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CyberArtisans Web Developers Newsletter |  |
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Welcome to the August 2009 issue of the CyberArtisans newsletter! Each month we try to present information that will be useful to you as a website owner and as a user of the web. If these newsletters are useful, please forward this to a friend. To unsubscribe, follow the directions at the bottom of this email.
The recent attacks on Twitter and Facebook were what is called a Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attack. In a DDOS attack, thousands of compromised computers around the Internet are instructed to send a request to the same server simultaneously, effectively overloading it and usually crashing it. Since it can take hours to restore a complex system like Twitter, it is a crippling attack. However, the attack that knocked both services off the air may have backfired. It turns out the attack was aimed at the account of one specific user who rather vocally supports the Georgians in their "disagreement" with Russia. While aimed at that one account, the attack knocked the entire service off the air. The blogger blames the attacks on the KGB although others believe it came from a pro-Russian source that may or may not have had Russian government connections. As sometimes happens in these cases, however, the victim has emerged victorious, because his cause has gotten much more notice and press play than he could ever hope to get by himself. Let's see, if memory serves, an Animal House quote seems appropriate here: "Thank you sir, may I have another?"
Convinced that your passwords protect you well? Try these two sites to see if you're right. PasswordMeter.com and Microsoft Password Checker use different algorithms to rate a password's strength. For the most part they agree but occasionally one will pronounce a password strong while the other decides it's weak. While they both do a good job generally of evaluating passwords, they miss passwords that use obvious words. So for example, they both rate "M1cr0$0ft" fairly high even though this is so commonly used as a password as to be virtually useless. The Microsoft site also links to a site that shows you some ways to build strong passwords and offers some strategies to avoid when creating passwords. Just for fun, run some of your passwords through these sites — you may be surprised at how weak they are.
The idea that email may be becoming obsolete sounds almost ludicrous at first, but it is a concept that is being discussed seriously. Many discussions that used to be carried out on email are now being carried out on social networking sites or via forums on the web (yes, we know all you English majors think it should be "fora" but current usage has become "forums" and we will stick with that). Communication being a two-way process, people naturally gravitate to communication channels that produce the results they want with the least effort. For example one of our children almost never answers his phone but almost always answers text messages instantly. We have a choice: stubbornly insist on calling him (and not getting an answer for our effort) or texting him and getting a quick answer. Care to guess what we do? Similarly, many people pay more attention to their Facebook page than their email. Here the solution is a little more complex — do we send this person a private message via Facebook or do we post a message on Facebook and possibly involve lots of people in the conversation? The difficulty we see with media other than email is maintaining a history. We keep track of most of our projects via email exchanges with our clients, so it's easy to review the communications all the way back to the beginning of the project. We can do this with Facebook or Twitter but only if we record the conversation in a separate environment, which is a pain. We don't believe that email is going to disappear any time soon. But we do believe that other media is proving itself better for certain types of communication. Tech support, for example, can be handled quite effectively with Twitter (we are engaged in such a conversation now with one of our vendors). There's no need to keep a permanent record of the conversation and the response is often much faster than for email. Nonetheless, the handwriting is on the wall: Diversify your communications channels or run the risk of being left out of some important conversations.
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