If you have a server on premises, as many businesses do, you probably have a service contract with an IT company or you have an entire IT department to do the work for you. The company that keeps their servers in house faces down time issues that affect their ability to provide customers with access to their website. Things like off premises power interruption or failure to back-up data in a timely manner can have a serious effect on your website. If the server was off premises and had a…

A story by Cameron Scott at PC World quoted Constellation Research CEO Ray Wang as saying the Twitter outage on June 21 was caused by company efforts to increase infrastructure. Twitter is no stranger to outages and has made many strides to improve service for the ever growing number of users of the popular social media network. A group of hackers, UGNazi, is claiming that they were behind the temporary outage but regardless the source of the outage Twitter was back online serving the public at right around 3 PM…

Earlier this month Microsoft sent out an email to the media promising a major announcement. They didn’t disappoint when, on June 18, they announced their new foray into the computer hardware business. The Surface will be the company’s new tablet that will use Windows 8 – the new operating system that has been promised to be released by this coming fall. The software giant has not been very successful in the past with hardware products. The X-box is more an exception to the rule as they have taken both their…

The World Wide Web Consortium that oversees standards for all web activity has released a sixth version of the “Standards for Web Applications for Mobile”. The fact that it is the sixth version shows just how much has happened in the mobile community in the two years since the first standards were released. A brand new version is also scheduled to be released in August of this year so web developers probably shouldn’t work too hard memorizing this one. The organization recognizes the role of the web in this new…

The Invulnerability of the Mac operating system has been challenged before but the latest attempt by hackers to prove Macs can be infested has hit approximately 600,000 computers. Half of the users infected are believed to be in the United States. There is an estimate that about 12% are in the UK and maybe 19% in Canada. The virus named Backdoor.Flashback.39 and it is put on the computers when users go to a bogus site that uses Java script to upload a Java applet which then infects the computer. Since…

The most anticipated IPO in recent memory has come and gone and so far the results are mixed at best. The IPO had some high expectations to meet and the fact that there are over 900 million users may have been some of the reason that these higher price expectations were not met. On the first day the stock began trading a half hour later than expected due to what NASDAQ explained as a “technical error”. This error caused quite a bit of confusion among traders and has even led…

There have been many complaints about losing their ranking unfairly due to Google’s new search algorithms. In an article in PC World following the announcement of the changes the company was quoted as wanting to punish sites that violate their “quality guidelines” and reward great sites, not algorithms. One of the more revealing items in the PC World article was Google’s estimate that the change will only affect about 3% of search queries. That is a small percentage but not one you’ll want to be on the wrong side of….

The web design community has been hearing about the need to develop new technologies that could function with older web browsers since 2004. The World Wide Web consortium has targeted 2014 as the date for full recommendation of HTML 5 and they are developing a test suite to evaluate its operability. Back in 2006 noted software engineer and HTML 5 editor Tim Hickson targeted 2022 as a possible full recommendation date. It seems that 2014, by that standard, is highly optimistic. This may be confusing to those less involved in…

Dear Blog readers and cPanel users, A security alert has been risen for cPanel version 11.25.  cPanel versions below and excluding 11.25, are vulnerable to CSRF which leads to uploading a PHP script of the attackers liking.

What’s the best way to land a programmer’s job at Microsoft? Well, there’s the standard method of going to school for computer science, succeeding admirably, creating programs of your own and then applying and hoping you get the nod. Then there’s the slightly less orthodox method employed occasionally by young and ambitious hackers. In this case, a 14-year-old Irish hacker managed to break into the online servers for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 last month and start a phishing scam that tried to get other players to divulge personal…