Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, has decided to shut down the website on Wednesday to join Web blackout protest. Several web sites will be down for several hours or the whole day to protest against SOPA. The English version of Wikipedia will be down for the entire day. If you own a big site that will affect others and send a message you can join web blackout protest too. The more sites the bigger the message that is sent. Other sites that will join the protest are Reddit for 12 hours and Cheezburger Network. If they continue with SOPA we will see more protests like this and maybe more aggressive ones.
xOmar can not be found
A Saudi hacker called OxOmar claims that he can not be found. After some Israeli hackers exposed credit card details, which were invalid, he responded by publishing 200 valid credit card details daily. He described those Israeli hackers as idiots and he sent a message to agencies that they can not find him. Being confident, he even described the method he uses to hack. The method is simple but yet very effective. He creates a website using a browser based exploit and then he mails a URL having the exploit page as a hidden iFrame and infects many computers with his bot. The bot is written by xOmar in C++ from scratch. In addition to other bots he putted an encoded SOCK5 protocol.
Disable personal results on Google
In a previous post we said that Google changed the search results and added personal results above the rest of them. For some people this is annoying and not a desirable feature. Don’t worry, if you don’t want this new feature you can disable it from your profile options. You can find your profile options in the upper right corner on Google bar. Click and select Search settings, find the option that says Personal results and there are two options there to use or do not use personal results. If you select do not use personal results you will not see those results and you can have original search results again. You can see (and change) other settings related to searching including the number of search results per page, if you want Google’s instant predictions and if you want to open each selected result in a new window when you click on it.
Google changes the search results
Google search will show you results not only from the web but also from data on your Google+. This means that you will see on the search results posts that were shared with you on Google+, people you follow and profiles. There are three new features that Google merged to its search algorithm. First of all, you will be able to see personal results. This will enable you to find Google+ photos and posts you shared or people shared specifically with you. They are called personal results because only you will be able to see the results. Secondly, you will be able to see Google+ profiles in search results and also in auto-complete mode. This allows you to find people you want or interested in following very fast. Finally, search results will show people and pages (on Google+) of a specific topic or area of interest. You can see the profiles or follow people from results after a few clicks.
Pirate Bay is blocked by a Finnish ISP
Helsinki District Court forced one of the biggest Finnish Internet Service Providers (ISP) to block access to The Pirate Bay. Anonymous have targeted the Copyright Information and Anti-Piracy Centre (CIAPC) that persuaded the court to take such decision. After a while, there was a twitter that CIAPC site (http://www.antipiracy.fi) was down and it is still down while I am writing this post. Elisa, the ISP that was forced to block access to Pirate Bay, has stated that they will try to revert this in supreme court. Nobody wants to loose customers and if that continues I am sure that a large group will move from Elisa to another ISP. Censorship is not tolerated and people get upset by actions like this one.
Firefox is still the best web browser
Three months ago we have announced that Firefox 7 was the best web browser. Now three months and two versions later we would like to inform you that Firefox is still the king. Firefox is now on version 9 and in a recent comparison by Tom’s hardware Firefox was found to be the best for windows among the top web browsers. The test as previous ones is testing web browsers in Javascript, Java, Silverlight, memory and Flash performance. All browsers are tested on loading times for single and multiple tabs and HTML 5 compatibility and performance. They are also tested for hardware acceleration, page load reliability and standards. There is also a test for WebGL and almost everything you can imagine and you want your web browser to be good at.
Pirate Satellite
A group of German hackers is planning to launch a communication satellite in order to stop internet censorship. The project is called Hackerspace Global Grid and a satellite will provide connections to independent stations on earth. The connections will be a network of nodes and it will be independent of the internet. This project is a reaction for SOPA and other laws all over the world. This is not surprising at all, people react when someone is trying to restrict their freedom and can do amazing things. Germans want to launch a satellite and in Sweden they have created a religion for file sharing. I imagine that this is not the end and we will see something similar in other countries.
File sharing is now a religion
In Sweden there is now a new religion for file-sharing. Missionary Church of Kopimism is an officially registered religious organization. Swedish piracy group Kopomi was trying since 2010 for that and after several failed attempts it finally succeeded. Kopimi means “Copy Me” and the flag of Kopimism has Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V as sacred symbols. For those who don’t use Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V, they are key-combinations used for Copy and Paste respectively. Church was founded by Isak Gerson, a Philosophy student in an attempt to legalize copying.
SOPA supporters change their mind
Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is not welcome by internet users. Some companies support it and some are against it. After GoDaddy announced its support to SOPA, thousands domain names moved from GoDaddy to other domain registrars. I found many coupons from hosting companies that are offering discounts if you leave GoDaddy and go to them due to GoDaddy’s SOPA support. While I was checking the reviews from those companies to leave GoDaddy the company officially announced that they changed its mind and it is now against SOPA. So I will stay with GoDaddy for now because they understood that their customers don’t like SOPA.
Lilupophilupop infected one million pages
A month ago Internet Storm Center (ISC) reported that Lilupophilupop is infecting web pages by injecting a code string in them. If your page was injected with that string it means you have a coding issue and to avoid it you need to validate input, all parameters your application accepts. Now, a month later, about a million pages are infected by Lilupophilupop with SQL injection. Most infected websites belong to Netherlands (have a .nl extension) and are about 123000. In the second place we have about 68000 fr sites followed by 56000 uk sites. The number of infected pages increases and it is mostly based on the ignorance of the web developers. Sadly, most of the web developers don’t pay attention to the security of the systems and applications they create. This allows attackers to exploit the security holes and have such results.