MySpace, the social networking site, has been lying low for a while. Once the top social networking site in the world, MySpace has seen Facebook and later Twitter overtake them in terms of popularity and number of users. While there may be many reasons for the downfall of Myspace, they are certainly trying to be back in the reckoning now. This can be evidenced from MySpace's co-president Mike Jones's recent blog post that Myspace results will appear as part of Google search results.
Here are a few excerpts from the blog :
In December, Google announced plans to implement the MySpace Real-Time Search API, which would push publicly available updates from our users to Google in real-time. The implementation is now LIVE on Google and we couldn't be more excited to be the first social networking platform to light up real-time integration with Google.
Beginning today, when you search for anything on Google, as part of your search results you will see live updates from MySpace users, including news, photos, and blog posts that they have chosen to publically publish. Further, all of these updates will be ranked to reflect the freshest, most relevant results, making it easier to find the latest information on anything you're searching for on Google, including the music and artists you enjoy most.
This could well be the stimulus that MySpace so desperately needed to fight against the Facebooks and the Twitters of the world. Will they regain their lost glory? It should be an interesting few months ahead of us.
It has been an exciting and eventful year for us here at Site24x7. We grew a lot this year, both in terms of features added to our monitoring service as well as expanding our user base. Here is a quick recap of what went into Site24x7 in 2009.
- Five new locations were added to our global monitoring network. Servers were added in China, Japan, India, Brazil and Sweden.
- Support for 10 new languages including French, German, Spanish, Chinese Simplified, Japanese, etc.
- New monitor types such as POP, Port, SMTP.
- REST APIs for developers.
- Enhanced SLA monitoring capabilities
- Major enhancements to website monitor including 3-minute monitoring intervals, option to mark trouble as downtime and downtime as maintenance, etc.
- Reseller programs for businesses.
- iPhone client
- Uptime buttons to help webmasters showcase the uptime of their websites, and more.
We want to thank you for your fantastic support throughout 2009. We promise to keep improving and to keep introducing new features/enhancements in the coming year as well.
Happy holidays and a prosperous new year!
As you must have known by now, Twitter was recently hacked and defaced by a group claiming to be the Iranian Cyber Army. The hackers managed to compromise Twitter's DNS records and left a defacement message on the website. Both twitter.com and status.twitter.com were down and some users faced a temporary problem with sending tweets. There has been extensive coverage of this downtime in various tech blogs such as Techcrunch.
The Twitter status page provides the latest updates on this incident: We are working to recovery from an unplanned downtime and will update more as we learn the cause of this outage.
Update (11:28p): Twitter’s DNS records were temporarily compromised but have now been fixed. We are looking into the underlying cause and will update with more information soon
This hacking, although lasting only for a short duration of time, did manage to garner attention.
Now if this can happen to the best of services, it can happen to your site as well. In most cases, hackers have political intentions and they leave politically motivated messages on the site as in the recent Twitter example, or alter the content of the site. If your website encounters such a problem, you can set up website content monitoring to be aware of the problem before it affects your website visitors/customers.
On some occasions, hackers manage to gain access to your DNS records and make them point to alternate sites. If you are monitoring DNS records, you can instantly become aware of this problem and rectify it quickly.
For webmasters and website owners, it does make sense to follow the relevant security guidelines and best practices to keep the hackers at bay. Even then, hackers do manage to break through even the toughest security controls and gain access. The least a webmaster can do is to use a good website monitoring service such as Site24x7 (shameless plug
) to continuously monitor websites for any defacement!
Our Chinese monitoring location has been temporarily rendered out of service. This is due to an unprecedented disruption of network activity at the datacenter level, and this reportedly affects tens of thousands of websites. You can read more info on this downtime from our web host's blog:
http://blog.sinohosting.net/china-servers-downtime-notice/
In order to ensure our China location users are not affected, we have routed the monitoring to our Japan server. All users who have configured China as their primary monitoring location will now have their monitoring checks coming from Japan.
We thank you for your understanding and regret the inconvenience caused. We will be shifting the monitoring to China as soon as the connection is restored.
What do you think is the fastest growing domain name on the internet? It is the Chinese (.cn) domain. As the Chinese economy is growing, so is the number of internet users in China. In fact, the number of Internet users in China surpassed the US in 2008.
According to CNNIC, there were 298 million Chinese Internet users by end of 2008 and growing at 800,000 new users per day. It is currently 22% of Internet users worldwide, and could surpass Internet users in Europe very soon. This is to say the least an impressive growth rate.
Also, there is a new top level domain that will be offered to users. (.China) will solely consist of Chinese characters. Until now China has had to settle for .cn, which is incomprehensible to the typical Chinese Internet user.
.cn is today the largest ccTLD and the 2nd most registered top level domain after .com with almost 17 million registrations. Since CNNIC has made it very easy to register .cn domain names, .china is expected to have similar regulations. So it can be expected that the new top level domain will surpass .cn inside 2-5 years after launch, and .cn will only serve for users using Latin characters.
Zdnetasia recently reported that Indian government has announced plans to introduce digital passports to its citizens from 2010 onwards. We decided to take a closer look at what digital passports are and how they are implemented around the world.
What is a digital passport?
A digital passport, also called biometric passport or e-passport is the same as the traditional passport with the addition of a small integrated circuit or chip embedded in the back cover. The passport contains a microchip which contains the same information as on the picture page and a biometric photograph in addition to a machine readable zone. The chip is based on the "WORM" technology which stands for "Write Once, Read Many". These passports are designed to be harder to forge and to identify the bearer more securely.
The e-passport has been implemented in around 70 countries in the world. Most European union countries had introduced e-passports around the 2004-05 time frame. In the UK, the digital passport has been issued since February 2006.
Controversies
It has not been smooth sailing for digital passports from their inception. They've had their share of controversies too. There have been some protests in the past about the privacy of the bearer. Activists in many countries have questioned the lack of information about what exactly the passport's chips will contain. When the e-passport was introduced in the United States, there was criticism against the usage of RFID in the chips. Privacy activists were claiming that the signals from the chip were not encrypted and can be easily intercepted, thus jeopardizing the privacy of the bearer. Just a few days ago, human rights campaigners in Netherlands were up in arms against the government policy of storing fingerprints taken from passports on to national database.
In spite of all the opposition, more and more governments are keen on issuing digital passports to their citizens. This is because it has the potential to bring down passport forgery thereby improving the security aspect as well as it is easier to maintain than traditional passports. So the coming years should see most European Union and Asian countries actively embracing this RFID-based technology.
Service Disruption Time: 1/6/09 12:40 pm PST Detail: Service Disruption All Instances Root cause: Starting at 01/06/2009 20:39 UTC, a core network device failed due to memory allocation errors. The failure caused it to stop passing data but did not properly trigger a graceful fail over to the redundant system as the memory allocation errors where present on the failover system as well. This resulted in a full service failure for all instances. Salesforce.com had to initiate manual recovery steps to bring the service back up. The manual recovery steps was completed at 01/06/2009 21:17 UTC restoring most services except for AP0 and NA31:17 UTC restoring most services except for AP0 and NA3 search indexing. Search of existing data would work but new data would not be indexed for searching. Emergency maintenance was performed at 01/06/2009 23:24 UTC to restore search indexing for AP0 and NA3 and the implementation of a work-around for the memory allocation error. While we are confident the root cause has been addressed by the work-around the Salesforce.com technology team will continue to work with hardware vendors to fully detail the root cause and identify if further patching or fixes will be needed. Further updates will be available as the work progresses.The event has attracted lots of coverage on the net and also triggered discussions on the downside of using remote services. Just goes to re-inforce the fact that 100% uptime is practically impossible, even for the top-level SaaS players!
