While there are many free and inexpensive web hosting companies available to choose from on the Net, hosting reliability along with access to 24/7 technical support should be weighted among the most important considerations when making a selection over and above price. After all, when it comes to your business, especially if you engage in e-commerce activities, you don’t want to take the chance that your site could experience interrupted or lost service (which could translate into lost money/customers) due to exceeded bandwidth, simply because you opted for free hosting.

The other main advantage to electing a paid web host is the fact that their services are bound by standard terms and conditions. In other words, you know exactly what you’re getting. Most web hosts typically offer three or more different packages depending upon the sophistication of a given website’s design along with a user’s preference for security features. More complex designs and users who desire heightened security preferences can be expected to be billed at higher rates. With that said however, the majority of web hosts offer both monthly and annual payment options.

If you can find a web hosting company such as, Netpros.ca , that also offers domain registration and parking (ie: the purchasing of a domain for holding purposes while your site remains under development) even better, as it can get quite confusing dealing with many small-but-related services through different companies, especially when it comes to billing. Furthermore, a web host that also offers domain registration can act as a one-stop shop if you’re looking to purchase and host sub-domains related to your main area of business in the future.

Package-wise, the following is a list of important features and related considerations to compare:

1. Bandwidth: How much traffic does your site generally experience?
2. Disc Space: Is your site media heavy and/or does it have interactive features?
3. Email: How many personalized (if any) domain-associated email addresses will you require for your site? Does your hosting package include newsletter mass email campaign capabilities?
4. Domain Parking: Is this included as a free feature when you register a domain?
5. E-Commerce: Does your hosting package include software that enables you to sell your products or services? Is the software easy to use?
6. Billing: Is there an automated billing option?
7. User-friendliness: If login is required to access your web hosting services, is the layout user-friendly and easy to navigate?

Once you’ve asked yourself the above questions, you’ll be in a better position to make an educated choice. Reputable companies should have no problem responding to any further inquiries or concerns you may have in regard to their services.

A “customized” experience? Well, that doesn’t sound too bad…at first glance. After all, as a consumer living in fast-paced distraction-heavy North American society, wouldn’t it make sense to be able to cut through the crud and get to the goods actually of potential interest to you, without any effort exuded on your part for that matter? Further, considering that marketing has become so pervasive in society it‘s literally impossible to block out PR messages even in one own’s home, it’s not as though this seems like anything new. “Seems” however is the key word in that sentence.

In the good old days, you could always just shut the door or hang up the phone. The difference in modern times is distinct: the average Internet user is completely oblivious to the fact their surfing history is being tracked, let alone sent to various companies, without their knowledge or consent.

As the study revealed, “More than half of the 185 high-traffic websites looked at shared a consumer’s username or user ID with another site: signing up on the NBC website shared a user’s email address with seven other companies, while viewing a local ad on the Home Depot website sent a user’s name and email address to 13 companies. Google, Facebook, comScore and Quantcast were among the top recipients of username and user ID information.”

Jon Leibowitz, Chairman for the Federal Trade Commission stated that although the FTC has no intention of disallowing marketing companies from participating in “behavioural advertising”, the protection of consumers’ online privacy is at the forefront of their concerns. Irrespective of this, legislation put forth to allow consumers to enable a “do not track” option in regard to their Internet use has seen limited success, thus far.

On the upside of things, users of Mozilla’s Firefox and Google’s Gmail can be somewhat alleviated from “cyberrazzi paranoia” as both companies have recently taken independent steps to protect the privacy of their users. While Mozilla has released a “do not track” feature customers can activate by visiting their Internet Browser Privacy Options, signed in Gmail users will automatically be re-directed to an encrypted search form (check to see if the url begins with “https”) to enable anonymous surfing.

John Simpson, Privacy Project Director for the non-for-profit organization, Consumer Watchdog, is among those pushing for the approval of “do not track” Internet use legislation.

Just days after the aforementioned incident, Spain arrested three Anonymous hackers in connection with attacks on Sony’s PlayStation Network, governments, banks, and others. Retribution followed quickly, with an Anonymous attack that reportedly took a Spanish police department off the Net.

The attacks take the form of a distributed denial of service (DDoS), which involves a coordinated flooding of a Web site with traffic via specially-crafted network tools.Security firm Sophos said the Turkish attackers apparently used an attack tool called LOIC (Low Orbit Ion Cannon) that isn’t terribly anonymous:

“LOIC…doesn’t do a very good job of covering your tracks–making it potentially easy for computer crime authorities to track those behind the attacks.”

A loose group of angry hacktivists is only one force spotlighting the Net’s vulnerabilities today. The International Monetary Fund suffered, what was reported over the weekend to be, a major network breach. Google said it disrupted a plan the company said originated from China to break into Gmail accounts. It’s open season for hackers.

One person’s illicit hacker might be another person’s sanctioned military authority, though. The United States and United Kingdom increasingly talk of cyberwar as just another facet of ordinary war.

Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20070818-264/turkey-arrests-32-after-anonymous-web-attacks/#ixzz1PC4G0dD5

The effort includes secretive projects to create independent cellphone networks inside foreign countries, as well as one operation out of a spy novel in a fifth-floor shop on L Street in Washington, where a group of young entrepreneurs who look as if they could be in a garage band are fitting deceptively innocent-looking hardware into a prototype “Internet in a suitcase.”

Financed by a $2 million State Department grant, the suitcase could be transferred across a border and quickly set up to allow wireless communication over a wide area with a link to the global Internet.

The American effort, revealed in dozens of interviews, planning documents and classified diplomatic cables, obtained by The New York Times, ranges in scale, cost and sophistication.

Some projects involve technology that the United States is developing; others pull together tools that have already been created by hackers in a so-called liberation-technology movement sweeping the globe.

The State Department, for example, is financing the creation of stealth wireless networks that would enable activists to communicate outside the reach of governments in countries like Iran, Syria and Libya, according to participants in the projects.

In one of the most ambitious efforts, United States officials say, the State Department and Pentagon have spent at least $50 million to create an independent cellphone network in Afghanistan using towers on protected military bases inside the country. It is intended to offset the Taliban’s ability to shut down the official Afghan services, seemingly at will.

The effort has picked up momentum since the government of President Hosni Mubarak shut down the Egyptian Internet in the last days of his rule. In recent days, the Syrian government also temporarily disabled much of their country’s Internet, which had helped protesters mobilize.

The Obama administration’s initiative is in one sense a new front in a longstanding diplomatic push to defend free speech and nurture democracy. For decades, the United States has sent radio broadcasts into autocratic countries through Voice of America and other means. More recently, Washington has supported the development of software that preserves the anonymity of users in places like China, and training for citizens who want to pass information along the government-owned Internet without getting caught.

But the latest initiative depends on creating entirely separate pathways for communication. It has brought together an improbable alliance of diplomats and military engineers, young programmers and dissidents from at least a dozen countries, many of whom variously describe the new approach as more audacious and clever and, yes, cooler.

Some say the State Department is simply taking advantage of enterprising dissidents who have found ways to get around government censorship. American diplomats are meeting with operatives who have been burying Chinese cellphones in the hills near the border with North Korea, where they can be dug up and used to make furtive calls, according to interviews.

The new initiatives have found a champion in Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, whose department is spearheading the American effort: “We see more and more people around the globe using the Internet, mobile phones and other technologies to make their voices heard as they protest against injustice and seek to realize their aspirations,” Mrs. Clinton said in an e-mail response to a query on the topic. “There is a historic opportunity to effect positive change, change America supports,” she said. “So we’re focused on helping them do that, on helping them talk to each other, to their communities, to their governments and to the world.”

The website continued to grow worldwide, hitting an all-time high of 687 million users, according to data from the tracking company Inside Facebook, which uses Facebook’s own advertising tools to determine the number of people using the site every month. Growth slowed however, having risen by 13.9m accounts in April and then just 11.8m in May. Typically in the past year it has grown by 20m a month. That slowdown could thwart founder Mark Zuckerberg’s ambition to reach 1 billion users worldwide, despite his prediction last June that “it is almost a guarantee that it will happen”.

Growth in Facebook use seems to peak in any country once the site is used by roughly half of those who have internet connections, though with more than 2 billion people online worldwide, the site could still reach the 1 billion figure. However, it would need people who have joined the site to stay with it…and that hasn’t been happening in some countries.

Magnus Hoglund, Chief Executive of the Law Media Portal, Law360.com, who has worked on digital media companies for the past decade said: “From my experience, I get the sense that being on Facebook is not cool anymore. The early adopters and trend setters are moving away. [But] these are also exactly the type of people brand advertisers want to reach; if they are leaving, it doesn’t look good for Facebook.”

The site has been criticised in the West for its approach to users’ privacy, with repeated protests about the way in which controls on data access are relaxed. Last week, the revelation that it had extended an automatic facial recognition system for tagging photos beyond the US without asking people if they wanted to opt-in, drew criticism from privacy groups and security consultants.

The drop in use was most marked in the US, where numbers fell from May’s 155.2 million to 149.4 million at the start of June. It marked the first time in a year that the number of people logging onto the site over a month had fallen.

In the UK, the fall was smaller at around 100,000 users to 29.8 million, or 58% of the 51.4 million people online. Canada saw a fall of 162 million to 16.6 million, while Norway also saw a fall of around 100,000 users over the month.The fastest-growing countries, including Brazil and Mexico, grew at a maximum of 10% over the month.

The fall in users is most evident in developed countries where Facebook first launched to the public in September 2006, after its first two years when it catered only to US college and high school users.

Eric Eldon, one of the researchers at Inside Facebook, said that it was hard to see how the social networking site could hit its 1 billion target except by getting into China, which has 420 million internet users but just 391,000 Facebook users as of March. The site has been banned in China since 2008, while cloned versions abound inside the country. Zuckerberg visited China in December 2010, which led to speculation that he was working on a way to get the site approved by the government, but there has been no further detail on whether that is happening.

Facebook still dominates the world in terms of social network use, with Russia and China as the biggest holdouts where home-grown networks are the most popular.

Hoglund added that following the stock market flotation of LinkedIn and Yandex and Groupon’s plans to go public, this summer could mark the high-water mark for media and technology market offerings as firms rush to cash in before their capital runs out.

Meanwhile, reports in the US suggest that Facebook may have to make a public share offering at the beginning of 2012 because it will have more than 500 shareholders. US securities exchange commission rules oblige companies to make a listing once they passed this threshold. Facebook did not respond to the Guardian on the issue.

Source

Statistics on browser versions gathered by StatCounter suggest about 17% need to change in the light of Google’s decision. Google made its announcement in a blogpost stating its engineers were keen to make use of the latest capabilities in browsers, and that required support for HTML5 technology. As a result, beginning August 1st, Google will only support what it calls “modern browsers”: by this, they mean only the latest versions and major prior releases of Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari.

As newer versions of these browsers are released, Google will get its web services working with them and then drop support for the third-oldest versions.”Support” in this sense means that Google will only do compatibility-testing with more up-to-date browsers and therefore cannot guarantee that web services will continue to work properly with older versions.

Concluding the blogpost, Venkat Panchapakesan, Vice President of Engineering at Google, wrote: “These new browsers are more than just a modern convenience, they are a necessity for what the future holds.”

In mid-May, Mozilla, which oversees the development of Firefox, kicked off a plan to get the 12 million or so people using version 3.5 of its browser to update. They said they were “frustrated” with efforts to get people to upgrade and had taken a series of steps to force change including: pop-up screens, adverts, re-directs and updates to steer people toward more recent versions of Firefox.Figures gathered by Mozilla suggest the campaign has had some success as the number of users on Firefox 3.5 has now dropped to about one million.

Microsoft’s campaign to stop people from using Internet Explorer 6 is one of the longest running upgrade efforts.The software giant has used an automatic update system to get newer versions of its browser out to many users.However, many companies prefer not to use this system and that has meant IE6 is clinging firmly among some businesses and nations.

Figures compiled by Microsoft suggest that “globally about 11% of browsers are IE6″, and there is wide variation around the world: about 34% of Chinese net users are on IE6, as are 22.3% of South Koreans and 11.6% of Vietnamese people.

Source: BBC