| Malware writers exploring Software as a Service model
The business of writing, buying, and selling malware has become increasingly commercial over the past few years, but a new report from online security firm Finjan sheds light on just how mainstream the crimeware business has gone. Earlier this month, the company discovered a small, standalone application gathering data on over 8,700 servers, including web sites from 2,500 North American companies and a handful of sites in Alexa's top 100 ranking. Potential buyers were able to log into the malicious server hosting the data-gathering service and evaluate any given web site's size and Google Page Rank to decide whether or not the site's FTP information was worth purchasing or not. The concept of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is nothing new, but this is the first time anyone has organized the purchase of FTP login credentials, with additional tools available to help a buyer confirm he's making a smart purchase.
LeaseWeb Launches Windows Express Server
Business hosting provider LeaseWeb, in collaboration with Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT), has announced a new low-cost dedicated hosting service targeted at small and midsize businesses. LeaseWeb Dedicated Windows Express Server allows customers to be online within 24 hours with a proprietary start-up server and broadband package. Dedicated hosting -- as opposed to shared -- offers companies a complete system without the threat of negative performance caused by other users. The Windows platform guarantees continuity of the solution through upgrades. LeaseWeb's network has been shown to have a realized uptime of 99.99 percent, according to a WatchMouse study in 2006. LeaseWeb is based in the Netherlands with offices throughout Europe and in New York. « Back to Critical News « Get more advice every month.
Wikia Search to offer first peek next week
Wikia Search, a community-driven search engine, will get its first public preview on Monday, according to co-founder Jimmy Wales. In an e-mail sent to the Wikia Search mailing list on December 24, Wales wrote that he aims to make the initial version of the search tool available in alpha form. "We want to run over the system with help from people to complain about what is broken," he wrote. Wikia Search, which aims to allow people to contribute to how pages are ranked and to edit search results, will have open-source search algorithms and application program interfaces. The search platform includes the Grub search project, acquired by Wikia in July, which employs user-donated distributed processing power to crawl the Web. Wales, who also co-founded user-generated online encyclopedia Wikipedia, hopes Wikia Search will eventually rival other search companies by making the way in which search results are arrived at more "transparent." "The desire to collaborate and support a transparent and open platform for search is clearly deeply exciting to both open source and businesses," Wales said in a statement in July.
German tech show CeBIT goes green
Banners sporting the CeBIT computer fair logo flutter in the wind on February 27 at the fair grounds in Hanover, central Germany. With efforts to fight climate change growing apace around the world, the IT industry is also doing its bit, as the world's largest technology fair starting next week in Germany aims to show. .
Easy WebContent Web Page Editing Service
It is a rare but unalloyed pleasure to try a product or service for which you have only modest expectations, and find yourself blown out of the water. Easy WebContent, an online service designed to take the fuss out of editing Web pages, is that good. In fact, this $9.95-per-month service is better than most stand-alone Web design applications I've used during my 13 years of building sites. Easy WebContent isn't designed to compete with an Adobe Dreamweaver-scale product; it's meant to help average mortals create and update Web pages. And in that market, it has no rival. Online services such as Homestead.com use template approaches that restrict what you can do with your site; Easy WebContent comes much closer than its template-oriented competitors to being a Web design application.
Palme Middle East on course for 20% growth
The show, which runs from April 27-29 at Dubai's International Exhibition Centre, has already expanded into Hall 4 to accommodate the extraordinary growth in the Event 360 vertical sector. With Palme now occupying an unprecedented five halls (plus the Pavilion) show organiser Alex Heuff has revealed that stand space for the sixth edition of the show is already 70% sold with five months to go. Event 360The change of emphasis placed on Palme Middle East 2008 by show organisers, IIR Exhibitions, has attracted a raft of first time exhibitors; one such participant in the Event 360 sector, Purple Fire, has immediately become a platinum sponsor. The repositioning of Event 360, which will target the growing number of event managers throughout the GCC's meetings and incentives industry with a programme of conferences and awards, spearheads a package of improvements at this year's show.
A new stage in the world class struggle: November-December 1995
In December 1995, David Walsh travelled to Europe as part of an international team of reporters to provide on-the-spot coverage of the massive strike wave in France. They studied the strike movement and the political crisis it produced and interviewed strikers, union officials and representatives of various "left" organisations, as well as non-strikers from various layers of the population. This pamphlet was first published as a series or articles. It presents a detailed analysis of the strike movement and the role played by the various unions, political parties and tendencies. It addresses a number of questions: Why did this movement erupt in France? Why has there been no comparable movement to this point in the US, although the attacks on social programmes carried out there go far beyond those proposed by the French government? What do these events portend for the future development of the class struggle in France, Europe and internationally? What have these events revealed about the revolutionary capacity of the working class, as well as the critical political problems which must be overcome? French workers in revolt: Contents What sparked the strike movement? A mass movement of social solidarity Political problems of the strike movement How the labour bureaucracy stifled the strike movement The culture of opportunism The spectre of a European-wide movement The significance of the strike movement Apendix: Two footnotes on the radicals Chronology Political parties and trade unions in France What sparked the strike movement? For three and a half weeks in November and December, masses of French workers did battle with the right wing government of President Jacques Chirac and Prime Minister Alain Juppé.
World's finest tech sites immortalised
They may have transformed man's understanding of the universe but the monumental impact of the world's first large radio telescope and the planet's largest particle physics lab has never been fully recognised. Now both Jodrell Bank and Cern are among the technological landmarks that could be immortalised alongside the pyramids of Egypt and Taj Mahal on Unesco's World Heritage Site (WHS) list. The UK National Commission for Unesco and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport are hosting a three-day workshop to set the framework for creating future World Heritage Sites that mark advances in science and technology. Experts on the history of science and world heritage from 15 countries are taking part in the London-based sessions to create the framework, which is expected to stimulate a surge in the number of science and technology heritage sites across the world.
Geopolitical Rebirth
Everyday more and more people are drawn away from George Bush and pulled towards Noam Chomsky, or Naomi Klein. More people want to know what is really happening and more are looking beyond the mainstream. That is due to the audiovisual reports on CNN. The owners of the media assumed we were stupid, they underestimated the power of collective consciousness and without knowing it, have made us repudiate them. We learned to disgust them for their empty promises and wars presented as acts of peace. They presented us peacekeepers dressed up as soldiers and soon we understood. They talked to us about atomic energy and never disarmed, it didn’t takes us long to react. The same happened with those wars on terrorism, soon we understood they were taking away our rights, airports became intolerable, people kept disappearing, our democratic governments were torturing and all this without fair trials.
The Daily Weekly
Outfitted at each desk with a flat-screen TV and three Xbox 360 consoles, the testers are checking that Xbox 360's latest boredom-eradicating features—which enable you to fast-forward through movies before they've finished downloading, and chat with your friends via MSN instant messenger while you download free game samples—can be installed and used without the system freezing or crashing. So far, it's touch and go. Days from now, every Xbox 360 user will be prompted to install the new upgrade when they boot up their machines. But the testers have to do it first, downloading the software, then performing the new tasks, over and over, on several units of each variation of the console: Those sold in North America, the European Union, Japan, and "Rest of Asia" all differ. Each row of testers has a designated "lead," who manages the team and copies down the data: IP addresses, software version, serial numbers.
Rich Hofmann: There will be a lot to digest in Clemens steroids ...
I WAS GOING TO HAVE a Roger Clemens Hearing Party but didn't know what to serve. The other sports are so much easier. Super Bowl parties all have a hollowed-out loaf of bread, kind of shaped like a football, with some dipping glop poured inside. If you have people over to watch a fight on pay-per-view, it's pretty much chips right out of the bag. But what do you do with this? And can you drink at 10 o'clock on a Wednesday morning? Or, rather, can you not drink and get through it? So many questions. Like, can ESPN's Chris Berman find a way to keep himself off of Deadspin for 5 minutes and come up with a few nicknames on the pregame show? Like, say, Henry "Turtle" Waxman? If I were a member of the committee, one of the esteemed honorables who had the good fortune to be assigned to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform - screw that Foreign Affairs or Ways and Means stuff - I would be torn about my appearance.
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