Month in Review - February 2005
The news month of February was highlighted by evolving technology, security issues, and a couple of controversial business moves but the month started off with a historic business move from Sun Microsystems with their $1/cpu-hr computing offer. 2MHost celebrated their 4th anniversary while Intermedia.NET celebrated it's 10th.
Microsoft made big news by open sourcing their Office file formats and releasing their new MSN search. Bill Gates this month became
Sir Bill as he was given the honorary title of knight by her majesty the Queen of England. Bill is the third American to receive the title after Ronald Reagan and George H. Bush. Positive Technologies rained on Bill's parade a bit this month by exposing 2 security flaws that allow code to be run on a users computer without their compliance.
Mozilla's FireFox enjoyed a good month as the browser continues to gain market share although at a slowed rate despite Secunia's reporting of an
IDN implementation flaw that allows hackers to spoof URLs in the address bar. Later in the month Mozilla released
FireFox 1.0.1 to fix the problem which drew criticism from international users because the fix involved removing support for IDN entirely.
Go Daddy made news again this month, offering free
SSL certificates for open source projects as well as becoming the fastest growing
Certification Authority.
February was a big month for technical advances as Intel created a new technique to build lasers from standard silicon could lead to computers that move data at the speed of light although the new technology will not be ready for commercial use for 4-5 years. Not to be outdone, industry rival Hewlett-Packard created a
crossbar latch system at a molecular level which will shrink the size of a standard computer to as small as 2 nanometers while current transistors are spaced at 60 nanometers apart.
"We are re-inventing the computer at the molecular scale," said Stan Williams, HP Senior Fellow and QSR director. "The crossbar latch provides a key element needed for building a computer using nanometer-sized devices that are relatively inexpensive and easy to build."
In other tech news, GlobusWORLD is set to host a
conference on grid technology. Grid computing enables the virtualization of distributed computing and data resources such as processing, network bandwidth and storage capacity to create a single system image, granting users and applications access to a pool of IT capabilities.
200 Paul Avenue was awarded
SAS 70 Certification. Developed by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AIPCA), SAS 70 (Statement on Auditing Standards) is an international standard used to measure the reliability of a service organization's internal controls and auditing practices.
Netcraft rated
DataPipe named the most reliable web hosting network during the second half of 2004.
Spamhaus called out
MCI as a prime host for spammers and estimated the company made upwards of $5 billion from the illegal enterprise last year. HostSearch contacted Virginia police about the matter seeking comment but were told by police officials that "they do not give legal advice". Alls well that ends well however, MCI was eventually forced to boot malware distributor Send-Safe.com from their servers.
Internet legal watchdog Ben Edelman saw his Globat hosted
site go down for several days in a 600MB+/second DDoS attack after posting an article to his site about spammers. Then security firm Netcraft's site also went down briefly after reporting the Ben Edelman attack although Netcraft declined to respond to inquiries on the downtime.
In more business news, Verizon opened up a new
$25 million call center and Site 5 reported a 100% increase in their customer base.
Canadian web host RackForce booted the
Supporters of Shareeah site from their servers after they were made aware of a connection with Al Qaeda.
