St. Petersburg Web Design Blog

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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).
Continue reading “Scientology Site get’s Hacked” »

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.

We just finished the Boat-Lift-USA.com site!

Check it out here:

Boat Lift Installations

Boat Lift Installer Directory

Hmmmm, Here’s cool trick to impress the Geezers with down at the local Pub!

Ok so there’s these people going around, giving out cash:

Why? Continue reading “Modern Day Robin Hood ?” »

More data pulled from the latest comScore Search Engine Report shows everyone the secret I learned when I worked at Verizon superpages.com. More people are using local search instead of a telephone book to find goods and services.

63 percent of U.S. Internet users (or approximately 109 million people) performed a local search online in July, a 43-percent increase versus July of 2005.

After all, compare the amount of info you would get if you looked up autos for sale on local.google.com or in the phone book. The phone book would just show some ads with general statements like “We sell the best cars!” local.google.com will provide links to local car dealers web sites where some one can view a map and directions to thier location(s), and perhaps even see some or all of the autos that are actually in stock!

What were they looking for?
59% were searching for a restaurant or other entainment venues
52% were searching for business phone numbers

What did they do after the search?
47% visited a local merchant after searching
41% made contact offline
37% made contact online

How many searches were made in last month alone in America?
More than 849 million local searches conducted in the US in July.