This is the first time such an action has been mounted while the Oireachtas is in formal session and follows on from a phone ban and other industrial action yesterday.

The unions in question – the CPSU, PSEU and IMPACT – forecast that the action will ’severely impact’ on Oireachtas business, including committee sessions.
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In a joint statement, the unions said that email correspondence and document transmission play a central role in the circulation of draft legislation and related papers including amendments, the circulation of the order of business, the work agendas of all committees and the enabling of access to the Houses of those members of the public attending such meetings – including those scheduled to provide direct evidence to the committees.

CPSU Assistant General Secretary Theresa Dwyer described the action as unfortunate, but warned that pressure on Dáil and Seanad proceedings would intensify further when the Dáil resumes after the St Patrick’s Day break, unless meaningful negotiations get under way.

IMPACT National Secretary Louise O’Donnell stressed that the action was directed towards the Government, and not at the wider public.

PSEU Assistant General Secretary Phyllis Behan said certain Oireachtas members had not only voted to cut the pay of public servants, but in some cases had availed of every opportunity to denigrate them.

“It looks nice until midweek, when we will start to see some rain move into the area. It is too early to say how much rain there will be. The rain will just be unsettled for the latter half of the week,” said John LaCorte, meteorologist with the National Weather Service.

“(Today) and Tuesday will be in the upper 50s with about 57 for a high. We are a bit above average, somewhere around 10 degrees or so,” LaCorte said.

Some observers are seeing flowers starting to sprout.

“Flowers just sort of sense the weather. They start to poke sometime in the middle of March – if it continues to be warm and we can get rid of the snow patches,” said LaCorte.

However, with the warming, there is a slight chance this time of year -that with the rain later in the week and the thawing snow – that there will be an increased risk of flooding.

“The only problem that could arise with the warmer temperatures is right now the snow is melting at a nice steady pace. We have to watch the rain. If we get heavy rain and the melting, a chance for a flood warning could increase,” LaCorte said.

The first chance of showers this week is on Wednesday. The daytime probably will be dry, with clouds increasing Wednesday night, according to LaCorte.

Wednesday will drop to the lower 50s.

There will be a 30 percent chance of rain on Thursday and Friday with temperatures dipping in the upper 40s and lower 50s.

The good news, depending on one’s point of view, is that there is no snow in sight, according to LaCorte.

“Unify’s product portfolio has grown significantly in the past year with the addition of Lotus Notes email archiving, Microsoft Exchange email archiving, eDiscovery solutions and Oracle Forms to Java migration,” said Frank Verardi, vice president of sales, worldwide software group, Unify. “We’re particularly excited to preview Team Developer 6.0 and unveil our new report archiving solution that provides secure, long-term preservation of transactional data and reports to cost-effectively comply with business, legal and historical research requirements.”

CeBIT is the world’s largest trade fair showcasing digital IT and telecommunications solutions for home and work environments. CeBIT 2010 is expected to attract more than 6,000 exhibitors, from over 75 countries, and nearly 500,000 attendees from all industries.

The relaunch of ListMarketer Software’s website reflects its new corporate image and innovative direction. The same was also displayed at industry tradeshows such as Ad:Tech New York and Affiliate Summit West. In a release, Jeff Johns, art director of ListMarketer Software, said it is the recent upgrades in ListMarketer’s software and the upcoming launch of new products such as SmartSender email marketing software that made it imperative to update its corporate image and relaunch the website to better reflect its current position as a leader in the industry. Johns added that both current and potential bulk email marketing clients have responded well to the newly relaunched website and are happy to have an excellent resource available for learning more about ListMarketer Software’s current and future email marketing software products and services.

ListMarketer Software is planning to release other innovative products along with the SmartSender email marketing software option in 2010. The SmartSender solution takes a new approach in sending email marketing. The SmartSender software reacts to ISP response data in real-time to provide a cutting edge solution to the delivery and email marketing needs of customers. The intuitive interface of SmartSender allows users to navigate the ListMarketer email marketing software to easily set up campaigns, import data and review reports. According to Tim White, CTO of ListMarketer Software, as a number of cutting-edge email marketing software developments and products are being released this year. This led ListMarketer to come out with a corresponding new corporate image and website.

ListMarketer offers marketers, ad agencies and publishers reliable, high-speed outbound email management and delivery at competitive rates. ListMarketer gives companies that rely on email marketing a distinct competitive advantage by enabling them to efficiently deliver highly-targeted, optimized, and measurable email campaigns to their audiences. ListMarketer provides both hosting and co-location solutions.

One easily accessible method of disk encryption for Windows users is BitLocker, a Windows feature that provides disk encryption. Unfortunately, it is only available in the Enterprise and Ultimate editions of Windows Vista and Windows 7, and in Windows Server 2008. Other Windows users will need to employ a third-party tool, such as TrueCrypt, a free, open source disk encryption tool.

TrueCrypt runs on all of the major platforms: Windows XP/Vista/7, Mac OS X, and Linux. There are a variety of encryption options, including system drive support and hidden volumes. TrueCrypt also features real-time or on-the-fly encryption; meaning the files within the encrypted volumes aren’t decrypted until absolutely necessary.

You can use one or more of TrueCrypt’s three encryption methods:

·File container: This is the easiest option for beginners and essentially makes a virtual drive that is, of course, encrypted. Though it’s a single file, it can contain other files and folders, similar to a zip or compressed folder. By entering the encryption password, you can mount or assign the file container to a Windows drive letter using TrueCrypt. Therefore, it will appear just like any other drive or partition when browsing your files in Computer or My Computer. Then you can copy and/or drag files into the encrypted drive. Once you unmount or restart the computer, the file container is inaccessible and remains encrypted. Since the file container is like any other file, you can still move, copy, or delete it.

·Non-system partition or drive: This encrypts an entire secondary partition or drive (where Windows isn’t installed), which can be an internal hard drive, USB flash drive, solid-state drive, or other storage device. This method doesn’t really provide any advantages over the easier method of file containers. However, if you plan to use encrypted drives long-term, you might just want to secure the entire drive or a partition. As with file containers, you have to mount the encrypted drive or partition using TrueCrypt before you can access it.

·System partition or entire drive: If you want full protection and privacy of your computer and data, you may want to encrypt the primary partition or drive (where Windows is installed). This would protect the system files, such as temporary, cache, hibernation, and swap files. This method, however, is the most complex and may require you to modify your drive partitions.

Each method has a hidden implementation to provide double-protection. This is useful if you are ever forced to reveal your password and encrypted data; or if someone finds your initial password. It works by creating a decoy or outer encrypted volume and then placing a hidden encrypted volume inside. When encrypting the system partition or drive, you can actually create a whole hidden Windows installation.

Google’s MySpace Integration ‘Poses Challenges for SEO’ The change means that users can now receive real-time status updates from the social networking site when they browse the main search engine results pages.

However, Sam Tilston, marketing director of memorybits.co.uk, said that Universal Search does pose some challenges, as search marketers can no longer focus solely on SEO services, search positions and driving web traffic.

Instead, “they now have to create content and build links to web properties that are included in Google’s universal search”, he explained.

For example, a press release optimised with keywords may only put a company on the top page of a Google search temporarily and with little effect.

If search marketers do not adapt their focus, competitors will gain advantages over them, Mr Tilston added.

Google first launched Universal Search on May 16th 2007 it also includes a Twitter application that enables businesses to cross-post updates into MySpace.

The flurry of big community sites placing nofollows on all their outbound links has been deeply disturbing to the search engine optimisation community. It’s been a while since Wikipedia blocked all link juice from its pages. Facebook, which was once seen as a great opportunity for inbound links, has been out of the game for a long time as well. The most recent uproar was when Twitter, which initially provided some link juice for its users, put nofollows across the board.
Bothered and bewildered

Information on nofollows is uncharacteristically slow to filter through the SEO community. Usually, changes to the playing board of the internet are detected and defined within a matter of weeks. For some reason, the use of nofollows on important sites sends a wave of confusion through even experienced SEO circles. Not months, but years afterwards, forums are still clogged with ‘What if I did this?’ type questions.

The issue isn’t made any clearer by the fact that the industry is rarely warned before a big site labels all of its outbound links as nofollows. Of course, that’s to be expected. The industry is rarely warned about any major change, but often the websites are willing to talk about it. The emotional reaction to nofollows, however, seems to have discouraged big site representatives from talking too much. The maisma of betrayal surrounding Twitter’s move to nofollow links in the bio section of users’ profiles, for instance, not only was Twitter man Evan Williams reluctant to discuss it, but Matt Cutts, who triggered the move, was on the defensive.
Saving the situation!

This lack of information has been confusing. For example, site owners have noticed that Google still recognises a lot of links coming from sites like Facebook and Twitter. There have been plenty of hopeful posts and even a study or two suggesting that somehow, these links are still counted towards PageRank.

At the moment at least, all of these are pipe dreams. Despite appearances, Google is not suddenly going to realise the unfairness of the situation and override the instructions on big sites. The only way to get link juice remains to get inbound, followable links. You can talk to us at SEO Consult about this.

This issue is mainly an issue because of hope. A big site like Twitter suddenly laying down a nofollow on all of its user outbound links represents a big blow for the search engine optimisation of thousands of sites. SEO experts and site owners can’t help but hope that there is some way around it, a way to salvage the situation. Unfortunately, there is none.

Researchers at Trend Micro on Monday said they have spotted two spam campaigns — one promoting a fake gift card promotion, the other counterfeit watches — in the wild, Maria Alarcon, an anti-spam engineer, said Monday in a blog post. As Valentine’s Day nears, internet users should expect the scams to get more malevolent.

“Every special occasion and/or holiday is, in today’s threat-laden internet landscape, not just a time for people to celebrate but also a time for spammers to scam unwitting users with their devious scams,” Alarcon said, adding that in more malicious cases, the fraudulent emails show up containing links or attachments to viruses.

And if previous holidays and media events are any indication, users also should be on the lookout for poisoned search results, also known as black hat search engine optimization (SEO). Attackers use this tactic to get their malicious links near the top of search results so users are fooled into believing the results are legitimate.

Black hat SEO is the new spam, Mike Geide, senior security researcher at Zscaler, a web security firm, said in a blog post last week. The recent Haiti earthquake is a prime example of this, he said.

“It used to be that when you checked your email and/or email spam folder, there would be a slew of messages with links or attachments that would have titles related to the popular subjects of the time, and would be used to spread malware,” he said. “Now the game seems to be that you sip your morning coffee and browse the web — largely driven from search results from Google. However, many of these search results cannot be trusted.”

Google has said it uses manual and automated processes to remove malware from its search index.

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Dr. Jeffrey Buch stated that SEO 1, with their top-notch expertise in search engine positioning, could help the practice achieve its goal of a higher search engine ranking. The renowned male infertility expert also mentioned that it had become essential for the clinic to establish a leadership presence on the Internet at a nationwide level as demand for his surgical remedy transcends the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex.

“One of the reasons for choosing organic SEO over the traditional PPC campaigns was the long-term price tag associated with the former. Just as we have a long-term commitment to the families we help, we understand that a strong organic presence is essential for branding and visibility rather than opting for pay per click (PPC) favored by fly-by clinics,” said Dr. Buch.

When contacted, a marketing executive from SEO 1 said that they were confident that very soon the prestigious Legacy Male Health Institute, PA will be in their list of satisfied clients who had managed to turn their website into prime online real estate with the help of the search engine optimization firm.

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SEO 1 Services is a search engine marketing company specializing in online visibility solutions by increasing its clients’ ranking and positioning in popular search engines. Leveraging over three decades of combined Internet marketing know-how, SEO 1 Services’ integrated approach creates highly targeted optimization campaigns that deliver online visibility, web traffic and Internet business objectives. SEO 1 Services’ certified consultants drive the innovation, the proprietary technology and optimization methodologies that have delivered our clients’ success.