St. Petersburg Web Design Blog

Cyber Monday is coming. Cyber Monday is the first day of the online holiday shopping season. It begins the Monday after the Thanksgiving holiday.

Your competition is ready. 84 percent of retailers plan some sort of special online only promotion fot this season. That’s up from 72 percent last year.

The shoppers are ready. Last year, Internet research firm comScore Inc said U.S. buyers spent $733 million on Cyber Monday, up 21 percent from the prior year. Forrester Research said this autumn that U.S. online sales are projected to grow a mere 12 percent — their lowest-ever jump since online sales have been tracked.

You want some of that business don’t you? You want your competitors to have less of that don’t you.

So why haven’t you contacted me yet?

Fewer young Americans have Internet access than their peers in the Czech Republic, Canada, Macao and Britain, a survey of 13 countries around the world showed.

Among 12 to 14 year olds, 100 percent of British youth use the Internet, followed by Israel at 98 percent, the Czech Republic and Macao and 96 percent and Canada at 95 percent, according to the World Internet report by the Center for the Digital Future.

By contrast, only 88 percent of Americans of the same age had access, trailed by Hungary and Singapore, where more than seven in 10 young people use the Internet.

source: Yahoo Tech

In the war against free speech on the internet the Telcos are quietly winning. Here’s the latest blows:

• In December, Rogers Communications ( a Telecommunications and Internet Service provider), essentially hacked Google, adding a message to Google’s home page that appeared to it’s customers that where getting close to the ISP’s bandwidth limit.
• Comcast has admitted to blocking file-sharing traffic. link
• Comcast is discovered to blocking non file-sharing software as well. link
•      – BTW, the methods they use are illegal (packet forging and/or spoofing) are not just illegal but felonies (each act) under federal law.
•      – Ironicly, comcast reported this story on their own site, I quess they are proud of their censorship efforts
• Time Warner/AOL blocked e-mails from and to subscribers that were critical of thier “pay-to-send” (a method that ensure that spam will reach AOL users for a fee) email plan. link
• Verizon prevented the abortion rights group Naral Pro-Choice America from getting a “short code” that would allow the group to send text messages to supporters. They claim they have a right to block anything they’d like.link
• Comcast blocks other companies VOIP traffic a few days before they begin offering their own VOIP services for twice as much as others. link
• Telus (an ISP in Canada) blocked 766 websites in an effort to block one Pro-Union web site during a lock-out by the company. link. NOTE: This is a very extremely sloppy and lazy way to block one site.
• AT&T cut off the webcast of a Pearl Jam concert just when lead singer Eddie Veder was critical of U.S. President George Bush. link

The Telco’s argument in justification of all this is twofold as is their battle plan:

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The Church of Scientology, whom has their worldwide headquarters near St Petersburg Florida, in Clearwater Florida, has has their official web site hacked. On Jan 19th a group of hackers, naming themselves “Anonymous” knocked the Church’s Web site offline with a distributed denial-of-service attack.
A “Distributed Denial of Service” (DDOS), attack is one of the most common types of attacks against well guarded web sites, servers and computer systems. When it’s an attack against a web site, it involves having millions of computers request a web page over ad over again. So many of these requests come in that the machine that hosts this file cannot keep up with these requests and does nothing. It’s hard to block because of the distributed part, which means it not several computers in one location but computers from all over the world.
How do they get people from all over the world to sit in front of their computers and request pages from the same web site over and over again? They don’t! That where spyware, viruses and trojans come into play. Software containing these forms of malware are installed on millions of computers all around the world when their users install them unknowingly by opening the wrong e-mail attachment, visiting the wrong web site or installing software that has been knowingly (or unknowingly) infected with these programs. This malware then gives the infected computer to start requesting a certian web page over and over again starting on a certain date (usually).
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