Archive for March, 2009
March 30th, 2009
Two eye opening reports have been published recently. Both deal with what has been termed Ghostnet which has been discovered in tracking the infiltration of Tibetan computer networks. The two reports are: ‘Tracking GhostNet’ (University of Toronto’s Munk Centre for International Studies and The SecDev Group) and ‘The Snooping Dragon: social-malware surveillance of the Tibetan movement’ (University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory) – see the end of this post for a copy of this report.
The reports bring to light just how simply computer networks may be compromised and just how much damage may be done by such attacks. Neither reports are able to identify the originators of GhostNet but both name the Chinese Government as the potential aggressors. Potentially even more worrying Read the rest of this entry »
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March 29th, 2009
Due to it’s open source and collaborative origins as well as its standards compliance, the Firefox Internet browser is very easily extensible. This is hugely beneficial for users of Firefox as the already powerful core Firefox application can be extended to perform all sorts of additional functions. As the creators of Firefox extensions have substantial benefits to gain through making available good quality applications and functionality (such as showcasing their skills and gaining links to their websites), most of the extensions are available at no cost (i.e. free) at addons.mozilla.org
My Top 3
Listed below are three free extensions which I use Read the rest of this entry »
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March 25th, 2009
Google is an awesome search engine and leaves Yahoo and Live far behind. Today Google is even better with the introduction of even better search. Google has, in the past few hours, introduced new search capability in that the search term, or terms, is searched within the entire content of a web page and related terms are also returned. For example, if I were to search on “theory of constraints“, relevant results with “quality management’ may also be returned (The Theory of Constraints is a Quality Management process/framework). Another example is if I searched for ‘IT Infrastructure Library’, results for ITIL will also be returned (ITIL is the acronym for IT Infrastructure Library).
Another improvement is that snippets (the bit in blue under the header of the returned search result) may now be longer and the search words are highlighted in bold in the snippet itself making it easier for the searcher to make a decision as to the relevancy of the returned search results.
This new capability is as a result of the efforts by the Israeli/Australian (now living in the U.S.A.) search guru who pioneered the Orion Search Engine, Ori Allon.
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March 25th, 2009
YouTube is extremely popular. YouTube (and other streaming video sites such as Flickr, Dailymotion etc.) provides a sharing platform for all sorts of video whether that be video blogging, TV clips, movie previews or any other video. A common criticism of YouTube and other video sharing sites is that the videos can be longer in length than viewers would like. Along comes a site currently in beta called 12seconds.
12seconds is basically video microblogging (vicroBlogging). Just as Twitter provides the outlet for quick and short blogging (microblogging), so 12seconds allows users to submit, share and view video clips up to 12 seconds in length. Video may be submitted via email, MMS or via the website making submission from mobile devices quick and painless.
12seconds is still in its early days but is going to be very popular!
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March 24th, 2009
A blog, fushnchups.co.nz, has received the equivalent of the digg Effect. Various newspaper and online articles have named the controversial content of the blog in the past few days. This has led to fushnchups.co.nz being unavailable (at the time of this articles writing). The ‘digg Effect’ is a reference to articles in digg becoming so popular that the originating website cannot handle the traffic sent from digg.
Certainly one of the criticisms of the rise of sharing sites such as digg has been that posts (articles) from blogs which are controversial or sensationalist tend to gain more votes (and visits) than sites which are objective. Some sharing sites such as Mixx have managed to avoid encouraging sensationalism to some degree by making posting more demanding by encouraging tagging and multiple category selection (it is very quick, for example, to submit a link to digg as opposed to Mixx).
Blogs rely on visits. fushnchups.co.nz seem to have received their fair share!