I read a Twitter post earlier mentioning Google’s public DNS service, and suggesting that it could displace the popular OpenDNS
I thought it would be interesting to do a performance comparison between Google and OpenDNS, to see how they compare. I also decided to include the nameservers of my ISP, Virgin Media, to illustrate whether there are performance gains to be had by changing to OpenDNS (which I primarily use, along with others) or Google, or whether staying with defaults works. Continue reading ‘OpenDNS vs Google – speed comparison’
I still receive occasional newsletters from Heart Internet, after trying out their free web hosting a long time ago (actually, I seem to recall it being a plan to mirror some content there, and never actually getting round to it).
Anyway, their latest newsletter sings the praises of their new “generic Nominet TAG”:
Previously, because of Nominet’s rules surrounding the registration of .uk domain names, we have had to register our reseller’s domain names through our Nominet tag, HEARTINTERNET, thus potentially exposing ourselves to reseller’s clients. Not any longer! We have now added an additional Nominet tag to our control panel for our resellers to use called EXTEND. This allows all our resellers to register domain names or transfer domain names through a generic tag, helping maintain their brand’s integrity.
I’m not exactly sure how this is helpful – instead of your clients seeing HEARTINTERNET they see EXTEND; it’s still not your brand, and Nominet’s tag list page still clearly identifies the tag as belonging to “Heart Internet Ltd t/a eXtend”.
(I was however amused by the wording of “potentially exposing ourselves to reseller’s clients” – that’s probably something best avoided! 
)
And the Guinness World Record for failing at Internet PR goes to… Guinness World Records Ltd.
Recently, FAIL Blog posted a story with a screenshot of the Guinness World Records website, showing the record for “Most Individuals Killed In A Terrorist Attack”. Underneath details of the record, was a link cheerily inviting the reader to “Break this record!”.
It’s clearly a standard part of their site template, but was amusingly unfortunate appearing on that particular record.
However, in a show of complete lack of humour and PR, Guinness World Records Ltd decided to send the owners of FAIL Blog a legal bluster email stating that the GWRL logo is trademarked and demanding that it be removed from the page in question.
I’d like to think that use of a company’s logo when talking about them would be covered by fair use, but fair usage is increasingly murky and hard-to-define legally.
FAIL Blog have decided to comply by blurring out the GWLR logo, but I can’t help thinking GWRL have really shot themselves in the foot by bullying FAIL Blog into removing the logo (even if the GWRL name wasn’t mentioned, you’d easily guess).
This is how *not* to do PR in the Internet age, folks.
Just found Facebook Chat for Pidgin – a plugin for the popular Pidgin (formerly Gaim) multi-network IM client.
It allows you to chat to your friends on Facebook using Pidgin rather than the little chat widget on the Facebook site, and supports showing the profile picture and current status etc too. Very nice stuff.
Here’s a story I just posted at work about Network Solutions holding domains to ransom:
It appears that Network Solutions are immediately registering all domains searched for. In what I consider a highly shady move, Network Solutions have started immediately registering domain names when customers search for them via the Network Solutions website, and holding them for 4 days – effectively meaning that if you checked whether it was available using their domain search tools, you now have no choice but to buy it from them, locking out all other registrars.
I tested it by searching for network-solutions-stole-my-domain.com which was previously untaken, and within minutes, they’d registered it – see a whois lookup for confirmation.
Continue reading ‘Network Solutions holding domains to ransom’
It seems that, as of February 2008, Netscape Navigator will no longer be developed. Netscape may not be popular any more (certainly nowhere near the ~80% share they had in their heyday) but the Mozilla project owes a hell of a lot to the original Netscape codebase.
Netscape are recommending that all remaining Netscape users should move to Firefox – sensible advice
So, farewell Netscape, commendations for playing a big part in the spread of the Internet (even if the 4.x browsers were often a real PITA for web developers), and RIP.
It may be just coincidence, but shortly after I wrote about John Burns from Monster.ie spamming a load of Irish IT pro’s, I’m now getting quite a few phishing mails purporting to be from Monster. They don’t have a plain text part, and interestingly purport to have been sent using Sylpheed on Linux:
X-Mailer: Sylpheed version 0.8.2 (GTK+ 1.2.10; i586-alt-linux)
The mails contain content like:
Dear Monster (Jobs & Careers) member,
Monster Technical Department requests you to complete Online Employer Form.
This procedure is obligatory for all clients of Monster.
Please select the hyperlink and visit the address listed to access Online Employer Form.
It could of course just be a co-incidence, but it seems strange that I’m receiving this now, shortly after making a post about Monster. I do have an account on Monster – I’m a little concerned that my account may have been one of the ones which fell into the hands of attackers in Monster’s recent data security breach (for more info read [1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6]).
Sidenote: Monster.ie head honcho James Mailley issued an apology for the whole spamming fiasco.
UK2 asks "What scripts have you found most useful during the last year?"
Ditlev from UK2 is trying to put together a list of the most popular scripts & web apps and asks for feedback on your favourites – whether it’s WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, phpBB, phpMyAdmin, SquirrelMail or any of the thousands of scripts out there, go and cast your vote
Updated my DNS propagation tracker, so that you can specify a set of nameservers to query rather than using a random set, or enter a domain to query the nameservers listed for that domain (useful if you want to check that all nameservers for your domain are giving the same answer).
Here it is: DNS propagation tracker
Recently I’ve received a number of spams where it looks like the spammer hasn’t set up their spamming tool properly, containing just placeholders:
06/03/2007 (13:53 GMT +03:00)
1.0
Content-Type: text/html
Date: %CURRENT_DATE_TIME
%MESSAGE_BODY
C’mon, if you’re going to spam a message to thousands of people, at least test it first!
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