ITNews

eWeek is reporting ISPs Assailed at FCC Hearing.

Unfortunately none of the ISPs accused of wrongdoing showed up to hear the harangues by the Cristian Coalition, Raging Grannies, and other irate citizens complaining about IPSs mucking with packets.

You’ve got to hand it to ISPs like Comcast for doing about everything wrong to contain a public relations blowout.

…John

Did you know some ISPs (Internet Service Provider) inject advertisements into your Web queries? This and other stupid things some ISPs do are discussed in the Electronic Frontier Foundation posting Software for Keeping ISPs Honest.

The March 27th, 2008 announcement of a détente between Comcast and BitTorrent was great news. The two parties announced they will undertake a collaborative effort with one another and with the broader Internet and ISP community to more effectively address issues associated with rich media content and network capacity management. Read the details in the BitTorrent posting Comcast and BitTorrent Form Collaboration to Address Network Management, Network Architecture and Content Distribution

Unfortunately, the general problem of ISPs doing strange things to Internet traffic without telling their customers is likely to continue in the future. EFF and many other organizations are working on software to test ISPs for unusual (mis)behavior. In this detailed post, we have a round-up of the tools that are out there right now, and others that are in development…

Yep, it is likely to continue. The mighty power of greed knows no boundary. As though defending against Internet hackers, crackers, and crooks, isn’t enough, we will soon need to defend ourselves from unscrupulous ISPs.

…John

Last fall I placed an online order with Batteries.com. An email notified me of the order and shipping, and my credit card was charged. A few days later the order arrived. Another success in my years of flawless e-commerce transactions.

A few months later I received an email from batteries.com notifying me that an order identical to the first one was about to ship. What order? I hadn’t placed another order. Customer service cancelled the order and assured me it would not happen again.

To make sure, I requested all my account information be purged, and to notify me when it was done. “No Problem,” customer service assured me. I did not receive a notification, so I faxed the owner making the same request. No response.

I was not pleased Batteries.com went silent, but I decided not to fret about it. Silly me. A couple of days ago, I noticed Batteries.com had charged my credit card again for the identical amount of the original order. This time without even sending an email notification.

Fraud Alert sounds went off in my head, so I quickly notified my bank. I learned the only way to block this sort of thing was to replace my old card with a new one.

Would you believe, while I was replacing my old card, Batteries.com made yet another charge to my old card for the original amount?

So, my experience has been, Batteries.com Keeps on Charging.

…John

According to The Register posting Apache rules web server landscape.

Apache is still top of the web server charts with just under half of the top 100 US websites running on the open source software.

Here are the results from Netcraft.

(Credit: Netcraft)

Growth is up again this month, with the February 2008 survey receiving responses from 158,209,426 sites. This is an increase of 2.6 million sites, compared with last month’s unusually low growth of only 354 thousand.

Apache continues to climb back, now reaching nearly 51% of the market share, while both Microsoft and Google fall slightly in share.

Some strong growth is seen amongst the smaller web servers. LiteSpeed grows by a further 10% this month, now approaching half a million sites with a total of 476 thousand hostnames. The LiteSpeed web server is interchangeable with Apache and is used by the Wordpress blogging system. LiteSpeed was the fastest and most robust server that Wordpress had tested, according to its founding developer, Matthew Mullenweg.

Unusually, America Online’s open source AOLserver sees tremendous growth, jumping from 35 thousand to 105 thousand sites in just one month. AOLserver is a multithreaded, Tcl-enabled web server which can be used for large scale, dynamic web sites, but has not seen the release of a new version since 2006. The majority of the new sites served by AOLserver are hosted in Poland.

I’m surprised AOLserver is hanging in there, especially since AOL has been in deep yogurt for sometime.

…John

The iTnews posting Cyber-attack launched from 10,000 web pages says

A security firm has identified over 10,000 web pages rigged by cyber-criminals to hijack the PCs of unsuspecting surfers.

The web pages have been modified to silently redirect visitors to sites laden with malware that attempt to break into the user’s PC.

McAfee Avert Labs described the assault as “one of the largest attacks to date of this kind”.

There is some good news in the posting.

McAfee Avert Labs first spotted the attack on 12 March. “Of the 10,000 pages that were compromised a number have already been cleaned up,” the firm stated.

To quote the catch phrase from Hill Street Blues

“let’s be careful out there”

…John