In recent weeks we have noticed a high number of users who have been compromised with the following exploit, because they were running outdated WordPress installation, vulnerable to several security flaws now patched in the latest version 2.9.1
http://securityreason.com/exploitalert/7683
As always, it is highly important to make sure your WordPress installation is up to date and that you are regularly backing up both your installation and databases. With the current “Automatic Update” features of the WordPress dashboard, it couldn’t be easier to update your installation.
Wordpress
Over the last 72 hours you may have heard numerous victory cries from long suffering web designers & developers. At the end of January, Google joined the long growing list of companies ceasing support for older browsers such as IE6 by officially announced that they were phasing out their support of the browser, beginning with Google Docs and Google Sites from the 1st of March. As a result, users of IE6 will find that key functionality within these Google services will not function properly. If that’s not a major wake-up call for organisations still dragging the ball on the cost of upgrading key software, then they will soon find themselves left far behind.
Read more…
Web Browsers
New statistics from NetApps show that Google’s Chrome web browser has climbed above 5% market share in January, to move ahead of Apple’s Safari web browser. Firefox has remained stable around 25% market share, while Internet Explorer 8 continues above 62%, gaining a slight increase due to the recent popularity of Microsoft’s new flagship OS, Windows 7 giving users a reason to upgrade from Windows XP.
Firefox’s director Mike Beltzner has commented that his organization welcomed competition from Google’s Chrome and even hinted that future Firefox versions may take advantage of some Chrome source code. However, it’s hard not to think that the not-for-profit organization isn’t concerned about a multibillion dollar corporation eating into its market share. Chrome has the advantage of being promoted on the many Google web properties, and Firefox depends on Google for revenue, including the Google search box in default installations.
Web Browsers
We’ve been busy for quite sometime in the AUSWEB labs, testing and finalizing our new VMware Cloud Hosting solution. For Christmas we received one of the final pieces of the puzzle, that being our new EqualLogic SAN which will provide both high-availability and fail safe redundancy for our upcoming Cloud Hosting solutions.
AUSWEB’s new Cloud Hosting solutions utilise VMware ESX and vSphere 4 running on our high-powered DELL PowerEdge Server cluster, to deliver cost-effective hosting options with dynamic scalability, offering you high availability and full redundancy with fail safe performance.
Cloud Hosting allows you to add processors and memory on the fly and scalable storage space from AUSWEB’s EqualLogic Enterprise-Class SAN to any AUSWEB Cloud VMware Virtual Machine as you require, meaning you only pay for what you need as you need!
With AUSWEB Cloud Hosting you can run any Guest Operating System that runs under VMware ESX, including all Windows versions, all Linux distributions and many more.
All VMware Virtual Machines are connected to our high speed storage network to deliver blazing fast speed and server performance with a 99.99% uptime guarantee.
Stay tuned to this space for more Cloud Hosting announcements in the coming weeks.
News, Web Hosting News
From Arstechnica:
Microsoft has issued a notification it is releasing tomorrow for Internet Explorer at approximately 10 am PST. The patch will fix vulnerabilities in IE6, IE7, and IE8 on supported editions of Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008, Windows 7, and Windows Server 2008 R2—vulnerabilities notably exploited in the recent series of Chinese-based attacks against Google and 30 other tech companies.
The patch is now available via Windows Update and on the Microsoft Download Center. Here are all the links you need:
News, Security
For the majority of people who are concerned with proper browser functionality and of course security, Internet Explorer would certainly not be a preferred browser choice. For many web designers Internet Explorer remains a headache that must be catered for because of the large number of users out there who refuse to switch or are unable to upgrade from long outdated versions such as IE6, which have many problems with modern HTML/CSS code.
Read more…
News, Web Browsers, Web Design
A new post has appeared on the official Google Blog, detailing security attacks on their infrastructure originating from China:
Like many other well-known organizations, we face cyber attacks of varying degrees on a regular basis. In mid-December, we detected a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google. However, it soon became clear that what at first appeared to be solely a security incident–albeit a significant one–was something quite different.
First, this attack was not just on Google. As part of our investigation we have discovered that at least twenty other large companies from a wide range of businesses–including the Internet, finance, technology, media and chemical sectors–have been similarly targeted. We are currently in the process of notifying those companies, and we are also working with the relevant U.S. authorities.
The post goes on to mention that Google is now reviewing their business operations in China, which already operate in a censored capacity in conjunction with Chinese laws, and this may result in the shutdown of Google.cn and a complete withdrawal of Google’s Chinese offices. You can read the full post below:
Official Google Blog: “A New Approach to China”
Google, News
The Quality Assurance team of cPanel discovered a bug within the SpamAssassin ruleset that will mark messages sent in the year 2010 (that’s today) and beyond with a higher spam score than expected. This bug can result in legitimate mail being flagged as spam.
Read more…
Email, Operating Systems, Plugins, Scripting & Coding, Software, Spam, Spam Protection, cPanel
It’s that time of year again, for those yet to take advantage of our December Special with 25% OFF for VPS plans as well as Dedicated Server & Discount Dedicated Server plans, there is one week left to go!
Visit www.ausweb.com.au for more details and promotional codes.
We are closing telephone sales and support from Christmas until January 4th. However, online support continues as normal 24/7 throughout the holiday period. For full details please check our Announcements page from your Client Area Member’s Portal.
Wishing customers new and old a very Merry Christmas and safe New Year, from the team at AUSWEB! Thank you all for another great year, with some big announcements we’ve been promising to come in early 2010!
News
In recent weeks there has been an increasing number of attackers exploiting a vulnerability with insecure osCommerce installations, which allows admin access without a password usually resulting in spam mail-outs to your users.
As always, it is highly important to stay on top of security updates with all scripts, such as shopping carts and also to be proactive and ensure that you are taking adequate measures to secure your installation.
There are several useful threads discussing recent vulnerabilities for the different release versions of osCommerce on the osCommerce community forums including the following topic with updated reference information for securing your osCommerce installation:
How to Secure your osCommerce Site – http://forums.oscommerce.com/index.php?showtopic=313323
Scripting & Coding, Security, Web Development
New statistics from comScore Networks research shows Microsoft’s Bing has risen to 10.3% of the U.S. search market in November, it’s highest result so far. However, it appears the market share is being taken from Microsoft’s partner-in-waiting, Yahoo and not search leader Google’s whos market share rose over November.
Under an agreement struck earlier this year, Microsoft will assume responsibility for the underlying technology for both the Yahoo and Bing search engines. Microsoft has said the arrangement will give it more critical mass to compete effectively against Google. ComScore’s statistics below spread out from June 2007 show it’s going to be quite an uphill battle.
You can view further detailed statistics over at Silicon Alley Insider.
News, Off Topic
Christmas has come early this year here at AUSWEB HQ, with a fresh delivery of turbo charged DELL R200 Intel Quad Core Servers. To mark the occasion and the holiday season we’re offering big cost savings into the New Year with 25% OFF for all new signups on our VPS and Dedicated Server plans during the month of Christmas! The longer you signup the more you save, on top of our existing generous signup discounts on selected plans, with 1 Month Free on Yearly signup & 3 Months Free on 2 Year signups!
Our already reduced range of powerful Discount Servers with AMD Opteron and Intel Dual Core CPU’s are also slashed a further 25% during Christmas. If you have been considering the jump to Dedicated Server hosting our discount servers offer extremely high performance at great value. With a further 25% Off, there has never been a better time to make the jump to a Dedicated Server with huge savings for your hosting in 2010 and beyond. Our Discount Servers are in strictly limited supply though, so get in fast!
For full details and information about all of our VPS and Dedicated Server plans and for our details on our XMAS 25% Off Promotional Code, visit the AUSWEB website – www.ausweb.com.au!
News
Continuing their hot-streak of announcements and free service releases & updates of late, Google has now introduced “Google Public DNS”, a new experimental public DNS resolver promising a host of improvements to browsing speed and performance and both validity and security.
The DNS protocol is an important part of the web’s infrastructure, serving as the Internet’s “phone book”. Every time you visit a website, your computer performs a DNS lookup. Complex pages often require multiple DNS lookups before they complete loading. As a result, the average Internet user performs hundreds of DNS lookups each day, that collectively can slow down his or her browsing experience.
Complex pages require multiple DNS lookups before they start loading. This can slow down the browsing experience. Our research has shown that speed matters to Internet users, so over the past several months our engineers have been working to make improvements to our public DNS resolver to make users’ web-surfing experiences faster, safer and more reliable
We believe that a faster DNS infrastructure could significantly improve the browsing experience for all web users. To enhance DNS speed but to also improve security and validity of results, Google Public DNS is trying a few different approaches that we are sharing with the broader web community through this service.
You can view the full details and documentation on the Google Code blog here: http://googlecode.blogspot.com/
To give Google’s Public DNS services a try, you can view instructions to get started here: http://code.google.com/speed/public-dns/docs/using.html
Google
When you signup for an AUSWEB hosting plan, the first thing most customers do is upload their website – replacing the default New AUSWEB Customer index.html file for new accounts.
A common question we receive, is ‘how can I create a simple landing page for my website?’. Usually from customers who are using their domain for Email and/or file hosting and not yet ready to invest either too much time or money into a fully-fledged website – and just want a simple landing page with an image or contact details and info.
Obviously there are numerous options for HTML coding, anything from Notepad to DreamWeaver is capable of coding something suitable for all situations depending on your experience. However, if you’re looking for something quick and easy that doesn’t require much knowledge of HTML, a web based What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get (WYSIWYG for short) editor is probably just the thing you need!
Fortunately, Google Sites has one of the easiest and most user friendly WYSIWYG editors available, allowing you to specify various HTML options and choose from a range of pre-defined themes and templates, before letting you adjust everything in an easy and intuitive browser based editor even novices can use. You can change text, colours, images, add and remove links, as well as simple and advanced table and layout format settings. Everything you need to design the simplest blank landing page with a contact address, to a full webpage setup is available to you.
Head over to Google Sites to check it out, all thats required is a Google account!
Google, HTML, Web Design
Google has just released their 2009 Search Trend results, cataloguing the people, events and memories that made up this year. The clear winner as you might be able to guess was the king of pop Michael Jackson, who’s search results spiked massively after the singer’s death and continue to rank highly.
For the full story visit the Google Blog, and for the full Zeitgeist rankings over several categories check out the following link: Google Zeitgeist 2009
Google, Off Topic
The world’s oldest intact computer just turned 60, quite the milestone! From ABC News:
The world’s oldest intact computer is turning 60 in Victoria.
The CSIRAC – Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research organisation Automatic Computer – is housed in the state’s museum and has today been granted heritage listing as part of its birthday celebrations.
It is the first computer ever to be made in Australia; the fourth computer ever to be made in the world; and the only first generation computer that remains intact.
The CSIRAC was designed from scratch and hand built in 1949. It was run off paper tape, which Mr Demant says probably now constitutes the worlds oldest software library.
“It consisted of nine cabinets, which are about seven foot high and very wide, and there was a console and the computer was driven,” he said.
“It wasn’t automatic like we know today, you actually had to intervene every now and then in running a program and it ran off paper tape… so its output was paper tape and there was no screen as such.”
We’ve sure come a long way, but it’s quite interesting to see the point modern computers, and modern rack mounted servers have evolved from with Australia’s first generation of software programmers being trained on CSIRAC.
You can find in-depth details and pictures over at the CSIRAC page on the Museum of Victoria website: http://museumvictoria.com.au/csirac/
Off Topic
As part of Google’s ever-growing range of tools for improving your website and businesses, Australian users can now visit the Google Local Business Centre to create a listing to help customers find your business on Google and Google Maps.
Use the power of Google’s data to learn where your customers come from and what they search for to find you. You can add photos, opening times, contact info and other details along with your location on Google Maps, to help people search for your products faster and easier than ever before.
You can view more info on the Local Business Centre in a neat little video presentation via Google Australia’s Youtube Channel here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8iGJjYIzVc
Google
Google has thrown another curveball into the mix ahead of next years planned release of Chrome OS, officially releasing details on the OS as well as Open Sourcing the project: Read more…
Chrome OS, Google
Don’t get me wrong – Our business and infrastructure very rarely moves, However we have having a revolution.. Or maybe it’s an evolution.
Ausweb has very quietly (Apart from the occasional blog post) been preparing one of the most amazing platforms for the future growth of our business, and in preparation of the future growth of all of our customer’s (existing and future) businesses. We have designed and built an almost indestructible infrastructure based in Sydney, which is due to open to the public soon.
We have been testing and developing, and testing and developing some more, continuously for the past 6 months in preparation to launch this product and we are almost there. We’ve purchased a stack of equipment, and we are about to purchase the last piece in preparation for the announcement and launch.
Read more…
Rambles, Science & Tech, VMware
WordPress was updated to version 2.8.6 last week, with a couple of new security holes patched up. You can view full information about the new version on the WordPres Blog.
Users who have installed WordPress using Fantastico, can upgrade automatically using Fantastico, or of course automatically from the WordPress dashboard.
Security, Wordpress
