Networking & Internet

The news stories all contend that the THESEUS research project is aimed at competing with Google in the search engine space, but the THESEUS website says otherwise:

“THESEUS is a research program with the goal of developing a new Internet-based infrastructure in order to better use and utilize the knowledge available on the Internet. Using the standards and basic technologies (“semantic toolbox”) developed by THESEUS on the Internet, the users will also be able to produce and edit contents, rules, and structures themselves, as well as edit, collect, and link multimedia contents intelligently. Connecting today’s Web 2.0 with its open, interactive, and social network philosophy with semantic methods will turn the Web into the Internet of the next generation (Web 3.0 = Web 2.0 + semantics).”

Sounds a bit more than just a ‘search engine’ to me. If you read some of the news stories, blog entries and in particular, the comments, you will see what sounds like contempt that anyone could dare to compete with Google, or perhaps fear that they might succeed. C’mon folks, competition helps to drive technology to newer and greater heights. And if it’s done with a little help from a government entity – in this case, the EU/Germany – so what? Governments have (and still do) funded way worse things, but that’s another topic for another day.

via TechCrunch.

NETGEAR today announced worldwide availability of its Gigabit-speed Storage Central Turbo (SC101T), the next-generation of its bestselling storage area networking (SAN) product line.

Storage Central Turbo is the industry’s most versatile and affordable networked storage solution for simultaneously sharing and protecting digital assets such as music, photos, videos, HD movies, and data files. It enhances the end-user experience via faster SATA disk drives, greater flexibility and secure mirrored data protection. It functions much like a locally attached USB disk drive, but remains accessible from several Windows PCs on the network.

Learn more about the product on Netgear.

Ugh. The W3C has launched a new working group to look into a new version of HTML, v5. According to this well-written article, lobbying for an HTML 5 spec was pushed by Apple, Mozilla & Opera among others. I can’t say that this thrills me. We’re now at the point where XHTML (and CSS) has taken a nice hold on the Web and browsers are supporting those standards pretty well. It seems like we’re approaching a pretty decent uniformity in that department after years of having to code differently for multiple browsers. HTML 5 is looking to introduce tags like section, article, and footer among others. As one commenter pointed out, and I agree, this seems to be a return to specific meta tags that blurs content and presentation.

Granted there are some interesting and possibly useful new features like form validation, but why do we need to go back to HTML for that? What do you think?

Some estimates of Internet mail traffic put spam around 80% of all emails being sent. My personal knowledge for several very large corporations show that number to be low as I’ve seen numbers anywhere from just above 80% to as much as 97% of incoming mail being marked or dropped due to spam.

It will be interesting to continue checking spam logs as Robert Alan Soloway, a 27 year old spam king, was arrested this past Wednesday and has been accused of sending billions upon billions of spam emails using technology known as botnets. Botnets have become popular with spammers over the past few years and are software robots that are relayed commands by a Bot server to send spam. The largest known botnet had 1.5 million nodes. These nodes are made up of compromised computers usually of home owners with high speed Internet.

A Microsoft lawyer said Robert Soloway is one of Internet’s top ten spammers. Unfortunately, businesses would contract Robert to drive more traffic to their web sites. While this is a legitimate business in itself, the spam king would spam his collected addresses unbeknowst to the client.

How can the average home Internet consumer protect themselves? First you need to understand how the spammers gain your information. Spammers get email addresses by buying your name from a list, opt-in lists, email extractors which scour the web, brute force attacks called MX server extractors, viruses, spyware and malicous code. To protect your primary email address, use a separate email address from Yahoo! or Google for posting to sites or in forums. Never post anything on the Internet with an email address you don’t want spammed. Opt-in to lists sparely and to sources you trust like Yahoo!, Amazon and Gizmos for Geeks. Finally, protect your machine with antivirus utilities and spyware utilities. Your machine will run slower and you’ll have to pay for yearly service, but that is the cost of playing on the Internet. You can protect your machine by not loading software downloaded off the Internet or sent to you in email unless you are positively sure the downloaded application or game is valid and spyware free.

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