Google's registrar status, first noted by LexText, is likely to prompt speculation about its ambitions in web hosting and blogging. Google operates Blogger, the free blog hosting service with a huge user base. Cheap or free domain names could prove useful to Google in the notoriously price-sensitive blog hosting sector, where most bloggers use subdomains (i.e. myblog.bloghost.com) rather than full domain names (www.myblog.com).

Comcast Communications, the largest U.S. provider of broadband, currently hosts its high-speed Internet service at AT&T WorldNet, while its corporate site resides at Digex, a unit of MCI. SBC is America's largest provider of high-speed ISDN Internet access over phone lines, and is in a pitched battle for subscribers with Comcast, reflecting a larger war for broadband supremacy between cable providers and phone companies.

Go Daddy will instead use the newly-purchased ad slot - to appear in the final minutes of the game - to repeat a first-half ad, which has already been approved by Fox. Go Daddy will make the rejected ad available on its web site Monday, apparently hoping to get additional publicity from Internet buzz, and leaving skeptics to wonder whether the "rejection" was a strategic ploy to gain extra mileage from the Super Bowl investment.

Once the bot has gained access to MySQL, it uses the MySQL UDF Dynamic Library Exploit to upload malicious code to the infected system and then connects to an IRC channel. Once incorporated into the bot network, the "zombie" machines attempt to infect other servers, but could easily be used for other purposes.

The offer is similar to an earlier 1&1 campaign to promote the launch of its U.S. hosting operation, which offered up to three years of unpaid hosting. 1&1 is clearly hoping to convert the free accounts to paid customers, which it presumably has not yet done with the approximately 100,000 accounts it signed up under its U.S. launch promotion. The free hosting offer debuts as many hosting companies are seeking to attract customers with enhanced disk space and bandwidth allowances, rather than price cuts that further erode profit margins.

Yahoo has extended its $4.98 a year domain name promotion through at least Feb. 8, the third such extension since it introduced the offer on Dec. 10. The promotion was intially scheduled to end Dec. 31, but the extension suggests the offer is generating business for Yahoo, which is seeking to attract small business customers.

In other domain pricing movements, Go Daddy has lowered its one-year .com price from $8.95 to $7.95, having shfted back and forth between the two prices periodically over the last year. The registrar recently expanded its hosting offerings, will be an advertiser in the Super Bowl on Feb. 6, but has not indicated whether it will support its $2.4 million commercial with any special pricing offers.

While The SCO Group has become famed for its Linux-related lawsuits, its corporate motto continues to be "The Power of Unix."; but SCO customers might be forgiven for thinking that it should be "The Power of Unpatched Unix."

On Thursday SCO issued a security advisory announcing the release of UnixWare patches for flaws in OpenSSL that could leave secure servers open to denial of service attacks. The only problem is that the flaw was made public more than 10 months ago.

Domain registrar Melbourne IT today acknowledged that it failed to properly confirm a transfer request for Panix.com, allowing the domain for the New York ISP to be hijacked for most of the weekend. The Panix incident has focused attention on recent ICANN rule changes that allow domains to be transferred more easily, which some registrars warned would also make it easier to hjack domains.

The hijacking disabled all email and Internet access for thousands of Panix customers, and persisted despite active efforts by the North American Network Operators Group (NANOG) to assist Panix in recovering the domain. The delays were blamed on unresponsiveness by several providers within the domain management system, but especially Melbourne IT, which appears to have no readily-accessible support on weekends. The Panix.com hijacking was not reversed until Melbourne IT's offices opened in Australia Monday morning (late Sunday in New York).

Apparently not. The Earthlink Protection Blog is hosted by Six Apart on its TypePad blog hosting service, which is in turn hosted in an Internap data center in San Jose.

The image above illustrates a live phishing site in action. In this case, the content looks genuine, as the URL appears to belong to the PayPal web site, https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_login-run, but the content is really being served from a phishing site at http://quith.info/paypal/index.html. The only clue that something is wrong is that the browser is not displaying the padlock in the bottom right hand corner, indicating that this is not really a secure web page. A bug in the script also causes the popup window to remain visible even when the browser is minimized.

However, the Toolbar reveals the true location of the web site, which is hosted in Poland. People using the toolbar are then able to report the site, and thereby block access to the page for other less alert people using the Toolbar.

Similar attacks against institutions including PayPal, eBay, TCF Bank, Regions, GarantiBank and LloydsTSB, have been reported and blocked by the Toolbar community in the last few days. In all cases, nearly-identical scripts have been used, suggesting either that the same fraudsters are responsible for all of the attacks, or perhaps simply that fraudsters are copying ideas from each other.

This can affect all versions of Internet Explorer on Windows XP although the popup window does not correctly obscure the real URL if Service Pack 2 is installed.

The Netcraft Toolbar is currently available for Internet Explorer, and automatically blocks access to known phishing sites whilst displaying the longevity, hosting location and country for each site you visit. The toolbar can be freely downloaded.

LokiTorrent is among the most visible portals supporting BitTorrent, the popular distributed file-serving technology developed by Bram Cohen. LokiTorrent is among the sites facing lawsuits from the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) over the use of BitTorrent in illegal file-sharing.

A dynamically upgrading chart of www.lokitorrent.com is available here.

The Apple web site, which runs on Mac OS X, experienced some slowdowns but was largely available. Apple's online store (also on Mac OS X) struggled, however, experiencing outages and lengthy response times. Faring even worse was the official site for MacWorld Expo, which runs on Windows Server 2003, and was offline for hours following the show's keynote address by Apple CEO Steve Jobs.

Dynamically updating performance charts are available for the www.apple.com, store.apple.com and www.macworldexpo.com sites.

Feedburner's data, based on an analysis of its 800 most popular feeds, show that web-based feedreader Bloglines is the clear market leader with 32.8 percent of the volume, followed by the NetNewsWire client for Mac OS X with 16.9 percent. Firefox is next with 7.8 percent, placing it ahead of established RSS clients including Pluck (7.2%), NewsGator (4.5%), FeedDemon (3.8%) and the web-based My Yahoo (2.6%).

The Firefox browser autodetects the availablility of an RSS feed for a site, and can integrate feeds using Live Bookmarks feature or extensions such as Sage.

Go Daddy is using SWSoft's Virtuozzo to power its VPS offering, following in the footsteps of EV1Servers, which announced a major VPS hosting initiative in September. VPS uses "virtual partitions" that allow a single machine to be used by multiple customers, with better security than shared hosting but many of the features of a dedicated server. While it has been a pioneer in discount pricing of domains and shared hosting, Go Daddy's dedicated server offerings start at $219 a month and VPS at $39.95 a month, well above the offerings of current price leaders in those categories.

Discount dedicated servers have been enormously popular in recent years, driving huge growth for EV1Servers and a succession of competitors who matched or undercut its $99 a year pricing. Hosting resellers and resource-intensive web sites have been the primary users of dedicated offerings, but the customer pool has expanded dramatically as prices decreased, making them more accessible to sites previously housed on shared servers.

Six Apart publishes Movable Type and operates the paid blog hosting service TypePad. LiveJournal is a free blog service based on open source code with more than 2.5 million active accounts, with the majority of its users between the ages of 14 and 22. About 860,000 of those blogs are updated at least once a week.

The deal comes amid growing interest in blogging's commercial potential, and comes a year after Google purchased Blogspot, LiveJournal's chief competitor in the free blogging space. LiveJournal's services will remain free and its code will remain open, which was a concern in light of Six Apart's rocky free-to-paid transition for Movable Type last May.

From a customers’ point of view, the percentage of failed requests is more pertinent than outages on the hosting companies’ own sites, as this gives a pointer to reliability of routing, and this is why we choose to rank our table by fewest failed requests, rather than shortest periods of outage. Six hosting companies went through the period with 0.2% or less of requests failing from our seven measurement points.

Four companies in the top 10 were also in the corresponding top 10 a year ago, with Datapipe moving from second place last year to top the chart. Other companies in last years list include Pair Networks and iPowerWeb.

The distribution of operating systems commonly used by hosting companies amongst the sites is quite even with three of the top ten sites running on each of Windows, FreeBSD and Linux.

In the January 2005 survey we received responses from 58,194,836 sites, a robust gain of 1.27 million sites from the December survey.

After months of little change in market share between the two major web servers, Apache added nearly a full percentage point to its lead over Microsoft, which is now 47.5 percentage points (68.4% to 20.9%) as measured by hostnames, with a slightly smaller gain in active sites.

While this month's 1 percent shift is modest by historic standards, it follows a 12-month period in which Apache's lead grew by just 0.09 percent (from 46.56 to 46.65%), despite adding 7.6 million sites between Dec. 2003 and Dec. 2004. Microsoft added 2.46 million sites during the same period.