I've been playing with a fun little tool (its free), that I thought would be attractive to many people with a webpage. We are all quick to point the finger at the web host when our site not being up to snuff may be the culprit.

Many of us add plugins and widgets to our sites without considering the resultant implications to site load speed... which we all recognize as being vital in this day and age of instant gratifications.

FireBug lets you explore the far corners of the DOM by keyboard or mouse. All of the tools you need to poke, prod, and monitor your JavaScript, CSS, HTML and Ajax are brought together into one seamless experience, including a debugger, error console, command line, and a variety of fun inspectors. A must for every person concerned about optimizing their site's performance!

Firebug was written by Joe Hewitt, one of the original Firefox creators.

The Firebug plugin YSlow is a web development tool and analyzes web pages and tells you why they're slow based on the rules for high performance web sites. It offers

• Performance report card

• HTTP/HTML summary

• List of components in the page

• Tools including JSLint

http://www.joehewitt.com/software/firebug/

http://getfirebug.com/

Some Fun Features

Logging for web pages

Web developers have suffered with "alert debugging" for centuries. If you enjoy clicking the "Ok" button 40,000 times a day, FireBug is not for you. Otherwise, you'll enjoy having the ability to log messages from JavaScript in your web page directly to the FireBug console.

JavaScript Debugging

Want to stop your JavaScript and step through it line by line? No need to fire up a big fat debugger. FireBug includes a simple lightweight way to set breakpoints in your scripts and examine every step of execution.

Errors at your fingertips

Nobody likes to see errors in their web pages, but with FireBug you won't mind as much. FireBug adds a little icon to the Firefox status bar which tells you if your page is busted. Open up the FireBug panel and you're looking at the errors that occurred in that page, and only that page. No more digging through the muddy pile of errors in the JavaScript Console window.

Inspectors galore

Elements and styles and events, oh my. There's a lot going on behind the curtain of a web page. FireBug's inspectors let you stroll lazily through the DOM using the familiar hyperlink model of the web. If you see an object reference, you can click it to inspect it.

Command line

If you enjoy "alert debugging" then you probably also enjoy typing "javascript: " urls in the location bar all day. If not, then you'll enjoy using FireBug's JavaScript command line instead.

Ajax Request Spy

If you feel hip every time you fire off an XMLHttpRequest on your Ajax website, FireBug will secure your place amongst the avante garde. The FireBug console can log all Ajax request traffic as it happens, and allows you to inspect the responses.

Live Editing

It's no fun just looking at the DOM. FireBug's inspectors let you edit some parts of the DOM. More editing features to come in a future version...

Cloud Storage FlexiScale Drops the Ball ... well loses the ball would be more acurate.

Cloud storage service FlexiScale has been offline for several days while it attempts to fully restore customer data from backup.

The initial problems for FlexiScale began when one of the main storage volumes was accidentally deleted by an employee during a system upgrade earlier this week. FlexiScale then encountered problems while trying to restore the data from backup, as explained by CEO Tony Lucas in a email:

Dear Customer,

I felt it important to send you all an e-mail explaining the current problems our FlexiScale service is having, what we are doing about it & when we expect it to be resolved.

As some of you are aware, we have been having issues with I/O (disk speed) in recent weeks. We identified short term and long term measures to eliminate these problems. The short team measures involved reorganising how data was stored across our storage network in a more efficient manner, and the long term measure was to increase the overall I/O capacity of the platform.

As a preparatory step to adding additional capacity one of our engineers was reorganising the data structure on the storage network and whilst cleaning up the snapshots we use as our backup process accidentally deleted one of the main storage volumes. This caused an immediate outage to a large amount of our customers

We immediately took action to take the entire disk structure offline (which caused the remaining customers to be taken offline) as it was the only way to preserve the integrity of the data on the system. Work then commenced with our storage vendor to restore this data.

Although we have now successfully gained read-only access to everyones data, a bug in the storage platforms operating system has prevented us from providing read-write access to it. This was discovered at 11pm last night, just when we thought we were about to bring the entire disk structure back online.

After consulting with our storage vendor it was agreed the most sensible option would be to copy the entire volume to a new disk structure (still maintaining it's integrity and structure), from where we could re-mount it correctly. Unfortunately due to it's size we didn't have spare capacity on the platform to create a complete duplicate of it.

An investigation of other ways of restoring the data then was undertaken but all options were considered too risky, and although downtime is a major problem for everyone, we felt the integrity of the data was the most important factor.

The decision was then taken to get additional capacity in from the storage vendor as soon as possible so that we could then increase the capacity to a sufficient level to allow us to copy the volume and successfully restore it. We originally thought we would be able to get this today, but unfortunately it will not arrive until mid-morning tommorow, although we have done (and will continue to do) everything we can to speed this up.

At this time we are assisting customers who need access to specific files to get this, and we will continue this as long as we can into the night as resources allow.

Tomorrow morning once the storage arrives and is online, we will copy the data across and then begin to restart the entire platform as quickly as possible, but as the system wasn't designed to restart everything at once, this will take time.

We will be offering credits against our SLA, which will be determined once everyone is back up and running, as I'm sure you can appreciate all resources are being focused on that at this moment.

I, and all my staff are well aware of the potential impact this will be causing to you our customers, and we are doing everything we can to help in that respect. We will also be undertaking an investigation to ensure additional safeguards are put in place to prevent this happening again.

Sincerely,

Tony Lucas
Chief Executive Officer
XCalibre/FlexiScale

Millennium Data Systems announced it has acquired the assets of  Toronto based managed hosting provider Hostingplex (www.hostingplex.com).

Hostingplex is the third acquisition of Millennium this year.

”We believe that Hostingplex is a great fit for the organization and look forward to serving their 5,000 small medium business customers”, Matthew Saunders, COO of Millennium Data Systems stated.

“Its been a very busy summer for us with acquisitions”, noted Tony Di Benedetto CEO of Millennium Data Systems. “In total we have added 12,000 business customers to our Network, expanded our data center capabilities and introduced many new managed services and offerings to our customers”, added Di Benedetto. “Our focus remains to fortify and build upon our managed services platform aggressively by acquiring accretive and highly synergistic managed service providers”.

Management expects Hostingplex assets to be fully integrated by September 2008, with no disruptions to Hostingplex’s 5000 clients.

We reported on the botched transfer of clients after the acquisition of Hostvector by  Millennium Data Systems, that resulted in days of downtime.

Millenium Data Systems acquisition of Hostvector 

 

Millennium Data Systems Acquires VistaPages Inc.

 

About  HostingPlex

Since 2000, HostingPlex has been providing mission critical web hosting solutions to businesses, both in the public and private sectors of today's marketplace. HostingPlex is a service of Inverdigm, which is a privately-owned,  IT-related services company located in the City of Toronto.

Reviews HostingPlex

Ever wonder how many other domains are sharing you server real estate. Bet you do every time your site is taking just a little to long to load. Well now there is a cool little tool thatmay just help you know. While there is no guarentee that you'll get the complete list, it will certainly give you an idea of the number of domains shared on a server.

A reverse IP domain check takes a domain name or IP address pointing to a web server and searches for other sites known to be hosted on that same web server. Data is gathered from search engine results,  Knowing the other web sites hosted on a web server is important from both an SEO and web filtering perspective, particularly for those on shared web hosting plans.

http://www.yougetsignal.com/tools/web-sites-on-web-server/

Background

All web sites are hosted on web servers, which are computers running specialized software that distribute web content as requested. Each web server typically has a single IP address, a unique numeric identifier assigned to no other computer on the entire Internet. Web sites are usually associated with domain names, textual strings like "google.com" that are easier for users to remember than numeric IP addresses. Since HTTP version 1.1, many domains can be hosted on a single IP address.

As of 2003, more than 87% of all active domains names were found to share their IP addresses (i.e. their web servers) with one or more additional domains. More than two thirds of these domains share their server with fifty or more additional domains. Simply put, most web sites are hosted on servers that host many other web sites.

While IP sharing is typically transparent to ordinary users, it may cause complications for both search engine optimization and web site filtering.

Concerning SEO (search engine optimization)

Almost all popular search engines (Google, Yahoo, etc.) increase a web site's rank based on the number of links pointing towards the web site. In an attempt to falsely inflate a web site's popularity, an individual may generate hundreds or even thousands of dummy web sites containing little to no content except for links pointing towards a specific domain name. One method that search engines use to detect this type of miscreant behavior is to see if these inter-linking web sites are hosted on the same IP address or IP address range. If the web sites are in the same IP address range, it is highly likely that they are operated by the same individual. Search engines devalue links from web sites pointing to other web sites hosted on the same IP address range.

Conversely, search engines value links from web sites hosted on different IP addresses. An effective search engine optimizer would go further than hosting inter-linking web sites on different IP addresses. They would host the web sites on completely different class C network addresses. They would make sure that all of their domains were registered with different registrars under different names. They would not use the same template on more than one web site. They would erase all traces that their sites are operated by the same individual. They would go through all of this trouble with one goal in mind - to game the search engines in order to bring in more organic traffic.

For most web sites, having a dedicated unique IP address will have little to no effect on search engine rankings. Matt Cutts, the head of Google's Webspam team, stated:

"If you are an average webmaster and just running a few sites, I wouldn't worry about them being on the same IP address and I definitely wouldn't worry about them being on the same server. That's something that everybody does."

Concerning web site filtering

With so many sites sharing IP addresses, IP-based filtering efforts are bound to produce "overblocking", which is the accidental denial of access to web sites that abide by the stated filtering rules. Overblocking occurs when a single website containing some form of adult or explicit content is blocked by its IP address. If this happens, all other sites hosted on that IP address, regardless of their content, will be blocked as well. Unfortunately, research has indicated that it is not atypical for a single web server to host a mixture of sites that are sexually explicit and sites that are not.

Overblocking is a problem known to affect filtering in China, Vietnam, Saudi Arabia, and other countries that employ government-mandated country-wide web filtering policies. Additionally, research has indicated that IP address filtering is used by many commercial web filters installed in libraries and schools in the United States. Sometimes Internet services providers are legally required to implement IP address level filtering. For example, under 2002 law, the Attorney General of Pennsylvania ordered Internet service providers in Pennsylvania to disable access to sites found to offer child pornography. Most providers receiving such orders reportedly use router-level filtering to disable access to the affected IP addresses, even though those IP addresses host scores of additional web sites without child pornography.

Solution

To avoid any of the potential problems related with IP address sharing, it is best to acquire a unique IP address for your web site. Contact your web host and tell them you would like your own unique IP address. Be sure to let them know you would like a fresh IP address, not a recycled one. Web hosts will often reuse IP addresses that spammers have previously blacklisted. You may need to speak with several individuals until you can find a technician who can understand your request. Acquiring a unique IP address for your web site can cost anywhere from $25 to $100 for an initial setup fee, and $2 to $25 per month thereafter.

By Chris Williams 

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/08/08/1and1_exchange/

Budget hosting provider 1&1 Internet has hit problems while updating its Microsoft email platform. Customers have been unable to access web mailboxes for more than 24 hours.

Reg readers quickly spotted the problem and were told that the firm, which also owns gaffe-prone West Country hosting oufit Fasthosts, didn't know when the problem would be sorted.

We received this statement from 1&1 on Friday afternoon explaining the outage:

Some of our customers using Microsoft Outlook Web Access have in the past 24 hours experienced a problem accessing their mailbox. No customers using 1&1's Linux mail servers nor MailExchange customers have been affected.

Following preparations for an update to new software for Microsoft Exchange 2007 Front-end, one server serving the Outlook front-end has partly been inaccessible as a result of a change in its IP address. The IP address of this server was apparently made available too late for some DNS servers for some ISPs, resulting in some hundred customers using these DNS servers not being able to access their mailbox via Outlook Web Access.

The vast majority of DNS servers have already incorporated the change to this Exchange front-end server, however, due to different DNS server configurations run by ISPs and users, a number of users may still be experiencing a reduced performance. Customers experiencing such an issue can try to refresh their DNS cache with the command IPCONFIG/flushdns. An alternative work-around would be to use a different mail-client other than OWA until the DNS-server has fully updated.

 

Vaughan, Ontario Canada – July 31, 2008 – Millennium Data Systems, an emerging Canadian managed services company announced it has acquired the assets of VistaPages Inc. (www.vistapages.com), a Toronto based managed hosting provider.

“VistaPages operations team and their 5,000+ SMB customers will now have access to a greater breadth of services and product offerings via Millennium’s suite of hosted and managed services”, commented Paul Di Benedetto, Chief Technology Officer at Millennium.

“The acquisition of VistaPages reinforces our business mandate to aggressively grow our managed services practice via accretive acquisitions”, added Tony Di Benedetto CEO of Millennium Data Systems. “VistaPages is the second acquisition for Millennium in 2008, the first being HostVector and we will continue on the path of acquiring additional managed service providers”, added Di Benedetto.

Management expects to have VistaPages completely migrated onto Millennium's national IP Network by end of August 2008. The national network allows clients to deliver content in a more efficient manner to its targeted audience by reducing latency and network hops.

We do hope that the acquisition goes better than the recent Millenium Data Systems acquisition of Hostvector that resulted in days of downtime. Start praying!

About Vistapages
VistaPages, Inc. is a privately-owned organization located in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. At VistaPages, we understand that our customers' web sites are important and they require reliable services to ensure that service is not interrupted. We have established a solid foundation to offer a reliable, easy to use and low cost web hosting solution for small-to-medium sized businesses.

VistaPages is a leader in providing its customers with a reliable solution to individuals and small to large-sized businesses, helping thousands of customers get their web sites online, with ease.

For more information please visit; www.millenniumdata.com or contact;
Millennium Data Systems
905-669-4700

http://techdirt.com/articles/20080803/1834441874.shtml

Over five years ago, we wrote about a college that was starting to offer a new computer science class in writing computer viruses. And, of course, various anti-virus companies went ballistic, claiming how dangerous it was. Yet, as we pointed out at the time, anti-virus companies don't have the greatest track record in actually stopping viruses -- so it seemed only reasonable to teach people to better "think like the enemy." Anyway, it appears not much has changed. Theodp writes in to let us know about an article in Newsweek about a very similar course being taught at Sonoma State University by George Ledin, where students are tasked with creating their own malware.

Once again, various security companies are condemning the technique, even sinking so low as to compare Ledin to A.Q. Khan, the Pakistani scientist who sold nuclear technology to North Korea. They even insist they won't hire his students -- which seems particularly short-sighted. As Ledin points out, it appears that this is really more about the security companies wanting to keep the world more scared than they need to be of malware, so as to pretend that they're the only ones who can solve the "problem" -- when the truth is they're not very effective at it. He complains that anti-virus firms keep their code secret (thank you, DMCA). He points out that if they were willing to open it up, and let lots of folks work on improving it, it would get much, much better. All he's trying to do is help more people understand the enemy without first having to work at one of those companies that's been so ineffective in stopping malware -- in the hopes that maybe some of his students can actually come up with a better soltuion.

The following column is cute in a sadistic kind of way. We've all come up against similar walls when dealing with the unresponsiveness of large corporate conglomerates. Probally why most people give the best reviews for the smaller hosts

By Daniel Rubin Inquirer Columnist

Don't even start with the jokes. He's heard them all before. And he is not amused. You're either broken or made stronger when you grow up in 1940s West Philadelphia and your last name is Libshitz. And Dr. Herman I. Libshitz, retired radiologist, is no pushover. Verizon is learning this the hard way.

This spring, the 69-year-old physician and his wife, Alison, were trying to upgrade the Internet service in their summer place in Rehoboth Beach, Del. They had dial-up. They wanted DSL. When it was time to enter their user name and create an e-mail address, Verizon wouldn't let them complete the job.

This is how the doctor remembers it:

"We called their help line, and got a wonderful young man in the Philippines who told us: " 'We can't install it because your name has - in it.' "

I asked the doctor how I was going to print that. He said, "Just say it's a word contained in Libshitz."

He'd defended his family name with his fists as a boy at 58th and Pine. He wore it proudly on his Air Force uniform during the Vietnam era when he was defending his country. He'd displayed it on white coats at Hahnemann and Jefferson, then at Duke and Texas, where he spent most of his distinguished career, before retiring to Chestertown, Md. He'd signed it to 200 academic papers and six texts. The doctor asked to speak with a supervisor.

What's in a name

The Libshitzes got the same answer from the supervisor, who suggested they try misspelling their last name. That wouldn't do, either.

The couple uses Libshitz in its e-mail address with Prodigy. So there had to be some way around the rules, the two figured. The doctor went for a third opinion. This involved a little subterfuge. He dialed the Verizon number for billing disputes. He explained his problem, "and the first person said, 'That's outrageous,' and put me on to a second person, who said he'd never heard of such a thing."

A third supervisor, from a help line in Norfolk, Va., agreed as well, but said the only person who could help was in Tampa, and that man would have to call India to get them to change the computer code. No one called him back.

Several days later, Libshitz received a letter from Verizon's customer-relations desk in Everett, Wash., informing him that he could not have the user name because it didn't comply with company rules. So the couple returned the Verizon DSL kit.

"If I can't use my own name, I'm going to stay with my AT&T dial-up," the doctor said. "The hell with them."

Ten-hut!

What he wants, he says, "is for these people at least to stand at attention to explain themselves. I don't know if you've ever tried to get to Verizon. . . . You cannot get to them. They are insulated from things like this." I called Sharon B. Schaffer, a Verizon spokeswoman, who offered a refreshing answer to my question as to how this happened.

"I don't have a clue," she said. "Actually, I'm kind of surprised. If this is Dr. Libshitz's name, your name is your identity. He's had this his entire life. . . . I think he needs a little bit of personal attention."

A couple days later, she e-mailed me a formal response: "As a general rule (since 2005) Verizon doesn't allow questionable language in e-mail addresses, but we can, and do, make exceptions based on reasonable requests. The one from Dr. and Mrs. Libshitz certainly is reasonable and we regret the inconvenience and frustration they've been caused."

The doctor said he was willing to try again, but grudgingly. "These people have no trouble putting me in their phone book. They send me mail with that name, they send me a bill routinely, and they cash my checks with Libshitz on it. They just offended me."

original www.philly.com/philly/hp/news_update/26089374.

By Chris Williams

www.theregister.co.uk/2008/08/01/dutch_vacuum_knol_google/

A Dutch vacuum cleaner salesman is demanding a massive payday from Google in exchange for control of his company's web address, Knol.com.

The advertising giant is aiming to end its heavy reliance on Wikipedia for useful search results by brewing its own web encyclopedia, Knol (it's short for knowledge, apparently). The new site differs from Wikipedia's free-for-all/Sum of All Human Knowledge™ editing policy by giving individuals ownership of articles they write, and allowing more than one article on the same topic. It being a Google venture, there's plenty of contextual ads, too.

There can't be many who dare twist Google's arm in a business deal these days, but Hilco Knol, 43, registered Knol.com years ago, long before Google's Wiki-beating plans were made public. His firm uses the address to resell professional steam cleaning equipment.

Acccording to a translation from Dutch newspaper AD, Knol has received a buyout bid carrying five zeros from Mountain View, but he refuses to part with his domain for less than €1m. He said: "It would only be interesting if Google made an offer with six zeros, because the Dutch tax rate of 52 percent would leave too little on the table. An offer in the million Euro range would make things a lot more fun."

When Google first announced Knol in December last year, it hadn't bothered to contact Hilco about the domain. He argues that changing all his company stationery and publicity will be an expensive endeavour. In the meantime, visits to Knol.com have rocketed. ®

 

It is being reported that the NetworkSolution's UK branch has gone down.

While there seems to be no issues in the US network, clients are reporting the outage  on a number of hosting foruums. Network Solution.com makes no mention of any service inturuptions  on their US website.

Network Solutions has a history of ownership change and growth. After going public in 1997, they were aquired by Verisign in 2000.  They have been purchased since by 3 other owners. Today they are presently owned by General Atlantic.

We will continue to update the status as it becomes available

Update August 1 2008 10am

Networks Solution continues to have issues.

Idcdc reports: For what is worth, it's down in Romania as well.

 Update Aug 1 2008  6:24

Network Solutions is back online   :>)

Hosting company CTN1 in France is down for the third day.Initially it was rumoured to be a server migration to a new data center....well three days would be excessive.

Maybe they could plug one in and update their clients. Just a thought.

CTN1 WebLog

Check out all the great hosts reviewed at HostJury.

 

It seems that One9host .net is having issues. It is being reported that they have been down for 2 days. We have attempted to contact the site admins in both New Jersey and California, but so far have got no response. 

 

The following press release was taken in part from the Millennium Data site:

 Vaughan, Ontario Canada – July 18, 2008 – Millennium Data Systems, an emerging Canadian managed services company announced it has acquired the assets of HostVector (www.hostvector.com ), a Toronto based managed hosting provider.

“HostVector’s array of hosted network services which include; dedicated, virtual and e-mail hosting will complement Millennium’s current managed services offerings”, commented Tony Di Benedetto, CEO of Millennium Data Systems.

It continues.... Management expects HostVector assets to be fully integrated by August 2008, with no disruptions to HostVector’s 1000+ clients however history shows otherwise:

The Reality of the situation

"About 26 hours ago my email client stopped pulling email from my Hostvector account, where I host multiple websites.
This morning I got a call from a client that their website (that I host through Hostvector) was down - their ebay listing pictures, oscommerce site etc are all unavailable - and still are.

I called into HV's tech support and got a frontend voicemail message announcing a DNS change and that all should be well soon - or at least by midnight tonight. There was no way to reach a live person.

To offer them patience/benefit of doubt, I wait until midnite - no services. On hold again with them"

A great deal of their clientele seem to have been down for 24+ hours leaving the HostVector clients without a single question answered.

 

 

 

---

By Mark Long
http://www.crm-daily.com/story.xhtml?story_id=60984

Google's PageRank Web site-ranking method is being challenged by Microsoft. Microsoft's new tool, BrowseRank, aims to add a human factor to the site-ranking process. Microsoft claims PageRank does not take into account frequency and staying time of Web site visits, while BrowseRank monitors user behavior data to calculate page importance.

Microsoft Relevant Products/Services engineers, in collaboration with researchers at several Asian institutions, have proposed a new method for improving upon the Web page rankings produced by today's search engine requests. Called BrowseRank, the new approach adds a human factor to the process by weighing how people actually use the Internet, the collaborators reported in a paper recently presented before the Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval.

"The more visits [to] the page made by the users, and the longer time periods spent by the users on the page, the more likely the page is important," the paper's authors noted. The goal is to "leverage hundreds of millions of users' 'implicit voting' on page importance," they said, "in accordance with the concept of Web 2.0."

Missing the Mark

Google's trademarked PageRank method measures the relative importance of Web pages through the use of a sequence of data-processing instructions -- called a link analysis algorithm -- that assigns a numerical weighting to each element within any given set of hyperlinked documents.

"Pages that we believe are important pages receive a higher PageRank and are more likely to appear at the top of the search results," Google said. "We have always taken a pragmatic approach to help improve search quality and create useful products, and our technology uses the collective intelligence of the Web to determine a page's importance."

Gauging the relevance of Internet searches is extremely important to Google, Yahoo and Microsoft because it allows the search engine leaders to more precisely target their placement of ads on behalf of clients. But Microsoft and its collaborators claim that PageRank misses the mark because it allows the importance of pages to become artificially inflated.

For example, Web sites such as Adobe.com are ranked very high by PageRank because Adobe.com has millions of sites linking to it for Acrobat Reader and Flash Player downloads. "However, Web users do not really visit such Web sites very frequently, and they should not be regarded [as] more important than the Web sites on which users spend much more time, like MySpace.com and Facebook.com," they explained.

Giving Users a Vote

Microsoft and its academic collaborators say their new method is superior because it is based on a user-browsing graph that is generated from data that reflects actual human behavior. "User-behavior data can be recorded by Internet browsers at Web clients and collected at a Web server," they said.

BrowseRank's user-browsing graph can more precisely represent the Web surfer's random walk process, and thus is more useful for calculating page importance, the collaborators claim. Furthermore, the amount of time spent on the pages by users is also included under the BrowseRank method.

"In this way, we can leverage hundreds of millions of users' implicit voting on page importance," researchers explained. "Experimental results show that BrowseRank indeed outperforms the baseline methods, such as PageRank and TrustRank, in several tasks."

For its part, Google notes that PageRank, which is based on a Stanford University patent, is not the only method it employs to rank search engine results. Instead, Google said it relies on more than 200 different signals to examine the entire link structure of the Web and determine which pages are most important.

"We then conduct hypertext-matching analysis to determine which pages are relevant to the specific search being conducted," Google explained. "By combining overall importance and query-specific relevance, we're able to put the most relevant and reliable results first."

(In following examples, we will substitute the name "Ted" as the System Administrator)

• Make sure to save all your MP3 files on your network drive. No sense in wasting valuable space on your local drive! Plus, Ted loves browsing through 100+ GB of music files while he backs up the servers.
• Play with all the wires you can find. If you can't find enough, open something up to expose them. After you have finished, and nothing works anymore, put it all back together and call Ted. Deny that you touched anything and that it was working perfectly only five minutes ago. Ted just loves a good mystery. For added effect you can keep looking over his shoulder and ask what each wire is for.
• Never write down error messages. Just click OK, or restart your computer. Ted likes to guess what the error message was.
• When talking about your computer, use terms like "Thingy" and "Big Connector."
• If you get an EXE file in an email attachment, open it immediately. Ted likes to make sure the anti-virus software is working properly.
• When Ted says he coming right over, log out and go for coffee. It's no problem for him to remember your password.
• When you call Ted to have your computer moved, be sure to leave it buried under a year-old pile of postcards, baby pictures, stuffed animals, dried flowers, unpaid bills, bowling trophies and Popsicle sticks. Ted doesn't have a life, and he finds it deeply moving to catch a glimpse of yours.
• When Ted sends you an email marked as "Highly Important" or "Action Required", delete it at once. He's probably just testing some new-fangled email software.
• When Ted's eating lunch at his desk or in the lunchroom, walk right in, grab a few of his fries, then spill your guts and expect him to respond immediately. Ted lives to serve, and he's always ready to think about fixing computers, especially yours.
• When Ted's at the water cooler or outside taking a breath of fresh air, find him and ask him a computer question. The only reason he takes breaks at all is to ferret out all those employees who don't have email or a telephone.
• Send urgent email ALL IN UPPERCASE. The mail server picks it up and flags it as a rush delivery.
• When the photocopier doesn't work, call Ted. There's electronics in it, so it should be right up his alley.
• When you're getting a NO DIAL TONE message at your home computer, call Ted. He enjoys fixing telephone problems from remote locations. Especially on weekends.
• When something goes wrong with your home PC, dump it on Ted's chair the next morning with no name, no phone number, and no description of the problem. Ted just loves a good mystery.
• When you have Ted on the phone walking you through changing a setting on your PC, read the newspaper. Ted doesn't actually mean for you to DO anything. He just loves to hear himself talk.
• When your company offers training on an upcoming OS upgrade, don't bother to sign up. Ted will be there to hold your hand when the time comes.
• When the printer won't print, re-send the job 20 times in rapid succession. That should do the trick.
• When the printer still won't print after 20 tries, send the job to all the printers in the office. One of them is bound to work.
• Don't use online help. Online help is for wimps.
• Don't read the operator's manual. Manuals are for wussies.
• If you're taking night classes in computer science, feel free to demonstrate your fledgling expertise by updating the network drivers for you and all your co-workers. Ted will be grateful for the overtime when he has to stay until 2:30am fixing all of them.
• When Ted's fixing your computer at a quarter past one, eat your Whopper with cheese in his face. He functions better when he's slightly dizzy from hunger.
• When Ted asks you whether you've installed any new software on your computer, LIE. It's no one else's business what you've got on your computer.
• If the mouse cable keeps knocking down the framed picture of your dog, lift the monitor and stuff the cable under it. Those skinny Mouse cables were designed to have 55 lbs. of computer monitor crushing them.
• If the space bar on your keyboard doesn't work, blame Ted for not upgrading it sooner. Hell, it's not your fault there's a half pound of pizza crust crumbs, nail clippings, and big sticky drops of Mountain Dew under the keys.
• When you get the message saying "Are you sure?", click the "Yes" button as fast as you can. Hell, if you weren't sure, you wouldn't be doing it, would you?
• Feel perfectly free to say things like "I don't know nothing about that boneheaded computer crap." It never bothers Ted to hear his area of professional expertise referred to as boneheaded crap.
• Don't even think of breaking large print jobs down into smaller chunks. God forbid somebody else should sneak a one-page job in between your 500-page Word document.
• When you send that 500-page document to the printer, don't bother to check if the printer has enough paper. That's Ted's job.
• When Ted calls you 30 minutes later and tells you that the printer printed 24 pages of your 500-page document before it ran out of paper, and there are now nine other jobs in the queue behind yours, ask him why he didn't bother to add more paper.
• When you receive a 130 MB movie file, send it to everyone as a high-priority mail attachment. Ted's provided plenty of disk space and processor capacity on the new mail server for just those kinds of important things.
• When you bump into Ted in the grocery store on a Sunday afternoon, ask him computer questions. He works 24/7, and is always thinking about computers, even when he's at super-market buying toilet paper and doggie treats.
• If your son is a student in computer science, have him come in on the weekends and do his projects on your office computer. Ted will be there for you when your son's illegal copy of Visual Basic 6.0 makes the Access database keel over and die.
• When you bring Ted your own "no-name" brand PC to repair for free at the office, tell him how urgently he needs to fix it so you can get back to playing EverQuest. He'll get on it right away, because everyone knows he doesn't do anything all day except surf the Internet.
• Don't ever thank Ted. He loves fixing everything AND getting paid for it!

http://www.sysadminday.com/time.html

http://techdirt.com/articles/20080720/1055151734.shtml

Rogers -- a Canadian telco -- has been attracting a lot of negative attention lately between deliberately disabling notifications for cellular roaming charges, setting ridiculous iPhone pricing plans and injecting its own content into Google's home page. As if that wasn't enough, Rogers has started hijacking failed DNS lookups. This means that when a user types in a web address that doesn't exist, instead of getting a "page not found" error, the user is redirected to a search page filled with banner ads and sponsored links. Michael Geist notes that there's an "opt-out" feature, but it doesn't take long to see that it's pretty pathetic. The "opt-out" sends a cookie which just redirects the user to a different Rogers page instead -- a fake "Internet Explorer" error page hosted on the same server. It does essentially the exact same thing, only pretending (poorly, for non-IE users) to revert back to expected behavior. And the option is reset whenever the browser's cookies are cleared. The comments on Geist's post are evidence that many Rogers customers are not pleased (myself included).

This isn't just annoying, it's also a security threat. It breaks how the internet was designed to work; a lot of software is written with the expectation that a DNS lookup for a non-existent domain name will return an error. For example, Kevin Dean notes in the comments on Geist's post how this has caused problems for him accessing his VPN. At first, he thought his computer had been compromised, since Rogers' new "feature" ends up resembling a hostile attempt to redirect traffic to an unknown server.

Some American ISPs already do this, such as Earthlink (which was used to demonstrate the security risk), though it seems to have a slightly better opt-out process, instructing users to configure alternate DNS servers instead of setting a browser cookie. VeriSign had originally tried to do something similar with SiteFinder back in 2003 (though not at the ISP level), but it didn't exactly go over too well. VeriSign reluctantly backed off, though it just recently obtained a patent on the concept. Rogers is the first Canadian ISP to implement the practice and it seems to think it won't meet much resistance. In another comment on Geist's post, Ian relates a telling quote from the FAQs page for Paxfire (the American company handling this for Rogers): "What feedback you do receive typically will come from a small group of highly technical users. Even that feedback tends to fall away after just a few weeks -- as they get used to the new behavior."

Rogers thinks it can just brush off complaints from its users, especially since there really isn't a lot of choice in the Canadian ISP market. However, Rogers should be careful in treading so brazenly into what some consider "net neutrality" territory. Bell Canada (one of Rogers' few competitors) has landed itself in front of a national regulatory body over its throttling practices. Rogers wants to have complete control over its network, but by continually pushing the line they only spur on the debate about net neutrality and government regulation. We haven't heard the last of this.

http://techdirt.com/articles/20080722/1513011763.shtml

Monster Cable has a long history of abusing trademark law to threaten and/or sue pretty much any company that uses the name "Monster" in its brand. That has included the TV show Monster Garage, a clothing store called MonsterVintage, Disney for the movie Monsters, Inc., the makers of Monster Energy drink, the Chicago Bears for having the nickname "Monsters of the Midway," and the Boston Red Sox for offering "Monster seats" on top of their famous "Green Monster" wall. We recently noted that it had also gone after Monster Mini Golf.

Of course, that's not how trademark law works. It doesn't give Monster Cable total control over the name Monster. It just gives the company the right to prevent others from using the brand in the same market in a way that is likely to confuse consumers. It's difficult to believe that anyone would think that Monsters, Inc., was somehow from Monster Cable. But, on and on it goes -- though, it appears that Monster Cable's lawyers were finally convinced to drop one suit. An anonymous reader points us to the news that Monster Cable has withdrawn its trademark challenge against the makers of Monster Deer Block, a salt and mineral lick designed to attract wild deer. Apparently, some lawyers for the makers of Monster Deer Block persuaded Monster Cable's lawyers that there was little chance of consumer confusion between the product and the makers of expensive audio/video cabling.

 

Martyn Williams has an interesting look at the Japanese mobile content market. He notes that for the calendar year 2007, more than $100 billion was spent on mobile content. The total was actually $107.5 billion and includes items such as ring tones, Web site subscriptions and e-commerce purchases. E-commerce made up about 65% of the total amount spent and all sorts of transactions were handled including: movie and event ticket sales, travel reservations, air and rail ticket sales, stock trading and online auctions.

The biggest percentage gain came from "high-fidelity music" which increased 42% thanks to more mobile devices handling better quality sound. Mobile gaming jumped 13% as well.

Interesting stats

Written by Allen Stern

http://www.centernetworks.com/japan-mobile-ecommerce-content

 

__________________

Due to unanticipated levels of interest inthe presale of Dot Pro  domain names, Registry Pro has moved their 'go live' date from July 14 to September 8.

After meeting with a number of registrars last week at the ICANN conference in Paris, and talking to current and prospective registrars about implementation of the modified restrictions passed by the ICANN Board on April 29, it is apparent that the time frame  first set is not sufficient to accommodate the interest!

The .Pro top level domain, previously restricted to registrants in the accounting, engineering, legal and medical fields, will be available to all licensed and credentialed professionals and professional entities internationally on Monday, Sept 8, 2008.

In the meantime, us techie types can get our Dot Me domains on July 17th

For more information on the dot pro requirements:

http://www.registrypro.pro/

 

"Surreptitiously tracking individual users' Internet activity cuts to the heart of consumer privacy. The information collected through NebuAd's technology can be highly personal and sensitive information.  Embarq's apparent use of this technology without directly notifying affected customers that their activity was being tracked, collected, and analyzed raises serious privacy red flags," said Rep. Markey.

The text of the letter is below.
 

 
July 14, 2008
 
Mr. Tom Gerke
Chief Executive Officer
Embarq
5454 W. 110th Street
Overland Park, KS  66211
 
Dear Mr. Gerke:
 
We are writing with respect to a recent test conducted by Embarq to tailor Internet advertising to the web-browsing patterns of individual Embarq subscribers.  We are interested in the nature of this test as well as the impact that this test, and the underlying technology it employed, could have on consumer privacy and other issues.
 
We understand that Embarq conducted a test earlier this year in a select community in conjunction with NebuAd to create consumer profiles for the purpose of serving ads to consumers based upon their search and surfing habits.  As you may know, questions have been raised regarding the applicability of privacy protections contained in the Communications Act of 1934, the Cable Act of 1984, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, and other statutes, to such practices. 
 
In particular, we are concerned that Embarq may not have directly notified the subscribers involved in the test that their Web use was being analyzed and profiled.  We therefore request that you answer the following questions in order for us to better understand the nature of the test conducted, its impact on consumers, and the broader public policy implications of this technology.
 
1.         In what community was the test conducted and how was that community chosen?
 
2.         How many subscribers were involved in the test?
 
3.         How did Embarq notify subscribers in the affected community of the test?  Please provide a copy of the notification.  If Embarq did not specifically or directly notify affected subscribers, please explain why this was not done.
 
4.         Did Embarq conduct a legal analysis regarding the applicability of consumer privacy laws on the service used in the test?  If so, please explain what that analysis concluded.
 
5.         Please explain why Embarq chose to conduct the test allowing consumers who objected to "opt out" rather than first asking customers to "opt in."
 
6.         How did Embarq notify subscribers in the affected community of their opportunity to "opt-out" of the test?  If Embarq did not specifically or directly notify effected subscribers of the opportunity to "opt-out," please explain why this was not done.
 
7.         How many subscribers in the affected community opted out of participating in the test?
 
8.         Did Embarq conduct a legal analysis regarding the adequacy of the "opt-out" notice and mechanism employed to allow consumers to effectuate this choice?  If so, please explain what that analysis concluded.
 
9.         What is the status of the consumer data collected during this test?  Has it been destroyed? 
 
Thank you in advance for your attention to this matter.  We respectfully request a response by Monday, July 21, 2008.             
 
Sincerely,
 
s/John D. Dingell                                               s/Joe Barton
Chairman                                                         Ranking Member
Committee on Energy and Commerce               Committee on Energy and Commerce
 
 
s/Edward J. Markey
Chairman
Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet
                       
 
 
 
cc:        The Honorable Cliff Stearns, Ranking Member
            Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet
 

Version 2.6 of WordPress.org is now available, almost a month ahead schedule. Version 2.6 “Tyner,” named for jazz pianist McCoy Tyner, contains a number of new features that make WordPress a more powerful CMS: you can now track changes to every post and page and easily post from wherever you are on the web, plus there are dozens of incremental improvements to the features introduced in version 2.5.

For a look at the new WordPress 2.6 features in action, check out this video:

http://wordpress.org/development/2008/07/wordpress-26-tyner/