Carbon emissions from computing looks set to overtake aviation, a UK environmental charity claimed today.

According to Global Action Plan, IT now accounts for 10 per cent of energy consumption in the UK.

Speaking at the House of Commons this afternoon, Trewin Restorick, the author of "An Inefficient Truth" report, said IT departments have been "incredibly slow to get off the mark" when it comes to reducing their carbon footprints.

He added that big name vendors had not been helping by using the environment as "a new marketing tool".

"I've seen a lot of green froth and hype from a whole bunch of vendors which are pretty hard to substantiate," said Restorick.

IT departments poised to fly past airlines on CO₂ emissions – Kelly Fiveash – 3 Dec 2007 19:55

The annual McAfee Virtual Criminology Report was released yesterday warning of a rise in international cyber spying, labelling it the single biggest threat to digital security.

McAfee estimates 120 countries are now using the Internet for Web espionage operations.

Cyber-attacks on private and government Web sites in Estonia in April and May this year were "just the tip of the iceberg", the report warned.

Estonia said thousands of sites were affected in attacks aimed at crippling infrastructure in a country heavily dependent on the Internet.

As well as communications, everything from stock orders, inventory checks, banking and salary payments are all made electronically the world over.

Ian Grayson suggests in his post "Email – what if the flow just stopped?", that we should not be relying souly upon digital records but also keep some back up methods of the traditional and papery kind, in the event that anything drastic should happen. At least business will be able to continue in some manner rather than completely grind to a halt.

Careful what you post online, be very careful.

Steven J. Murdoch , a security researcher at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory recently had his WordPress blog hacked. The hacker created an administrator account on the blog. However Steven quickly deleted it. He then began investigating how this happened. In the process of doing this he was curious about the password that the hacker used.

WordPress stores raw MD5 hashes in the user database. It is believed to be computationally infeasible to discover the input
of MD5 hash from an output. Someone would have to try out all
possible inputs until the correct output is discovered.

Steven looked at various lengthy methods of uncovering the password, but in the end he turned to Google. It seems that many sites use hashing for query strings. His search led him to a genealogy page with the surname of Anthony. Bingo, this was indeed the password.

More detail can be found in his original posting about Google as a password cracker.

Computer companies are on notice after the world's largest hard
drive manufacturer, Seagate, reached an out of court settlement, after
claims it had misled consumers regarding storage capacity.

The
class action, filed in a California court, claimed Seagate wrongly
defined one kilobyte as one thousand bytes, not 1,024 bytes, which is
regarded as the industry standard.

This results in a hard drive labelled as 1GB, actually being 73,741,824 bytes, almost 70MB, short of the mark.

theage.com.au 31/10/2007 

Here are some very sucinct tips for growing your website's reader base.

5 Things That Will Improve Your Web Site Traffic (Plus 1 to Avoid)

Webworker Daily – 9/10/2007

Harry McCracken writing for PC World plays it safe with his summation of Microsoft's latest action in his article "Internet Explorer 7's Slow Start".

A more cynical view would be that Microsoft's Internet Explorer is loosing large amounts of market share to their most serious rival Firefox. By allowing anybody to download and run Internet Explorer 7, including those with non-validated versions of Windows (pirates) the hope is that they'll pick up some traction. 

Looking at the satistics of a number of sites I host, which are quite varied in their audiences, I would conclude that IE7 doesn't have a chance. Firefox usage steadily continues to grow. All of these sites are now reporting 30% or more Firefox usage.

Times are changing, including the browsers. 

Firefox 3 is in its final stages of Alpha development with a host of new features and improvements.

Mozilla has unveiled for the first time several security features it's talked up for months. Among the security provisions are built-in anti-malware warnings and protection against rogue extension updates. 

Debuting is Places, the name given to the new unified history and bookmark manager. Unlike current browser bookmark tools, Places will use a database — the SQLite database engine powers it — so users can search for saved pages. Places will also support the use of tags, or user-defined labels that are applied to categorize bookmarks and make them easier to retrieve via searches.

On offer is also a new download manager that will integrate with third-party virus scanners and malware protection.

The graphical rendering of Firefox also gets an update with the Cairo rendering engine and animated PNG image files. The versatile Cairo graphics library is a vector-based drawing API that supports a wide variety of backends. Cairo can take advantage of hardware acceleration where available and simplifies cross-platform graphics application development by providing an internally consistent and cohesive framework that emphasizes platform-independence.

Thanks to this new graphics infrastructure, boxes with corners rounded by the pre-CSS 3 property border-radius are rendered with beautiful anti-aliasing (currently accessible as the non-standard -moz-border-radius and soon -webkit-border-radius). Cairo also provides smooth scaling of images. Up until now scaled images looked jagged.

The new improvements in Firefox 3 will finally enable it to pass the Acid 2 test, a CSS test case developed by the Web Standards Project to illuminate flaws in HTML/CSS rendering engines. To pass the Acid 2 test, browsers must comply with W3C standards and provide support for a wide variety of features that are considered relevant by web designers. The Acid 2 test has been passed by several other browsers, including Safari, Konqueror, and Opera, but not Internet Explorer. Passing Acid 2 is considered to be a significant milestone in Firefox development.

Firefox 3 has particular implications for the development of the Mac version of Firefox, as it provides support for the use of Cocoa Widgets.

One downside of Firefox 3 is that several older operating system versions are no longer supported: Windows 95, 98 and ME and OS X 10.2 Jaguar. 

Mozilla has not officially committed to a release date for the final version of Firefox 3.0. 

2Clix has withdrawn from a legal case against the founder broadband discussion forum Whirlpool. But it is not necessarily all is well that ends well. The legal question still hangs over Australian public forums as to who takes the legal responsibility for publically posted comments. This grey area still exists in the Australian laws.

Ever since news of 2Clix's legal action against Whirlpool founder Simon Wright first broke, the general opinion has been that it was, at best, a massive miscalculation. 2Clix's suit, which sought to have two threads discussing the effectiveness of its products removed from the site, instead resulted in global publicity of those threads. Those threads still currently dominate the top five search results for '2Clix' on Google, hardly a good outcome if you're seeking to minimise bad publicity. 

Companies that engage in such legal action against negative discussions need to also think about the flip side of the coin. If they can demand that negative comments should be taken down, then what if all of the positive comments go with them.

Yahoo recently began beta testing Mash, the company's experimental social networking web site. Mash (invite-only as of now) looks like a cross between Facebook, MySpace and Netvibes and it also has a bit of wiki DNA: Anyone you grant permissions to can edit your profile or add modules they think are relevant to your profile.

After being sucked into the Facebook vortex, I'm not seeking any further networks. Building these online networks is time intensive.

All of these social networks still haven't caught onto the idea is the user's information is their own, with people still being locked into their closed systems. Eventually an open source standard will come along and bust their model, allowing people to repurpose their data how and where they will.

A friend of mine, Julian Guppy, recently found himself deep in the bowls of Microsoft's London office to discuss a project. We had joked that he should wear his Linux penguin hat and his Firefox T-shirt. The T-shirt he did wear, but Julian's surprise was not at any reaction to his apparel, but to discover that even Microsoft employees use FireFox and it's host of web developer tools to debug websites.

It's a sad indictment of Internet Explorer and it's development tools, but a resounding endorsement for Firefox.

Here's my favourite list of FireFox plugins that make it the most indispensable web development tool I use:

• Firebug
• Web Developer's Toolbar
• ColorZilla
• Copy Plain Text
• IE Tab
• ShowIP