Something strange happened on Monday to my photoblog, In Photos.org. It disappeared off Google’s radar and traffic has dropped like a stone since.
Category Archives: Web
Is RSA encryption broken?
First spotted on the ILUG mailing list, it appears that a young 16 year old student has cracked the RSA encryption system and won 1st prize at the BT Young Scientist Competition 2007.
If it’s true then Internet commerce could be in for a rough time, but some previous winners have proven to be less than remarkable when seen against the cold light of day. This comment from the winner, Abdusalam Abubakar, seems to indicate that the method used might not be that effective either. Check out this ILUG thread for further discussion. Can it be true he wrote it in Visual Basic?
“It was great, unbelievable. I didn’t think I was going to win anything. I didn’t want to be optimistic,” he told The Irish Times last night. Abdusalam, whose name translates into “man of peace”, based his initial work on partially successful attacks on the world’s most widely-used encryption system, RSA, mounted by two mathematicians. He decided to take the best aspects of both and generalise a new approach, which he believes has the potential to tackle at least some less complex coding systems.
The strangest invoice ever
Just moments ago I received the following in an email. Searching for the companies mentioned doesn’t return anything useful or suspicious so I thought I’d post it here in case anyone else got it too.
**Electronic Invoice** Date: January 5, 2007
To: From: Massimo Ferranti AllWebCo Delfo Italiana Srl 180 Juniper Avenue Via Varese 9 Satsuma, AL 36572 Muggio, MI 20053 Italy Item Description Rate Amount
———————————————————————–
Annual Hosting denav.com $599.40/year $599.40
————————————————————————
Tax (0%) 0.00
– Balance Due when rendered – Total $599.40Total Paid $599.40
Balance Due $ 0.00********************************************
AllWebCo
To change the credit card we bill for your account:
https://plus40.safe-order.net/allwebco/cc_change.shtml
–=============–
To pay through PayPal:
http://allwebco.com/paypal-payment.htm
–=============–
To pay by electronic check, please use the following secure url:
http://www.allwebco.com/icheckpay.shtml
–=============–
Please make any checks payable to AllWebCo, and mail to:
AllWebCo
180 Juniper Ave.
Satsuma, AL. 36572
–=============–
If you have any questions regarding your billing, please
email Billing@AllWebCo.com********************************************
Moments later I received a thank you email in response to payment of the invoice. The mind boggles.
Hi,
Thank you!
We have received your new billing information and have renewed the annual
hosting for denav.com.Total cost $599.40.
Have a wonderful day,
Kendra
AllWebCo
Irish Blog Awards on March 3rd
The second Irish Blog Awards will take place on the 3rd of March in Dublin. Damien wants to know if you’re going so leave a comment on his post if you’re interested. I have yet to make up my mind but there’s already a number of comments left and it will probably be even bigger than last year!
If your company is looking for exposure in the blogging community, there are a number of sponsorship slots still left to fill. More details on the page linked above.
Is my competitive ad filter broken?
I have noticed adverts from a particular domain listed in my Adsense competitive ads filter are still appearing. I understand it might take several hours for changes to the filter to become active, but 4 days?
creativeinterview.com has been on my list since the 22nd of December but I still saw it appear on the Love Messages post on my photoblog.
Google, is something broken?
Update! It appears I’m not the only one with this problem.
Bah, it happened again on 2006-12-30. An advert for 1helpon.info/filmxfilm appeared on my site despite 1helpon.info being in my competitive ad filter for ages. Grrr.
Nothing left to read
My aggregator is empty. Things are quiet on the Internet and I’ve finally clicked and scanned through every one of the 230+ blogs in my Bloglines account.
But no, that’s not true. I opened The Dilbert Blog in a new tab for further reading because Scott Adams always seems to have something that will catch my attention and imagination.
That’s the dilemma I face. Many blogs have only one or two posts before I get to read them. Usually I can scan through them quickly. On an (almost?) daily basis Scott writes long lengthy essays on everything from free will, to religion, to the war in Iraq and to hypnotism that I find irresistible so I always skip “The Dilbert Blog” because I know I’ll be sucked in and spend the next several minutes reading and wanting to blog about at least one of his articles. Scott’s posts are gone once I click on another blog, but the rest of them are crying out for attention too! What is one to do?
I put the Online Photographer in that category as well.
A good blog, like a good book, is something you can get lost in and forget yourself in. It tickles your brain cells and gets you thinking. What blogs do you put off reading until you have quality time to really enjoy them? What are the blogs you know you can’t read by skimming over them?
Linkbaiter of the year 2006
Funnily enough, I bought an issue of Time magazine today in which someone is complaining about the white covers of recent issues and expressing the hope that the person of the year cover would have a little more impact.
Little did they know that Time would become linkbaiter of the year by naming everyone on the Internet as person of the year for 2006! More on Techmeme, Copyblogger and lots of others.
Time still has a white cover however!
Moved home last night
This blog moved home that is, I’m still tucked up in Blarney!
I moved to a slightly more beefy linode 200 VPS at linode.com and thanks to Michele at Blacknight the dns changeover took place quietly and unobtrusively last night around 1am. Hopefully you’ll see a slight improvement in page download speed which should improve over the next few days as I tweak settings and give MySQL more memory.
Conference Hijacked by French Politics
It hasn’t been a good time for the organisers of Le Web 3 in Paris, France. First of all their WiFi was down or sketchy and while that’s simply an annoyance and is a terrible reflection on the WiFi provider surely things couldn’t get worse?
They did. In place of the advertised speakers, two French presidential candidates spoke. Wasn’t this conference supposed to be about web technology? I can’t wait to see what they do next! How will they better today’s fiasco? I would certainly be looking for a refund, especially if I had travelled from abroad.
Worse than that, at a conference where the majority of the delegates were not French, the two political candidates addressed the audience in French (and Sarkozy didn’t even take questions).
How to blog in Cork using free wifi
It’s hard to believe, but despite the really bad uptake of broadband services, or perhaps because of it, Ireland leads the way in WiFi hotspots!
Last week I had the pleasure of using the free WiFi services in Douglas shopping center to make a post on the Mallow Camera Club site. I had half an hour to kill so I popped into O’Brien’s, bought a coffee and a biscuit and settled down. I wasn’t the only one taking advantage of this generous gift. I spotted three others seated at various points around the library tapping away on their laptops. It’s something I never imagined I’d see! Yes, yes, yes. If you’ve enjoyed the use of free WiFi in your city this won’t be anything new, but this is in the “Celtic Tiger” economy where nothing is free and everything is over-priced.
So, next time your significant other is popping down to the shops, tag along. They might have free WiFi and it’ll do you the world of good to get out from behind that desk! I’m waiting for retailers and restaurant owners in Blarney to realise that free access to the Internet would draw all the self-employed Internet geeks out of their homes and into their establishments. I wonder how hard would it be to drop that hint …