Large swathes of Asia, the Middle East and north Africa had their high-technology services crippled Thursday following a widespread Internet failure which brought many businesses to a standstill and left others struggling to cope.
One major telecommunications provider blamed the outage, which started Wednesday, on a major undersea cable failure in the Mediterranean.
India’s Internet bandwidth has been sliced in half, leaving its lucrative outsourcing industry trying to reroute traffic to satellites and other cables through Asia.
Reports say that Egypt, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Bahrain are also experiencing severe problems.
Nations that have been spared the chaos include Israel — whose traffic uses a different route — and Lebanon and Iraq. Many Middle East governments have backup satellite systems in case of cable failure.
We’ve read the articles, we’ve watched the news stories about the RIAA going after people left and right for illegally downloading music from the internet. Well, it seems that the RIAA also believes that you shouldn’t be able to go to the store and purchase a CD (or buy a CD online) and copy it according to this article.
“Not content with the current (and already massive) statutory damages allowed under copyright law, the RIAA is pushing to expand the provision. The issue is compilations, which now are treated as a single work. In the RIAA’s perfect world, each copied track would count as a separate act of infringement, meaning that a copying a ten-song CD even one time could end up costing a defendant $1.5 million if done willfully. Sound fair? Proportional? Necessary? Not really, but that doesn’t mean it won’t become law.”
The change to statutory damages is contained in the PRO-IP Act that is currently up for consideration in Congress. We’ve reported on the bill before, noting that Google’s top copyright lawyer (and the man who wrote a seven-volume treatise on the subject of copyright law), William Patry, called the bill the most outrageously gluttonous IP bill ever introduced in the US.”
So, if you’ve bought a new CD that holds several of your favorite songs. Want to copy it to carry in your vehicle or to work to listen to? Be careful as it may end up costing a heck of a lot more than what your favorite songs are worth.
Blogging, instant messaging for internal groups, constant communication from online IM’s to cell phone text messages. We all do it, utilizing whatever we can to remain in contact with people.
WordPress, the most dominant player in blogging is about to make some changes in the game with Prologue.
The idea seems to be that if you have multiple bloggers on your WordPress blog, you can now use Twitter-like short messages to chat internally.
“Is it a Twitter-killer? No, not currently anyway, as most Twitterdiction folks are using it for shouting to the public vs. internal messaging.”
Matt Mullenweg comments in the announcement for Prologue stating, “Some folks have suggested that using WordPress, Prologue, and RSS you could create a pretty effective distributed version of Twitter. This isn’t something we’re personally interested in, but we’ve made the theme available as open source under the GPL so if you want to hack around it yourself you’re welcome to. For WordPress.com users the theme is available in your “Presentation” section.”
“When YouTube first started to experience its exponential growth and our hosting needs changed, ServerBeach offered us great flexibility. They continually redesigned our streaming architecture for optimum performance while keeping our hosting costs in check.”
Many of you know (or may not know) that YouTube’s beginning days were with ServerBeach. YouTube grew at an incredible speed and ServerBeach was there every step of the way providing them with the hardware and network necessary to support their amazing growth.
YouTube outgrew ServerBeach in November of 2007. Please take a look at our farewell video to YouTube. We’ll miss them! Really we will…..
I stumbled across an article this morning titled, “Social networks may find it does not pay to be too possessive”. The first paragraph states one of my many frustrations with websites such as FaceBook -
“It is a frustrating fact of modern internet life. Users of websites such as Facebook and Google spend hours building up and maintaining friend lists and e-mail address books, but when it comes time to move such social information to another online service they frequently find it impossible to get their data back out. Instead, they must start re-entering their personal details from scratch.”
Most of us have hundreds of contacts that we’ve accumulated over time and always find ourselves having to re-enter each contact one-by-one on every new website that we join. Very frustrating, time consuming, and just a plain nightmare at times.
Well, that may soon change.
“Over the past year, growing numbers of influential voices have been calling for the creation of common standards for “data portability” – a move that would enable widespread sharing of social information between websites.
Advocates of portable data argue that such an open approach would not just make life easier for users who want to migrate between websites; it could change the very economics of the web itself as companies rush to build new services that take advantage of the free flow of social information.
Some believe the advent of truly portable social data could usher in new web services that far exceed the capabilities of existing “Web 2.0” sites. “We are on the cusp of the next phase of the web,” says John McCrea, chief marketing officer at Plaxo. “We think we are about to see a major transformation, as things that have been powered inside ‘walled garden’ social networks become part of the open web.”
Excitement among industry-watchers is palpable. “This is the trend of 2008,” says Jeremiah Owyang, an analyst at Forrester Research.
According to a “Sanity Check” article on TechRepublic this morning, the dependence of business on technology will continue to accelerate 2008, but not all of the trends are happy ones. They’ve created a list of which tech trends to keep an eye on during 2008 and how they will impact business and IT — for better and for worse.
1. Enterprise IT budgets will shrink in the U.S.
2. Utility computing will start a new wave of IT outsourcing
3. Mobile Internet will change the way people work
4. Green IT will gain legal momentum
5. Unified communications will unlock the business value of VoIP
6. Businesses will continue to avoid Windows Vista
7. WAN caching will save bandwidth and speed up remote users
8. Demand will grow for alternative form factor computers
While this has nothing to do with the web hosting market, code, or anything else related to our market, I came across this new case from Apple and found it to be amusing (I really think it’s cool and different).
Today, Apple unveiled it’s new Manila Case, the world’s thinnest case for the MacBook Air. When it’s empty, the Manila Case measures 0.07-inches at its thinnest point, but the dynamically adaptable height goes up to a maximum of 6.9-inches, fitting perfectly to the MacBook Air shape. The base price starts at $300.00. *gasp*
You can customize the case by changing the color of the string, get an Apple Pencil and an eraser for easy note-taking on the Manila Case surface, a drawing of a landscape, and a aircraft-grade aluminum clip.
So all in all, if you’re so inclined - you can buy yourself a $300.00 manila envelope. *wink*
We all know how important security is (OK, the majority of us). When it comes time to purchase a new computer, what do most people do with the old? Sell it, throw it away, give it to our children or a family member to use, or just let it sit and collect dust. Many don’t think about the data stored on the hard drive of these computers. When selling it or giving it away, most just re-install the Operating System and send it on it’s way. Some of the more effective means of protecting your data would be to take the extra steps and melt down the platters or take a drill and punch holes through it. Now how many of us actually take the time or just have the time in general to do this, let alone think about it?
For those of us who leave the hard drives in tact, we must ensure some reasonable security of our data. How many of us are familiar with the filesystem? “Huh? Filesystem?” Your storage device has a table stored at the beginning of it that lists partitions that have been created there. For each partition, there is a table of contents that catalogs the locations of all files on the system.
Any time you delete a file from a filesystem, all you’re doing is deleting the file’s entry in the table of contents. The actual file stored on the disk. When future writes to the hard drive are made, those files may be overwritten by new files or by additions to old files, but unless and until that happens the data that makes up the file, itself, remains untouched. This means that someone with the right forensic software can often recover “deleted” files very easily.
So deleting the entire partition is better, right? Wrong. In fact, it could be worse. When you delete the partition, you not only leave the file data in place, but you also leave the table of contents that catalogs all the locations of files and file fragments in that filesystem. All that is deleted is the partition’s entry in the partition table.
For some good pointers on how to make sure your data is safe, take a peek at this article written by Chad Perrin.
