New publishing tools make it easier than ever to get into “blogging” – the hottest trend in communication on the Internet.
Terra Lycos last month introduced publishing tools to help people launch their own blogs. America Online is expected to offer a similar service to its 35 million subscribers later this year.
These tools promise to take blogging out of the underground into the mainstream.
Google, the maker of the Web’s most popular search engine, recently purchased Pyra Labs, which runs the biggest network of weblogs – with more than 1 million members, including 200,000 running active blog sites.
Blogging is spreading largely because of inexpensive blogging software that is designed to make it easy for just about anyone to publish an online journal. No technical skills or knowledge about computer coding are required. Organizing blogs doesn’t require much thought or labor because the software automatically sorts things in a chronological sequence, starting with the most recent entry and working backward.
California-based Google hasn’t provided specifics about its future blogging plans since buying Pyra Labs for an undisclosed amount in mid-February.
In a posting on Blogger’s website, Pyra Labs said it decided to sell after concluding “there were some sensible, cool, powerful things that we could do on the technology/product side with Google that we couldn’t do otherwise.”
Because blogs tend to focus on specific subjects and attract people in similar demographic groups, some believe they could be a hit for advertisers hoping to target their pitches.
It would have been unthinkable under the Taliban, but now liberated Afghanistan has its own domain suffix – .af.
The Internet was actually banned under the rule of the Taliban regime – a government that harbored and supported the al-Qaida terrorists who attacked the United States Sept. 11, 2001.
Domain suffixes are the equivalent of a country code for telephone numbers. The .af suffix has now been reserved for private and official e-mail and for Web users in Afghanistan.
All nongovernmental use of e-mail services and websites was punishable by death during the rule of the fundamentalist Taliban.
Afghan expatriates, acting privately, registered the .af domain at the time. The first websites officially registered under the new domain are the sites of the Communications Ministry and the local unit of the United Nations Development Program.
A new worm that leaves behind two Trojan horse programs has begun spreading over the Internet and may be paving the way for a crippling distributed denial of service attack.
Although the experts are not yet rating the Deloder worm as a high risk to PC users, the technical make-up of the Trojan horses it leaves behind is of concern. They consist of a commonly used piece of network administration software called Virtual Network Computing and an Internet Relay Chat bot, or remote-access Trojan horse.
The VNC component allows attackers to connect to an infected system and control it as if they were in front of it. They have full access through a graphical user interface.
The IRC bot, when activated, connects to a remote server and waits for commands, which could mean that infected systems are going to be used for a distributed denial of service attack.
This worm, unlike others such as Klez, requires no user interaction to spread – it exploits common passwords, such as “password” and “computer,” in share directories in Windows NT/2000/XP machines and hence spreads automatically.
However, because the virus attacks through weak share-directory passwords, the effect on corporations has been minimal because share directories are typically firewalled.
