IBM has a significant presence with both organisations, and it has probably had a role in encouraging both organisations transititions to Linux.

Users of collaborative spam detection systems such as Vipul's Razor, are quite well protected against these fradulent mail attacks, as early recipients of the message will report the message, and subsequent recipients will not even see the message in their normal mail routine.

However, the steadily increasing numbers of well heeled, but technically unsophisticated people making use of internet banking are greatly at risk to this type of attack. Although the mail below is aimed at Barclays customers, similar mails targeting the customers of National Westminster, the Halifax Bank and the brokerage T D Waterhouse have been reported during the past week, and every bank and brokerage can reasonably expect that their own customers will be targeted, as the potential of emptying out large numbers of people's bank accounts is so attractive to criminals, and the fact that some banks have taken their sites offline may indicate that they are seeing a volume of suspicious withdrawls.

Leading the charge is Go Daddy, which over the past two years has emerged as the pacesetter in the domain name market. Go Daddy's shared hosting business has grown rapidly since August 5, when it beefed up the account features on its hosting plans and cut prices to as low as $3.95 a month.

The netblock listings indicate that all of these sites are outsourced by Sun, and it may be the case that the more the company outsources, the harder it is to avoid their sites running on Linux rather than Solaris.

The DDoS attacks appear to have targeted Internet Haganah, which seeks to identify web sites with terrorist links and then lobbies hosting providers to shut down the suspect sites. Internet Haganah operator Aaron Weisburd says his site was targeted by Al Qaeda sympathizers, while reps from Hosting Matters declined to identify either the target or attacker. Hosting Matters was flooded by up to 150 megabytes of data per second on Oct. 16, leaving most clients offline for much of that day and again on Oct. 20 and 21.

Baltimore was an early evangelist of enterprise Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) and briefly a FTSE-100 company during 2000. Although its business has considerably reduced in size, the www.baltimore.com site, which Alexa ranks in the busiest 50,000 sites on the internet, will have seen a considerable volume of traffic since it was last rebooted.

A French court last week fined Google France 70,000 euros (a little over $80,000) for allowing advertisers in its popular AdWords program to buy text ads tied to French phrases for "travel market" and "airflight market" which had been trademarked by two travel agencies, Luteciel and Viaticum.

Netcaches are reasonably expensive devices, and internet-wide we find only around a thousand in use as reverse proxies. However, one of these devices is at GoDaddy and serves content for in the region of 1.4 million template sites and redirects for domains registered by GoDaddy.

Many of the NetApp installations are well known and prestigious sites, including Nokia, Motorola, and Sony. Apple's mac.com and the US 8th Army in Korea are also users as is The Gap, where the Netcache is itself fronted by a Redline Network Accelerator.

A table of the Hosting Providers who grew the fastest over the 6 months to October 2003 is provided below. Companies are included in the filter if they started April 2003 with more than 10,000 active sites (as this removes those which grew simply through starting with a small base), and had growth of more than 50% over the period.

As often, opinions in the hosting forums are all over the place on the impact of 1&1’s offer, ranging from” the end of the American hosting industry as we’ve known it” to “they’ll close within a year”.

It was surprising how many people in the US hosting industry simply hadn’t heard of 1&1. In terms of hostnames found by the Web Server Survey, 1&1 is the largest hoster in the world by a margin, and hosts fully 18% of the hostnames in Europe, making it plain why they felt the need to expand into the US.

After August, which contained the Blaster Worm, the SoBig Virus, and the North East US/Canada power outage, September was a much more benign month for the internet, with the top two sites showing remarkable reliability.

Just one of the 2976 requests made from our five performance measurement points to the British Telecom site failed, and only two out of 2976 requests failed to the Dell Host site.

These are the most reliable statistics that have been posted to date on a calendar month basis, and also the first time that a site running Windows has been placed top.

However, Verisign was not the first TLD operator to think of wildcarding their domains, and we already maintain a mechanism for preventing hostnames that resolve to the ip addresses of these wildcarding systems from being included in the survey.