Interesting to see Verisgn’s Chief Security Officer, Ken Silva, spreading himself over the news warning of a new type of Denial of Service (DoS) attack.
The new twist with the DoS attacks? Requests are initially made to a DNS with a faked return address for the DNS to reply to. This false address is the site being attacked, with the effect that the DNS is sending lots of responses to the target-server, bring it down. hence the Service being Denied.
Why would Verisign be interesting in telling people about this? Well they own Network Solutions, the largest domain register, so clearly they’ve got a vested interest in DNS working well.
More interestingly, their main business is selling security certificates. These certificates are used to ‘prove’ who you are and are, in turn, verified by VeriSign (See how they came up with the name now?).
To date, certificates have generally only really been used by sites to provide potential purchasers with a level of confidence in translating with them.
I think Verisign has a vision far beyond this. I imagine they’re getting very excited about the semantic web, where machines will be forever talking to each other, swapping little nuggets of data. I imagine that when the verisign CxO’s are lying around fantasising about how life could be, a world where everyone of these machine need to have a certificate (one of theirs naturally) would pretty much be the highest state of excitement.
Look at their spate of purchases towards the end of last year; weblogs.com and moreover and see how this strengthens the argument. They want to be in a position to prove that your blog post is created by you, or that the news source that says it the Digital-Lifestyles is Digital-Lifestyles.info and not some wanna-be imitation. Positioning yourself as an owner of frequently used ping server can only help you.
So keep your eye on VeriSign, we think they think they’re going to become a large part of your online life.
Suppose you ran a Web site, and got a little money in advertising. And then suppose someone came along, and said: “I can give you more readers, and extra advertising!” – would you be grateful? Especially if this was genuine, and tested out? Well, 
The Kryptonite comparison, summary: inhabitants of the InterWeb Blogland discovered you could steal a bike locked with Kryptonite even if all you had was a ball point pen, and Kryptonite dismissed those quaint Bloglanders as irrelevant. Well, yes; if you sell a product which is shown to be non-functional, you need to deal with the bad press.
Now, I can see Google’s point. “What is this guy’s problem?” you might say. After all, most adverts on Web pages are there without the explicit consent of the site manager. One-click and other advert providers post adverts “on the fly” and track the individual user. Click on one advert for fast cars, and they’ll probably show you more next time you visit; and they don’t ring up the Web site manager and ask specific permission. They just download the advert. (Eventually. When you’re almost out of patience, and thinking of switching to Firefox and running Adblock. Another story…)
Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is slowly but steadily creeping into American homes, with adoption up 20% since June 2005, and growing user satisfaction.
Only way is up
Early adopters to VoIP may recall the experience being akin to talking to a stuttering Dalek in an echo chamber, but the research revealed that 67 percent of VoIP users believe voice quality is now equal to traditional landline services, with 19 percent reckoning that internet calls sound better than those on wired phones lines.
Making blogging too easy seems to be making it hard. It may be coincidence, but one example of “too easy” blogging is the spam blog, or splog – and suddenly, there’s a rash of upset bloggers who have had their blogs blacked.
And a spam blog is something that doesn’t actually have any real content. It’s just links to trackback pointers for everybody else. The trouble is, all the signs of a spam blog are caused by the ease with which they are built. You just have to create the blog (two clicks) and then set up a robot that scours the web for new posts, and links to the trackbacks.
I’m not saying that Qumana is what caused the blog to be blacked. I am saying that if it produces a series of random, unrelated tags to a single site, it’s going to fulfil one of the prime indicators of a splog. And when random, unrelated blog entries all get tagged “Qumana” whatever their subject, you have something so similar, it’s going to be quite hard to see what a blog provider can do to filter it.
Several forests are having to be torn down to supply Google with enough chequebooks to keep up with their current spending spree.
Bought for an undisclosed sum, a statement on @LastSoftware’s site details how they fluttered eyes at each other a wireframe table: “We got to know a bunch of Googlers while we were building the Google Earth plug-in for SketchUp, and it quickly became apparent that we could really stir things up together.”
“Google’s resources will allow us to serve our current users better, and Google’s reach will allow us to expose more people to SketchUp in one year than we could have touched in 10 years on our own,” he commented in a budsy message to customers.
The combination of SketchUp’s 3-Dimension models overlaid on Google Earth’s maps could serve up a competition busting offering, with the added detail offering real value to GPS users.
Microsoft is to release a suite of free parental controls and other safety measures designed to safeguard children on the Internet.
Kids definitely won’t like this, but the software also lets parents access their activity reports to check what they’ve been up to online.
Family Safety Settings will be available for any PC running Windows XP with Service Pack 2 as well as the upcoming Windows Vista operating system.
The US mobile companies are finally, really getting hold of delivering content of all sorts to mobile phones.
As with all things to mobile phones, we’d love to see the figures as to who actually pays for access to this. A barrier which has yet to be consistently cracked.
Google’s plans for galaxy-spanning domination have continued apace with the launch of Google Mars, giving surfers the opportunity to explore the surface of the Red Planet.
Finally, the Infrared mode offers a mosaic of infrared images taken by the Thermal Emission Imaging System (THEMIS) on NASA’s Mars Odyssey spacecraft.
You can also track the landing sites of failed and successful space missions and find the probable crash landing site of the much loved – but totally unsuccessful – Beagle 2 mission.
In what some are viewing as a challenge to Microsoft’s Office software, Google has dipped into its deep pockets and snapped up Upstartle, a small company best known for their online word-processor, Writely.
Blog announcements
“That could provide enough revenues to pay for the acquisition in months and provide an interesting diversion to keep Microsoft looking over its shoulder,” said Bradshaw and Mitchell, adding that Writely’s integrated collaboration and blogging tools could also prove useful resources for Google’s hugely popular Blogger service.