Month of May, 2008
Revision3.com has published a detailed description of the Denial of Service (DoS) attack they suffered during the weekend. The attack originated from MediaDefender, a company that is in the business of stopping the spread of illegal file sharing. Revision3 is a web TV network, creating and producing its own original shows.
The DoS attack overloaded one of the servers and took the entire site offline. After significant effort on part of Revision3's technical staff, the site was eventually put back online. At the peak of the attack, up to 8,000 packets hit the Revision3 server per second.
Dreamhost, an established web hosting provider, recommended to their clients to consider using Google's webmail interface over their own email offerings. The reason cited was that support requests for email problems constituted the majority of all support calls and messages. The web hosting company will continue to run its own email servers and offer their own service to clients.
Google will allow web developers to load popular JavaScript libraries for their web apps from the company's global server network. Currently the following frameworks are supported: jQuery, Prototype, script.aculo.us, MooTools, and dojo; this selection covers the most popular JavaScript libraries.
News outlets are reporting that a previously unknown security flaw in the Flash multimedia plugin is exposing Windows-based PCs to risk. The exploit affects Adobe Flash Player 9.0.115.0 and 9.0.124.0, allowing execution of arbitrary code. Sources say thousands of web pages, which have been compromised earlier via SQL injections and other hacking techniques, are already redirecting browsers to malware sites containing the Flash exploit code.
The global internet infrastructure keeps growing, with three new big data centers slated to go online in the US. Google, Oracle, and Switch Communications have invested a total of over $1 billion into three facilities, located in North Carolina, Utah, and Nevada.
Google's new computing powerhouse is likely to be the first of the three to start operations. Last Thursday, the company announced the completion of the first building and invited local media and citizens to take a peek.
A new research paper by the The Interactive Advertising Bureau(IAB) shows that internet advertising revenues totaled $21.2 billion in 2007. This is an increase of 25% over 2006, itself the third consecutive record-breaking year.
In an official press release, Microsoft has announced its plans to return to the discussion table with Yahoo. This time the focus has been shifted from total acquisition to alternative, limited methods of cooperation. Sources are reporting Microsoft considers displaying ads next to Yahoo search results.
An unclassified Powerpoint presentation, made by the FBI, contains details about potential security risks, related to counterfeit network equipment. Cisco branded routers and switches, imported from China, have been identified as low-quality and possibly dangerous imitations of original products.
Google overtook Yahoo as the most popular online destination in the USA, according to the latest statistics by comScore. 141 million Americans visited Google online properties in April, compared to 140.6 million visitors for Yahoo. The search engine giants are followed by Microsoft's network of websites, with 121.2 million visitors, and AOL, which attracted 111.2 million people.
A programmer's error has caused a serious security flaw in the popular Debian Linux distribution. All SSL and SSH cryptographic keys, generated on a Debian platform since September 2006, are to be considered potentially compromised. Experts say they will need to recreated from scratch after a fix to the OpenSSL package is applied. The official security advisory, containing link to a detector for known weak keys, is available here.
Techcrunch reports that the Mozilla Corporation is working on a "stealth" web analytics project, which will integrate with the Firefox web browser. The new metrics solution aims to provide accurate and accessible data about website traffic and usage.
According to the article, the project is in a very early stage of development and does not have an official name yet. It will measure site traffic for Firefox users only, but with a market share estimated between 20% and 40% (depending on geographic location and study method), the open source browser provides an impressive user base, and a corresponding large data set.
If you are in the market for a solid state drive (SSD), you might as well hurry up, because Google has started buying. Unnamed sources are reporting that the search engine giant has ordered from Intel the first batches of SSDs for use in the company's HQ.
PHP 6, currently under active development, will include full support for Unicode strings, in effect allowing the use of non-ASCII characters in PHP scripts, alphabetical sorting across different alphabets, and more. This will be useful to web developers worldwide -- Unicode maps the characters of all human languages, and the list of new additions (and removals) is likely to ensure the continued wide usage of this programming language.
WHIR TV has a new video interview with Niko Nelissen, VP of business development and co-founder of Q-layer, discussing a new paradigm for datacenters. Video after the jump.
MySQL AB, property of Sun Microsystems, reversed its decision about releasing advanced MySQL 6 features under a closed source license. Last month it was announced that the upcoming version of the widely used database server would not contain certain closed source encryption and compression backup extensions. Reportedly, those would be included only in a paid enterprise version. Now, according to a blog post at mysql.com, the decision has been reversed and MySQL will remain fully open source.
Have you noticed an increase in the number of suspicious "undeliverable mail" messages in your inbox? If yes, you are not alone in this predicament, and no, your server has not been hacked. There are reports that the amount of the so-called bounceback spam, or backscatter, has been rising globally.
