UK Dedicated Server Hosting Provider Blog

Archive for February, 2009

113 million people use Google's free email system 'GMail'

Google’s free email service ‘GMail’ was down for 2.5 hrs and went off line at approx 09:30 GMT.

Google have apologised for the outage stating that they do not know what caused the problem but are looking it what the root problem was as a priority.

There is independent evidence that the service was down for up to 4hrs for some users.

In a statement posted on its official Google blog it said: “We’re really sorry about this, and we did do everything to restore access as soon as we could.”.

It said its engineers were still investigating the “root cause” of the problem.

“We know how important GMail is to our users so we take this very seriously,” it added.

“The majority are now able to access their e-mail accounts again and we’re hoping to have service restored for the remainder very soon.”

A legal claim by a Pittsburgh couple that Google’s Street View feature violated their privacy has been thrown out by a federal judge.

Christine and Aaron Boring sued the search giant after photos of their home appeared on the free mapping program.

The couple accused Google of privacy violation, negligence, trespassing and unjust enrichment.

In her ruling, Judge Amy Reynolds Hay said the Borings “failed to state a claim under any count”.

“We are pleased the judge agreed the suit was without merit,” said Google in a statement to the BBC.

Street View displays street level, 360-degree photographs of areas taken by specially equipped Google vehicles.

Failure

The photographs at the centre of the lawsuit, launched last year, were taken at the foot of Mr and Mrs Boring’s driveway and shows their house, a pool area and detached garage. Signs marked the road as private.

The suit alleged that Google’s Street View had caused Mr and Mrs Boring “mental suffering” and diluted the value of their home.

Click here to read this entire article on the BBC’s website.

Hackers have released a new version of the Conficker virus that affected more than 15 million computers across the world, leading to fresh fears of a new wave of cyber crime.

The worm, known variously as Conficker, Downadup and Kido, affects Microsoft’s Windows operating system. Earlier this year, it was estimated that some 15 million computers had fallen prey to the virus, which embeds itself deep within the machine’s operating system. It then provides hackers, spammers and cybercriminals with a “back door” into machines, leaving computers vulnerable to further malicious attacks and even the theft of personl data and confidential information.

The new version, dubbed Conficker B++, circumvents many of the protections put in place to defend against the old worm. It could also make it more difficult for antivirus companies to track down where the virus originated from and put a halt to its spread, by removing the need for Conficker B++ to “phone home” to a remote server in order to download more malicious software to a compromised computer.

Earlier this month, Microsoft issued a $250,000 reward for information leading to the capture and conviction of Conficker’s authors. The company has also released a set of removal tools and software patches to combat the worm, but these may not offer protection against new strains of the virus.

Security specialists feared that the original Conficker outbreak had been engineered by hackers and cybercriminals to build a “botnet”, a network of compromised machines that could then be used to launch malicious attacks, and even to remotely activate tools and software that would have made it easy for cybercriminals to steal personal information or even banking login details.

If you haven’t already got your .TV domain – you’re missing out on the second highest selling TLD (not including .COM) sold in January 2009.
.TV is receiving a lot of publicity as the destination for rich media on the Internet. If .TV isn’t a part of your web site hostong, then you may be missing out on quailified traffic coming to your website.

What’s unusual about dot-tel is that customers buying the names can’t build a traditional Web site. Dot-tel is the equivalent of an online Yellow Pages.

Each owner of a dot-tel name can use it to list names, phone numbers, physical addresses, Web addresses, Twitter and Facebook pages.

The domain is intended largely for users of mobile phones, who can find it difficult to navigate a Web site on a tiny screen. The listings work on any computer connected to the Internet.

.info domain names are proving to very popular, get yours before someone else does.
Sales of .info domain names increased by 30% in the last month, you have to ask your self “why?”.
There are 2 reasons, companies want to make sure they own their own .info to prevent someone else ‘cybersquatting’ on it, and the search engines like them.

We are pleased to announce the addition of cPanel to our web hosting control panel systems.

cPanel is now being used as our control panel of choice for all of our Linux based web hosting packages.
Q: Why have we chosen cPanel?
A: It is very secure with an intelligent firewall built in preventing password and dictionary attacks, it is also very fast compared to other major control panel offerings.
You do not need to be a expert to use it as there are online videos showing how to setup an email account for example, more info here www.cpanel.net.
It is much cheaper than other similar systems which means our hosting costs stay low, which we can pass onto our clients.

We are still using Parallels Plesk on all of our Windows IIS based servers as over the years this control panel has proved itself to be very powerful.

Protect your online identity

Did you know that when you register a domain name, the contact details you supply are made publicly available using a service called ‘whois‘?

This information is held by the domain registrar companies and is perfectly legal in all countries.
As this information is easily accessed by the public it can be a source of SPAM, email marketing and even could be used to try and steal your domain name.

Don’t Panic, help is at hand and it is very easy, all you need to do is login to your Mantis Computing Client Area and from here you can tick the box that says ‘Opt out of whois’ – this is free for .co.uk domains, .com and others do have a small charge of approx £10.

If you want to find out more about this service then please get in touch.