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Networked Blogs
Jul
30
Internet DNS Threatened?
Filed Under internet, life online | Comments Off
Is the way the internet translates friendly URLs — such as ChristopherHedges.com into IP addresses (this website’s IP address is 208.109.149.107, for example) — that send people to websites threatened by a flaw that the bad guys can exploit?
The New York Times reports that IT people and ISPs are rushing to fix their DNS servers before the information about the exact problem is released to the public.
The potential consequences of the flaw are significant. It could allow a criminal to redirect Web traffic secretly, so that a person typing a bank’s actual Web address would be sent to an impostor site set up to steal the user’s name and password. The user might have no clue about the misdirection, and unconfirmed reports in the Web community indicate that attempted attacks are already under way.
One easy solution computer users can do for themselves right now if their ISP hasn’t responded to the threat is to switch to Open DNS, reports the New York Times.
Jul
28
Some former Google employees escaped from the Googleplex and have opened up their own shop named Cuil (pronounced “cool.”)
Motley Fool says that there are some things in favor of Cuil:
Cuil reportedly looks through more pages on the web than does Google meaning that you might find something someone searching Google might not — three times more pages than Google and 10 times more than Microsoft’s search engine are indexed by Cuil.
Also, Cuil doesn’t keep track of what you’re searching for — everyone searches for some silly stuff on the net, but it isn’t cool when someone figures out you’re looking for strange items on the web.
I’m with Motley Fool’s prediction that Cuil — if it is all that it says it is — will end up being snapped up by Microsoft or Yahoo or maybe even Google itself.
