Webdepot's Blog

Is there a better way to prevent click fraud?

webdepot — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 06:23:07 +0000

Fraudulent click is always a headache for advertisers and on-line advertising companies. In reality, advertisers usually can’t avoid paying money for fraudulent clicks. This harms advertiser business growth and confidence in the marketing campaign. In the mean time, on-line advertising companies lose money too in fraudulent click investigation and prevention. The worst case is to refund to advertiser for fraudulent clicks. For example, Google ever paid 90 million settlement for click fraud.

Other small size on-line advertising companies who could not spent much on click fraud prevention, they just use CPM instead of CPC. However CPM is not good for advertiser to budget the ad campaign, especially for small business.

Is there a better and confident way to prevent click fraud? It depends. The technology used for ad delivery to websites has drawback on click fraud prevention. Let’s use Google as an example. Google usually use gives publisher a snippet of Javascript code for ad delivery. This snippet of code has ad format and publisher information. When the web page with Google ad is visited, the ad code pull ads from Google. When the ad is clicked, it goes through Google first, then redirect to advertiser landing page. Mean time, the click is recorded by Google. From the entire process, you can see the click record is dependent on the http request going through Google when the ad is clicked.

So here is the problem. There are many ways to forge the HTTP request traffic which looks the same as the normal click request. Other than that, the fake HTTP request can pretend to originate from different IP addresses. So no matter you detect this in real time or analyze the whole click pattern offline, you can’t prevent click fraud fundamentally. The problem is this ad delivery technology applies almost no control on user behavior.

Fortunately, there are always people fight with evils in order to make the world better. Younexus.com invented ad delivery technology applies much more control on the ad delivery and ad click. The new technology prevents click fraud from the root. In next article, this new technology will be introduced.

Useful marketing web sites

webdepot — Wed, 06 May 2009 03:38:35 +0000

For small business and start up companies, the following web sites can be the start point to drive traffic to your web site.

(originally organized by AskRex)

Social Networking:
www.Facebook.com
www.MySpace.com
www.LinkedIn.com
www.Orkut.com
www.Xanga.com

Press Releases:
www.PRweb.com
www.1888PressRelease.com

Social Bookmarking:
www.Delicious.com
www.Technorati.com
www.Digg.com
www.Squidoo.com
www.HubPages.com
www.Stumbleupon.com

Video Sharing:
www.YouTube.com
www.Blinkx.tv
www.KillSomeTime.com
www.Lulu.tv
www.video.yahoo.com
www.video.google.com

Struts 1 and Struts 2 Difference

webdepot — Sat, 02 May 2009 00:59:32 +0000

Struts 2 is much different than Struts 1. Struts 2 is more powerful and overcome all drawbacks of Struts 1. In fact, Struts 2 is merged version of WebWork, which intended to overcome all Struts1 drawback.

Action Class :
In Struts 2 action class implements an Action interface, but in Struts 1 it was extends from an Action class. This is a major difference. Struts 2 action classes are POJO(Plain Old Java Object) hence coding and testing are easier than Struts 1.

Thread Modeling :
Struts 1 action classes are singleton, one instance per container, all request were handled by this one instance. ThreadSafe coding guideline must be kept in mind while developing Struts 1 action class. In Struts2, action classes are not singleton, as many instance can be created and there is no performance penalty and garbage collection overhead.

Servlet Dependency :
Sturts 2 action classes are not servlet API dependent, because HTTPServletResponse and HTTPServletRequest objects will not be passed to execute methods directly.

ActionForm Input :
Struts 1 action forms are extended from action form base class and action form inputs can’t access by other JavaBeans. But in Struts 2, action form inputs can be accessed from taglibs.

ValueStacks :
Struts 1 uses standard JSP mechanism to bind objects into page views. But Struts 2 uses valuestack technology to bind objects into page, hence taglibs can directly access objects without coupling page view (needed more understanding).

Control of Action Execution :
Struts 1 supports separate request processor for each module, all are sharing same life cycle. Struts 2 supports creating different life cycles on a per Action basis via Interceptor Stacks.

The following are additions of Struts 2

instant support of AJAX,
integration with Spring dependency injection,
Configuration based profiling
Debugging

Source :

http://struts.apache.org/2.1.6/index.html

Guidlines to write scalable and thread-safe Struts action class

webdepot — Sat, 02 May 2009 00:33:22 +0000

The Struts controller servlet creates only one instance of your Action class, and uses this one instance to service all requests. Thus, you need to write thread-safe Action classes. Follow the same guidelines you would use to write thread-safe Servlets. Here are two general guidelines that will help you write scalable, thread-safe Action classes:

Only Use Local Variables – The most important principle that aids in thread-safe coding is to use only local variables, not instance variables, in your Action class. Local variables are created on a stack that is assigned (by your JVM) to each request thread, so there is no need to worry about sharing them. An Action can be factored into several local methods, so long as all variables needed are passed as method parameters. This assures thread safety, as the JVM handles such variables internally using the call stack which is associated with a single Thread.
Conserve Resources – As a general rule, allocating scarce resources and keeping them across requests from the same user (in the user’s session) can cause scalability problems. For example, if your application uses JDBC and you allocate a separate JDBC connection for every user, you are probably going to run in some scalability issues when your site suddenly shows up on popular web site. You should strive to use pools and release resources (such as database connections) prior to forwarding control to the appropriate View component — even if a bean method you have called throws an exception.

News: Oracle buys SUN

webdepot — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 21:00:50 +0000

IBM and Cisco is out of picture. Oracle and SUN announced the deal today that Oracle will acquire Sun for $9.50 a share in cash, or about $5.6 billion excluding debt, in a deal that plunges Larry Ellison & Co. into the hardware market.

Since Oracle is going to owns Java, the acqusition would impact open source deeply. Reading some comments on this acqusition, developers starts to worry about MySQL ‘s future would be tuff in the future.

Other than Oracle database product, MySQL is the biggest wide spread used database product. It is free open source product, which is the first preference by small or medium size companies.

How Free Products & Services Survive?

webdepot — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 22:57:35 +0000

What keep Internet products and services free? Let’s use Google as an example, what is supporting Google to provide free search service? It is advertising. Without advertising, we can not enjoy the free Internet service, free television program, news. Users need to pay for it.

See how people feel about ad-block. It is very interesting.

Not only media and TV can be free, other products can be free too, like software. Microsoft will offer free office next year. It would be supported by ads.

Companies start to support ad-supported model for software to be done properly. So freeware and open source can move faster than ever. It is good for consumers.