ITNews

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

Google AdWords will soon be penalizing slow landing page load time, in its continuing efforts to improve user experiences.

Read all about it in the Google blog posting Landing page load time will soon be incorporated into Quality Score.

I think the traditional wisdom that Web surfers abandon a site if the first page doesn’t load within 8 seconds is no longer true. High speed Internet connections have most likely increased impatience to 4 seconds or less.

…John

The PCWorld posting Get Ready for a Crackdown on Broadband Use
subtitle says

As traffic increases, experts say ISPs may start charging by the gigabyte, limiting use of some services and snooping at the data passing through their networks.

Major broadband ISPs shrug off criticism that their networks can’t handle the increased demand for bandwidth. “We’ve been successfully delivering broadband services to our customers for 10 years, and that’s not going to change anytime soon,” says Mitch Bowling, senior vice president and general manager for Comcast’s high-speed Internet group.

I usually don’t comment on “maybe” postings. This one is a sort of “maybe” since some ISPs are in the planning stages for charging by bandwidth usage.

Time Warner Cable is experimenting with managing bandwidth by billing its customers, not at a flat monthly rate, but on the basis of how much bandwidth each customer uses. The cable company is rolling out a trial version of a consumption-based billing system in Texas later this year. “We have more than enough bandwidth, but we are looking to the future,” says Alex Dudley, spokesperson for Time Warner Cable.

Under the new billing scheme, customers who exceed their monthly bandwidth allotment risk incurring an overage charge. A spokesperson says that the billing scheme isn’t in place yet, so the company doesn’t yet have any hard numbers available regarding these charges.

Also, some ISPs are already throttling bandwidth.

Comcast spokesperson Charlie Douglas explains that a single customer who uses disproportionately more bandwidth than his or her neighbors can slow down the Internet for everyone on the block. Comcast has faced a user uproar for manipulating the way file-sharing programs work and for introducing bandwidth caps on individual accounts without identifying what those caps are.

I smell greed in the air here. The cable ISPs are claiming they are loaded with bandwidth, and

According to network monitoring firm Keynote Systems, broadband users rarely feel the impact of bandwidth bottlenecks today unless a big media event causes a brief spike in Web use or unless a major component of the Internet infrastructure suffers unexpected damage. Keynote describes these types of Internet slowdowns as virtually imperceptible brown-outs.

So why throttle and charge extra for bandwidth? I speculate it is all about movie downloads. The greed mongers smell money and are preparing to stifle any competition, such as iTunes download movie rentals.

We’ll see.

…John