Traditionally, the end of an era is marked by terrible portents and cataclysmic events. As signs go, the sight of Sun's Scott McNealy exchanging banter (and hockey shirts) with Microsoft's Steve Ballmer might seem mild enough, but the shift it represents is indeed epochal.

The two companies come from very different backgrounds: Microsoft grew from the world of the first personal computers, Sun from workstations. But as their ambitions overlapped in the networked business world, Scott McNealy's strategy has been increasingly defined by his fierce and vocal opposition to Microsoft, especially once the latter took over from IBM as the driving force in computing.

This makes the cosying-up of the two companies extraordinary, even if the benefits of doing so are clear. Sun gets a couple of billion dollars, while Microsoft removes another troublesome competitor – one that had a dangerous tendency to call on national governments for help in its legal battles.

But most of all, both can take comfort from the creation of a united front against a common threat: GNU/Linux. Steve Ballmer gave the game away when he explained at the press conference where the Sun deal was announced that “it's an agreement that comes from two companies that believe in intellectual property, that develop intellectual property and that are respecting intellectual property.”

Red Hat remains the leading Linux distribution in use on the Internet, experiencing slight market share erosion in the first six months of 2004, but still showing a healthy net gain of sites under its new licensing structure. Debian and SuSE show market share gains among Linux distributions detected by our Hosting Provider Switching Analysis, while Gentoo has the fastest percentage growth rate.

The gains by Debian, SuSE and Gentoo have been helped by the continued growth of the hosting market in Europe, where these distributions have their largest users. Debian is now running on more than 1 million web-facing hostnames, showing particular strength among French service providers Gandi (72k hostnames) and Proxad (58.8k). SuSE, which is now owned by Novell, has its largest installations at German providers 1&1 Internet (174k hostnames)), Deutsche Telekom (97k), Evanzo (49k) and Intergenia AG (47k). More than a third of Gentoo's hostnames are housed at two European providers, Denmark's Forskningsnetten (6.1k) and Germany's Dotcom-server (5.6k)

That trend held true for June's largest gainer, domain registrar Go Daddy, which added 64K hostnames after five consecutive months of growth exceeding 100k hostnames. Germany's 1&1 Internet AG was next, continuing its relentless growth as it exceeded 4 million web-visible hostnames for the first time.

The Internet is under attack. More precisely, one particular way of using it is under threat: the decentralised, peer-to-peer (P2P) approach.

One piece of US legislation aimed at taming the rough vigour of P2P networks is called dramatically the “Protecting Children from Peer-to-Peer Pornography Act of 2003.” As its name implies, it views P2P as a sink of iniquity whose poisons threaten America's innocent youth. The P2P industry organisation P2P United naturally sees things differently, and suggests taking another approach to deal with the problem.

By comparison, the proposed US “Inducing Infringement of Copyrights Act of 2004” sounds quite innocuous, but as the accompanying press release explains, the targets are nonetheless “corporations distributing so-called ‘peer-to-peer filesharing software',” and their “truly malicious business model”, which entails “inducing” children to commit crimes by swapping music files. This has provoked some lively discussion, as well as a point-by-point rebuttal of the key ideas.

Although both Acts invoke the need to protect children to justify their new controls, the real impetus behind them comes from a very different imperative: to shore up a tottering music industry that is grappling with file-swapping on a massive scale (the leading P2P program has been downloaded over 350 million times). The legislation therefore forms part of a series of corporate assaults on P2P systems. The more recent proposal represents an attempt to reverse a decision handed down by a US court when it refused a request from the music industry to hold Grokster responsible for copyright infringement committed by users of its software.

Netcraft has the following vacancies; applications from outside the UK are welcome if supported by citizenship of an EU country or a current work permit for the UK and an excellent command of the English language.

Software Development Roles

Netcraft wants to recruit software developers to its team based in Bath, England. Projects involve working on a range of commercial services extending Netcraft's network exploration and internet security services.

Important attributes include;

• A broad knowledge of Internet technology, together with an attention to detail, and a desire to find things out empirically rather than rely on conjecture.
• A keen interest in network security, data mining, or web based user interfaces.
• Evidence of conspicuous achievement and a strong computing background, consistent with a first class degree in Computer Science.
• Expressive verbal and written communications skills.
• A well developed sense of precaution; a person who likes to plan for the future with suitable programming abstractions, automated test suites & version control, and generally feel that they are in control of their own destiny.
• Demonstrable programming ability and experience.
• Prior experience with any of MySQL, Perl (consistent with making effective use of the CPAN and developing web applications with Catalyst or mod_perl), Python, Ruby, Rails, Javascript, CSS, or Unix systems programming would be helpful.

Sales Positions

Netcraft requires additional sales people to sell its Internet services.

The role is based in Bath, and involves both account management and new business development, including generating prospects, responding to inquiries, proposal writing, and helping determine strategy for new services.

Candidates should;

• Provide evidence of prior sales achievement, and demonstrate that they have with the attention to detail and determination necessary to succeed in a competitive environment.
• Possess articulate verbal communications skills, and the ability to write well.
• Be likeable and candid, capable of building long term relationships with clients, and further extending Netcraft's high level of repeat business;
• Have a grasp of a broad range of internet technology, and an enthusiasm to learn.
• Be confident using contemporary office technology, including electronic mail, RSS feeds, Instant Messaging, Microsoft Office (Outlook, Word, Excel) and wiki.
• Fluency in languages other than English is also very much of interest.

A significant part of Netcraft's business is in the US, and time zone differences make it likely that a good chunk of weekday evenings is spent working.

Analyst

Netcraft requires an analyst based in its offices in Bath: periodic travel to client offices and industry events will be required.

The role would include producing content for news.netcraft.com, writing promotional and analytical content for Netcraft services & datasets, and responding to questions from customers, building up a wiki-based repository of explanatory information about Netcraft's services.

Candidates should;

• Provide samples of their technology writing and demonstrate that they can produce material which is lucid, informative, and above all, interesting and enjoyable to read.
• Articulate verbal communications skills.
• Be likeable and candid, capable of building long term relationships with clients and the media, and further extending Netcraft's high level of repeat business;
• Have a keen interest in Internet technology, and an enthusiasm to learn.
• Be confident using contemporary office technology, including electronic mail, RSS feeds, Instant Messaging, Microsoft Office (Outlook, Word, Excel) and wiki.
• Have an education consistent with a 2:1 or better degree and/or relevant experience in a role where writing about Internet technology is a core activity.

Graduates, Industrial Years, Summer Placements

Netcraft is very keen to receive applications from high performing Computer Science students wishing to work at Netcraft after graduation, or work here for an industrial year or summer vacation. Plenty of programming experience and some background in one of the above technologies would be required.

Netcraft is also keenly interested in applications from graduates for sales roles.

Making Contact

Send a cv to cv@Netcraft.com.

A table of the Hosting Providers who grew the fastest over the 6 months October 2003 to April 2004 is provided as an excerpt from our Hosting Provider Server Count. Companies are included in the filter if they started October 2003 with more than 600 servers, and finished April 2004 with at least 2000, and grew at a rate of 25% or better. This removes hosters which can show a significant percentage increase simply by virtue of being small at the start of the period.

Comparing with last quarter shows percentage growth down somewhat amongst the companies at the top of the list, although absolute growth in terms of servers is larger in this quarter.

Online betting sites have been repeatedly targeted by extortionists employing electronic attacks, including a series of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks at the outset of the Euro 2004 event.

Netcraft is monitoring the performance of twenty leading UK Internet Gambling Sites, with dynamically updating graphs available here.

During June all of the hosters monitored experienced an outage. Seeweb, an Italian hosting company, was once again the most reliable hoster, taking first place two months in a row. Second placed was the Pair Networks site.

This month the operating systems of the top 10 hosters was very mixed and varied, with three running Linux, three FreeBSD, two Windows (Myhosting.com on Windows 2003 and ExpressTechnologies on Windows 2000), one Solaris and one OpenBSD.

The rise of the phisher kings continues apace. Their most recent achievements include the combined IIS and IE exploit that infects visitors to apparently impeccable sites, and a phishing attack based on the use of Browser Helper Objects.

There is nothing new in this, since bugs in Internet Explorer have been part of the Internet landscape for years. What is novel is that this time people may have had enough, prompting what has been rightly called "a growing crisis of confidence in Internet Explorer".

One straw in the wind is a recommendation from the Internet Storm Center, a global monitoring and alert system for online attacks. In the face of the IIS and IE exploit, this organisation recommended that users "install and maintain anti virus software, if possible turn off javascript, or use a browser other then MSIE until the current vulnerabilities in MSIE are patched."

This is not the first time that users have been urged to switch browsers. In October last year, US-CERT (Computer Emergency Readiness Team) offered the simple solution of "use a different web browser" as a way of dealing with bugs in Internet Explorer. Two things make the situation different now.

The update disables an ActiveX control known as adodb.stream, which will prevent the Download.Ject attack. The malicious code was being downloaded from the infected IIS servers onto users' machines, and included a trojan that records keystrokes in an attempt to capture eBay and Paypal passwords. The Russian server distributing the attack code was shut down on June 24, four days after the first reports of the exploit, but security professionals predict that copycats are likely to try and replicate the attack.

In the July 2004 survey we received responses from 52,131,889 sites, continuing the recent growth trend with a gain of just under half a million sites from June.

The open source Apache server has gained more than 4 million hostnames in the first half of 2004, compared to slightly more than 1.5 million hostnames for Microsoft server products. That split has closely tracked existing trends, leaving market share virtually unchanged so far this year.

The months ahead may test that stability, given recent security problems with Microsoft's Internet Information Server (IIS). Numerous sites running IIS 5.0 on Windows 2000 were compromised and used to install password-stealing trojans on the machines of Internet users visiting those sites. Microsoft insists only unpatched servers were breached, but the initial version of the key Win2K patch was buggy. It remains to be seen whether having infected their own customers with malware will prompt the affected Microsoft-IIS 5.0 sites to switch platforms. Previous Microsoft-IIS worms have had suprisingly little impact on market share, although Code Red prompted a general tightening of router and firewall rulesets restricting access to web sites of all denominations, not just Microsoft-IIS.