St. Petersburg Web Design Blog

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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Sun Microsystems said on Wednesday that it will pay $1 billion to buy MySQL, the provider of a popular open-source database.

In case you’re not a Web Developer (because if you are you are certainly at least familiar w/ mySQL), MySQL is thew most common open-source databases out there. It’s the database behind most custom web applications and many of the open-source web applications out there like Joomla, Drupal, almost every blogging system (wordpress, etc.), php-Nuke and many many others.

MySQL CEO Marten Mickos had previously said that the company intends to go public rather than be acquired. Its business model is to give away the source code and its database for free, and to charge customers an ongoing subscription fee for support and services.

read quoted news story

The Federal governments General Services Administration tried to shut down all of the state government pf California’s web sites after a CA county’s (Marin county) web site was hacked and reportedly was redirecting people to a porn web site. The Federal government says they feel they are responsible for every web site that ends in .gov Not just the domain nmaes that end in .gov but the websites content as well evidently.

There are 2 scary elements to this:

1. The feds were unable to take down all sites located at domans that end in .ca.gov like it wanted it too.
2. They were so inept that they felt that this was the way to deal with this problem instead of just taking down the one site.

For those of you reading this that own web sites but don’t manage themselves. Don’t worry, this is a much easier thing to fix that the government made it look. Prevention is obviously crucial (another area the feds are lacking in, obviously), but if the the unthinkable happens in can fixed in less than 10 minutes.

St Petersburg Web Design and Florida Data Services have been good to me! Dream Designs by Texx Smith has just finished a huge data project for a contractor in the “My Safe Florida Home Program,” now it’s time to re-focus on expanding our client base.

As the Owner and Lead Project Manager of Dream Designs by Texx Smith, new clients are one of my favorite parts of the business!

Each client has a need for a new solution. It’s true, most of them want a web site for marketing purposes (nothing wrong with that), but each client has different things to say with their web site and their own take on marketing. Sometimes it’s adding a video (and/or making it), sometimes it’s making something so visually stunning people will just have to be impressed.
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