Some areas of the web site for Opera have been slowed by a surge in traffic from Internet users downloading software. The activity was prompted by Tuesday's announcement that the Opera web browser would be distributed free. Users previously had the choice of either a paid product or a free version supported by ads displayed within the browser interface.

The ad-free version of Opera 8 was downloaded more than 1 million times in the first two days of availability,according to Opera Software, which said server logs showed a majority of downloads came from Internet Explorer users. This chart shows the performance for get.opera.com, one of several mirror sites serving browser downloads.

With one of history's most powerful hurricanes bearing down on the Houston/Galveston area, EV1Servers is taking steps to protect the more than 1 million web sites hosted in its Houston data centers. CEO Robert Marsh says the company has more than 10,000 gallons of diesel fuel on site, procured an extra generator in case grid power is unavailable for an extended period, and established a secondary support facility in Wichita, Kansas. "We anticipate that the coming storm will have no impact on our operations," Marsh said in a message to customers. "However, we are prepared to deal with any eventuality."

Hurricane Rita is currently a category 5 storm with sustained winds of 175 miles an hour, making it an even more intense storm than Hurricane Katrina, which laid waste to New Orleans and the surrounding Gulf Coast on Aug 29. Forecasters predict Rita will weaken slightly and make landfall early Saturday as a category 4 storm. "Our buildings are designed to withstand Cat 4 conditions," Marsh said Wednesday night on the EV1 forums. "It is anticipated that we will see high Cat 3 conditions, based upon the current track and our location. This could easily escalate to cat 4 conditions."

EV1Servers is the world's eighth-largest web host, housing 1.1 million hostnames and 642K active sites. Any service outages for the company could ripple far beyond Houston, as many web hosting resellers lease servers housed in its Houston facilities. EV1Servers has more than 150 different customers with at least 1,000 web sites, including hosting providers based in the UK, Brazil, Japan, Italy and the Netherlands as well as the United States. EV1 says its networks "oversee 1.5% of all U.S. Internet traffic."

British betting site operator Leisure & Gaming plc has paid $1.4 million to acquire the domain name vip.com. The sale is the highest publicly reported domain resale of 2005, nearly doubling the $750,000 price for sales of property.com and website.com. The deal comes just two months after Leisure & Gaming plc acquired VIP Management Services and its themed online betting sites for 23.4 million pounds (about $42 million US).

Prices for registering a stand-alone .com domain remained unchanged this month at all major providers except Register.com, which ended a $30 "sale" and is once again the priciest domain seller at $35. The bargains on new domains have shifted to packages in which a domain is bundled with a hosting account. Go Daddy last week began offering domains for $1.99 with the purchase of any non-domain product, such as hosting or SSL certificates. That slices $2 off the $3.99 price for that package, which Go Daddy introduced in January.

Security researchers say they have found weaknesses in Cisco's Internet Operating System (IOS) which may enable an Internet worm to spread between Cisco routers. But Arhont Ltd. denied reports that such a worm had actually been developed.

In a post to the Bugtraq mailing list, Arhont's Andrei Mikhailovsky said his firm had discovered weaknesses in the way IOS uses the Enhanced Interior Gateway Routing Protocol (EIGRP), which handles information exchange between routers. "Among the discovered issues are multiple vulnerabilities in EIGRP implementation," Mikhailovsky wrote. "Also, authors have addressed the _theoretical_ aspects of an algorithm for a cross-platform worm that could spread in IOS based devices." EIGRP supports the AppleTalk and IPX (Novell Netware) networking protocols in addition to IP, allowing cross-platform routing. Arhont offered no additional details, but said it is preparing an advisory for Cisco's Product Security Incident Response Team (PSIRT).

A serious security hole has been discovered in TWiki, the popular open source collaboration software. The vulnerability allows remote attackers to execute shell commands on affected systems, and is already being actively exploited, with some analysts warning that a worm could soon follow. A hotfix is available from the TWiki web site.

TWiki is an enterprise collaboration platform typically used on development projects. It is used for internal communications at companies including IBM, Yahoo, Circuit City, Reuters, Boeing, General Electric, Wachovia and ZoneLabs. Some large companies use it to run web-facing Wikis, such as British Telecom's UK Telco B2B Forum.