Entries Tagged 'Technology' ↓
March 13th, 2007 — Technology
Here’s who’s shaping what you read, watch, hear, write, buy, sell, befriend, flame, and otherwise do online.
Despite what Time magazine would have you believe, you are not the most powerful or influential person on the Web. PC World love online personals, social networks, and videos of people falling on their keisters as much as the next person, but without the folks who create the Craigslists, MySpaces, and YouTubes of the world, much of the Web’s potential would be lost among spam sites and other online detritus.
So who’s making the biggest impact online? PC World considered hundreds of the Web’s most noteworthy power brokers, bloggers, brainiacs, and entrepreneurs to figure out whose contributions are shaping the way we use the Web. We whittled the list down to the top 50–well, actually the top 62–people, but as you’ll see, there are some you just can’t separate. And don’t despair: Get a little more traffic on your Web site, and you may show up on the list next year.
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1. Eric Schmidt, Larry Page, and Sergey Brin
Executives, Google
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 When your stock price can top $500 a share, you’re collectively worth $33 billion in cash, and you run the most trafficked search engine on the Internet, you can afford to do, well, pretty much whatever you want. Sergey Brin and Larry Page’s little project from Stanford has grown into the Web’s most talked-about powerhouse, and one of the few names on this list to have morphed into a verb. Schmidt left Novell to join the board of directors at Google in 2001 and soon became the company’s CEO. Having conquered the online advertising world, Google seems to be gearing up for an acquisition spree, its headline-grabbing purchase of YouTube marking a big step toward complete domination of the Web.
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2. Steve Jobs
CEO, Apple |
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 No doubt you’re sick of the media bonanza surrounding the every move of Apple’s CEO, but when one man’s appeal for DRM-free music reverberates around the world, it’s hard to ignore the power he wields. Jobs popularized legal music downloads and legal TV and movie downloads. And though the iPhone won’t be released for five months, its demonstration at Macworld Expo suggested that this product might finally popularize Internet browsing on a mobile device.
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3. Bram Cohen
Cofounder, BitTorrent
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 P2P systems like KaZaA and eDonkey are so last year. The future is all about BitTorrent, the brainchild of math wizard and programming wunderkind Bram Cohen. BitTorrent, developed in 2001, has gained in popularity as a way to download large files (like movies) by sharing the burden across hardware and bandwidth. The technology’s adeptness at handling large files got Cohen in trouble with the Motion Picture Association of America, which ordered BitTorrent to remove copyrighted content from its network. But that setback hasn’t slowed it down. Reportedly, more than a third of all Web traffic now comes from BitTorrent clients. BitTorrent and the entertainment heavyweights have since joined forces. The newly released BitTorrent Entertainment Network launched recently with thousands of industry-approved movies, television shows, games, and songs for sale and rental.
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4. Mike Morhaime
President, Blizzard Entertainment
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 In the world of online gaming, there is World of Warcraft and there is everything else. With 8 million players worldwide, Blizzard earns about $1.5 billion a year on WoW. And each player is breathlessly beholden to Mike Morhaime for the chance–if it ever comes–to obtain that Blade of Eternal Justice. As with Second Life (see #17), entire real-world businesses are based around the game. Unlike Second Life, though, these businesses–which exploit the WoW economy and gameplay–are not entirely welcome.
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5. Jimmy Wales
Founder, Wikipedia
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 Many onliners treat Internet encyclopedia Wikipedia as their first and last stop in researching a topic; and its user generated content has become so reliable that Nature magazine declared it “close to [Encyclopaedia] Britannica” in accuracy. The site has been cited as a source of information in more than 100 U.S. court decisions since 2004. But its popularity has also made Wikipedia a target for spammers–so much so that Wikipedia temporarily blocked the entire country of Qatar from making edits. To thwart spammers, Wales decided to slap “nofollow” tags on external links, telling search engines to ignore the links in order to avoid artificially inflating the search engine ranking of the link targets. This strategy ensures that Wikipedia’s prominence in search results will continue to grow. But Wikipedia may just be the beginning for Wales. He recently launched his own search engine, Wikia Search, which searches only sites mentioned in Wikipedia.
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6. John Doerr
Venture capitalist, Kleiner, Perkins, Caulfield & Byers |
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 A former salesman for Intel, John Doerr has been the king of Silicon Valley venture capital for 27 years, investing in tech businesses ranging from Sun Microsystems to Amazon.com to Google. Jeff Bezos (see #24) once described Doerr as “the center of gravity in the Internet.” He has also put his money behind his politics, backing controversial state ballot initiatives in California involving alternative energy and stem-cell research.
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7. Craig Newmark
Founder, Craigslist |
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 His Web site has no ads, charges absurdly low fees to a small fraction of its visitors, has a “.org” domain, and employs 23 people. Yet despite its humble appearance, Craigslist racked up 14.1 million page views last December and was the 52nd most viewed site last December according to comScore Media Metrix. Newmark’s Craigslist has become an addiction for many, who impulsively refresh the listings of free stuff, “rants & raves,” and personal ads while shirking their day jobs. Most importantly, it has almost singlehandedly demolished the offline classified advertising business. (In the San Francisco Bay Area alone, one study found, the site drains up to $65 million annually from local newspapers’ help-wanted ads.) Take that, old media!
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8. Peter Levinsohn
President, Fox Interactive Media |
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Fox Interactive Media, owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, is one of the Web’s most powerful entities, controlling 13 sites that range from uber-popular MySpace.com to controversial FoxNews.com. A complement to News Corp’s array of traditional film and television properties, this Internet-focused division ranked among the top 10 visited properties in the world in December 2006, according to comScore World Metrix. And there will probably be more to come, as Fox Interactive still has $2 billion in acquisition money to play around with, according to TechCrunch (see #30).
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9. Marissa Mayer
Vice president for search products & user experience, Google
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 Google’s product czar oversees the search giant’s increasingly diversified list of Web services and tools, such as Google Maps, Google Desktop, and Google Base–an eBay-esque e-commerce service. The first lady of Google joined the company as its first female engineer in 1999 (she was approximately employee #20) and worked on developing Google’s now-familiar minimalist look. But don’t accuse her of all work and no play; according to Google’s Web site, she organizes employee movie nights.
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10. Chad Hurley and Steve Chen
Founders, YouTube |
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Despite Google’s acquisition of the company, YouTube founders Chad Hurley (CEO) and Steve Chen (CTO) look like they’ll be shaking things up for some time to come. The Internet video kingpin announced plans to pay users for videos, and it has signed several big-media content partnerships (with MTV, NBC, Warner Music, and others). Fellow co-founder Jawed Karim left the company to pursue a master’s in computer science at Stanford University.
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11. Kevin J. Martin
Chairman, Federal Communications Commission
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 He may look innocent and unassuming, but Martin is arguably the most powerful bureaucrat on the Web. He took over the reins of the FCC in 2005, and to date he has encountered minimal controversy and none of the scandals that predecessor Michael Powell suffered. But that doesn’t mean he couldn’t cut off your Internet connection like that if he really wanted to.
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12. Brad Templeton
Chairman of the board, Electronic Frontier Foundation |
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 If you’ve ever found yourself on the wrong side of an electronic copyright or privacy scuffle, you know that Brad Templeton and the Electronic Frontier Foundation are your friends. They’ve defended file-sharers sued by the Recording Industry Association of America and filed complaints against America Online for disclosing subscriber search terms; currently they’re fighting to unmuzzle bloggers who published leaked documents related to Eli Lilly’s alleged misrepresentation of side effects of the drug Zyprexa. Templeton’s passion about copyright and free speech is not surprising. The Web publishing veteran got his start back in 1989 when he founded ClariNet, a company that published what Templeton calls “the Net’s first newspaper.”
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13. Henry Chon
CEO, Cyworld
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 Don’t call Cyworld a Korean MySpace; MySpace is an American Cyworld. In South Korea, an estimated 25 percent of the population (and 90 percent of people in their teens and twenties) have Cyworld accounts, where individuals design miniature animated avatars to represent them in its unique online space. In 2006 CEO Henry Chon brought Cyworld to U.S. shores. Though Cyworld hasn’t yet achieved comparable success here, MySpace shouldn’t rest easy if Chon’s track record is any indication of future competition.
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14. Shana Fisher
Senior vice president for strategy and M&A, IAC/InterActiveCorp |
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IAC/InterActiveCorp chairman and CEO Barry Diller loves his online enterprises. After a buying binge, IAC now owns Ask.com, Citysearch, Expedia, Match.com, Ticketmaster, and a host of other service-oriented Web businesses. But who tells Diller where to plunk down the cash? That would be his mergers and acquisitions advisor, senior VP Shana Fisher, who determines exactly where and when IAC should invest. Her control over IAC’s purse strings makes her arguably the most powerful woman on the Internet.
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15. Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis
Founders, Skype and KaZaA |
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It seems like Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis just can’t stop themselves. First they built the popular (though malware-addled) peer-to-peer file-sharing network KaZaA; then they followed that endeavor up by building the amazingly popular VoIP software Skype. After selling Skype to eBay (see #28) for $2.6 billion, the duo has gone back to the drawing board to produce Joost (formerly “The Venice Project”), a P2P video distribution service that is currently in private beta form. Will Zennstrom and Friis pull off a trifecta of killer apps? After being forced to settle an RIAA lawsuit over KaZaA for more than $100 million, they are negotiating directly with content providers as they prepare for Joost’s official launch.
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16. Matt Mullenweg
Developer, WordPress blogging site and software
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 Matt Mullenweg can barely buy a drink, but this 22-year-old open-source enthusiast developed WordPress, the open-source publishing software favored by blogging diehards around the world. In 2004, WordPress became well-enough known that Web publishing powerhouse CNet hired Mullenweg to work on it and other projects. Mullenweg quit in 2005, however, to work full-time on WordPress, which today is more like a content-management system, with various templates, widgets, and plug-ins, and Askismet antispam protection (we reviewed the service in January 2007.)
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17. Philip Rosedale
CEO, Linden Lab
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 Philip Rosedale took the MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game) concept and spun it into the Web’s most talked-about virtual destination: Second Life. But don’t call it just a game. For more and more “residents,” Second Life has become a first life, where they can do everything in the virtual world from getting married to launching businesses that function exclusively within the site’s confines. Many real-world businesses have opened Second Life branches, too. In fact, Second Life has become so popular that the inevitable backlash has begun: Nick Denton’s Valleywag (see #45) has compared the game’s economy to a pyramid scheme
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18. Jon Lech Johansen
Creator, DeCSS decryption program |
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 Better known as DVD-Jon, Jon Lech Johansen is the Norwegian hacker who broke the encryption system used on DVD movies, thereby allowing them to be copied. He released the DeCSS decryption program in 2002 and was promptly prosecuted in his homeland. Eventually acquitted, Johansen went on to crack Apple’s iTunes DRM (repeatedly) while working as a software developer in the United States. Beaten to the punch in cracking high-definition DVD formats by the still-anonymous muslix64, who created “backup” programs for HD DVD late last year and for Blu-ray Disc in January, Johansen nonetheless remains the renegade that big media fears most.
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19. Jerry Yang, David Filo, and Terry Semel
Executives, Yahoo
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   Google’s product innovations and its blockbuster purchase of YouTube for $1.65 billion may have pushed Yahoo out of the limelight, but the Web giant led by founders Yang and Filo and CEO Terry Semel are fighting back. In the past two years, Yahoo has acquired online photo-sharing site Flickr and social bookmarking site Del.icio.us. It also continues to launch new properties such as Yahoo Food and Yahoo Pipes (for creating custom data feeds). Yahoo’s recent switch to the Panama advertising platform represents another attempt to recapture ad revenue from Google. (Full disclosure: The author of this story writes a blog hosted at tech.yahoo.com.)
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20. Jack Ma
COO, Alibaba.com
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 Want to do business in China without springing for a plane ticket to Shanghai? Alibaba.com is your best bet. Founded by Jack Ma in 1999, this massively successful business-to-business e-marketplace is the best place online to meet people and trade proposals and product offers. (Ma has been quoted as saying that the firm got its bizarre start when he was kidnapped in Malibu and released on the condition he help his captor start a business in China.) In 2005, Yahoo (see #19) made a multibillion-dollar investment in Alibaba, which now runs Yahoo China. The venture recently became mired in scandal, when it provided information that led to the imprisonment of a Chinese journalist accused of leaking state secrets.
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21. Brewster Kahle
Director, Internet Archive |
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Since 1996, the nonprofit Internet Archive has been collecting terabytes of data–old books, movies, music, and radio shows. Meanwhile, another feature, called the Wayback Machine, has been quietly taking snapshots of Web history to memorialize where we browsed. Take a look at the Internet Archive’s old snapshots of your favorite Web sites and you may be shocked at how different they used to be. Kahle cofounded the Internet Archive with the goal of “preserving our digital heritage,” but don’t let the humble curatorial pose fool you: Kahle has also challenged changes to U.S. copyright law in Kahle vs. Gonzales, a high-profile First Amendment legal case.
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22. Ray Ozzie
Chief software architect, Microsoft
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 In 2006, when Bill Gates abdicated the position of chief software architect at Microsoft after 30 hands-on years, observers applauded his choice of successor: software visionary Ray Ozzie. The creator of Lotus Notes and Groove collaboration software is now charged with ensuring Microsoft’s technological relevance in an age in which the Web threatens to replace the traditional desktop OS. A pioneer in computer-based collaboration, Ozzie seems well equipped to do the job. One piece of unsolicited advice, Ray: You might consider updating your blog as a first step.
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23. Markos Moulitsas Zuniga
Blogger, Daily Kos
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 The left’s most high-profile voice on the Web, Markos “Kos” Moulitsas, is a political powerhouse without equal online. His blog draws comments from liberals ranging from Nancy Pelosi to Jimmy Carter, and Moulitsas even launched a conference (broadcast in part on C-Span) for like-minded political activists. Kos’s endorsements haven’t always triumphed, but his backing of Ned Lamont was influential in opponent Joe Lieberman’s loss of the Democratic Senate primary in Connecticut last year, though Lieberman eventually won the general election as an independent. Kos has not indicated any desire to run for office himself as yet.
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24. Jeff Bezos
CEO, Amazon
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 He may have launched Amazon.com with the goal of developing it into a big online bookstore, but Bezos proved that shlepping books and CDs across the country was just a first act. The next round: adding toys, T-shirts, and power tools. And now, for scene three, Bezos has thrown himself into Web services. What does it mean? Just the start of a new framework for developing Web sites, including “utility computing” services that let you buy server time at a rate of 10 cents an hour. While we wait to find out how his newfangled grid computing strategies pan out, don’t forget that Bezos will sell you a Barbie Fashion Fever Grow ‘N Style Styling Head for 50 percent off.
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 You know a grassroots movement is a success when big business wants to join in. And for once, big business–namely Microsoft–did it right. This was largely due to Robert Scoble. At the time a Microsoft employee, he blogged about the company and revealed a human–and sometimes egg-covered–side of the Redmond empire. The glimpse into Microsoft’s inner workings, cool technologies, and smart people shattered (or at least dented) the Microsoft stereotype. Microsoft blogs have subsequently become an integral part of the company’s communication with users. In 2006 Scoble left Microsoft for PodTech.net, where his video podcast Scoble Show features interviews with geeks. Recent guests include PC World’s editor in chief Harry McCracken, who stopped in to debate the eternal question: Mac or PC? Scoble has also interviewed 2008 presidential candidate John Edwards, whose outspoken bloggers got him into hot water.
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 Entrepreneur and journalist John Battelle has had a ringside seat for the unfolding of Webs 1.0, 2.0 (he cohosts the Web 2.0 Summit conference with Tim O’Reilly–see #36), and (in its preliminary stages) 3.0. In addition, he founded what some would call the Vanity Fair and the People Magazine of the Internet era: Wired Magazine and The Industry Standard. His most recent venture, Federated Media Publishing, represents the A-list of online content. Its slate of more than 50 sites includes 43 Folders, Ars Technica, BoingBoing, and TechCrunch. Battelle’s 2005 book The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture and his blog Searchblog are required reading for anyone who wants to understand the constantly evolving landscape of the tech industry.
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Acknowledging his kinglike status in the field, Wired once called him the “Elvis of Cyberlaw”–and the name stuck. Lawrence Lessig is a professor at Stanford University Law School and founder and chair of Creative Commons (CC), a nonprofit initiative that promotes a free but nonrevocable licensing system for online works. Designed to enable copyright holders to share content and yet still control it, a CC license spells out whether the holder wants to require attribution, restrict commercial use, or allow derivative works under specified circumstances. Musical acts such as DangerMouse and David Byrne have made songs available under the CC’s Sampling Plus license for noncommercial sharing and commercial sampling, while restricting advertising uses of it. A wealth of Creative Commons-licensed media is stored in searchable form at the Creative Commons Search page.
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February 15th, 2007 — Technology
As the world in general is heading to the e-world and business, so there is a possibility to live out there, but to do so you need the land, atmosphere, humans, etc… Second Life gave it to you as a 3-D virtual world entirely built and owned by its people. In that platform you need everything to live any normal life like the way you’re living now. Second Life was born in 2003, and today it has over than 3.5 million habitants.
What make me write an article about second life, it’s not the original idea they have in this web application, but how friendly it is when you join and be an inhabitant. From the moment you join you will start discovering things, it is a wide continent where you will team with up people that you never knew. Now once you discover it a bit, you will find the right land to build up your house or business.
You will be surrounded by the creation of your fellow residents, as they have the same rights as you to buy, sell, build and trade. As for the marketplace it supports millions of US dollars in monthly transactions. The commerce there is handled by the in-world unit-of-trade, the Linden dollar, which can be converted to US dollars at several thriving online Linden Dollar exchanges.
Here are Second Life overall Metrics through January 2007, from the web metrics guru:
Just got done reading TechCrunch’s post on Second Life Census Metrics (where you can also download a spreadsheet with all the data) and my original predictions about the population of Second Life reaching 7 million by the end of this year are realisable (and I’m looking at the actual registered users - deduped).
Sure, there are multiple avatars for some individuals, that’s why I charted them both, side by side. In fact, there’s probably an “engagement metric” you can get out of the widening gap between unique individuals who have registered and the number of avatars existing in Second Life. More and more people are creating 2 or more avatars and that spells Engagement and more time being spent online in Second Life.
The population by country makeup is also telling, most being the G9 countries, it’s US and then France (the French always liked “Sexy” games).
Of course, these “Census” numbers released by Linden Labs are far from the metrics that each Island, Each Business, each Avatar could have. I’m in the process of trying to contact ElectricSheepComany.com to find out what they have to offer. Hopefully, I’ll get a hold of someone one over at ElectricSheep one of these days.
February 14th, 2007 — Technology
Here we go almost 3 years since the release of the latest design of Nokia Communicator the 9500, and almost 10 years since the release of the first Communicator in 1997, which made up to 10 communicators since than. But today we are in 2007 and it is time for the new communicator the E90, the eleventh Communicator model.
I am a Nokia Communicator fan and got used to always wait several years for a new model and always being slightly disappointed by the lack of some important features and reduced performance of new models compared to smart phones announced/released at the same time. Like the lack of vibration, T9 and other features missed in the 9500. The 9500 which finally delivered Bluetooth and GPRS/EDGE but (in 2004/2005) still no UMTS, low-res camera and slow(ish) 150 MHz processor, compared to 220 MHz clocks of S60 smart phones (e.g. the 6630) announced at the same time… The 9300 and the 9300i provided improved WLAN connectivity but still the same processing speed and no UMTS support…
History often repeats itself…. but NOT THIS TIME! The E90 has everything you could dream of and provides the fastest processor currently used in Symbian OS smart phones and the largest operating memory (RAM) capacity ever used in a Symbian OS based device. Yes, it’s true, Nokia has finally created a Communicator that it as fast as other high-end Symbian OS devices and as powerful (and MORE functional) than high-end PocketPC Phone Edition devices! But still something missed like no Blackberry service or touch screen.
You can find the hardware and software features below:
General
Network HSDPA / GSM 850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900
Size
Dimensions 132 x 57 x 20 mm, 140 cc
Weight 210 g
Display
Type TFT, 16M colors
Size 800 x 352 pixels
- Second external 16M colors display (240 x 320 pixels)
- Full QWERTY keyboard
- Downloadable themes
Ringtones
Type Polyphonic (64 channels), MP3
Customization Download
Vibration Yes
Memory
Phonebook Yes
Call records Yes
Card slot microSD (TransFlash), hotswap
- 128 MB shared memory
- 330 Mhz ARM processor
Data
GPRS Yes
HSCSD Yes
EDGE Yes
3G Yes, 384 kbps
WLAN Wi-Fi 802.11b/g
Bluetooth Yes, v2.0
Infrared port Yes
USB Yes, v2.0, miniUSB
Features
OS Symbian OS v9.2, S60 rel. 3.1
Messaging SMS, MMS, Email, Instant Messaging
Browser WAP 2.0/xHTML, HTML
Games Yes + Java downloadable
Colors Red, Mocha
Camera 3.2 MP, 2048×1536 pixels, autofocus, video(VGA 30 fps), flash; secondary QCIF videocall camera
- GPS receiver (built-in maps)
- Video calling
- Java MIDP 2.0
- MP3/M4A/AAC/eAAC+/WMA player
- FM radio
- T9
- Voice command/dial
- PIM including calendar, to-do list and printing
- Document viewer
- Photo/video editor
- Integrated handsfree
Battery
Standard battery, Li-Ion 1500 mAh
Stand-by Up to 330 h
Talk time Up to 5 h
February 12th, 2007 — Technology
The 21st century is called the digital time, the speed time, and the remote access world. Today we run a business, we own a company, we are managers in big or small companies, we have a home business, etc… all these type of businesses need to have a website. Why have a website, or why it is a must to build a website? Well I can list you the basic things which can answer this question, in just 10 points that I came up:
- Have your online presence which will build up your brand name in the e-world.
- Because there’s not enough room on a business card.
- Updates are cheaper than printing new catalogues every season, on every new collection or new products series.
- Someone needs to contact you; he goes to your website and gets the address and all other needed information.
- When you are sleeping, busy with personal things, on holidays, or doing other things not related to work, it is available for your customers, clients and associates if they have any question or they are in need of some urgent information.
- In place of answering the same questions over and over and over. A website will do it once on your behalf.
- Enables you to share your expertise, experience, education, and enthusiasm without lifting a finger.
- Permits you to have simultaneous one-on-one conversations with many different people.
- Presents the opportunity for you to show off your personal side or your professional side or both sides.
- It will be a big support if you have clients from different countries and continents. They will have access to all your product updates. See product pictures and others.
Well there are a lot of more reasons to have a website, but I think those are fair enough for you to start thinking of building your own website and create your online presence which will bring new clients to your business.
In case this post helped you, and you need more information on how to build a website, quotation and others, contact me and I will give you a free consultation and refer you to the right place where you can start from.
February 9th, 2007 — Technology
Text is said to be linear, when written on a paper. When it is written on a machine it is in a digital form. Digital text is more flexible, is moveable. Hypertext is above all, it can link to other pages and websites.
Most early websites were written by html <HTML>, <p> is a structural element referring to a paragraph, <li> is also structural element referring to “list item”. As html expanded, more elements were added, such elements defined how content would be formatted. In other words, form and content became inseparable in html. So at this point or period digital text can do better. Form and content can be separated.
RSS feeds are one of the new technologies that made digital text do more, like if you go to cnn.com and submit to its feeds you can start getting the news without going there or even having them in a small box or section on your website. The source is an XML file that has links to the content with descriptions, so the data inside is brought, and we can have those news separated.
Blogging is a new technology as well, which made digital text richer, there’s a blog born every half second. Blogs are not just a text, it can be videos like you tube.com. XML facilitates automated data exchange.
Now the question is: “who will organize the data?”
dili.cio.us, dig, google, yahoo, live msn…
XML + u & me created a data based backed web, a database-backed web is different, so the web is different. This makes you conclude that we are the web. How?
When we post and then tag pictures, we are teaching the machine, each time we forge a link we teach it a new thing. Think of the 100 billion times per day humans click on a web page. Than you will find the machine is being teached in a very intensive way, final conclusion! The machine is US!!!
Digital text is no longer just linking information, same for hypertext and as well for the web.
The web today is linking people, WEB 2.0 is linking people.
We can define Web 2.0 by people sharing, trading and collaborating.
But! We will need to rethink a few things, such as:
Copyright, authorship, identity, aesthetics, rhetorics, governance, privacy, commerce, love family, Ourselves.
February 8th, 2007 — Technology
One of the latest warnings on the internet, that I would like to share with you, a major attack on the Internet itself! Maybe you didn’t notice it but you might be interested in what happened, that’s why I am posting the Washington Post artilce below for full story details.
Tuesday marked the fourth anniversary of “Safer Internet Day,” a 40-country effort to raise awareness about computer and Internet security. But the day probably didn’t feel too safe for the dozens of unheralded technologists responsible for defending the World Wide Web against one of the most concerted attacks against the Internet’s core since a similar assault in 2002.
Details about the sources, size and methods used in the attack are still trickling in, but like the celebration of Safer Internet Day, it’s not clear that anyone using the Web at the time even took notice. That’s largely a good thing, and I’ll explain why later in this post.
At around 7 p.m. ET on Monday, three of the Internet’s 13 “root servers” — the computers that provide the primary roadmap for nearly all Internet communications — came under heavy and sustained attack from a fairly massive, remote-controlled network of zombie computers. These are machines infected surreptitiously with programs that allow criminals to control them remotely. The zombies were programmed to try to overwhelm several of the root servers with massive amounts of traffic.
Among the apparent targets was a root server controlled by the Department of Defense Network Information Center. There is also evidence to suggest the attackers targeted the servers responsible for managing the stability of the “.uk” and “.org” domains.
A number of technologists I spoke with who helped defend against the attack said it’s too early to say definitively where the attack came from, but this perspective from an operator responsible for maintaining one of the root servers suggests that South Korea, China and the United States were the biggest source of computers used in the attack (the initial analysis suggest that 13 percent of machines involved in the attack were located here in San Francisco, the site of the RSA Security Conference, from which I’m currently blogging.)
In the news coverage so far, theories about the motives behind the attack varied widely, from speculation that it was just hacker mischief to notions that it was cooked up by curious criminals bent on testing their ability to extort the many wealthy and powerful interests that rely on a functioning Internet.
The truth is that no one but the attackers knows the true reason. Paul Levins, vice president of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) — the entity charged with, among other tasks, coordinating responses among root server providers in such attacks — said it would likely be at least a week before the more meaningful facts come out.
“This is a fact based community, and we’re waiting for the facts to come in after the analysis before we can make committed statements about what the origins were, and its intended targets,” Levins said.
This attack highlights a couple of important but often overlooked points, one dark and troubling, and the other somewhat more hopeful. First, the tools and resources used by organized cyber criminals — namely hacked personal computers that can be remotely controlled by attackers — are so abundant that they’ve become virtually disposable. Experts estimate that at any given time there are tens of millions of hacked personal computers that are used in attacks or, more commonly, in sending spam and hosting phishing Web sites.
On the other hand, the fact that there is scant evidence that anyone surfing the Web at the time of the attack even noticed is testament to the resiliency of the global Internet infrastructure, as well as to the swift action on the part of the technologist and experts charged with maintaining the network most of us have come to take for granted.
Not that you can ever have enough security and capacity to handle these types of attacks. The various organizations that operate the 13 root servers are constantly upgrading bits and pieces of their systems to make them more robust and resilient, and one root-server operator — Verisign Inc. — is announcing Thursday that it plans to spend $100 million over the next three years to achieve a tenfold increase in its capacity to handle Internet traffic requests.
January 6th, 2007 — Technology
“Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”
We are in 2007, and we can say congratulation to Google, especially for their CEO Dr. Eric Schmidt (Chairman of the Executive Committee). They accomplished many things in 2006, their services were almost in full shape, and we cannot forget the $1.65 billion USD deal of YouTube.
Like I said in the previous post, Google is not only a normal search engine today, but it got many other services which we will go through in this post.
“Did you ever try www.googlw.com?”
Web Search that’s what most of us know the giant for, it is the best search engine when we want to find something over the internet. It needed two brains like Larry Page & Sergey Bin to create it, and since its birth it is having major upgrades to survive on the top among them all.
Images Search well they wanted us to be their first and second choice, so if we need to search for images related to topics or keywords, here we go, didn’t try it yet? So you should.
Video Search oh common’ what else? Today Google provide us with the video search where we can find video clips, documentaries, commercials… and to support their point they just bought YouTube.Com the biggest movies sharing directory on the net, so the $1.65 billion were paid for each one of you tubers, but what you got?
News ok am some who hate to follow up the radio or tv news, as well I hate to go get the world news from sites, not even cnn.com was a site that I would like to go to every day, but Google just gave it to me, I just keep the news.google.com page opened in my browser, very simple interface, not heavy to load like others, it reloads automatically every 10 minutes, it got all types of news so I am updated for the top stories and if I got more time I will search for some others.
Maps we can never get lost with Google, not only yahoo got their maps section but the giant made his own interface too.
Books oh copyrighting we forgot this? Never, they done it and now they got problems with many publishing houses, but their books search is one of the bests and they are on top as well.
Blogs ok if you are an internet user, you should know about bloging Google just wanted every one of you to have his/her own blog even without having your hosting account, or know how to build it, just register there and they will give it to you with clicks. All you need your writing skills to start filling your blog with posts. Be sure your skills are better than mine 
Froogle maybe you like to shop on the internet than anywhere else to save up time, but your problem you hate to go from site to another, so here is the solution Froogle by Google.
Earth you dream to have your own satellite and start traveling from a place to another over the globe. They knew this and they gave it to you, just with Google Earth software application. Oh a big firm who used to buy 3D visuals to integrate their work for some publications or demos? Well just buy the corporate Google Earth and you have it all.
Gmail oh my account is limited to 2MB sorry I cannot get this e-mail, who said so? Google was the first to provide you with a free web mail with a 1GB of space, your problem was solved even before the Microsoft Live Mail (honestly I don’t know what would had cost those people to be more generous with us like was yahoo). So if you want yourname@gmail.com just contact me and will send you an invitation, just got 40 left.
Docs & Spread Sheets I am not on my computer and I need to write something urgent on word and than save it, ok you don’t need to have Microsoft Word or other applications, nor save it on that computer than e-mail it to your inbox or whatever, just use this service, same goes for the spread sheets.
Picasa I don’t know about how to use design softwares not even I got any, because I hate them know nothing about them, ok picasa is where you can find, edit and share your photos 3 in 1. oh the name turn me on, duuuuuuuuuuuuuh!
Talk ok they got gmail that’s nice, but we are fed with messengers. ICQ, Aol, Yahoo, MSN, Skype, … that’s what I didn’t like, why to have a service that people got used to many others before and wont change, even me who hates Microsoft products I wont stop using msn messenger, sorry Giant you should keep on focusing on your stuff otherwise you will be a little hobbit!
Translate ok thank you for being generous and having it all in one place, now I can see sites with different languages with this service.
Groups, Patent, Alerts, Catalogs, Checkout, Desktop, Directory, Finance, Scholar, Toolbar, Mobile Services and some other services Google offer to their users and will keep on adding more, but the main point is where are they heading?
Hope this post helped you to discover some new services that giant offers us. In the next post in this series will talk about how Google help webmasters to enhance their website and be useful to search engines. So if you are a webmaster, web developer or designer, hope what you will be waiting for help you.
December 4th, 2006 — Technology
This is a series of posts that will write about Google and where they are today!
Google, yes it is a word that everyone today knows: almost 99% of the internet
surfers if not 100%, and today it is a habit for everyone when they sit
behind their computer and logon to the net to type www.google.com in their
browser, because and especially for beginners Google is the only place for
them to find what they want (didn’t get any statistics just describing what
I see). But in fact there are thousand of search engines, other than the 3
major ones Google, Yahoo & MSN, and many are older than those new leaders
the blue, red, yellow, green.
Why Google? Or Google It.
One of the main reasons is the famous simple page with their logo and search
box. Second, because of the results that most of the users believe are
the best, but in fact there are a lot of crappy sites top listed on that
search engine but few know that, so I am telling you. Third, for me
no one can beat Google!!!!
Today, Google is leading the web with its search algorithm. One day after the
other it is hard to have your site listed in that search engine, and being
top listed, but still for many jerks over the net, they have their tricks to
beat up any algorithm made by Google or others.
Back in time, many search engines were created, and most of them were bought
by big names like Yahoo! And those who are still surviving for their names,
waiting for someone to dig up their search boxes. What Google did, was just
give a search page for those who are willing to search, but in their minds
if you read the company overview you will see this “Google’s mission is to
organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and
useful.” They were very professional and gained trust of their targeted
visitors which made them the world search engine leader today.
Google has many services, but if you go to their main page you wont
find more than their logo and the search box. Their services are almost
ruling the world, such as the image search, video search, book search, news,
froogle, maps, Google Earth, Adsense, Adwords, Webmaster tools, etc. I will
have a special post for each of Google services in future posts, of this
serie.
Lets hope that this was a more than overall intro about the Giant who is
trying to organize the world’s information, because as I believe their
mission is more than this only, they were made to break up some other Giant!
more in part 2…
