The Gadgetier

An update on the DNS flaw we reported on a few weeks back. If you’ve got no idea what this is about, we recommend reading up on these first, it affects everyone on the internet. If you have read the other 2 articles, you’ll know that some attacks had been reported, but the first ‘big’ attack has taken on Google. Users visiting Google were directed to a website copying Google almost exactly, but taking advantage of affiliate style links.

Now, the important part - you can check your ISP at DoxPara Research by clicking the ‘Check my DNS’ button. If your unsecure, we recommend you get in contact with your ISP and ask them what’s happening, and also leave a comment here to name and shame whoever it is.

Now, the second important part of the article, Apple. Apple have been very reluctant to patch, and have been reported to be ‘dragging their heals’. However, they finally released a patch for OS X.

Facebook has announced a deal with Intel to use their Xeon 5400 processors in thousands of new servers. The new servers will help with the massive growth Facebook is experiencing, and is said to improve the Web2.0 world as a whole. Intel is hoping to increase software performance on their servers, as well as increased infrastructure efficiency.

This deal is more good news for Intel, and their luck isn’t showing any sign of changing.

So, we all know that Hotmail, Yahoo and GoogleMail accounts have pretty relaxed rules when it comes to usage - login once every 90 days and you’ll probably keep your account. Thing is, what have you signed up for using your hotmail address, then forgotten to login? The reason we ask is because this makes it extremely easy for anyone to ’steal’ your account. Let me explain with this true story.

As you know, most businesses now have a website, and with that, comes a website manager, or admin. So, this one company had just one admin, who left the company after setting up and maintaining the website for a short while. He also registered the company’s domain, using a hotmail address as the registered email. Trouble is, when he left, he forgot to leave the domain password, not helpful for the new admin trying to migrate the website to a new hosting company.

Luckily the new admin was clever enough to do a check on the domain, and noticed it was registered to a hotmail address. He then went and registered for a hotmail account with the old username, which was free because the old admin had forgotten to login every 90 days or so. So, simply submit a forgotten password request and he was in.

The same is true for any other website you’ve registered for - so, just make sure you keep logging into those Hotmail accounts.

Back in March, a secret formation of major IT companies, including Microsoft, Cisco and Sun, set out to secure the internet’s security flaw. The flaw allows hackers to redirect perfectly typed URLs to a different address, easily allowing them to divert you to phishing sites. The flaw is to do with the addressing system that converts the URL into an IP address. For example, when you type www.thegadgetier.com into your browser, it diverts you to an address made up of lots of numbers computers around the world can understand, called an IP address.

Mr Kaminsky is the man behind the discovery, who found the error in the DNS (Domain Name System) six months ago. Both Mr Kaminsky and the involved companies are keeping the technical details a secret, as releasing them would allow hackers to easy exploit the flaw.

Mr Kaminsky said “People should be concerned but they should not be panicking.” If you are using a Microsoft OS, you should have received the patch on July 8th, as part of Microsoft’s Windows Update. Other companies are expected to release patches shortly after.

Not every site around the web plays by the rules. Just one of the many ‘rules’ broken is the copying of content from blogs and websites. All webmasters hate it, you write a brilliant original article only to find it posted somewhere else on the web, with only a few small changes made. But now we have a new weapon in our defence - Copyscape.

Copyscape utilizes the Google API tools to search through the web and find copies of your work. You simply enter a web address into the search, and hey presto, it pops up with all the websites that have the same content as yours. You can even add their logo to warn off thieving webmasters (see ours below). They’ll also be able to offer you premium services, where they’ll scan you’re the web for copies of your content automatically, and notify you if they find anything suspicious. Visit their website today, and stop people stealing your content.

Our new category, For Webmasters, opens today. In this section, we’ll post info of particular use for webmasters, bloggers and other website owners/content writters. We hope this will help you out in your day-to-day business of running and maintaining your websites, and alert you of some of the troubles faced, and how to deal with them. Check it out here.

The Gadgetier Team.

AVG recently bundled a new tool with their AVG 8 Antivirus software, called LinkScanner. This program automatically scans links that you MIGHT visit. For example, if your Google search reveals 10 results, LinkScanner will visit them all. Not only does this skew the websites hit counters and visitor reports, but it also increases the bandwidth used by the site, costing the sites more money each month. Although this hasn’t majorly affected us yet, it is starting to add huge costs onto smaller websites running bills.

Not only does this cause problems for the website owners, one user of the new software has reported LinkScanner downloading nearly 900MB of extra data in one day. This is a huge problem for Capped Broadband users, as it uses valuable download usage.

Furthermore, LinkScanner visits the site just as a browser does. This means there is no way to filter out the robotic clicks to gain accurate visitor numbers.