Recently, I’ve been hearing lots of hype about the pepperjam advertising system.

It sound similar to Google Adsense, in that you can place contextual ads on your website.

So I thought: hey, I’ll give it a go.

After signing up (and being accepted), I manually selected who will be able to advertise on my website.

Now this can be both good and bad.

Bad in that either: I might have a limited number advertisers to choose from, or I might have too many (and need to spend a long time vetting them all).

Good in that I can have complete control what appears on my site.

So I selected about 12 relevant advertisers.

Some will automatically allow me to show their ad on my website, while others wanted to check me out first (I presume they check my website, to make sure it isn’t something like a porn website masquerading as a craft website).

I’ve had 2 advertisers reject me (I suspect it might be because they only want US websites, and mine is Australian).

There also seems to be 2 ways I can advertise

• place the adverts manually on my site (each advertiser will give you the code for the type of AD you want to display ie: anything from a simple text link, up to large animated graphic adverts).
• Use the pepperjamADS function

Now, pepperjamADS is similar to google adsense, except you select a range of ads (from the advertisers that are on your “partners” list), select the format of the banner (eg 728X90 leaderboard, 250X250 square, etc)

Once you place the code for pepperjamADS on your website, partner adverts are displayed as 1 or more text links (similar to google).

Since I only have 9 partners in my partner list, then I suspect the ads placed in the banner will be more of a random selection, than a contextual list.

So far, its all interesting, and shows a lot of promise.

But I have had one slight problem:

I tried the pepperjamADS vertical skyscraper/banner, and found that the wording seemed to get truncated (or the space allocated for the adverts wasn’t large enough… I’m not sure which).

The upshot is that many ads will end something like: “… for the best service and”

I figure: Its a new service, its bound to have some teething problems… I’m not concerned.

I’ll just send them a bug report, and see what happens.

I sent the report on Saturday, and by Wednesday night, I didn’t get any feedback.

Now, a small bug doesn’t worry me much, but not getting so much as a short email to say “we are looking into it” is a bit more worrying.

When a company doesn’t provide some feedback, then I start to question the quality of customer service.

At this stage I’ve removed all my pepperjamADS vertical adverts, and I’m going to wait and see what happens.

Hopefully, its just a minor hiccup.

Posted by Computer Help as Business, Review at 1:43 AM EDT

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I recently got an email from Mike Duncan from SuperAntiSpyware. He asked me to become a reseller for superantispyware (SAS).

Well, before I endorse anything like this, I need to try it out, and decide for myself.

I have seen SAS once before, on a badly infected PC, so at the time, I instinctively classified it as either ineffective, or as spyware in disguise (and removed it).

So I download the free edition of SAS, and do a scan of my own system (which I knew was safe). In doing this, I found I had to disable the antivirus (antivir guard), as it would often intervene before WD and SAS could get a look at any infected file.

 

Once the scan was finished, it found 3 minor problems:

1. A large number of tracking cookies (and here is my first and second gripe with SAS: I regard tracking cookies as a necessary part of surfing the net… not something that should be detected as “bad” (as unsophisticated users can get themselves into trouble with this). In particular, coookies from google and major department stores should not be flagged. And when I decided to mark the cookies as trusted, I had to process all 200+ cookies manually (one at a time). NOTE: I tried this again a few weeks later, and found no problem un-selecting all cookies with a single mouse click.
2. A false positive: it detected a file from driverpacks.net as an “unknown” infection. (Again, it wasn’t detected a few weeks later)
3. Another false positive: it detected c:\windows\system\driver\win32.dll as the winup trojan (it was actually a file from the cygwin system that I use… Once again, it was not detected a few weeks later. Its good to see that SAS are really serious about improving how their product works.

Ok, some temporary false positives. That’s not a huge problem for me. Its just something to keep in mind for the future.

SAS portray themselves as a responsive company, which will remove the nastiest spyware. I’m also led to believe that new spyware is detectable/removable soon after it is detected in the wild. Unfortunately, thats not something I can easily test in a week or two… but I’ll see how things go over the next few months.

But in the meantime, I thought I’d test it against windows defender (my current favorite free antispyware program).

I fired up my virtual PC, and deliberately infected it with a small number of nasy infections from the past, plus some extra ones from malwaredomainlist.com. This is not a comprehensive test, it just allows me to see if I should keep going with SAS.

The first difference between SAS and WD, is that WD includes realtime monitoring/blocking. From my experience, non-technical users tend to forget to do manual scans, so thats something in favour of WD.

The second difference is that when WD detects a malware infection, it usually cleans it up without needing a computer restart… whereas SAS seems to always insist on a restart.

So here is the malware I tested, and the results of scanning with SAS and WD:

• Ultimate Defender: Both WD and SAS detect and remove, but WD doesn’t need a restart.
• VirusHeat: Both WD and SAS detect and remove, but WD doesn’t need a restart.
• AntiVirus2008Pro: Both WD and SAS detect and remove, but WD doesn’t need a restart.
• SpySheriff: Both WD and SAS detect and remove, but WD doesn’t need a restart.
• SpyRemover (from spyremover.com): Neither WD nor SAS detect it!

So, in summary:

Both SAS and WD seem about the same, except WD is faster, and has some nice features not present in SAS.

Since I charge customers for my time, then the slowness of SAS is a concern in my day to day work, as infected systems are usually much slower than normal systems, so a quick scan with SAS can end up taking over 1 hour. So I’ll be doing a scan with WD first, and then use SAS if WD doesn’t find anything.

Will I keep using it?

Yes (for the moment).

The reason is simple: In the past, I have often come across “new” infections that my current batch of security software is not able to remove (so I need to wrestle with the infection, and eventually beat it into submission ).

If SAS does what its makers say it does (and I must say I’m impressed with what I’ve seen so far), then I can save time (ie customer money) by using it as a front-line tool to remove infections that would otherwise take me over 2 hours to remove.

With my own PCs, I’ll continue to use WD for the moment.

Posted by Computer Help as Review, Technical at 1:43 PM EDT

3 Comments »