Google DNS
The words Google and DNS in the same sentence fill me with both excitement and apprehension.
For those that don’t know, we all rely on DNS (Domain Name Servers) to translate domain names (like www.google.com) into an IP address (66.102.9.99) – which allows your machine to correctly identify the machine on the internet somewhere that holds the site you’re looking for.
Google, being the massive company they are, with fingers in many pies have just stuck their hand into the DNS pie. Their DNS even have catchy, memorable IP addresses themelves – 8.8.8.8 & 8.8.4.4.
Many ISPs who provide DNS services to their subscribers use them to intercept mistyped URLs and supply a page of ads – something Google could easily integrate with AdWords. It also means that – should they want to – Google ould gather more and more data on the usage habits of anyone using their DNS.
Could this be the next step in taking over the world without anyone realising?
Pub Sub Hubbub
What is Pub Sub Hubbub? Well, apart from being a badly named service, it is basically a hub that sits between a server (publisher) and it’s feed users (subscribers). The server talks to Pub Sub Hubbub when content is updated and the Pub Sub Hubbub server then pushes content to individual subscribers dependent on their preferences.
This is innovative in that it actually pushes the content across the web rather than users constantly polling the service. This means that the publisher can save an awful lot of bandwidth and subscribers can receive the updates practically instantaneously.
You can find out more on the project by workers at Google (working outside of Google) here: http://code.google.com/p/pubsubhubbub/
If you’re using Feedburner to manage your RSS feed subscribers (and lets face it why wouldn’t you be? – note to self….), then you can enable Pub Sub Hubbub support. Click on the feed you want to enable, and under the publishing options, look for “ping shot”, and activate the service.
Hotmail user information leaked online
Reports are surfacing that the Windows Live Hotmail service has been subject to a hack or phishing scheme, which has led to the information from 10,000 user accounts to be posted onto the pastebin.com website early last week.
Microsoft said it had “been made aware of the claims that Windows Live IDs and passwords have been made available on the web”.
Guess it’s time for everyone to change their passwords, and remember that security is always a pressing concern.
Websites don’t like customers returning stuff… shocker.
It’s being reported in the media today that back in May, authorities, such as trading standards departments investigated 369 websites from across the EU in relation to how forthcoming websites were with regard to Consumer Law.
This investigation related to the sale of electronic goods to customers across the EU and aims to combat whether websites followed rules on providing information regarding the actual product and the price and also clear information about the trader and customers’ rights.
They found that 203 of the sites needed further investigation regarding content on their site. 66% of these sites failed to convey that under European Law, consumers have seven days to return ANY product bought over distance (on the internet or by mail order for example) for a full refund and without giving a reason. Other top issues included traders not supplying adequate contact details or company registered information and delivery charges being misleading or not explained at all.
Personally, I see an issue amongst alot of websites whereby the company behind the site isn’t fully aware of what exactly they are bound by when selling online.
For example:
- Have you included information about your company? – this includes: full company name, trading name, company registration number for a limited company, business address, VAT number (if relevant), email address, and phone number.
- Is this information clearly displayed to your potential customer?
- Do you direct your customer towards the terms and conditions during the sale process?
- Have you included a mechanism in relation to acceptance of orders where you control the point at which the contract is formed? – it has been argued on many occasions regarding email receipts for orders being made.
- Similarly, have you taken steps to avoid being bound by mistakes in pricing information that might be made?
- Have you limited your liability? – If you are dealing with the USA, is it in bold type and capital letters?
- Are your prices clear and unambiguous?
- Have you informed customers of delivery charges, cooling-off periods or your returns and refunds policy?
This is by no-means an extensive list, but a good place to start!
IE8, Javascript includes & Apache Error Logs
I mentioned this over at webdeveloper.com a while ago, and it’s still an issue that I’m running in to.
Apache error_logs are showing quite a lot of “file does not exist” errors for pages using rewrites. For example, you could visit “http://www.mydomain.co.uk/product/103697.html” and the error log would show “http://www.mydomain.co.uk/product” with the file does not exist error.
Fine (I thought) as the referrer is the page, it must be that there is a broken link.
No such luck – no broken links on the page, and seemingly nothing wrong. In fact, while I’m looking at the specific site that I noticed the issue on first, it appears that I’m not affecting the error_logs at all. None of my browsing is causing errors.
So, I switched to the access_logs and started looking for times & dates of the errors. Turns out, all users were using IE8.
Cutting a long story short, I figured out – by looking at the number of errors that would appear on each page request – that the issue had something to do with Javascript includes on the page.
All the javascript pages were referenced in the header include file as relative i.e <script type=”text/javascript” src=”js/monkey.js”></script> There has never been an issue with this – until now – and specifically with IE8.
I do seem to remember something about the new rendering engine in IE8 parsing the page several times to pull in content I don’t see how a browser rather than an specific action could be causing an Apache error.
To fix the issue, making the javascript files “more” relative cured the problem. Altering the source to “/js/monkey.js” fixed the issue.
To be honest, it’s got me stumped. Can anyone shed any light on this?