Striking workers at the Amen web hosting operation in France are using a weblog to air their grievances and try to gain a seat at the table as the business is sold to a new owner. Amen is part of cash-strapped VIA Networks, which last week agreed to a sale to UK provider Claranet to head off a liquidity crisis. But employees at Amen, which was bought by VIA last January, say they and their managers have been excluded from discussions about the sale and given no information about their fate, and gone on strike in protest.

The Amen on Strike blog, housed offsite at French host Nerim, details the Amen staffer's grievances over their treatment and ongoing efforts to meet with executives at VIA Networks to discuss their future. The amenengreve.info domain name was obtained through the proxy registration service at Network Solutions, which keeps the owner's name and address private.

It didn't take long for popesquatters to try and cash in on domains related to the new pope, Benedict XVI. The PopeBenedictXVI.com domain is for sale on eBay, with a starting price listed at $100,000, and a "buy it now" price of just $250,000. The domain owner is Total Interest Ltd., a Bahamas-based domain company that grabbed the name in February.

Other variations on the papal name taken by former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger are being auctioned at Sedo, where popesquatters Chris and Linda Dunaway of Gatlinsburg, Tenn. are offering an entire portfolio of Benedictine domains, including PopeBenedict.net, PopeBenedict.org, PopeBenedictXVI.net, Pope Benedict.info and PopeBenedictXVI.info.

Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks on The Final Fantasy XI virtual world have caused extended downtime within the past week, according to game publisher Square Enix. The attacks, which began April 9, raise the prospect that online games may be emerging as a new target for "DDoS blackmail" schemes.

"Recent technical difficulties with our PlayOnline server are due to a DDoS from anonymous third parties," Square Enix said in a message to users. "We have determined that this activity was undertaken with malicious intent and specifically targeted our network." The company said it has been working with law enforcement officials in the US, Japan and Europe, but has not yet isolated the source of the DDoS. "Attack methods have varied, which has caused a more time-consuming review of our network protection," Square Enix reported.

Serious vulnerabilities have been found in Concurrent Versions System, a source code maintenance system used by many open source development projects. The security holes, which could allow a remote compromise of unpatched servers, are addressed in a security update from the CVS development team.

Version 1.12.2 of CVS fixes a potentially serious buffer overflow. "An attacker could exploit these vulnerabilities to cause a Denial of Service or execute arbitrary code with the permissions of the CVS pserver or the authenticated user," warned an advisory from Gentoo Linux, posted on the BugTraq list.

While Internet betting sites set odds on the identity of the next pope, domain speculators are buying up domains connected to names that might be adopted by the new Catholic leader. Blogger and technology author Rogers Cadenhead admitted to participating in "popesquatting" potential papal domains. "My money's on one of these six names - BenedictXVI, Clement XV, Innocent XIV, Leo XIV, Paul VII, Pius XIII," Cadenhead wrote on his blog. "I mean this literally. I registered all six of these as dot-com domain names earlier this month, which I feared was tacky - to say nothing of soul-imperiling - until I read about the vacant papal see stamp. Clearly I'm not the only baptized Catholic who gets geeked about this process."

Cadenhead has plenty of company. PopeBenedict16.com is already for sale on the domain auction site Sedo. But speculators who are just now thinking about papal names are arriving late to the game. The JohnPaulIII.com domain was registered in 1999 while JohnPaulIII.net was bought last November.

EV1Servers has been approved as an ICANN_accredited domain name registrar, the company said today. The Houston provider was approved for top level domains (TLDs) including .com, .net, .org, .biz, .info and .us. The ICANN approval follows a similar move by The Planet.

"This is great news - for both EV1 and our customers," says Robert Marsh, the company's CEO and Head Surfer, who is on the mend after undergoing open heart surgery last month. Marsh said the company plans to introduce an enhanced domain registration system with new features including DNS management and URL forwarding, which will be available to both new users and owners of the 200,000 domains EV1 currently manages through its reseller relationship with Tucows/OpenSRS. The company will also offer an integrated reseller interface for domain names, SSL certificates and website builder software.

The Vatican web site is offline, presumably due to a surge of web users seeking information about the conclave to elect the next Pope, which began today at the Sistine Chapel. The conclave, a secret ceremony in which 115 Cardinals select the next leader of the world's 1.1 billion Catholics, was preceded by a special Mass at which a leading Vatican insider called on the electors to "defend traditional doctrine." News coverage of the remarks by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger may be a factor in the traffic slowing the Vatican site.

A dynamically updating chart of the availability of vatican.va is available here.

Blogging's popularity is causing growing pains for some of its leading brands, which are struggling to scale their site peformance along with their traffic. After a series of outages in recent weeks, the Weblogs Inc. blog network said yesterday that it is seeking new hosting digs. The company's announcement of its hosting search followed outages earlier Thursday on Engadget, the flagship of the fast-growing network:

Weblogs Inc. is hardly alone, as hosting problems are becoming more prominent in the blogosphere, where millions of sites continue to host with free services. Among the most prominent are Google's BlogSpot, which has experienced persistent performance problems in recent weeks, and Six Apart's LiveJournal, which was hit by a lengthy outage in January

Rackspace, is once again ranked as the most reliable hosting company site this month, followed by OLM and INetU. Rackspace was also the top performer in February. This month's top 10 includes five sites running on Linux, two on Windows 2000, one on Windows Server 2003 and two on FreeBSD.

This marks the seventh consecutive month in the top 10 for INetU, a managed hosting provider in Allentown, Pa. Since the start of 2004, INetU has been among the reliability leaders for 14 out of 16 months. Other consistent top 10 performers in recent months include Datapipe (eight of the last 10 months) and New York Internet (five of the last seven months).

Claranet has signed a letter of intent to acquire cash-strapped hosting provider VIA.Net Works for $26.5 million, the two companies said today. Under terms of the deal, Claranet would acquire all of VIA's European and U.S. businesses, including PSINet Europe operations and the Amen Group, which were purchased last year during VIA's acquisition spree. Claranet had purchased VIA's UK operations in a separate deal last September.

The Amen and PSI Net Europe assets were placed for sale last month when VIA said it faced "an urgent liquidity crisis." The deal will quadruple the size of Claranet's hosting operation, combining its existing 54.2K hostnames with VIA's 175K hostnames. That would make the combined entity the sixth-largest hosting provider in Europe, behind Germany's 1&1 Internet and Freenet/Tect, British providers Fasthosts and PIPEX Communications, and Italy's Aruba.

A growing number of large hosting companies are becoming ICANN-accredited registrars, allowing them to sell domain names directly instead of relying on third-party wholesalers. The Planet is now accredited and is selling domains to existing customers for just $5.99 a year. Another huge dedicated hosting company, EV1Servers.net, says it is also seeking registrar status, citing the approval process as a factor in an extended outage for its online domain registration system.

Becoming a registrar allows hosting companies to eliminate the middleman and capture the fees being paid to their wholesale registrars on each domain. Some may be able to lower their domain prices and pass the savings along to customers. Germany's 1&1 Internet AG, the world's largest hosting specialist, is an accredited registrar and offers .com domain names for just $5.99 a year.

The domain price wars are finally being felt on the high end of the pricing spectrum, as Register.com has lowered its price for a one-year .com from $35 to $30. The move by the second-oldest registrar follows recent decision by the oldest registrar, Network Solutions, to offer price-slashing promotions. Register.com says the change is a "limited time offer." But after years of refusing to lower prices, the industry pioneers seem to be recognizing that the pool of folks who'll pay them $35 for a domain is shrinking.

In other pricing moves, Yahoo has ended its $4.98 a year offer, raising its one-year .com price to $9.95. Also moving to $9.95 this month is RegisterFly, which had previously been at $14.95.

Netcraft launched an anti-phishing system at the start of 2005: people install a toolbar and effectively become part of a giant neighbourhood watch system whereby the most experienced members of the community can report phishing sites and effectively block them for the rest of the community.

Some 700,000 unique phishing sites have been detected and blocked by Netcraft’s community to date [April 2007] and it has featured widely in the media from the Financial Times & Wall St. Journal through to Slashdot.

Many of the world’s largest banks report their confirmed phishing reports into the Netcraft feed, and third party tests by C|Net and Ziff Davis have assessed the Netcraft Toolbar as the most effective anti-phishing service, and it is licensed by Microsoft for use in IE7, and by many of the leading anti-virus, content filtering, hosting and domain registration companies.

Netcraft makes the list of phishing sites reported by the Toolbar community and validated by Netcraft available as a continuously updated feed suitable for ISPs, hosting companies, enterprises, and other companies that operate mail servers and web proxies, or network monitoring systems.

The feed can be used to prevent customers and employees from succumbing to phishing attacks and presents an excellent opportunity for ISPs to win new customers and to reassure existing customers by taking a proactive stance against fraud by providing phish-free web and mail.

Well constructed phishing mails often get through conventional spam filters as they may carefully mimic bona fide communications. According to Verisign, between 3-5% of people receiving a phishing attack have given away details of their bank accounts.

The phishing site feed offers real time protection against phishing. This can be deployed in a variety of ways:

• Integration with mail servers to prevent customers from receiving emails that contain phishing URLs, and also to prevent such emails from being sent.
• Integration with web proxies to deny access when a phishing URL is visited.
• Integration with intrusion detection systems and other network monitoring tools to block phishing activity in unconventional channels such as Usenet, FTP and IRC.

The phishing site feed is a continuously updated encrypted database of patterns that match phishing URLs reported by the Netcraft Toolbar community and validated by Netcraft.

The feed employs a versioning system to ensure that customers who have fallen behind can catch up incrementally, or if necessary, by requesting the full database.

The feed is available for a wide range of proxy servers and mail servers, while reference code and technical documentation is supplied to demonstrate how to integrate the feed into bespoke content filters, firewalls, network IDS and similar applications.

Support pertaining to the service is available via electronic mail and telephone.

Please contact us (sales@netcraft.com) for pricing, giving details of the mail server (e.g. sendmail, qmail ...) and/or proxy server (e.g. Squid, Apache ...) or other program that you would like it to interface, and the approximate number of users you have.

If you would like to join the Netcraft anti-phishing community, the Toolbar can be downloaded from toolbar.netcraft.com.

Should companies built around open source use only open source software? Red Hat's choice of Movable Type to power its Red Hat Blogs has drawn criticism in light of the company's Open Source Now initiative, in which Red Hat touts its "unwavering commitment to the open source community."

Movable Type is proprietary blogging software from Six Apart, which built a huge user base as shareware but switched to a stricter paid license for its latest versions. That prompted many users to switch to open source blogging tools, especially WordPress and Drupal. Given the availability of numerous open source blogging tools, readers of Red Hat Blogs questioned the company's choice.

In the April 2005 survey we received responses from 62,286,451 sites. The monthly gain of nearly 1.7 million hostnames marks the strongest growth thus far in 2005. When compared with previous years, the big gain suggests a seasonal pattern to the Internet's strongest growth. Last year's biggest month was April, with a similar gain of 1.7 million hostnames, while 2003's best showing was a 3.3million site gain in March. Those are the three largest monthly gains since the Internet economy began its recovery in 2002.

While this month's gain is notable, monthly growth of 1 million-plus hostnames is becoming routine. The survey has added at least 1 million sites in 10 of the last 18 months, compared to just three times in the previous 18-month period.

The web server market was little changed, however, with Apache picking up 0.2 percent share from Microsoft on the month.

The Vatican web site is struggling to handle a surge in web visitors seeking information on the deteriorating health of Pope John Paul II. Late last night Vatican officials announced that the 84-year-old Pontiff had suffered "septic shock and cardio-circulatory collapse" after receiving last rites earlier in the day.

Since its launch in 1995, the Vatican web site has become an important source of information about the Roman Catholic Church, and is available in six languages (English, Spanish, French, Italian, German and Portuguese). The Vatican has had a lengthy technology partnership with Hewlett-Packard, which provides infrastructure to help the Holy See scale its web operations, which run on a Compaq Tru64 operating system. But with more than 1 billion Catholics worldwide, the site is likely to struggle while the Pope's condition remains the focus of attention.

A dynamically updating chart of the availability of vatican.va is available here.