Chad's News

The BBC recently performed a computer security experiment. They created a virtual Windows XP Home system encased within a highly-protected XP Pro system, thus enabling them to monitor all internet traffic coming in to the XP Home “machine.” Then they connected it to the internet. The first attack occurred within seconds, and there was never a period longer than 15 minutes without an attack of some sort. Note that they didn’t surf or otherwise use the internet; rather, they simply connected the machine to the internet and let it sit idle. This is a good reminder why it’s important to use firewalls and keep Windows updated.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/…
(via slashdot)

In an update to Tuesday’s article on the pending acquisition of YouTube by Google, the web site of Universal Tube & Rollform Equipment Corporation—utube.com—crashed due to excessive traffic. Apparently a large number of people heard about YouTube for the first time and typed in “utube”. Oops. This is also why top-level web pages shouldn’t be bandwidth intensive.

http://money.cnn.com/…
(via slashdot)

UPDATE: Universal Tube & Rollform Equipment Corp. has now sued YouTube.

Let’s discuss sending large attachments via email. It’s very easy, in these days of broadband internet access, to forget that some people still have dial-up—in which case they have to wait and wait for their email to download, all the while hoping the connection stays up and doesn’t time out. It’s just plain annoying. (I once received a spam email with an 11MB attachment. It would’ve taken me over an hour to download, and I finally dealt with it by just deleting the mail spool file on my server.) Alternatively, sometimes an email server is configured to reject attachments above a certain size, in which case it’s not possible to send the attachment. There is a better way…

I resolve this matter by uploading the file to my web site and sending an email with a link. For those who don’t have personal domains, the linked article lists free services that let you upload a large file for others to download.

http://www.komando.com/…

UPDATE: Kim Komando has locked down this particular article, so here is an alternate link that gives the same information. (Thanks to Josh.)

A web application is a program run over the internet via a browser. So, for example, Writely is a full-featured word processor accessible via the web. The advantage of Writely, as with all web applications, is that you can use the program and access your data from anywhere in the world and on any computer.

An early type of web application was web-based email. Yahoo! Mail, MSN Hotmail, and GMail are examples. But recently we’ve seen the advent of full office suites. In addition to Writely there are Thinkfree, Zoho Writer, Google Spreadsheets, Picasa Photo Editor, Google Calendar, and Google Base (among others). Microsoft, obviously a bit worried about this competition, is planning to make their Works office suite available via the web.

Web applications are catching on—even in the Chad’s News household. I’ve switched mail programs from Outlook Express to Gmail. I did it for the spam filtering, but it’s also nice to be able to check email whenever I’m out of town. I also switched RSS readers from Habari Xenu to Bloglines.

One of the big negatives for web applications is that you’re trusting precious data to a third party. Using Gmail, for example, I have no way of backing up my email data and I’m trusting Google to maintain it in perpetuity. I’m also trusting Google to not go out of business. (This can be a real issue. I have a friend who hosted digital photos in an online repository that went out of business with almost no notice. He happened to be offline for a few weeks, and by the time he got back online it was too late to retrieve his data.) There are also privacy concerns when using a web service for confidential data.

Another negative is that web applications rarely have all of the features found in a dedicated program. For most people this will not be a issue, but power users may run into problems.

Web applications are here to stay, and they’re gaining in popularity. Expect to see them used more frequently.

(Thanks to Josh for the idea behind this article.)
Copyright © 2006 by Chad Cloman

Here are some nice tools for the web site developer or networking geek. The first is a comprehensive color chart with the corresponding HTML color codes (beats my method of guessing until I get something close to what I want). Second, are some quick-reference header diagrams for the various internet protocols (IP, TCP, UDP, and ICMP). Both of these links are courtesy of digg.

If you’ve been keeping up with the news lately, you may have heard about net neutrality. As it was first explained to me, telecom companies didn’t think it was fair that bandwidth-hogging, content-providing web sites (think Google) didn’t have to pay for their traffic that travels over the telco infrastructure. So I pay Qwest, for example, to access Google. Google serves up the content through their connection to the internet, whatever that is, and the data travels through the internet, eventually arriving at Qwest’s network and then my PC. This is net neutrality. Some of the more vocal telecom companies, however, want to also charge Google for sending the content over their network. In essence, double-charging and wringing every bit of money possible out of their network infrastructure. It’s no wonder, then, that companies such as Google and Amazon are firmly opposed to this and have been pressuring Congress to pass a net neutrality bill that outlaws it.

Since this original explanation, however, net neutrality has undergone a transformation. Without a net neutrality law in place, the internet would become a two-tier network, where content providers have to pay for preferential treatment. Thus Google, paying for this privilege, would find its content served up in much the same way it is today. While Chad’s News, which cannot afford such extravagant services, would be relegated to a “slower” internet. The best explanation of this is in the linked video of Comedy Central’s The Daily Show. From the video, “The point is that with net neutrality all internet packets – whether they come from a big company or a single citizen – are treated in the exact same way.” (Note that there is some off-color humor in the clip, and the real meat of the issue starts about halfway through.)

So the push is on in Congress. The current efforts to get net neutrality passed as law have failed, but we can expect to see it come up again later this year.

http://www.youtube.com/…
(via The Consumerist)

Here’s another one of those crazy web ideas similar to The Million Dollar Homepage. This guy started with a single red paperclip, hoping to trade it up until he got a house. Which he has indeed managed to do.

http://www.oneredpaperclip.blogspot.com/

This is a great resource for web developers: a comprehensive internet browser archive. Need to test that web site on IE 4.0 but don’t have a copy available? Just go download it.

http://browsers.evolt.org/
(via digg)

This number is pretty impressive, considering the web is less than 15 years old.

http://news.yahoo.com/…

(Those not familiar with Skype and VOIP may want to review my previous post on the subject.)

For the rest of the year, SkypeOut (computer-to-phone) calls are free as long as both the computer and the phone are in the US or Canada. I’m not sure how useful this will be, as most cell phones have free long-distance—Skype’s primary selling point is cheap international calls.

http://www.consumerist.com/…

Official Skype announcement: http://share.skype.com/…

According to this article, 60 billion emails are sent each day. The really amazing statistic, however, is that AOL alone blocks 1.5 billion spam messages per day—which is 2.5% of all emails sent.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/…

When web server software is first installed, it creates a default page similar to this one. You then have to replace it with the actual source code for your web site. One day the official city web site of Tuttle, Oklahoma was replaced by the default page, but the city manager went absolutely ballistic because he thought it was caused by a hacker. He blamed the maker of the operating system used by the hosting company, and he just would not listen to reason—even threatening to call the FBI. The article in The Register gives a summary, but I found that reading the actual email exchange was much more amusing.

As of this writing the site in question, www.cityoftuttle.org is still showing the default page.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/…

UPDATE: Mr. Taylor complains to The Register, then gets a sympathetic writeup by the local newspaper. In addition, someone has finally fixed the web site, www.cityoftuttle.org.