Technology Info

Almost everyone hates spam. The only people that don’t hate it are the ones that make vast amounts of money from sending it. The profits they turn are so large that regardless of what spam fighters do, the amount of spam keeps increasing. According to web security firm MessageLabs, spam accounted for 81.5 percent of all e-mail traffic in June.

This number, which is calculated based on 3 billion e-mail connections that MessageLabs scans every single day, more or less corresponds with US-specific data. An analysis of year-to-date spam rates for individual US states shows that the percentage of e-mails that were spam range from 77 (Montana) to 91 percent (Illinois). In other words, in every single state in the US, over three quarters of e-mails sent are junk. The average spam level in the US was 86 percent in June. (link)

Computer industry heavyweights are hustling to fix a flaw in the foundation of the Internet that would let hackers control traffic on the World Wide Web.

Major software and hardware makers worked in secret for months to create a software “patch” released on Tuesday to repair the problem, which is in the way computers are routed to web page addresses.

“It’s a very fundamental issue with how the entire addressing scheme of the Internet works,” Securosis analyst Rich Mogul said in a media conference call.

“You’d have the Internet, but it wouldn’t be the Internet you expect. (Hackers) would control everything.”

The flaw would be a boon for “phishing” cons that involve leading people to imitation web pages of businesses such as bank or credit card companies to trick them into disclosing account numbers, passwords and other information. (link)

Until recently, the development of mobile-friendly websites has been regarded as nothing more than an irrelevant black art. That has since changed, thanks to more web-capable phones making their way into the mainstream (such as, of course, the iPhone). But the landslide of new and improved mobile sites has opened the doors to a sort of standard-free chaos, where almost anything (that works) goes and security is a second thought. The Open Mobile Terminal Platform (OMTP) group hopes to change that, however, by launching a new initiative that focuses on mobile development without sacrificing important principles like security.

The project will be called BONDI and will be supported by a number of OMTP members: 3 Group, AT&T, T-Mobile, Telenor, Telefónica, Telecom Italia, and Vodafone. The group plans to “harmonize the various open and proprietary ongoing initiatives and this cooperative work will minimise the potential for technology fragmentation,” and will provide a secure web services interface for developers to use when creating mobile sites. “The new handset software will be engineered in such a way as to prevent fraudulent and malicious activity through unauthorized access to functions or sensitive personal information,” says OMTP. (link)

A recent collaborative study between Google, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, and IBM offers new insight into how many people surfing the web are doing so safely. According to the report, a clear majority of users (some 59 percent) are using the latest version of their preferred Internet browser—but that still leaves 40.1 percent who aren’t. That’s a troublingly high number for anyone working in IT security, given that virtually all (89.4 percent) of the vulnerabilities reported in 2007 were remote exploits. Not all of these exploits specifically targeted the web browser, but it’s become the target of choice for an increasingly large percentage of all attacks. Proper browser security is therefore of paramount concern. (link)

The technological feats of the 3G iPhone are key to the coming pornucopia. To date, mobile porn has consisted largely of still images, racy text services and “moan tones,” which are sultry-sounding ringtones. In Europe there is an active market for video chatting; customers pay on average $50 a month to exchange dirty messages with actresses. But now, thanks in large part to the iPhone’s video dexterity, short clips are becoming a staple of the mobile porn business. The speed promised by the iPhone 2.0 is much anticipated. Google Trends, which measures Web buzz, shows a sharp increase over the past year in the popularity of the term “iPhone porn.”

Leading porn purveyors see the iPhone as a dream come true. Its relatively ample screen size, speedy Web access and ease of use are just part of it. The device’s miniaturized version of Apple’s Safari software simplifies mobile access and streamlines the process of tailoring dirty sites for optimal viewing on the go. “It’s by far the porn-friendliest phone,” says Devan Cypher, representative for San Francisco–based Sin City Entertainment. As evidence of the gadget’s rocketing popularity in California’s porn capital, the San Fernando Valley, numerous iPhone-specific porn sites have been launched in recent months. “There are a few hundred iPhone porn sites now in use,” says Farley Cahen, vice president of business development for AVN Media Network, the adult industry’s trade body. Many others are currently in the works targeting the iPhone 2.0, which goes on sale July 11. (link)

Web traffic volumes will almost double every two years from 2007 to 2012, driven by video and web 2.0 applications, according to a report from Cisco Systems..

Increased use of video and social networking has created what Cisco calls ‘visual networking’, which is raising traffic volumes at a compound annual growth rate of 46 per cent.

Cisco’s Visual Networking Index (PDF) predicts that visual networking will account for 90 per cent of the traffic coursing through the world’s IP networks by 2012.

The upward trend is not only driven by consumer demand for YouTube clips and IPTV, according to the report, as business use of video conferencing will grow at 35 per cent CAGR over the same period. (link)

Disney will stream full-length movies on its Web site for the first time, as part of its “Wonderful World of Disney” series on ABC. The films are scheduled to stream through August.

“Finding Nemo” is available at www.Disney.com/WWoD (http://www.Disney.com/WWoD) through Friday, after the film’s airing Saturday on Disney-owned ABC. “Monsters, Inc.,” “Haunted Mansion,” “Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen,” “Princess Diaries 2,” “Freaky Friday” and “Peter Pan” also will be available on the site this summer.

A Disney spokesman said the decision to stream movies for free marks an “evolution” in the company’s online strategy. Fox, Universal, Lionsgate and MGM have all previously placed titles on Hulu, the NBC Universal/News Corp.-owned site, while Disney has gone the pay route and kept its films, for the most part, on iTunes. (link)

Companies that assign addresses for Web sites appear to be cutting corners on security more when they assign names in certain domains than in others, according to a report to be released Wednesday by antivirus software vendor McAfee Inc.

McAfee found the most dangerous domains to navigate to are “.hk” (Hong Kong), “.cn” (China) and “.info” (information).

Of all “.hk” sites McAfee tested, it flagged 19.2 percent as dangerous or potentially dangerous to visitors; it flagged 11.8 percent of “.cn” sites and 11.7 percent of “.info” sites that way.

A little more than 5 percent of the sites under the “.com” domain — the world’s most popular — were identified as dangerous. (link)

We’re hearing this from multiple sources: After nearly two years of high profile scaling problems, Twitter is planning to abandon Ruby on Rails as their web framework and start from scratch with PHP or Java (another solution is to stick with the Ruby language and move away from the Rails framework).

Former Chief Architect Blaine Cook famously said scaling Rails was “easy” in April 2007 (see image to right), but problems persisted after Cook claimed to have conquered the problem. The service most recently had a three day outage affecting their largest users. (link)

While current browser share estimates for Apple’s Safari web browser hover somewhere in the 4.5 percent range, Safari is attracting some unwanted attention from PayPal, the eBay-owned payment company. PayPal is urging its users to ditch Safari and instead use alternative browsers such as Internet Explorer 7, IE 8, Firefox 2, Firefox 3, or even Opera.

The reason for the warning is Safari’s lack of anti-phishing technology. Currently the Apple browser does not alert users to sites that could be phishing for your info, and it lacks support for Extended Validation. PayPal is, of course, a popular site among phishers in their neverending search for personal information, user IDs, and passwords. (link)