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I’d like to wish everyone a Merry Christmas, a happy new year and a positive 2009!
From myself and the RedGalaxy Team.
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Over the last month I’ve seen far too many complaints from users of Facebook - currently the world’s largest social networking site. The complaints have been sparked by Facebook’s development team launching a new design which, apparently, is a usability nightmare.
Personally I don’t see any issues - in fact once you get used to it I find it much more appealing and a lot faster to load, especially when viewing profiles. But one thing which concerned me a little was the discovery of a group on Facebook telling users how they can get the “old Facebook” back.
It relies on the user downloading Firefox 3 if they don’t already have it (you should do this anyway if you don’t use it - it’s a fantastic browser!) Once downloaded, they must embark on a full-scale challenge installing programs and changing settings on their computer. The instructions provided mentioned emulating Internet Explorer 5.5, which can only spell trouble. Microsoft’s IE5.5 was released back in 2000 and there is clearly something in this browser stopping the new design from working.
While following the instructions is all well and good, it means the potential for many of today’s websites to stop working is very high due to technologies developed since IE5.5 was released.
My advice? Take some time and get used to the new Facebook design. The Internet is an ever-changing world and nothing can stay the same forever.
The Register today reported that one of The Planet’s 6 data centres has plunged into darkness, taking 9000 servers and 7500 customers down in a massive outage caused by, they say, a transformer exploding and causing a fire in their electrical equipment room.
Fire crews disallowed the hosting company’s Houston-based centre from activating their backup generator plan, so whilst they have established their network and server equipment has suffered no damage, their customers are left unable to access websites, email and other facilities.
The Planet are posting hourly updates to the situation on their forum, so if you are a customer affected by their H1 data centre outage, please get the latest information here.
RedGalaxy UK offers website hosting at fantastic rates, offering quality service from friendly and helpful staff. If you’d like to find out more about what we can do for you, please contact us today!
There are ways of blocking content found on the Internet. Child safety software, filtering built into routers and firewall equipment. Even good ol’ Internet Explorer has the capability to some end. While these are all viable ways of stopping users of a particular machine or Internet connection accessing content, it clearly doesn’t work in favour of government bans.
Unfortunately, Pakistan went about it the wrong way on Sunday when they caused a 2 hour near global blackout on popular video-sharing website YouTube. The ban was ordered by Pakistan’s government in response to the posting of a forthcoming Dutch movie trailer portraying Islam negatively; to enforce the ban it’s alleged that Pakistan Telecom “hijacked” the Internet address of YouTube’s web server. What effectively happens is you can route traffic to a completely different address, display a different website and disable access to the intended website.
The details of the “hijack” were leaked onto the Internet by PCCW, a Hong-Kong Internet provider, and as a result many other ISPs worldwide blocked access to YouTube.
YouTube’s owner Google has since confirmed that Pakistan has lifted the country-wide ban and full service has been restored.
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