Before we start let me tell you that this is just an idea and not only it has not been tested I am also not too sure about the legal side of things. On the other hand I can see this working very well and you will get to do some good possibly.

The warez market is absolutely massive. You can upload a torrent of the most recent TV show and within hours it would be downloaded by thousands of people. There are a number of marketing techniques abusing this potentially massive traffic however I doubt anyone has ever thought about doing what I am about to tell you.

First of all you need to fake a popular application. You can tell what people are downloading by browsing a few torrent sites. Pick one with an affiliate program so that each time you would sell a copy of this software for them, you would get a percentage of the sale in commission. Once you have a target make sure your fake application is approximately the right size compared to original. Now here is the trick… Your fake application needs to scare the crap out of the person who downloads it. For example you can have your application display a huge warning up the top something along the lines of: “You have been caught downloading an illegal copy of our software”. Create a little animation that will look like it is sending some information somewhere. Then have a little popup say:”Your IP home address has been logged. You have 14 days -insert timer here- to buy a legal copy of our product -insert your affiliate link- before your details get forwarded to our legal team and your local authorities. -insert DMCA notice here-.

All you need now is to create a torrent and upload it to some torrent websites. You can even upload this fake software to Rapidshare and spread the link across all those Rapidshare link forums. Sit back and wait for sales to roll in. Obviously some people won’t care but other should be so scared they will go ahead and buy a legal copy via your affiliate link in order to stay out of legal trouble.

Once again this is just another crazy idea of mine and you should make sure what you are doing is legal if you do decide to give this a try. I assume the software company will only shake your hand for this and you will get to punish a few of those evil pirates. You will need some basic programming knowledge in order to create this application however it should not be hard at all.

Last night I ended up on an interesting website. I will not be linking to it because quite frankly the content itself was on the verge of illegal, nevertheless what I did find interesting was their layout. The page was divided into two halves by a big rectangle Adsense unit. So in order to get from the header to the main body you would have to scroll past this big rectangle. This would not be a problem if you were using a regular PC however when using an iPhone the only way to get to the main content is to actually click on the Adsense block and push it up. Anyone with poor coordination or shaky hands is very likely to slip and give the website owner a click. See it in action here where the Adsense unit is being represented by an image.

Talking about iPhone layouts I have just installed a plugin for this blog which detects iPhone users and displays a friendlier theme instead. Just fire up your iPhone and check it out for yourself. The post images might be screwing things up a little bit but I will be fixing that shortly.

Finally a lot of you have been wondering why I had a curious.txt rapidshare link in my footer. Rapidshare limits the number of downloads to 10 on regular accounts and I was surprised that the download limit has been reached within the first few hours of me adding that like, even though the link was very small and hidden in my footer. How did you even notice it? To your disappointment the actual text file did not mean anything. What I discovered is that all these new emerging Rapidshare search engines would normally go around and index any page containing a Rapidshare link. It took a while for my pages to get indexed by Google and then for all those search sites to scrap Google for content but eventually I started to receive hits from these search engines. Every time somebody searched for “marketing” or “seo” they were sent here even though they were only looking to download something marketing related.

This week my broadband has been really acting up. Apparently these problems are caused by Virgin Media rolling out their 50 Mb service. As a result I ended up without internet connection. This is a nightmare for internet marketeers as you can imagine. I had no option but to jailbreak my iPhone and use it as a modem for a day. My contract gives me free unlimited data and with download speeds reaching 2Mb/s this was indeed an excellent alternative. This is what I did:

1) I went to QuickPwn and downloaded their tool. After going through all the instructions it literally took me a few minutes to Jailbreak my iPhone. Please note that Jailbreaking an iPhone can void your warranty, break your iPhone, start a world war 3 and destroy the world so do it at your own risk.

2) I then went and downloaded an iModem application. You can buy it if you want but the free version I used simply made some image look less sharp. This only made the page load quicker so I did not complain.

3) I connected my iPhone to my PC using a USB cable and installed the iModem application. This wee application quickly recognized the phone and all I had to do was to click on “Activate phone/install daemon”.

4) I already had a tor button installed my FireFox but you can find it here. When your button is all setup right click on red “Tor Disabled” button at the bottom of your browser, go to “Preferences” and click on “Use custom proxy settings” and change the default ports (You should have 3 of them already filled in) from 8118 and 9050 to 8080.

5) Left click on your Tor button once again and you have yourself free USB unlimited internet. This is excellent for a laptop!

I take no responsibility for any damage caused as a result of you following these instructions and bla bla bla all the usual please don’t sue me just in case something goes terribly worng stuff.