First off is the news that a new “highly critical” security flaw has been found in the Jet database found at the back end of many a Microsoft application. Along with this months obligatory highly critical” Internet Explorer security flaw (3 actually). For those who prefer non Microsoft applications, OpenOffice have just announced that they too have a security flaw this month which can be taken advantage of via a specially crafted .doc file, a patch is in the works. Speaking of patches, if you run Windows Update sometime soon, you should begin downloading a raft of new security patches for Windows including 5 that are critical. Everything from Windows TCP/IP to Exchange gets a look in this month.

W3schools has updated their website browser statistics, and the good news is that Firefox has jumped up another 2% in the past month to just a tiny bit less then 24 percent of their overall visitors. The 2% seems to have primarily come at the cost of Internet Explorer 5 and 6. At HTMLfixIT we have shown a similar increase in Firefox usage in the past month, which in our case brings Firefox up to 38.68% and Internet Explorer 5 and 6 down to 49.8%. Internet Explorer still has the lead, but it is closing rapidly. Of course both of these websites are targeted to tech related subjects, so naturally these percentages would be much lower for the general population, but it is still significant growth and indicative that the reports of Firefox only being used by early adopters is false logic. (especially when you consider that Firefox itself has been downloaded 40 million times now.) Even if you don’t use Firefox and have no plans to try, you should consider this a good thing because if there is only one browser, there is only one choice, and the Internet standards would then be at the whim of a convicted monopolist. Choice is a good thing, we should encourage it, particularly as web developers. (To see HTMLfixIt’s browser statistics, look down the right hand side of the page you are reading.)

INSERT: As of today (12th April) Firefox is just a tad under 45 million downloads. Further proof that this isn’t just a gimmick but true sustainable growth.

ICANN, the “god” of internet names has approved two new top level domain names, .jobs and .travel as of April 8, 2005. There is great speculation whether the public really will get behind the use of such names, but one need not think further than airline.travel or cruise.travel to see how easy it might be to snag a great name that is easy to remember. They designated a “registry operator” for each of the domain names. They will then in turn presumably license some registrars (currently under construction … for .travel for example) and you can be off to the races fighting over your .travel (second quarter of 2005 it says … but that is now) or .job domain name.

Icann is considering numerous other top level domain names including: .CAT, .POST, .MOBI, .ASIA, .MAIL, .TEL, and .XXX. We are all for the latter, if all xxx content is then relegated to that top level domain name. Would that not be perfect? Anyway, the first three are further along in discussion.

All sorts of issues are raised by allowing top level domain names to be controlled and registered by private companies such as these. How do you verify the integrity of the process when it is time to get a drop on names. I personally am not that fond of big goverment, but some things, like this, should in my opinion be controlled by a neutral agency. And if you are going to do it, why aren’t you up and running when the time comes and ICANN approves you? Unfortunately that isn’t the way it goes. This is all about money and there are millions to be made and taken as a result of decisions like these.

First item today is the news that Intel has put in place plans to put advertising into PC and later Xbox and Playstation games. Apparently we will be seeing the same sort of thing from Coca-Cola, Dunkin Doughnuts and others as well. The question that springs to mind, is: “If Game makers are raking in big advertising dollars, will game buyers see some of that money in the form of cheaper prices (or free ad supported games), or is this just a way to inflate profits without benefit to users?” Advertisers have proven once again that if a medium can contain content of value, then it can (and should in their minds) contain advertising as well. Lets hope consumers benefit from this shall we?

In other news, Microsoft has taken a leaf from the Wikipedia free community driven web encyclopedia. MS is adding the ability for users to submit corrections and additions to MS workers for editing before possible inclusion in Encarta. Since Wikipedia is a FREE community driven effort and Encarta is a proprietary offering from a convicted monopolist, nobody seems to think it is at all likely that Encarta will garner a huge group of contributors like Wikipedia has. Apparently the new features have security implications for Microsoft’s subscription service.

I’m not going to go into a big anti-Microsoft PR FUD diatribe here, I think this ZDNET column speaks volumes all by itself. Somehow “Microsoft could lose up to 10 percent of mid-sized business customers to Linux in the next three years” when reported to the public became: “Linux Fails in Small Business Market“. How is that for creative PR work folks? You can see why they earn the big bucks right? As the saying goes, there are Lies, Damn Lies, and then there are Statistics. Read this little ZDNet snippet by Dana Blankenhorn as it says everything I would have only better. Techies are not supposed to listen to reports like these, these babies are destined for the CIO/CEO’s of the corporate world that don’t know any better. So before you believe everything you read, ask your resident geek for a reality check first. Microsoft is already losing to Open Source software in the webserver market by roughly 65/25%, so contrary to reports of this nature, a good many companies are running Linux or other OSS Operating systems. Just apparently not many of the ones asked by info-tech. There are some interesting snippets from that article though. Here’s one: “Of the respondents only 27 per cent runs Linux inside their organisation.” I’d prefer to word that as: “WOW!, 27 percent of mid-sized businesses are running Linux inside their organisation.” 27% is amazing when you consider how quickly Linux as risen to “enterprise capable” status. I’ll leave the conclusions to somebody smarter than myself, except to say that something smells seriously fishy.

INSERT: Joe Barr of Newsforge has written about the mis-representation of the facts in the original survey that tried to imply that Linux was stalled in mid sized enterprise. Turns out that these guys are the only ones that believe that to be the case and I believe IDC far more then Infotech. So should you.

With all the recent stories about people being fired for blogging about their work, it is becoming important that people realise that there may be repercussions for their online actions unless they take the relevant steps to protect themselves. To that end, the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) has put together a nice list of the things you can and should do to keep your job and your blog. Well worth the read.

Robots.txt is hardly new and is almost as old as the net itself. Having said that it is very handy when it comes to making sure that the search engines only spider the parts of your site that you actually want to show up on search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN, Altavista etc. You can make your own robots.txt file with a text editor, or you can use this handy online tool from Webtoolcentral. With the reports coming in about security flaws and data mining happening via specially crafted search engine queries, it makes more sense then ever to ensure that you limit what information people can dig out of search engine indexes. It can also be handy for limiting bandwidth caused by excessive spidering as I found out yesterday.

I’ve been trying to work out why so much of our normally sufficient bandwidth was suddenly getting used up for no immediately apparent reason. After much searching, tcpdumping and access_log watching, I discovered one of our hosting clients had a huge directory of video and music files, some of which were 250MB in size. It turns out much of the traffic was actually search engine bots downloading them, presumably to add to one of the new video searching facilities the search engines have all jumped on. After crafting a nice robots.txt and adding code to my download manager program to block search engine referrers from downloading the files, the bandwidth usage has dropped dramatically. It turned out that one of the worst offenders was ConveraMultiMediaCrawler, which showed up almost continuously in the access log. With my robots.txt and my modified downloader, none of the search engines can access those video and music files unless configured to allow it. Robots.txt may be old tech, but don’t let that make you think it isn’t a useful tool. It should be added that for it to work, the bot in question has to support the robots exclusion standard, but all the big ones do and that ensures you can control where your information ends up.