Month: December 2014

December 22, 2014

Domain Related, Hosting Related, SEO Related

Reading Time: 5 minutes

With the release of the Web Index Rankings, that measure economic, social and political benefits from countries across the world on December 11, there are some interesting results. The United Kingdom, as well as the Scandinavian countries continue to lead the index, and Canada ranks sixteenth. The World Wide Web Foundation began to produce this index in 2012. The Foundation utilizes a wide variety of data that measure the web's contribution to the world in the areas of social, political and economic progress. The report furthers that the web has allowed a level-playing field with unprecedented access to information as allowed by Sir Time Berners-Lee and CERN when they choose not to patent the creation of the web. The report states, “Today, armed with little more than a smart phone, anyone-- regardless of where they were born and or how much they earn-- can start a business, record a music video, crowd fund an invention, take courses with Nobel Prize- winning professors, or even launch a successful campaign for office.” In this new index, some chilling statistics have come back to the Foundation. Up thirty two percent from last years numbers, political censorship has increased to forty percent. This included the blocking of political or socially sensitive content. In the news lately has been the issue of net neutrality both here in Canada and the United States, and there is a lack of net neutrality in seventy four percent of countries. It should be noted that according to the Sunlight Foundation, only one percent of the US public is opposed to net neutrality, and this is after a plea from late night show host John Oliver on Last Week Tonight. Even with an estimated 1.8 billion internet users still with little to no right for privacy nor freedom of expression, the governmental control of the web continues to this day. read_more The bad news continues, with an increase of governments bypassing legal frameworks that are in position to protect citizens from government snooping, mainly on our communications, up to eighty four percent. It was at sixty three percent in the last index, and actions like British emergency legislation that was...

December 15, 2014

Domain Related, Hosting Related, Security, Security Related

Reading Time: 15 minutes

What are we talking about in this creative original blog post? How about a freshly deployed “blank content” completely-isolated-new-private-virtual-internet-environment; just like a starter internet on a different planet. In other words, imagine being on an internet where you and your friends are the only inhabitants of Mars but you are all connected through a common (and private) internet on the surface of that distant planet. We think you should be able to deploy and command your own completely isolated Virtual Private Internet (VPI) or perhaps better marketing name Virtual Private Planet (VPP); just add users! ) In this new age of omnipresent internet surveillance/spying/intrusions/ddos attacks, etc and creeping and shadowy “Orwellian” state takeovers, we here at 4GoodHosting thought thinking-up a new service offering, as private and secure as possible, could be a big value-add overall for our customers. So does the idea of a Virtual Private Server(VPS) still sound impressive? Well, try this instead... Virtual Private Internet(VPI) - or Virtual Private Planet (VPP - as private and secure as you and your friends and family living on another extremely distant planet and interacting over your own private internet). "Imagine" a virtual instance of an entirely other pre-configured "encapsulated internet" with almost no content stored in it, maybe just a couple of images and some started 'hello world!' webpages and templates and web builder programs. What if all “content” and logfiles were deleted from this internet, with just open-source webservers and virtualization software (vps - virtual private servers, instead of physical ones) and applications, programming languages, and scripts left on it? And then compiled and condensed into a VPI/VPP container with extra starter terabytes of storage (deeply encrypted by the VPP container) available only to itself and using its own entirely unique ip address protocol? As the whole container is encrypted other than its login sevice, so ,you would need to authenticate into, to get onto, that virtual private internet. Inside it, or on it, you could only request webpages and emails and voice communications from the other users within that self-contained virtual internet. Your ‘allowed-in’ VPI/VPP users can even pick their fantasy geographical location in your virtual fantasy world. Your...

December 9, 2014

Hosting Related, Security, Security Related

Reading Time: 4 minutes

A Scandinavian technology company, Fox IT, was one of the first discovers of a new threat to PHP based programs (such as WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, etc. ) The Fox IT CryptoPHP white paper is quite technical but we will summarize the issue for you here. It is about something termed ‘Nulled Scripts’ and given another label too, CryptoPHP. This is perhaps a new term to most of our customers. So what exactly are these so-called Nulled Scripts? Nulled scripts are scraps of PHP code, which can be found on free or otherwise non-approved WordPress plugin sites or even in WordPress theme archives; which have had their copy-protection removed. Various *pro* plugins and themes come with a serial number, or key, which enables paid features or provides access to download free upgrades. Nulled scripts have such protections removed (so that it is become ‘free’). There are many websites that are offering these nulled-scripts and also nulled WordPress plugins and theme installers. They shouldn’t be used because of the following problem: CryptoPHP explained The programmers who published the white paper have witnessed a drastic increase in the availability of nulled/corrupted scripts. read_more Of course it is not “new” news that alot of “free” WordPress plugins might have this kind of malware embedded in it; if it was not downloaded from a trusted source such as WordPress.org, WooThemes, WooThemes, Theme Forest, Drupal.org Joomla.org, etc. But this particular kind infection is more of a threat than previous malware because in it encrypts data before transmitting it back to its controlling servers; which of course can be located anywhere in the world. Identifying the infection is rather simple though: For example take this line of code: include('wpassets/images/someimage.png'); A web developer that could be reviewing the code should be suspicious of it because an 'image' is not supposed to be included this way into an PHP script. This “ include() “ function call is supposed to be used for importing PHP code. So this has turned out to be be a way of injecting malware PHP code contained in a fake image file. This devious technique isn’t readily detected by malware/virus scanners because most of the...

December 2, 2014

Domain Related

Reading Time: 4 minutes

In this day and age being paid using Bitcoins can be a confusing and perplexing and even a daunting experience. Yet current buzz is that the Bank of Canada is considering the advantages of using so called encrypted-currencies, notably Bitcoin. Canadian companies may be able to benefit in various ways by accepting bitcoin and then in turn exchanging those for Canadian dollars. What should business owners be thinking about cryptocurrencies today and into the next year? Would it ever be advantageous to pay your employees or refund your customers with bitcoins? You might want to check out the Bitcoin Alliance of Canada which explores these type of topics. The Bitcoin Alliance website states it is: “Dedicated to raising awareness of bitcoin among Canadian consumers, merchants, and policy makers; to promoting bitcoin adoption in Canada; and to furthering study and research in bitcoin." The need for bitcoin today This complex issue can be boiled down to some basic questions: “What percentage of people are aware of bitcoin at this time?” “What is the general impression and trust of bitcoin as an alternative currency?” “What is the real benefit for a company that isn’t involved in bitcoin as of yet?” The answer is, unless your customers already believe and and feel comfortable with bitcoin, then otherwise results won't be so good or 'worth it'. However there are some companies that are beginning to trade with bitcoins. For example, the electronics store NewEgg began accepting bitcoins from Canadian customers in June 2014. It even offered bitcoin-only deals for Black Friday. Also, Overstock.com started accepting bitcoin about a year ago and they now process about $15,000 per day in the encrypted currency. Canadian examples are: BitDeals.ca, Best Sleep Centre, and hundreds of smaller business ranging from restaurants, coffee shops, dentists, butchers, auto supply stores, and beauty spas and others. You can view a more extensive listing of them here. There are some good reasons to offer bitcoin payment. A customer may feel good buying a product (or service) that is shipped and to make the payment without having to be send private payment information, that they may fear will eventually get leaked somewhere. Even...