Archive for April, 2010

• Did the humble PDF get too complicated for it’s own good?

  by Webfusion in Tech News on April 27th, 2010 Post a comment

  Nobody can deny that Adobe’s Portable Document Format has been a massive success since being created in 1993. The versatility  has proven vital in developing cross-platform communications and our ability to leave tomes of paperwork at home, replaced by a simple PDF on a USB stick.

  However, this month the newswires have again been filled with reports of how PDF viruses pose a risk to cyber-security. The latest findings suggest that malicious PDF files could be used to infect previously clean PDFs. On his blog Jeremy Conway – a product manager with Nitrosecurity – reveals that by using a program launch action to trigger embedded code, “PDF files that have been stored on the user’s computer for years and are trusted, could now house any sort of badness and/or evil I chose to update them with”.

  Adobe, responded with a reminder that the warning message accompanying the pop-up dialogue in Adobe Reader advises users to only open files from a trusted source but it does call into doubt the previously perceived safety of the PDF, particularly after F-Secure revealed last month that Adobe Reader had been the target of nearly half of all malicious attacks in 2009 – overtaking Microsoft’s Word.

  Yet, perhaps the vulnerability of the format is a result of over-ambition of a format developed to create a document that didn’t re-format depending on the font you had on your computer or the version of an application you had loaded. The PDF was designed for uniform presentation of the document however and on whatever it was viewed or printed. It was effectively the digital equivalent of the photocopy that you could carry in an electronic form in your pocket or send via email.

  Modern developments of the format however now allow plug-ins, embedding and full multi-media functionality that increases usefulness and appeal of the format but also the vulnerability to attacks. While awareness of the security risks associated with PDFs might be raised, the still-common assumption that PDFs are safe might just be its own undoing. Perhaps it is time to go back to basics, creating a new simple 2-D document representation format and leave the gimmicky bits elsewhere for those that want them?

• All the .info you need

  by Webfusion in Domains on April 21st, 2010 1 Comment

  If you are in the business of creating websites it is highly likely you aim to create an informative internet resource – so why not grab a domain name that promotes just that.

  .info is a top-level domain name that was explicitly created for unrestricted use, you don’t need to be an educational establishment like a .edu or a government entity like .gov.

  A .info opens a world of possibilities and with our Spring offer you can save yourself money too.

  For just 88¢ you can move into the world of .info – saving yourself over $9.

  Hurry though, the offer ends April 29 2010.

• Is it possible to make sense of real time search?

  by Webfusion in Search Engines on April 14th, 2010 1 Comment

  Real time search results, that show what people are saying ‘right now’ on the ‘live web’, has been a battle ground for search engines in the last 12 months.

  The battle has been stoked by Twitter, whose platform has made the whole concept possible.

  Google and Bing moved quickly in 2009 to surface results from the latest news, blogs and reviews, and both ended up doing a deal with Twitter to feature Tweets in the Search Engine Results Pages.

  Real time didn’t live up to the hype

  Once the Twitter Integration went live on Google, tweets to and from brand owners (like webfusion) started to appear at the top of the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) for brand searches. The reaction to this change was mixed. To users, it wasn’t always useful to see what brand owners were talking about on Twitter – it distracted them from simply navigating to the brand’s website. And for brand owners, it was a potential hazard – Twitter conversations aren’t ones you necessarily want to air to newcomers.

  Drawing attention to an eye-tracking study from oneupweb, the Guardian in the UK said that users started to ignore the content.

  It seems that Google in particular found it very difficult to decide which Tweets were important, and flooded its own results with fairly useless information.

  Twitter is trousering significant revenues from the deal. Until their own advertising platform takes off, they’re going to want it to succeed.

  After a few days of Twitter results appearing high in the SERPs they almost all disappeared, and now its not easy to find them at all.

  Something that needs more discussion

  This was a topic covered at Search Marketing Expo SMX West in California. The major search engines said they were continuing to try and work out which queries to show results for, who’s Tweets were important to show, how to work out what was relevant, and how to get rid of spam.

  Enter some new players

  To try and answer these questions there are three search engine start-ups, who might just be able to show where ‘real-time’ can add value.

  CrowdEye.com: This search engine just features Tweets, and uses a ‘CrowdRank’ algorithm to decide which are the most relevant Tweets and links. Users can filter the results by time, and shows hourly tweet volume in the last three days.

  Collecta.com: Allows you filter by many different things, including photos, blog posts, blog comments, videos and status updates,

  Topsy.com: Applies ideas from both the above, allowing users to filter by source (photo, web, tweets) and by time and relevance.  It lets you look a lot further back than the last three days too.

  Real time search hasn’t been worked out yet, but these start-ups seem to be making a better fist of it than Google and Bing.

  Is real time search here to stay? Is it useful? Leave us a comment below.

• Mozilla report features some quirky stats

  by Webfusion in Tech News on April 8th, 2010 Post a comment

  This week saw the first ever Mozilla Quarterly Analyst Report, focusing on the “State of the Internet”. The Mozilla Community behind the thriving open source Firefox browser and Thunderbird email client can expect a quarterly report from now on from the Mozilla Metrics team “capturing the state of the internet as seen through Mozilla’s eyes”.

  As you would expect, there is plenty of shouting about the Firefox ever-increasing market share “hovering near 30%” but there are also some quirky stats too like “People start their work day earliest in Hawaii and Wyoming” while contrary to the belief of a ‘city that never sleeps’ the “latest start to the day is in New York”.

  We are promised more of the quirkier facts in every report and in the knowledge that “people in Antartica love add-ons” it might be worth looking out for. Whether the report might also spurn a new entry in the Guinness World Records Book is yet to be seen, although the participant in the opt-in part of the study who had more than 600 tabs open at one time in their browser might be first in line if it does.

• Top executives should be involved with cyber-policy

  by Webfusion in Tech News on April 1st, 2010 Post a comment

  CEOs, Chief Financial Officers and other top level executives should be involved with cyber-security decisions and not just leave it to IT according to a report published by the Internet Security Alliance (ISA) and the American National Standards Institute (ANSI).

  The latest report: The Financial Management of Cyber Risk – An implementation Framework for CFOs cites a review of cyber-policy released by President Barack Obama’s administration in May last year that reported $1 trillion worth of intellectual property was lost to US businesses to cyber attacks between 2008 and 2009. With further potential losses due to theft of personal information and the almost unquantifiable loss of customers to add to that, the financial risk of in adequate cyber-security could be fatal to a business.

  Larry Clinton, president of the Internet Security Alliance (ISA) commented: “We believe if we can educate American organizations about how much they’re actually losing, we can move to the next step, which is solving the problem,”

  Pooling the thoughts of a diverse range of cyber security experts, recommendations coming out of the report including appointing a cyber-risk team, develop a cyber-risk management plan across all departments and develop a company-wide cyber-risk budget.