Month of April, 2008
A large number of IIS-hosted websites are potentially vulnerable to a newly discovered SQL injection attack, report Hackademix and the Internet Storm Center. Thousands of sites have been compromised since January, mostly where web developers have failed to sanitize their user inputs properly.
Microsoft is testing its suite of office tools for delivery as a hosted application, reports ComputerWorld. The yearlong testing period will help the company to determine when and whether the new Office 2007 will be released to the hosting market. Web hosting companies will then be able to offer the service to their clients, using a technology called "application streaming."
Today is Earth Day, and the occasion is perfect to remind everyone that you can do your part to keep the planet nice and clean by choosing the right "green" hosting provider.
A web server, like any electrical appliance, is an indirect source of pollution. Rising eco-awareness is making many web hosting companies to go green and offer environment-friendly services to their customers. Some providers are completely powered by renewable energy sources that they own and operate, like solar and wind. Others buy electricity that is generated by utilities that offer a “green” option of electricity, generated through solar, wind, bio mass, or hydroelectric. Still others do not use electricity from alternative sources directly, but instead purchase credits that offset their carbon footprint through things like investment in renewable resource research or the planting of acres of trees.
Netcraft's monthly report shows INetU has had the most reliable hosting company site for March 2008. INetU is closely followed by Express Technologies, with Pair Networks ranking third.
Earlier this week Sun, the new owner of the MySQL brand, announced that upcoming "high-end add-ons" will be included only in the paid MySQL Enterprise. So far, the open source database has established itself as the best option for small and medium-sized web hosting companies, and by extension -- for millions of clients. Will they need to reconsider their choice of database server?
According to a post in Google's Webmaster Central Blog, the company is experimenting with ways to start crawling content that is accessible via HTML forms. This will add to Google's index some of the content that was previously located in the "Deep Web," beyond the crawling capabilities of current spiders. According to estimates, tens of thousands terabytes of data are located in the Deep Web.
In yet another successful publicity stunt, domain registrar and web hosting company GoDaddy proclaimed April 29th to be the official Webmasters Day. The day will be an occasion to celebrate the skills and efforts of people who make the WWW tick. GoDaddy's announcement is getting a fair share of coverage already, and it is likely that the new "holiday" will take off.
IT security company Sophos published the results of a new study, detailing the volume of spam and the distribution of its sources. Their research team monitored spam email and related websites for the first three months of 2008, using the company's global network of spam traps. The main findings: 92.3% of all email was spam and, in addition, they identified 3,300 new spam-related web pages every day, or one every three seconds.
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