A vulnerability has been reported in Firefox which could allow malicious sites to compromise computers running the browser. The security hole, which is rated highly critical by Secunia, affects all versions, including Firefox 1.0.6 and earlier and the just-released beta version of Firefox 1.5. An attack can be created using a specially-crafted URL, which will cause a buffer overflow in Firefox that results in a denial of service and, in some cases, remote code execution.

The flaw was discovered by researcher Tom Ferris of Security Protocols, who found an error in the way Firefox handles URLs (see description here). The vulnerability has been reported to the Mozilla Foundation, which is preparing a fix. There have been 86 million downloads of the Firefox browser, with recent estimates placing its market share at about 9 percent of Internet users.

Interland is selling its dedicated server business to Peer 1 Networks, which acquired Server Beach last year. Peer 1 said it is paying $14 million for 8,300 dedicated servers and 115,000 square feet of data center space in facilities in Atlanta, Miami and Fremont, Calif.

Peer 1 president and CEO Geoffrey Hampson called the deal an "outstanding fit" and promised little immediate change for Interland customers. “This transaction adds a large customer base, skilled staff, solid dedicated server equipment and three data centers to Peer 1 Network’s existing infrastructure," Hampson noted.

The dedicated server market has been the hottest segment of the web hosting industry over the past two years, as discount pricing allowed hosting resellers and web entrepreneurs to run their own server for less than $100 a month. The popularity of discount dedicated servers spurred huge growth for providers such as EV1Servers.net and The Planet. But dedicated hosting is more capital-intensive than other types of hosting, as providers must lay out cash to purchase hardware and licenses for each server.

In the September 2005 survey we received responses from 71,723,098 sites. The increase of 1.33 million sites from August continued the strong growth for the Internet this year, but marked a slowing from the torrid pace over the summer, with monthly gains about half of those seen in July and August.

Apache gained 703K sites and Microsoft servers added 217K sites, but share for both continued in a narrow range that has held steady for more than a year. The open source Apache web server is now poised to cross 50 million sites, probably within the next month.

Datapipe, Rackspace and Tiscali share the top slot as as the most reliable hosting company sites this month. The results continue a string of exceptional performances by Rackspace and Datapipe, both in 2005 and over the longer haul.

Rackspace, a managed hosting provider based in San Antonio, Texas, has been the top performer in five of the past seven months. The company's web site, which runs on Linux, has not had a measurable outage since March of 2004. Datapipe, a managed hosting provider in Hoboken, N.J., has been the best performer twice in 2005, and was the most reliable hosting company for the second half of 2004. The Datapipe web site, which is hosted on Windows Server 2003, has not had a measurable outage since Necraft began public reporting of monthly uptime performance in June 2003.

In August their performance was matched by Tiscali, a pan-European provider of hosting and Internet access services. This month marks Tiscali's first time as the most reliable hosting provider. Tiscali's site runs on Linux, which dominates with five of the top 10 hosters, with 2 on Windows, 2 on FreeBSD and 1 on Solaris.

Hunkered down in a data center on an upper floor of a New Orleans office building, a skeleton crew of staff at DirectNIC have kept the domain registrar operating throughout Hurricane Katrina and the catastrophic flooding that has engulfed the city. "We haven't lost service once during this entire disaster, and we have three weeks of backup power secured," CEO Sigmund Solares said on the DirectNIC website. "Our staff is safe and well - some have been working around the clock in New Orleans to keep clients running smoothly, and other employees have left to safer locations to keep an eye on the network from afar."

DirectNIC is housed on the 10th and 11th floors of a 27-floor office tower near Lafayette Square, a portion of the city that has escaped the worst of the flooding. Employees have live-blogged their efforts and posted photos of the storm's impact on the DirectNIC facility. An on-site webcam broadcast video of looting on surrounding streets. DirectNIC is the world's 11th-largest registrar, with more than 1.1 million domains registered. It is part of InterCosmos Media group, which also operates hosting/colocation provider Zipa.