The ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) board has approved the addition of a .xxx TLD (top level domain) for use by the porn industry. We saw the announcement about the approval of the XXX TLD in PC World. It looks like it will take a while to work through the process of formalizing the approval of the domain and it appears that the registration … [Read more...]
Lots of Deprecated Features in PHP 5.3 Will Break Web Sites
Many older sites written in PHP as well as many newer sites that evolved from older legacy code will find their sites broken when their servers are upgraded to PHP 5.3. That's because many older PHP functions and INI directives are now formally deprecated (made obsolete) in version 5.3. This will not just affect ancient web sites written with very old versions of PHP. Many … [Read more...]
Google Introduces Page Speed Tool to Improve Site Performance
For years people have tried to figure out how Google manages to produce lightning fast search results from the huge amount of data that they have to work with. They are still not giving away all of their secrets, but they have a released a free tool and a set of web site develoment "best practices" to help web site owners improve the performance of their web sites. … [Read more...]
FileZilla Alert – Hacker Threat Through Trojan Virus
We have recently seen a number of issues posted in forums that are related to hacked web sites where it appears that a Trojan virus infecting a site owner's PC may be sending FTP information to hackers. The common thread appears to be FileZilla. If you are using the FileZilla FTP utility, this is potentially a very serious threat to your web sites. We have seen … [Read more...]
LCD HDTVs May Dominate as Plasma Manufacturers Drop Out
February 12, 2009. This week two major manufacturers of plasma HDTVs announced that they are dropping out of the business. Both Pioneer and Visio announced that they are leaving the market for high definition plasma screen displays. While Pioneer was a major at the high end of the market, Visio worked the low end with low cost plasma HDTVs. Both found the market for plasma … [Read more...]
DTV Day Delayed
Most Americans should be aware that DTV Day, or the day almost all USA television broadcasters turn off their old analog transmissions and switch to the new digital signals, has been delayed until June 12. But about a third of the approximately 1,800 television stations have already made the switch to digital. Hawaii already made the switch to all digital transmissions in … [Read more...]
Norton Internet Security May Be Disabling E-Mail
For months people have been reporting strange problems with Mozilla's Thunderbird e-mail client. I have maintained that the problem is not likely to be Thunderbird, but is more likely to be related to a user's ISP or a Windows issue or a firewall blocking access. I think I have found and verified at least one potential source for the ongoing issue with either inbound or … [Read more...]