An article cannot be written based on rumors. What facts do we know? According to State of Michigan corporate records Alto Software, Inc. is owned by a Tucows employee. Alto Software's two products Alto Block All and Alto Memory Booster were posted on Tucows. Both products have high download counts and held top download positions from November 2003 to February 2004. In order for Alto Software to maintain top positions throughout holiday season they would had to have spent thousands of dollars in advertising dollars.

Abuse of Power Abuse of power sounds pretty absolute, unfortunately that line isn't as clear as one would think. It appears that ad spots held by Alto Software were provided free of charge. Free advertising, while possibly an employment perk, and not of itself bad, resulted in cost per click to increase significantly for other developers in those categories. In order for Alto Software to maintain their top position, cost per click was raised from $ .04 per click to more than $ .40 per click from November to January. Alto Software increased cost per click, in order to maintain top position, but were never required to pay for clicks. This forced other developers wishing to remain in a top listing to pay significantly more for each click. The handful of developers bidding on keywords and categories were forced to spend significantly more money each month, in order to maintain their position and compete against Alto Software's products.

A software promotion company (softwarepromoting.com) that appears to be a subdivision of Alto Software, guaranteed listings on Tucows.com. Softwarepromoting.com's website even went so far to say, that software promoted using their services was exempt from Tucows removal process. Competing submission services were unable to provide these guarantees. The legitimacy of Alto's promotion service also requires close scrutiny.

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Six Ways to Save Your Site and Internet

By Jason OConnor © 2004 http://www.oakwebworks.com

You are not only a Web Consultant, Internet Entrepreneur, or Web Business Owner; you’re also an Internet user. Since you are reading this article, you have already achieved a certain level of Web sophistication.

It is vitally important that when you make decisions regarding a website, an Internet program, an e-marketing campaign or a Web service, you take advantage of fact that you are a Web user also.

What this means is that practicing Golden Rule will guide you more than any article, book, tape, class or seminar out there. Let’s slightly alter this Rule to fit 21st Century Web world:

“Always create an experience on Web for others exactly how you would like experience to be for yourself in a similar situation.”

Here are top four biggest concerns, negative aspects, and downfalls of Internet today:

1.Spam 2.Viruses 3.Privacy 4.Identity theft

Here are top 6 ways you can alleviate these concerns for your customers or website visitors:

1) Don’t practice Spamming

Sounds simple, but spamming is painfully ubiquitous today. However, there are people out there who conduct email marketing with integrity. They have excellent success while avoiding everything that even hints of spam. They get much better returns than spammers. Why ever consider spamming again?

2)Offer an opt-out option – and make it prominent

Again, this is simple, and we’ve heard it a million times, but it can’t be repeated enough. Generally speaking, make opt-out checkbox next to email form field.

3) Have a Privacy statement/page – and make it obvious and easily accessible

In England, this is a law, and it’s policed. I wish it was this way everywhere. Place you’re Privacy link somewhere that a person filling out info on your site can easily see it. Make statement comprehensive. And stick to what you state in statement, to letter, or you are inviting legal action.

4) Take a highlight out of Privacy statement and place it right on web form