Hosting Company Shuts Down Blogging Service

The incident apparently began with the FBI monitoring certain web blogs for terrorist activity. Al-Qaeda is known to operate and spread their communication through the Internet, but the odd part about this shut down is that it was a community web service with many users.

The blogging service, Blogetery, reportedly hosted over 70,000 blogs, and most of those users had nothing to do with terrorism. Furthermore, the owner of the service is not being accused of terrorist activity either. The hosting company, Burst.net sent a warning to Alexander Yusupov to take down the sites but did not supply any official evidence of the FBI investigation. The FBI says that it did not order the service to be shut down and that Burst.net took that action on its own.

The sad part of all of this is that possibly thousands of blogs have just been erased from the Web with little regard for the innocent people who used them. The lesson to be learned, however, is that any website or service should have backups, even if the content is created by other users. Furthermore, with as many as 70,000 blogs, they also should have had some type of redundancy in place to prevent total data loss, even if it were accidental.

Source: Times Newsline

Is North Korea taking steps to connect to the Internet?

For decades, North Korea’s IANA-assigned block of IP addresses has sat untouched. But according to CIO.com, a company with connections to the Pyongyang regime has registered 1,024 of the IP addresses. Experts are unsure of what exactly North Korea intends to do with the addresses, but they could very well be used for government or military use.

However, it is unlikely that North Korea will make the Internet available to the general public anytime soon.

Leonid A. Petrov, a lecturer in Korean studies at The University of Sydney, stated:

There is no place for the Internet in contemporary DPRK. If the people of North Korea were to have open access to the World Wide Web, they would start learning the truth that has been concealed from them for the last six decades.

Still, it’s a sign of hope for the information-starved North Koreans. Citizens have had access to an intranet called Kwangmyong since 2000, but it only provides access to content uploaded by the government. Only a few thousand North Korean elites have full-fledged web access.

Photo | Flickr

Hungarian police seize 50 servers in piracy raid

Budapest police conducted a raid late last week targeting torrent sites. Visiting several hotels and a technical college, it seized 50 servers containing 500 TB of data. According to police, some of the data was used to aid in the illegal distribution of copyrighted material.

Many of Hungary’s BitTorrent sites are now down. The largest, Ncore, has nearly 900,000 peers. The Pirate Bay, which has servers in Hungary, shut down its Hungarian operations after receiving a warning. One of the main targets of the raid, Bithumen, is still operating from Germany.

The video above shows some of the servers police seized. Hungary undertook two similar raids in 2007 and 2009

What to do when your server goes down

First of all: do not panic. What may appear to be an outage, may actually be an issue with your network connection or Internet congestion. Once you have eliminated the usual suspects, there are a few steps you can take to resolve the issue quickly and get your dedicated server back up and running.

1. Test an SSH connection. If you can still SSH into your server, you most likely just have a software issue. If your web server application (such as Apache) has crashed, a simple restart may fix the problem. If you notice it starting to crash routinely every day or every week, you may have a security exploit.

2. If you cannot SSH into your server, try to ping and traceroute the server. If you get network connections all the way up the traceroute but cannot connect to your server, that means the network is fine, but the physical server may have crashed or been shutdown. Follow the normal procedure for rebooting. If your server is remote, you can ask your web host to reboot it. Some hosts also have automatic reboot switches that you can activate remotely. If something is wrong with the network, check with your host. They may already be diligently trying to fix the problem.

3. If rebooting does not fix the problem, and you cannot access your server, your host may offer you a KVM connection so that you can troubleshoot your server’s network settings.

4. If your host cannot even get the server to start in order to use KVM, they will probably have to re-image your box. This will erase everything, and you will be thankful at this point that you have kept backups of all websites on your server.

Photo Source: stock.xchng

Protecting Your Whois Information

If you run a company and have your domain registered under the name of that company, having your Whois information public might actually do your business some good. If something ever goes wrong with your website, Internet-savvy customers will still know how to contact you.

But if you are an individual or someone running a controversial website, having your name out there for everyone to see, might make you uncomfortable. Unfortunately, Internet rules govern that the contact information on your domain be current (i.e. your present address, reachable phone number, etc.).

There are some companies, including many registrars that offer domain privacy for an additional fee. It is, however, unclear how much privacy they actually provide. Some of these companies have been known to hand over contact information of registrants with little persuasion from law enforcement or other government entities in various countries. If you absolutely need privacy and have no other options, the best thing you can do is not use your home address, phone number, or your primary email address.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Setting Time to Live for your DNS records

Time to Live or TTL refers to when the nameserver checks with the authoritative nameserver to get the latest record. I caches that record for however long the TTL specifies before checking again. The lower the number, the sooner records will be updated.

Many nameservers are set to a default time of 86400 seconds (24 hours). With that setting, it takes 24 hours before all of the DNS servers globally are updated, although some Internet servers will update before others. The lower the number of seconds to live updates, the more often the nameserver will access the authoritative records.

While one’s first inclination might be to lower the TTL number so that nameservers are updated almost immediately, having a setting that is too low can cause too great of a strain on the server. If you change your DNS often, you might want to make the setting lower than one day, but if you only change it once in a while, that default setting might be fine. Some system administrators will lower the setting temporarily if they know they are about to make a big change to critical network services.

Image Source: Wikimedia Commons

First dotcom domain celebrates 25th anniversary

Although it was 1985 with Symbolics computers in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA registered the very first .com domain name, it would take nearly 12 years for Web as we know it to really explode with doctoms.

“This birthday is really significant because what we are celebrating here is the internet and dotcom is a good, well known placeholder for the rest of the internet,” said Mark Mclaughlin, chief executive officer of Verisign the company that is responsible for looking after the dotcom domain.

There are now 668,000 .com websites registered every month and over 80 million total. It has become the default choice for most web users. Even new users who do not even know how to perform basic searches often type whatever they want followed by “.com” hoping to score a hit. It is a huge information space and also a huge market for domain registrars and web hosting providers. Even with numerous other top-level domain options (such as .net and .org), it is .com that still reigns supreme and may continue to do so for years to come.

Source: BBC News
Photo: Flickr

Verisign to spend $300 million on tech upgrades

One of the most well-known Internet companies, Verisign is planning a major upgrade. After the upgrades, Verisign’s hardware will be capable of handling 4 quadrillion requests per day from computers trying to access .com and .net top-level domains (TLD) for which Verisign is responsible.

According to ken Silva, the Internet giant’s CTO, these upgrades are crucial to ensuring they can keep up with the rapidly increasing Internet traffic and the occasional spikes caused by malware, attacks, and malicious bots. In 2007, Verisign spent $100 million to increase their capacity until 2010. This next round of upgrades reflects the fast-growing nature of the Internet.

In addition to providing access to .com and .net domains, Verisign is also renown for selling SSL certificates. What is not clear from their announcement is what the upgrades will entail exactly and how long these latest upgrades will sustain the rapidly expanding cyber-universe.

Source: Associated Press

Yahoo to Buy Arab Portal, Maktoob.com

In an effort to reach a wider audience in Arabic-speaking countries, Yahoo announced that they intend to acquire Maktoob.com (the domain and the website), which is one of the largest Arabic online portals. Interestingly enough, it also has English support, which it automatically detected when I visited the site. Undoubtedly this reflects that the opposite is true. Arab countries want to reach a wider English-speaking audience.

Yahoo already has 44 million Middle Eastern and North African users, so this move will seek to customize their Yahoo experience rather than draw them in for the first time. Maktoob’s offerings includ Souq.com, an Arabic auction and online ecommerce service, cashU.com, an Internet payment solution, and Maktoob-Research, which does just what the name says.

Another indication of its obvious attempts at western mainstreaming is the fact that it uses .com top-level domains rather than those of a particular Arab country. What is not clear is how much of Maktoob will remain after it has been “Yahooed”. In the past, services like Flickr have remained relatively the same after Yahoo purchases. Will an Arab site receive the same respect? Yahoo answered questions about censorship rather easily. They will respect the “law of the land”.

Source: NY Times

The Internet is big, really big

According to new Internet data, there are now more websites than people in the world — over 1 trillion. With such large numbers, there are 150 domains per person, and it would take 31,000 to read all of them, even if you spent only one minute on each and never slept. Still, just 1.46 billion out of 6 billion people in the world use the Internet, meaning it would take a long time even for all of them combined to see all websites.

China leads the list with 338 million users, with the US trailing at 227 million. Japan, India, and Brazil round out the top five. The UK is a bit lower with 48 million users, reflective of its smaller population. The interestingly neglected part of this data and most raw data like it, is that there is no analysis of the website content.

Of the 1 trillion websites out there, how many are made up of malware, spam harvestors, phishing, fraud, schemes, ad portals, parked domains, and cybersquatting? Furthermore, of the sites that are none of the above mentioned, how many are actually useful and worth visiting? While it may be the job of Google and Bing to index legitimate sites, it will be up to someone else to catalog and evaluate them. As the Internet continues to grow, so does the need for some time of organization.

Source: News.com.au
Photo: Flickr