The Hypocrisy Weblog

cnet’s web 2.0 blog, “Webware” has announced it’s Webware 100 winners-list. The question is now; how is this list relevant to anyone in the Internet-business? Each and every category, 10 of them, has 10 winners each – and each and every site on the top 100-list anyone who’s involved in working with the Internet (in any way) have heard of.

The categories are; Browsing, Communications, Community, Data, Entertainment, Media, Mobile, Productivity and Commerce, Publishing, Reference.

Surely, it is a good ego boost for the people behind the services to get recognition, but does it serve any journalistic purpose? I am not so sure about that; Rafe Needleman and the Webware crew are preaching for the already saved. There is no internal ranking of the sites in the individual categories – so how do I as a visitor know which site got more votes than the other? (Yes, alright – they do have a list of the over-all top 10 and the sites that got over 1000 votes, though it doesn’t show the internal ranking in between the sites within each category. Perhaps the over-all statistic material wasn’t enough?! I don’t know…)

From my own perspective I am glad that the swizz army-knife-like site Netvibes, which deserves more media coverage – as it is a really nice service to keep track on all your communication needs ranging from rss-feeds (sites, forums, email, blogs etc), to email, to skype, to.. yeah – you get the idea.

Google was the company with most services in the top 100-list, yet this is not surprising as they are the biggest site on the Internet.

To the Webware authors; Please make the list more detailed the next time and get a broader statistic foundation (aka get more people to vote on the list), then we’re talking about a relevant list.

Via slashdot: xseedit writes “The RIAA has moved their main Web site www.riaa.com from IIS on Win2003 to Apache 2.2.3 on Red Hat. It appears that the move did not go smoothly as it resulted in an 8-hour downtime starting yesterday around noon, according to Netcraft. And the RIAA is still showing a ‘temporarily under construction’ page. They also moved their DNS from the small company that had been hosting them for the past 4 years, Tomorrow’s Solutions Today (TST Inc.), to Mindshift Technologies. One can only guess what happened here, but the move seems to have been sudden and unplanned. They still haven’t moved the riaa.org, riaa.net, and musicunited.org domains — those are still pointing to the TST nameservers that no longer accept queries for those domains. TST Inc. deserves credit, however. They seem to have managed to host the RIAA quite successfully for the past 4 years. Will Mindshift do a better job hosting one of the most reviled, and therefore most attacked, Web sites in the world? I wonder if anybody at the RIAA or TST would care to comment on the reasons behind this sudden move. Could it be that the RIAA is being sued by its hosting provider? Or perhaps the sue-happy organizaiton is suing its provider?”

As seen above, RIAA’s website has moved both server environment as well as ISP (Internet service provider). Comments on slashdot express the irony they see of RIAA moving from the closed-source environment being Microsoft Windows Server 2003 to the GPL:ed ditto of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.RIAA is probably one of the prime targets for various attacks (code, ddos, dos) on the Internet, and the move to a more resilient environment such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux was probably a necessity in the end. Also, one can figure that they grew out of the resources that their old ISP, Tomorrow’s Solutions Today, could provide.

What do you think was the reason for switching both server-environment as well as ISP?

After the Mac-hack contest announced by CanSecWest in April, Apple has been a popular target to find security flaws in. I should think that the more a brand sell, the more popular it is to hack…

However, the Safari-hack must’ve broken some kind of record as 3 minutes after the public beta of Apple’s Safari-browser for Microsoft Windows was released, self-proclaimed security-expert Aviv Raff found a serious bug in Safari which will make the browser crash and much possibly open up the browser for exploits.

Raff was clearly unhappy with Apple’s claim that Safari was designed to be “secure from day one” (he called this claim “pathetic”) but he said he wasn’t particularly going after Apple. “I don’t pick just on Apple,” he said. “I’ve posted about Microsoft and Mozilla issues too.”

It is not clear if this flaw exists on the Mac OS-version of Safari.

In other words; Do not think that you’ll be secure just because you opt-in for Apple OS X (or Ubuntu, or… yes, you get it). Apple, in this case, has been having security-issues with their products. An example of that is their multimedia player Quicktime, where serious vulnerabilities went for weeks without being patched.

Via PC World