Archive for April, 2010

North Carolina has picked a fight with the largest Internet retailer, Amazon, over tax records.  You don’t live in North Carolina so why should you care? Read the rest of this entry »

Today, with good reason, scores of businesses are having their static html websites rebuilt in WordPress and other content management systems, but some of these will meet with disaster and here’s why. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week Microsoft once again made news for a security issue.  While you may  have grown used to seeing announcements on the latest patch to fix the latest security hole on Microsoft’s products like Internet Explorer, this one was a bit different.  Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re website is hosted with Network Solutions you’ll want to check it immediately to see if it has been hacked.  During the month of April 2010 Network Solution servers have been twice hacked into and malicious code has been installed on some of their client’s sites.

Computerworld has done a more extensive article on the situation here.  Network Solutions isn’t saying what the vulnerability is which leaves us guessing that it has yet to be fixed.

From a business owner’s perspective their are two ways that this can be damaging.  First of all, there is lost trust with clients.  What’s happening (in at least some cases)  is that the hackers are redirecting these sites to a site that infects the visitor’s computer with a virus.   Once your client has to go through the hassle of cleaning up their computer and maybe some expense in doing so, how soon do you think they’ll want to visit your site again?

The second way that your site can be hurt is that if there is malware on your hacked site, Google may block your site from its index or mark it in its index as being infected by malware.  Left untreated your site could lose its rankings.  Google does have a process for getting the site reevaluated, but who needs the headache.

If you’re on Network Solutions and you’ve been hacked and you didn’t get notified of the problem, it’s probably worth contacting their customer support to ask why you weren’t alerted to the situation.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post on an experiment to use the iPad by Paul Colligan as his only computer.  Well that experiment began on the 3rd of April and  so far Paul likes it for traveling.  He reports that it is small enough to use on the fold down tray with someone sitting next to you and that the battery life was more than ample for a ride from LAX to PDX.  The battery life of the iPad is certainly getting high marks from various reviewers.

This still leaves a lot of unanswered questions about traveling with an iPad.  What was it like to watch a movie on?  Want to work on a spreadsheet for the meeting you have an hour after get off the plane, we don’t yet know how it was for that.

Today is Paul’s first day working from his home office on his iPad and what we know so far is that it is a great alarm clock as it woke him up at 4:30.  Unfortunately, that wasn’t the hour he wanted to get up, but due to WiFi and the fact that iPad is set for push email that was what time the email notifier started making enough noise to get him out of bed.  Hopefully things will improve for him on this first full work day of the experiment.