Send us an email...

DiggBar launches, twiggit is one of the first to use

DiggBar, the new shortURL and toolbar service from Digg, has taken the internet community by storm. This is a fantastic utility that travels with you when you click external links from Digg.

The DiggBar, even though small in size, is big in value and comes complete with the ability to digg posts, view total diggs, check out a varied sampling of comments, and see total page views (not just Digg views). The left-hand side of the DiggBar also includes options to favorite content, view more content from the source you’re looking at, and take a glimpse at related or random Digg content in a the dropdown preview window.

The Twitter crowd loves this and services such as twiggit have already implemented this as a short URL for your tweets.

The DiggBar will expose a lot of new people to Digg and will also increase Digg’s overall traffic substantially – unlike other short URL services, Digg doesn’t simply redirect to the longer URL. It keeps you on Digg and shows the site being pointed to in an iframe wrapper. You can get to the underlying URL by clicking on the X button on the top right.

But Digg didn’t stop there. They’re also using DiggBar for all stories on Digg as well. So all those home page stories that send massive amounts of traffic around the web are now redirecting right back to Digg, too. That keeps all that traffic in the Digg ecosystem, to the detriment of the sites being linked to.

Watch this short video from Kevin Rose (founder of Digg) or test it out by typing digg.com/ in front of any page URL.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Internet, Web 2.0 | 1 Comment »

WebHostingTalk hacked and taken offline

WebHostingTalk, one of the largest online forums for discussion of Webhosting and Server related issues, was maliciously attacked over the weekend.

A hacker gained access to an offsite backup server and then used information on that server to walk into the main live server. The hacker deleted the backup databases, and then deleted the live site. Apparently, they also covered their tracks and over wrote the drives so that no possibility of recovery was possible.

On a forum post a community member of WHT revealed the following:

This attack was very deliberate, sophisticated and calculated. The attacker was able to circumvent our security measures and access via an arcane backdoor protected by additional firewall. We are still investigating the situation, but we know the attacker infiltrated and deleted the backups first and then deleted three databases: user/post/thread. We have no record or evidence that private message data was accessed. Absolutely no credit card or PayPal data was exposed.

Unfortunately for WebHostingTalk, the last local offline copy of the system is from late last year. So expect them to be offline for a bit, while they rebuild their database.

It just goes to show how important offline backup is. Make sure you have the correct backup solution.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Internet, Security | No Comments »