The risk is believed to be widespread, given that IE 7 is the latest version of Microsoft’s browser and is bundled with XP service pack 3 and also Vista, said Dave Marcus, director of security research and communications for McAfee’s Avert Labs.

The AZN Trojan, which has been making the rounds since the first week of December, has the potential of infecting users’ system with a Trojan horse, or “downloaders” that can download other forms of malware onto a user’s system.

Microsoft announced it will release a security patch Wednesday via its automatic update system to patch users computers.

Users can potentially get infected two ways, Marcus said. One is to visit a malicious Web site that already has the malware installed on the site, or visit a legitimate site, in which the attacker has inserted the malicious script to run in the background, leaving visitors unaware their systems have been compromised.

“A lot of Web sites are pushing out this exploit,” Marcus noted. Some of the infected sites include Web sites that offer free wallpaper for mobile phones to sites that feature property to product-related sites.

Microsoft is encouraging users to update their systems once the patch is released Wednesday at 10 a.m. PDT.

“[Shoppers] know exactly what they want, where to shop for it and who has the best deals,” said Britt Beemer, retail analyst and chairman of America’s Research Group.

Based on this trend, the big difference this year from years past is that Beemer doesn’t expect people will deviate from their shopping lists.

That’s a problem for merchants who depend just as much on the impulse buy as they do on consumers’ shopping lists to get them off to a flying start on Black Friday.

Scenes from Black Friday 2008

“I talked to a number of people standing in line in stores today. All had lists. And the lists had no more than three items,” Beemer said. “The real question is whether there’ll be anyone left [in stores] by midday.”

The holiday excitement took a tragic turn at a Wal-Mart in Valley Stream, N.Y.

Police confirmed that a 34 year-old temporary employee was trampled to death at the opening of the store in the New York suburbs. A pregnant woman was taken to a hospital for observation.

“”Our thoughts and prayers go out to the families of those impacted,” Hank Mullany, Wal-Mart’s president for the Northeast, said in a statement. He said the company is cooperating with a police investigation into the incident.

Early start
With a weak economy in the background, bargain hunters gathered to snag special deals from anxious merchants who opened stores as early as 12:01 a.m.

Some malls reported higher traffic in the morning hours this year compared to last year.

At Atlanta’s Lenox Square mall, the parking lot was 30% full by 5:30 a.m. with an estimated 2,000 shoppers.

“There were lots of bags from Macy’s and other retailers indicating shoppers are purchasing more merchandise this year,” said Les Morris, spokesman for Simon Property Group. the nation’s largest mall operator.

Lori Johnson, mother of three, came to Toys R Us at the Rockaway Townsquare Mall in New Jersey shortly after 5 a.m., straight from her bartending job.

“It’s Black Friday. You have to shop on Black Friday,” Johnson said, hands filled with shopping bags. “As long as I still have money, I’ll last.”

Johnson and her sister, Tammy Bohn, purchased video games for 50% off.

The early reports of big crowds looked positive to retailers because the holiday shopping period, which unofficially kicked off Friday, can account for as much as 50% or more of sellers’ annual profits and sales. The day is dubbed “Black Friday” because of its importance in determining a store’s profitability for the year.

Most merchants have had an extremely difficult sales year as Americans seriously retrenched on their shopping habits in light of a worsening economy.

What’s more, a record slump in consumer spending has already forced leading store chains such as Circuit City and Sharper Image into bankruptcy. Given this scenario, the National Retail Federation (NRF) forecast holiday sales to rise just 2.2% this year, which would make it the weakest sales gain in six years.

But despite what looked like a robust start for retailers, NPD Group’s chief retail analyst Marshal Cohen said he estimates that the lines of early-bird shoppers seemed 20% less than last year.

Cohen, too, cautioned that the early buying frenzy could peter out by 10 a.m., or once the doorbuster deals that are only offered for a few hours were over.

“Shoppers definitely have a mission this year,” Cohen said. “They are serious about finding the best deals. They are very budget conscious, they’ve done their research and then they’ll go home.”

Both Beemer and Cohen project a first-ever decline in total holiday sales. Cohen forecasts a 3% drop while Beemer estimates sales for November and December combined will slip 1%.
However, there was pent-up demand for some items. Consumers were flocking to hot deals on electronics. A Best Buy (BBY, Fortune 500) store in Paterson, N.J., had a long line of people waiting from as early as 8 p.m. on Thanksgiving Day, according to Chuck O’Donnell, Best Buy’s district services manager for New Jersey.

“We’re bringing people into the store in waves. There are just so many of them,” O’Donnell said, adding that most of the shoppers were eager to pick up deals on laptops, digital cameras and iPods.

O’Donnell said he expected flat-panel TV shoppers to come later in the day.

A busy Black Friday at Wal-Mart

Flatscreen TVs, Blu-Ray players, vacuum cleaners and toys were selling fast at a Wal-Mart (WMT, Fortune 500) store at Fairfax, Va. Industry watchers expect the No. 1 retailer to emerge as a big winner by Christmas because of its value prices.

The hottest items at the Rockingham Park Mall in Salem, N.H., were Nintendo’s Wii Fit and Guitar Hero videogames.

Lines snaked around the block at Toys R Us’ flagship store in New York’s Times Square before its 5 a.m. open.

“I didn’t think it would be this [crowded], with the economy the way it was, but I guess Toys ‘R’ Us was offering the best deals, so this is where everyone came,” said shopper Nicole Williams, 29, of New York City at the toy merchant’s flagship store in Times Square.

Cold shoppers seek hot toy deals

Gerald Storch, CEO of Toys R Us, said people were in line at 9 p.m. Thursday outside the Times Square store.

“I am excited and optimistic about today and the rest of the holiday season,” Storch said.

One interesting trend, Storch pointed out, was that shoppers weren’t necessarily buying lower-priced toys. Storch said some of the fastest-selling toys in the first hour after the store opened were the $60 Elmo Live and the $139.99 Spike the Ultra Dinosaur from Fisher-Price.

“I’m not that surprised that parents are spending money on their kids, and they want to buy a good, quality toy,” he said. “Parents tell us that they will cut back on themselves, but not on Christmas gifts for their kids.”

Every sale crucial for merchants
The J.C. Penney store at the Columbia Mall in Grand Forks, N.D., was packed as early as 4 a.m. Penney’s customers were bagging bargains on home products and winter clothing.

Penney announced that its Black Friday sale this year will have “the most compelling Black Friday prices ever offered in the Company’s history” with more than 400 categories of products featuring deep discounts.

“Given the current economic environment, [the company] understands the issues facing our customers, and we are committed to offering the season’s most affordable gifts,” said Ken Hicks, president and chief merchandising officer for J.C. Penney.

However, retail analysts say merchants have to keep the shopping momentum alive not just on Friday but over the weekend as well.

This will be a real challenge. While consumers are cutting back on how much they spend on gifts, the NRF estimates that Black Friday and the Thanksgiving weekend will also likely see fewer Americans hitting stores.

The trade group said about 128 million people will commence their gift buying this Friday, Saturday or Sunday after Thanksgiving, down from 135 million last year.

Some retailers didn’t bother waiting until Black Friday to jumpstart their holiday sales. The Nike store at the Woodburn Company Stores in Woodburn, Ore., opened its doors at 8:45 p.m. Thursday.

“Nike had a line that wrapped across the front of the center and past five other stores,” said Kristy Kummer, marketing director for Woodburn Company Stores.

Still, Beemer remained unconvinced that retailers will see a decent start to the holiday season. “It will be a disappointment,” he said.

Battered from the credit crisis, housing market slump as well as recession, consumers have been more cautious about their spending. This week will bring more insight on how reserved they’re become.

“We’re just getting wave after wave of bad news,” said Dave Hinnenkamp, CEO at KDV Wealth Management. “And with the way the consumer is getting hit, the retail sales report (Friday) is going to be ugly.”

He said that the short term investors are wanting to see if the automotive industry will receive any help. Ford, Chrysler and GM met with Congressional leaders last week to seek financial assistance.

The meeting took place just after miserable financial reports from Ford and GM. Since auto sales are currently at their weakest point in more then 20 years a report that was released last week showed that any of the Big Three automakers were to fall it would cost the economy as many as 3 million jobs and $60 million in the first year alone. Saturday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid sent a letter to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, asking the Bush administration to consider expanding the $700 billion bailout to include car companies.

Sirius and XM satellite Radio have a combined paid customer base of more then 19 million. With the merger even in these economic times they are still expecting to see subscriber growth.

At this time it’s not known what new channels will emerge. However, many current stations will be merged as it wouldn’t make sense to have duplicate content.

XM subscribers will have the option to pay around $4 more put month to get Sirius content such as NFL and Howard Stern.

Some of the new sections will include:

Software reviews
Technology news
Computer / Internet security tips

Specifics of sections are still being finalized at this time.

If you are a blogger who would be interested in contributing quality and original content please contact us.

Most web hosts as does BizOHost provide some type of backup service. In our case we provide weekly backups. Whether or not your host provides a backup it is always a good idea to make a backup of your account and store it locally on your computer. If your site is static such as plain text site using no databases doing a simple backup each time you make major changes will be sufficient. However, if you have a site using technology such as MySQL databases where your stored information is frequently changing. Depending on how frequently your information is changing you may want to at least make a weekly manual backup of your own. Lets look into why it’s a good idea to make your own weekly backups.

In one example lets say your host makes backups each Sunday. On Tuesday you make major changes to your site. On Wednesday however when making additional changes you accidently delete some important files. Now your host of course may restore your account. However, as this would be from the backup on Sunday the important changes you made would not be included. As a precaution it would have been helpful to make a backup prior to initial changes on Tuesday and then another backup after you have found that your site is now stable and running smoothly.

In another example lets look at the stability of your host. BizOHost as any other reputable host that provides backups will make every attempt to ensure your backup is available when needed. However in an imperfect world there are issues that occur. We do backups on several levels so this shouldn’t ever be an issue with us. However, lets say your host only provides backups on one level. This being the same server your web site is stored on. Now lets say there is an error with that drive and the data is lost. At that point there wouldn’t be any backup of your data available and if you didn’t manually create one all information for your site would be lost. That’s a pretty extreme case, but the point we are trying to emphasize is when dealing with sensitive information you typically want to eliminate any doubt.

When using Cpanel which is the control panel we provide you will login at yourdomain/cpanel. Once logged in you will select the “Backups” link.

From there you may either download a Full Backup which would include your emails, site files, databases, etc.. in one file, or you may download a partial backup of specific information.

In most cases as with us only the host would be able to restore the Full Backup. You may however provide this file to us if needed and we will restore for no charge. For a partial backup you would be able to restore file(s) on your own.

1) Many times a customer who is not so familiar with maintaining their site will have their web designer or site admin open account in the name of the web designer or admin. Later on the actual domain owner may want to fire the admin or web designer. However, if the admin or web designer is not doing business honestly they may not hand over your account so easily or they may even attempt to do something to damage your site such as taking down your files or deleting the account all together.

2) It is very common for a web designer or admin to purchase and account in their own name and use their credit card information to pay for account as you the customer have already paid them directly. In most of these case the person will pay in advance for a year or so although this can apply to any billing cycle. Your site will run fine within that period but once it’s time for renewal you may have lost contact with the person who setup account for you. Account would then become suspended as no payment was made and you would be unable to access account as you are not listed as owner or a contact.

There are several other scenarios that could take place.

The best way to go about this is the following:

Setup account in your name and if needed when going through the order process list your web design or admin as a secondary contact. This way they may still contact us for support or sales request buy all major changes must be done by the primary contact which would be you. As primary contact should the need arise you will also always have access to remove the secondary contact.

Another thing to be aware of is account password. In most cases the web designer will only need access to upload your web site. From that point on your site would either be static or updates would be done through a Blog such as wordpress or joomla where you would be the one writing the content. In these cases after your web designer has done their job it is best to update your password so they no longer have access. If they need to do future work you may provide them the current password and once they are done once again change password to something new. If you have an admin who is constantly updating your web site I wouldn’t advise on changing on changing the password as they would obviously need access, but I do advise on two things:

1) You should always have the current password for your site and make sure it wasn’t updated to something you are not aware of.

2) You should familiarize yourself with how to update your password should the need arise.

Account security is a never ending process. Stay tuned for the next tip.

“Hi, my domains is ‘A Great Flower Shop’ and I can’t access it, please help.” Now lets look into why this is not good.

First, “A Great Flower Shop” is not a valid domain. A valid domain can only contain letters and or numbers and no special characters other then a dash symbol. A valid domain also must end with a valid TLD such as .com .net .org, etc..

agreatflowershop.com would be a valid domain name. If domain was specified as “A Great Flower Shop” this would also be the first domain we would guess as the correct domain.

However, in most cases the actual domain is something different such as a-great-flower-shop.us, agreat-flowershop-in-usa.com, good-flowersshop-buy.mobi, or domain may be completely unrelated such as bobsrosegarden.co.uk.

The more valid the information you provide. The faster we are able to assist you. It is also best to contact us from the email address on file for your account. That way your account information will automatically come up once you contact us.

Feel free to add your link to our directory. However, before doing so please be sure to add our link to site as this will be checked.

Thanks
BizOHost Team