that manufactures security devices used by hundreds of thousands of employees at thousands of companies to access sensitive information on corporate computer networks. The company has been criticized for playing down a data breach in March that compromised its SecurID tokens, coded devices used to facilitate remote access to corporate networks.
That may have contributed to subsequent breaches at Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin, American defense contractors, both of which use SecurID tokens.
RSA took two months to admit that the company’s security devices could have been compromised.
Indeed, the IMF attack may have been related.
But we don’t know, because the only people who know are the people who did the attack. Instead we are left to wonder what the hell happened, whether our SecurID dongles are safe and whether we should abandon the Internet — banking, shopping, email, taxes — and just switch everything off. The problem, I suspect, is twofold. Companies and organizations, and governments, have never been very good about owning up to security breaches until the bad guy has been caught. It makes everyone feel safer, and makes law enforcement look good. But on the Internet you rarely catch the bad guy — especially in attacks as sophisticated as these. The best we can go on is mention a country: China is the most common one.
The other part of the problem is that there’s a lot of money to be made out of cybersecurity. Companies that do this kind of thing were left out in the cold and now it’s pay day for them. So expect them to talk up the threat, but be coy on specifics, because they want their clients to feel safe. And one telecoms executive told me the other day that the usual response in his industry to cybercrime is “Hey, don’t worry, we’ll make even more money selling customers security products.”
We need to change this mentality. We need to know when attacks occur because we need to see a paper trail of report, investigation, conclusion. And, frankly, we need to know just how safe our own stuff is. Right now, given all the obfuscatory noise, I’d say not very.

Google Executives Throw Themselves Into the Google+ Fray

It may be too soon to say whether Google+, the search company’s answer to Facebook, will avoid the same disastrous fate as some of its earlier social networking products like Buzz and Wave, but there’s no shortage of action on the site among those who have early access.

Members are already sharing content and photos through the site, but it seems as though most of the activity revolves around poring over the intricate details of the service and dissecting the best ways to use the features of the service.

There’s another unlikely suspect jumping into the fray: Googlers.

When Danny Sullivan, a noted blogger and early users, complained that it was difficult to set up an account for his blog, Bradley Horowitz, vice president of product management who is overseeing the project jumped in to clarify that the service wasn’t yet set up for that. On another thread, where users were discussing the challenges around sorting their networks into groups for sharing, Jim Prosser, another Googler who works in public relations, gave tips on how to more easily shuffle friends around.

The transparency is not uncommon for smaller start-ups, whose momentum rests almost entirely on their ability to listen to user feedback and nimbly and quickly respond to bugs and glitches in the system. But for the larger companies, such as Apple, Facebook and Microsoft, it is not as common to see executives directly involved with the project working with users in real time to answer questions and resolve issues. Google has a lot riding on the success of Google+, its latest effort to build a successful social networking service that won’t turn people off or cause them to cry privacy foul. Google has long hoped to understand the social connections and interests of its users. It also hopes to gain access to data and information about the links, topics, photos and products that its users are sharing with each other to improve targeted advertisements. This, in turn, helps them compete with Facebook, which has long reaped the benefits of having access to such data.

Mr. Horowitz, who was also involved with Google Buzz, said that it was not uncommon for him to join discussions about product introductions to try and answer questions and give feedback.

“Obviously in a launch like this, for a product like this, direct engagement is the best and most important means of understanding what’s working and how to prioritize features,” he said.