'Net Features : windows

Device Fraud Rates Revealed

Amberly Dressler — Tue, 11 Sep 2012 18:00:00 GMT

As Web connoisseurs, we connect to the internet, and even make purchases with, a myriad of devices including everything from desktops to laptops, mobile phones to tablets, and handheld gaming devices to gaming consoles and smart TVs. Lucky for us, companies like iovation are watching our backs, or in this case, our transactions.

After tracking the online behavior of more than 1 billion devices (including all those listed above), iovation, which protects online businesses from fraud and abuse, revealed that Linux devices have the highest percentage of fraudulent transactions originating from them. Windows and OS X for Mac come in second and third, respectively.

In addition to using its own database, iovation came to this conclusion by analyzing fraudulent transactions as a percentage of overall transactions from each mobile and fixed Internet device it tracked from January to July 2012.

“Interestingly, we found that 2.3 percent of all transactions from Linux-based machines, 1.4 percent of all transactions from Windows machines and 1 percent of all transactions from Macs were fraudulent,” said Scott Waddell, Vice President of Technology at iovation. “You’ll note that there were no mobile platforms in the top three; we believe this is because fraudsters prefer operating systems that make it easier to automate their schemes.”

To tackle the numerous devices used to make purchases, iovation got by with a little help from its own ReputationManager 360 platform, which assesses transaction risk based on a shared device intelligence network that provides real-time risk reporting, exposed associations between online activities and device reputation.

Device reputation is a powerful tool in business owner’s ability to protect themselves and their end users, but how do you measure reputation? iovation’s ReputationManager 360 provides a solution to this conundrum, as it takes a look at the device and its online history, which creates a reputation score. This reputation score is then used in tandem with iovation’s real-time fraud protection.

These capabilities provide customers with insight into anonymous consumer behavior, which iovation CEO Greg Pierson says allows his company to identify risk that no other service can spot.

Windows Azure Comes to Web Hosts

Michael Garrity — Mon, 16 Jul 2012 19:00:00 GMT

Microsoft, once unquestionably the biggest name in technology, has fallen drastically behind the pack in most areas over the years. However, as of late the company has been making a major push to remain relevant, if not become a leader, in today’s hottest industries – not the least of which is cloud computing.

Earlier this week, Microsoft announced a new white-label-type version of its Windows Azure cloud platform for Web hosts using Windows Server.

The Service Management Portal (as it’s being called) will allow Microsoft’s hosting partners to provide their customers with an Azure-based Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) without having to tap into the Microsoft cloud. The service will use a standardized management portal, and will also come with extendable APIs. This will allow developers to connect their current hosted applications to their hosts’ other services, their own on-premises resources, or directly to Windows Azure.

At present, Microsoft is working on developing a collection of partnerships with various service providers, and has already named big time Web hosting and domain name company GoDaddy as the Service Management Portal’s pilot customer.

The service will also work with long-time Microsoft partner Apprenda; so, if Web hosts set up an Apprenda instance internally and plug it into the portal, their customers will be able to deploy their Web apps using the auto-scaling and other Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) capabilities of Apprenda from within the Service Management Portal.

For now, the offering is in a beta-ish Community Technology Preview mode.

Converting JPGs to PDFs (Freeware)

Allison Howen — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 19:30:00 GMT

A new Windows’ tool, JPG To PDF, converts JPG files to PDF’s quickly, and provides users with the capability to easily create PDF photo albums or eBooks.

The tool is a stand-alone conversion engine and works without PDF software like Acrobat PDF. Installation of the freeware is simple, and also comes in a portable ZIP version for USB drives.

Additionally, JPG To PDF is very quick, and can typically convert hundreds of JPG files to a PDF document within a few seconds. Furthermore, because of a built-in image analyzer, the tool can also convert TIF, BMP, PNG, GIF, PSD and TIFF files into PDF documents.

Smaato Measures Mobile Fill Rates and CTRs

Michael Garrity — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 19:00:00 GMT

A quarter two study by mobile ad optimization platform Smaato was released today and finds that ad inventory has been increasing at a faster rate than budgets, ulitmately leading to a decline in advertising fill rates.

The study was put together to look at a variety of mobile Web-based topics, including mobile ad adoption, fill rates and the overall effect on mobile ad network performance.

Another discovery that the study unearthed is that phones using Windows' mobile operating system had much higher clickthrough rates (CTRs) than iOS, Android, Blackberry and Symbian, both in the United States and across the globe.

Mobile Ad Networks
According to the study, the average ad network fill rate, worldwide, was 18 percent in quarter two of this year. That represents a 2 percent drop from quarter one and a 3 percent decrease from quarter two of 2010.

For the top 40 mobile advertising networks in the world, rates varied greatly, from 3 to 58 percent, but among the top 20 networks in the U.S., rates consistently declined from an average of 27 to 19 percent.

Smaato CEO Harald Neidhardt cites both the downturned economy and "an increasingly fragmented market" as reasons for the decline.

However, one bright spot that the study found was that there are typically higher returns for networks engaging in "specialization," such as offering a service like geo-location. Nine of the top 40 global networks that were specialized performed above the average Smaato index despite having smaller volumes than their competitors.

Mobile OS CTRs
Moving past networks and onto operating systems, the study measured the CTRs of various devices using different OS platforms.

Worldwide across operating systems, the highest CTRs to lowest, in order, were Windows Phones (taking the top spot for the second consecutive quarter), Symbian, RIM, iOS and Android, though the Google-owned OS saw its performance increase by nearly 50 percent from the same time last year.

It's a different outlook in the U.S., however, with Windows Phones just barely ahead of iOS, RIM out performing Symbian, and Android still trailing all of them.

Never fear, however, as Neidhardt sees a bright future for Android. "As the trend continues, we will see even greater demand from big brands and advertisers for the Android platform, and therefore greater revenue opportunities for publishers and developers as Android continues to proliferate."