Tabloid Edition

Finding the right web host

Aswe all know, if you're going to do anything in either business or culture these days you need to have a presence upon the web. This means in turn that you're going to have to get your web hosting sorted out.

The problem here is that there are literally thousands of people who can do this for you and they all have slightly different offers. Do you need lots of free tools to construct your site? Is uptime and reliability of more importance to you? Is the amount of data you can store? Or whether they will back up your site? Maybe it's bandwidth?

Well, there's a great site that can help you through all of these problems over which host to use. First, work out which of the various alternatives are actually what you need. Speed? Reliability? price or something else?

Then search through the relevant sections to find which hosts specialise in those areas you need. For example, here's the managed hosting section, the people who can help you directly in the management of your host. Or the Windows hosting section if you're going to be hosting your site on Windows rather than Linux.

Whatever are the criteria you need and you'll judge a hosting company by the site can help you narrow down to those who provide exactly those things.

Online backup

I have to say that this looks like a pretty good deal. You can get a fully featured 2 GB of online back up for free. If you need more space than that then 150 GB is only $4.95 a month for personal use, or 50GB business plans start at $9.95.

The basic idea is simple: instead of having to back up your computer yourself and then working out where to keep those back ups safely, simply set up the system and make sure you have automatic ones over the internet as often as you need. Smple, safe and secure: and also, as you can see, remarkably cheap. Online Backup an idea whose time really seems to have come. Click through that link to see what they can do for you.

And yes, it works with both Windows and Mac. This is what it all looks like:

Paul Erdos

Paul Erdos is back in the news again, some years after his death. The reason that Paul Erdos is back in the news is really rather amusing. An example of the way in which this internet, or perhaps this web thing, can set off a storm of people looking for information.

It all started with a slightly obscure (to non mathematicians) joke about Paul Erdos in the (excellent) XKCD site. That joke about Paul Erdos is here.

The joke is that Paul Erdos was a slightly odd mathematician who wrote papers with all sorts of people. Looking at all sorts of problems that could have a mathematical solution. In fact, he became so famous for cooperating with others that there arose the phenomenon of an "Erdos" number. If you had co-authored a paper with Paul Erdos then your Erdos number was 0. If you had co-authored a paper with someone with an Erdos number of 0 then your Erdos number would be 1 and so on.

In the way these things work it now appears that half the scientific universe has an Erdos number of 7 or 8.....OK, that's an exaggeration but.

Some more detail:

Paul Erdős (occasionally spelled Erdos or Erdös; Hungarian: Erdős Pál, pronounced ; 26 March 1913 – 20 September 1996) was an immensely prolific and famously eccentric Hungarian mathematician. With hundreds of collaborators, he worked on problems in combinatorics, graph theory, number theory, classical analysis, approximation theory, set theory, and probability theory.

Some of you will see the similarity between Paul Erdos, the Erdos number, and the game Kevin Bacon. For of course that's where the Kevin Bacon game comes from.

Anyway, there's a gentle amusement in seeing what is happening on the web at the moment. XKCD makes an obscure joke then tens of thousands are frantically interrogating Google to find out what the joke is. But, of course, a joke that needs to be explained isn't funny any more, is it?

(And yes, I did get it without looking it up.)

Demi Moore Bush

This is a little weird, I see that one of the top Google trends is about Demi Moore having gone to see George W Bush. Or maybe Demi Moore has gone to see George Bush Senior?

Whichever, there seems to be a lot of activity about Demi Moore Bush, so I assume that this is what is indeed being talked about.

What's that you say? It's actually all about Demi Moore bush? As in whether Ashton Kuchner's wife has a hirsute pudenda or not, that type of Demi Moore bush?

OK everyone, back on your heads. Back to normal, it does indeed seem to be all about whether Demi Moore's bush, not her possible meeting with either of the Bushes.

There seems to be a photo out there, a photo of some vintage it has to be said, proving the point but you can go and look that up for yourselves.

Ponbon.im

No, don't click any links to ponbon.im. This is a virus. More to the point ponbon.im is a worm, one that when you click on it will offer you a page where the phishers will attempt to steal your login and password. You really don't want that so you really don't want to clik on a ponbon.im link.

It’s called ponbon.im (and in some cases, another URL ending in .im). It has the potential to compromise your account. Following a link to that site could be big trouble if you don’t have updated antivirus software or you’re not using a secure browser. It’s also recommended that you download the latest updates for your operating system.

Worse than your computer getting infected, you may lose some of your Facebook friends when it uses you as a host to infect their their accounts as well.

Yup, it will indeed make you very unpopular, clicking on a pombon.im link:

As we've told you many times before, we're telling you again - do not click on suspicious links inside your Facebook messages and emails.

There is a new scam out there called 'Ponbon.Im' and other URLS ending in '.Im' that people are accidentally clicking on, infecting their computers or accounts.

There are other such links as well, it ain't just pombon.im.

There’s currently a big scam running on Facebook and a lot of accounts have been compromised. If you receive an email like check ponbon.im, check 121.im or check 151.im, just delete the email and DO NOT click the link, because it may compromise your account too.

It looks like ponbon.im is already blocked but there are others out there:

UPDATE: We’re told the scam is now using multiple URLs ending in “.im”, as Facebook has blocked ponbon. Simple rule: don’t click links in Facebook messages that look suspicious.

Be warned that there’s another Facebook scam going around today: compromised accounts are sending out links to a site named “ponbon.im”, as shown in the image - do not visit this site. Our guess is that the attack is using accounts that were compromised previously - if you receive the mail, simply delete it without visiting the link.

At the moment, probably the best advice is not to click on anything that is .im, whether it is ponbon or not.

121.im

121.im is one of those things that you need to be very aware of. For 121.im is a virus that spreads through Facebook. Or rather 121.im is a worm that will compromise your system if you click on it as a result of a link from Facebook.

There’s currently a big scam running on Facebook and a lot of accounts have been compromised. If you receive an email like check ponbon.im, check 121.im or check 151.im, just delete the email and DO NOT click the link, because it may compromise your account too.

Well, no one thought that something used by quite so many people was going to stay free of worms and viruses like the 121.im, did they?

The Facebook bugs just keep on swarming. If the combination of my Facebook inbox and Twitter chatter is any indication, there's yet another bug (or whatever you want to call it) floating around on the social networking site. It's not recent nasty bug Koobface, it's not mygener.im and, as far as I can tell, it's not even Boface.BJ. This time the link, which in my case came in messages titled "Hello," leads to sites with names like 151.im and 121.im. 

When you navigate to those addresses (and it seems people are, despite the very odd names), you will find a near-exact replica of the Facebook login page. You are, of course, prompted for your login and password. And once you give those, you, sir, have been hooked by the phishermen. 

Yup, the purpose of 121.im is to get your login and password so that your account can be compromised.

It seems to have been first spotted over in Germany. My knowledge of that language is sketchy, but this does seem to be discussing it:

Ohne zu wissen, wo die Risiken liegen, lässt sich schließlich ein Katastrophenschutzplan gar nicht erstellen."
Stefan Ortner von alpS und sein Team haben insgesamt 704 Gefahren herausgefiltert und digitalisiert. 241 im oberen Lechtal, 231 in Reutte und Umgebung, 111 im Tannheimer Tal und 121 im Zwischentoren. Allein 43 Lawinenstriche bedrohen die B- und L-Straßen.

Or maybe, given my lack of German, it's nothing to do with 121.im at all:

Im Jahr 2008 seien insgesamt 121 Patienten auf der Intensivstation der Klinik gestorben, in über 50 Prozent der Fälle habe die Tatverdächtige Dienst gehabt. 2007 zählte die Klinikleitung 93 Tote, in 42 Fällen davon war die beschuldigte Krankenschwester auf Station. 2009 starben 24 Patienten auf der Intensivstation, 16 davon während der Dienstzeiten der Frau.

That, I'm pretty sure, is nothing to do with the 121.im that we're interested in.

Just to repeat, no, you don't want to click on any link to 121.im and if you do, don't give them your Facebook or any other login or password.

Interfacing with the Internet

OK, so we all know that if we're going to run a business in this modern age we have to make sure that we've got that business on the internet. It might be that we want to sell directly. Or simply provide information about our products. Or attract potential customers. But we've got to be there, right?

Which leads us to web hosting. We need to work out where we're going to host our site. And of course, where we're going to do that depends upon what we want. Do we value uptime more than free tools? or disk space? or multiple domains? Is it cost or reliability that is most important?

Fortunately, there's a great site that can help you sort through these comparisons. Click through that link above to see what Webhosting choice can tell you about the various options from different companies.

Ethical hacking classes

Now any form of hacking is well beyond me. I'm amazed that I managed to get this blog set up to be honest, let alone anything more complicated. However, there are people out there who are engaged in this ethical hacking. The point is that instead of actively attempting to suborn IT systems, you're trying to find out whether such systems could be suborned. It's like the difference between trying to break into a house and trying to break in to see whether security needs to be better. one is obviously illegal and the second is an essential part of beating the bad buys.

For that's the way that IT Security works. The systems are simply too complex to be declared secure without there being people who test that it is. The thing is, of course, that there's no way of working out how to do this without being trained. Click through that link to find out more about how you can indeed learn more about this career which has rising pay and increasing job prospects: not a bad thing to find in these tough days.

There's much more available there of course, advice on secure programming, computer forensics and all of that. In fact, all of the things you need to take part in the current online work. No, not how to create websites. Rather, how to create secure sites, one's that people are actually confident in using.

What a great name

I've been a fan of discussion boards since before they were invented. Yes, really, Usenet was my haunt before the WWW had even been started. So I was interested to find this politics discussion site.

 It's got one of the best names possible: Argue with everyone. Which is pretty much what the guys on the site do, and they argue about pretty much everything political too. If you're like me, with opinions on pretty much everything, worth checking out.

Swinefighter

Swinefighter....well, it had to happen didn't it? Someone would release a game based upon the swine flu epidemic. And so someone has, swinefighter. Here:

Apr 30 - As the world worries about an imminent pandemic, a video game that capitalizes on the lighter side of swine flu is gaining momentum online.

In "Swinefighter", you must save the world - and yourself - from "killer pigs."

And while the point is entertainment, the website also offers recommendations from the U.S. Center of Disease Control on how to avoid contracting the flu.

Well, that's the news story about Swinefighter. Here the actual game.

And here's a short review of swinefighter:

I honestly don’t know what to think. When my homie Jude said check out the new game he made I was expecting something way different. In between typing this post I’m actually playing the game poking mad pigs around the world map. ha ha. This was a good one.