A new Virus is in town, it’s name is “searchmeup” and it is the first virus to make use of the image loading buffer overrun flaw found in Windows late last year. If your PC is unpatched for that exploit, you can be infected simply by visiting an affected website in Internet Explorer and loading a suspect image. You can also get infected by viewing a HTML email in Outlook and Outlook Express. The Virus can also download a Trojan horse or other malicious program onto your PC. Panda Software has written about the Virus and advises everyone to keep their anti-virus up to date, it’s also a good idea to ensure your Windows PC is fully patched. If you don’t have an up to date anti-virus application, head over to tips.littlehosting.com and grab yourself a free one. This virus affects Windows 2003/XP/2000/NT/Me/98. Mac and Linux are as usual, unaffected. Users of Firefox/Thunderbird are likewise unaffected. If your homepage in Internet Explorer suddenly changes, you should immediately run a Virus scan with an up to date scanner.

It appears there may be issues this year if you blog about political campaigns. C|Net has a story by staff writer Declan McCullagh that indicates a weakening of the Internet exception to the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, better known as the McCain-Feingold law. Previously, publishing a campaign link on the Internet was not considered a gift-in-kind to a campaign. It now may become one.

In a previous article we talked about the comparison of bloggers to press. The press can generally discuss a campaign or give a web address without it being deemed a gift in kind. However if XYZ Corporation put a link on it’s front page for a campaign, does that have value? Probably. What about a link from a blog? Does it matter if I advocate for the candidate or if I am discussing issues about the candidate or his/her positions? These are not new issues, having been discussed in detail in a 1999 publication titled: Square Pegs & Round Holes: Applying Campaign Finance Law To The Internet Risks To Free Expression & Democratic Values

If the Federal Election Commission is serious about getting after this issue, they should come up with some clear rules now. While ignorance of the law is no defense, the law should not be something one must have to find by divine means.

Nowadays there are a ton of tools on offer, all of which promise to revolutionize the search experience, there are tools for all the big search engines and many of the smaller ones as well. My own needs are much simpler, I don’t require any toolbar and don’t need local search as over the years I’ve learned practises that mean I know where any given file is, or at least where I need to look for it, I also don’t require a toolbar to access search engine functionality, I’m quite happy with the advanced search screen at Google and it serves me just fine.

However, sometimes you find something that enhances the experience in a way that is actually beneficial rather then just offering an alternative. I found such an enhancement today. It’s called Bettersearch and it is a Firefox extension that doesn’t provide an alternative interface to the search engines, it just enhances the standard interface. It does this by inserting a thumbnail image of the sites listed in the search results on the search page, allowing you to get a rough idea if the site actually matches your terms and is likely to be helpful or if it is just a saved page of search engine results from someone trying to game the search engines for advertising dollars, (something I’m seeing allot of nowadays). The extension does other things as well, but that one alone was reason enough to try it. The tool works with Google, Yahoo, MSN and more. Well worth the 20 seconds or so that it takes to download and install. Try it for yourself and see if I’m not right.

For those of you who wonder how Google manages to be so fast when they get so much traffic, you need to head over to Internetnews and read an explanation from one of Google’s engineers. Apparently the secret is to break big tasks into little tasks and spread them over multiple servers while making sure you have multiple backups of everything.

When is a monopoly not a monopoly? Why when you’re Microsoft and your desktop monopoly can’t help make inroads in Web server sales. While Windows accounts for the vast majority of the desktop world, that trend has not been of much use in making Microsoft’s Web server software (IIS or Internet Information Services) the dominant server software hosting Web sites . According to Netcraft Apache has taken another 2 percent of Microsoft’s web server market share this year so far, which gives the Open Source Apache a tiny bit under 70 percent (69.86%) of the whole shebang. Microsoft were found guilty of monopoly practices for among other things using their Windows monopoly to win the browser war against Netscape by giving Internet Explorer away for free as the default browser in Windows. They are now in trouble in the EU for doing the same thing with Media Player, and at some stage in the future may be in trouble for embedding MSN and related services into Windows as well. None of that helps sell Web servers though, which is why every month seems to see a little more of Microsoft’s web server market share go to the Open Source Apache, which is usually running on some form of Unix/Linux/BSD.

Last night while looking at msfn.org to put in my vote for Firefox on their poll, I noticed that the site was based on PHP, an Open Source language. Microsoft usually puts down anything with a GPL license at what seems to be every opportunity, so it seemed odd that a site for Microsoft developers runs on PHP, even if it isn’t’ an official Microsoft site. Then today Cnet put out an article speculating that MSN might be running on PHP and MySQL as well. The screenshot they show as possible evidence, shows the Brazil MSN with a PHP/MySQL error message displayed. I don’t actually think the image is anything but a fraud, because Netcraft shows that server as running Microsoft Windows Server 2003 IIS/6.0 and yet the file paths in the error messages seem to be Unix paths not Windows. Still, there has been long speculation that for a long time some Microsoft servers (like Hotmail) were running BSD and not Windows on the back end, so who really knows?

Yahoo have put up what they call a “Netrospective” site detailing the important things that happened on the Internet while they’ve been around as part of their tenth birthday. There are some interesting items in the list even if it is somewhat time consuming to navigate.

For one thing, look at the bottom row third from the right icon, it’s a pic of the Firefox logo and it talks about the past and current browser wars. (Yahoo recently released their search tool bar for Firefox) Other interesting aspects relate to Ebay, Amazon, Napster and other such companies that revolutionised the way people used the Internet. If you can put up with the DHTML or Flash presentation, it makes for an interesting look at the Internet from Yahoo’s perspective.