Category: Security

October 25, 2016

Domain Related, Hosting Related, Security

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Map published by Facebook Google and Facebook are engaging in a partnership to pay for the laying of what will be one of the highest-capacity undersea data cables - piping data in the form of light all the way across the Pacific; bridging Los Angeles & Hong Kong. This project is the second partnership Facebook has joined in. It is yet another current example recent big business in the submarine-fiber optic cable industry. This internet-centric industry has traditionally been dominated by group of private, and government, carriers. Companies like Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon operate huge-scale data centers that deliver various internet services to people worldwide. These internet big boys have are quickly reaching a point where their global bandwidth needs are so high that it makes more sense for them to fund cable construction projects directly; rather than to purchase capacity from established carriers. Previously this year, in May 2016, Facebook announced that teamed up with Microsoft on a high capacity cable across the Atlantic called “MAREA”. This cable will be linking internet backbone hubs in Virginia Beach, and Bilbao, in Spain. Telefonica will be administrating this future transatlantic data line. Europe and the Asia Pacific region are important markets internet services giants. The MAREA cable will boost bandwidth levels between both companies’ data centers both in Asia and the US. The submerged fibre line is named the “Pacific Light Cable Network”, named after Pacific Light Data Communications, Inc - the 3rd partner of the project. Both the MAREA and Pacific Light cable will be built by “TE SubCom”; one of the biggest names in the submarine fibre optic cable industry. The 120Tbps (Terabits per second) PLCN system will provide greater diversity in transpacific cable routes, as Facebook recently published. “Most Pacific subsea cables go from the United States to Japan, and this new direct route will give us more diversity and resiliency in the Pacific,” Facebook’s article states. read_more One difference that PLCN and MAREA have from traditional transoceanic cable systems is they will be interoperable with different networking equipment; rather than being designed to function with specific or proprietary landing-station technologies. Companies will...

September 26, 2016

Domain Related, Hosting Related, Security

Reading Time: 3 minutes

The name of the organization with seen to remain the same, “ICANN”, but the people is power over the organization is about to shift, without your vote, Oct 1st to an assemblage of the world body politic, mostly compose of despots and dictators. The effect of this is still yet to be seen, but one key person involved in today’s political fray, presidential candidate Donald Trump, opposed the lackluster plan. Basically, the current domain name system as you have grown to know, and trust, is about to go under changes that could easily lead to intimidation and censorship against free speech. Protection of grassroots political speech is also at risk. The world can go on with less adult websites, but the world simply won’t be as good or nice of a place without freedom of speech in other regards. The founders of America frequently stated that the citizenry must always be vigilant and jealously guard their rights and freedoms. This is the attitude now on the podium of Donald Trump; the only candidate opposed to the plan to hand over control of the internet to a conflicted party of those seeking ever more power in the world. U.S. Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump is currently conducting verbal opposition to the semi-secretively planned transition of oversight of the internet's domain name system (DNS) management from the US-based governance to the UN, a global organization of political stakeholders from around the world; which could abrogate and hand-over control of the internet itself to authoritarian regimes such as China and Saudi Arabia and others; foreseeably threatening online freedom. Internet DNS is basically a directory for internet-connected devices that helps translate domain names to numerical IP addresses. He strongly contends that the US Congress should act swiftly block the handover, scheduled to occur next week on Oct. 1 2016, or as his campaign policy director Stephen Miller stated "internet freedom will be lost for good, since there will be no way to make it great again once it is lost." The ‘handover’ of the internet DNS was proposed in March 2014, implying the transfer of oversight from the nonprofit Internet Corporation for Assigned Names...

August 8, 2016

Domain Related, Hosting Related, Security, Security Related, SEO Related

Reading Time: 4 minutes

You may have heard of the 3 more popular content management applications: Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla - but you are not sure which one is best for your needs. Perhaps you remain curious; so we will focus the the two ‘other’ choices besides Wordpress: Drupal & Joomla. Each particular CMS will provide the basic functions of: adding, deleting, and publishing various types of content. Each program has different strong points (and weaknesses) which should be considered whole-cloth, prior to making your ultimate decision. First write down your business’ objectives and goals. This should be is the first step in selecting the best CMS application suited for your particular business needs. Ultimately, optimally serving your business’ unique target audience. Choosing the right CMS (by the way, easily confused with CNS (Central Nervous System)), is the backbone for your project it will save you a great deal of headaches later. A reliable web host, with super customer support, also saves you from initial and future headaches. With 4GoodHosting.ca you can get both ultra-reliable hosting and the CMS of your choice for free: Joomla, Drupal, or of course; Wordpress - or any of the 200+ free scripts we offer you with any of our hosting package. Drupal: In 2016, there is an estimated 1 million+ websites built atop the Drupal CMS. Drupal is common to government offices, universities and colleges, Non-government Organization, Canadian & otherwise global enterprises. America’s White House website is taking advantage of Drupal’s strong website security features. Drupal is a comprehensive, expandable, powerful content management framework suitable to be the foundation of virtually any type of website. Drupal’s Advantages: * Tested Enterprise-level security; advanced control over URL structure * Lots of functionality - including advanced menu management, graphics modification utilities, poll management, and administration/users management * Built for high performance; pages load fast because of its defaulting caching features * Ability to handle large amounts of content & data * Extensive selection of themes, modules & extensions * Ideal for community platform sites (requiring multiple users - admin, editors, logged in users requiring customized content, private groups, etc.) * Large robust community generally responsive to inquiries and concerns. * Good SEO...

August 3, 2016

Hosting Related, Security, Security Related

Reading Time: 2 minutes

(US & Canadian News) Microsoft actually championed a huge victory in regards to user privacy {which certainly has affect on Canadians using Microsoft products and services: Email, Cloud Storage, Skype, etc.) on July 28th. An appeals court has ruled that a federal warrant to seize email from a Microsoft server in “Ireland” is invalid. Federal investigators received a spy warrant (for email contents) as part of a criminal investigation in December 2013, which touched off a debate between the tech-industry and law enforcement about jurisdiction & data storage. The timing of this coincides with Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) - where the company’s president and chief legal officer Brad Smith promoted a vision for the internet that "respects people’s rights" and is “governed by good law.” Microsoft said: “We obviously welcome today’s decision by the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. The decision is important for three reasons: it ensures that people’s privacy rights are protected by the laws of their own countries; it helps ensure that the legal protections of the physical world apply in the digital domain; and it paves the way for better solutions to address both privacy and law enforcement needs.” Privacy protections for information stored on paper should persist as data moves to the cloud. This decision helps ensure this result. — Brad Smith (@BradSmi) July 14, 2016 Microsoft has publicly acknowledged a need for cloud providers, particularly those based in the U.S., to win back over consumer trust. Representatives for like-minded lobby groups include: the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation), i2Coalition, plus big tech companies such as: Rackspace, Apple, Amazon, Cisco, Hewlett-Packard, and Verizon - and notably in this case Ireland’s Parliament - and each submitted briefs in support of Microsoft’s initial statements and position. “We conclude that Congress did not intend the SCA’s warrant provisions to apply extraterritorially,” the judges said in the ruling (PDF). “The focus of those provisions is protection of a user’s privacy interests. Accordingly, the SCA does not authorize a US court to issue and enforce an SCA warrant against a United States‐based service provider for the contents of a customer’s electronic communications stored on servers located...

May 24, 2016

Hosting Related, Security, SEO Related

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Is your website becoming much more popular? If you are searching for reliable yet inexpensive, and fast loading website hosting, “shared web hosting” or “V.P.S.” (Virtual Private Server hosting) service are two good, but not identical, options. The most common choice, to do it at rock bottom costs, shared hosting, but for many businesses the limitations of shared hosting eventually becomes outgrown. Migrating from a shared server plan to a VPS (or an entirely “Dedicated” or “Standalone Server) is typically the next step. 4GoodHosintg provides free upgrade migration services; to solve any nervousness when you may decide to upgrade your website to its own server. Some signs you have outgrown Shared Web Hosting: Skyrocketting Traffic For low traffic websites shared hosting is ideal. If you are noticing your traffic increase consistently, or if you are offering high-bandwidth content such as video(s); you may need to upgrade to a VPS (Virtual Private Server) for dedicated bandwidth, and for a lower-latency (faster) less congested network connections. When your business/website grows in size: your email, disk space, CPU & RAM (Random access memory) requirements will also eventually surpass your existing shared hosting plan. The growth of your business will often dictate the need for upgrades. Choosing between VPS and dedicated server Perhaps you would feel best serving your website by renting your own private server (standalone web server with it’s own dual power supply). However, first consider the differences between VPS and Dedicated servers - to find out which one is best for your application; including cost, as VPS are less expensive than leasing dedicated equipment in our data center. In either case, 4GoodHosting offers numerous advantages: such as 24/7 customer support, “RAID” hard drive and SSD redundancy, dual-coast back-ups, disaster recovery servers, plus the flexibility of upgrading or downgrading your server hosting package whenever you need with free migrations. read_more Maximum Security of your data If your business or organization is dealing with alot of company confidential data - then you should ensure the security of your data. By choose self-contained VPS or Dedicated Server hosting, you will more secure control over who has the ability to access your data. For VPS...

August 31, 2015

Hosting Related, Security, Security Related

Reading Time: 5 minutes

The above diagram shows you the architectural difference between cloud hosting solution and traditional hosting solutions. Cloud service partitioning of the overall system stack, as outlined above, only started to become generally promoted in 2008-2009. Traditional dedicated servers, shared server hosting accounts, and VPS hosting were offered all over the internet more than full decade before the word ‘cloud’ became the latest buzzword. This article is a bit different than most every other ‘cloud hosting’ article published so far. How? Well, there has been alot of hype over the past several years about the cloud approach to web hosting. Although cloud hosting is becoming an increasingly popular method of web hosting, there are some disadvantages to that arrangement. As with each kind of hosting, there are pros and usually at least one drawback associated with each type; and each has a significantly different cost. Hosting a website in a public cloud offers some benefits that we will review below, but there is one very significant drawback - which is an inherent lack of control over security/privacy of a company’s business data. This means that your information could be vulnerable to hackers and unauthorized users. After all you would be storing your ‘private’ business information out there in some unknown rather geographical location in ‘the cloud’. Would you simply trust that? If you just have a small website, that showcases your company with some simple functionality such a contact form, then a traditional shared hosting account or VPS (Virtual Private Server) is completely adequate; as it has been for a long time. Shared hosting has been the status-quo since the late 1990s’. Regarding software applications and databases that deal with your actual business data: such as your customer lists, their ordering information, your customer’s personal information or credit-card/banking information, you would logically want that information to be kept ‘in-house’ or internal. Your company’s most important data is usually the proprietary software that your company has developed (usually at great expense), or your company’s entire customer database (which is usually tied together with your customer’s personal credit card or banking details). This is something that you would not normally want to have...

May 26, 2015

Domain Related, Security, Security Related

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Click on image to see it full zize. Even before whistle blowing hero Edward Snowden revealed the deep penetration the US government has impinged on it’s citizens privacy as you use the internet, there were many reports of government institutions spying on citizens, and cellphone records have often been mentioned in those reports. In spite of this, we have as a whole ‘learned’ to accept it. Cell phone use records offer tremendous insight into any investigation, because of the sheer amount of detailed information about the individual suddenly under the microscope. Apart from basic contractual information like a subscriber’s name and address, lots of other data is also gathered and stored on file by mobile providers; such as everywhere you have been with your phone. This database of data includes who you phoned (and they have the same type of data warehoused on your friends too of course), who you received calls from, who you sms’d, what you said, who said what to you, your tweets and facebook activity, your photographs are up for grabs, videos, and again, everywhere you have been. There is not much left, as the above is already above most people’s imaginations. read_more Mobile operators also record all ip-addresses and even which websites users visited on the Internet. All this information is available to any government agent with a higher level of clearance than a police officer (or investigator). From the information which is gathered, mobile operators can apply algorithms to find out when you prefer to wake up, perhaps even how many times you tap snooze, when you went to sleep or other usage patterns. App downloading is recorded, and perhaps every-time, how often, you launch your favorite game. With the right surveillance order (or perhaps without one) a mobile operator can also relay information about who you associate with. Armed with a valid subpoena, police and other government agents can retrieve recordings of your calls and all your SMS’s; warehoused digitally for years. A 2013 CNN report exposed that US operators use this data, for marketing purposes in conjunction with third parties. While even though Americans are told that the...

May 13, 2015

Security, Security Related

Reading Time: 6 minutes

This blog concerns the topic of what is known as “Ransomware”. It is becoming a ever more prevalent annoyance that has been circulating around the internet. The devilish hackers behind it are attempting to extort money from common people. Like its name implies, "Ransom-ware holds your computer hostage, subsequently demanding payment in order for the person to be able to boot or log into their computer again.", says Eric Rainbolt, 4GoodHosting’s support manager. It goes onto a victim’s computer through unpatched software vulnerabilities to silently install itself, and sometimes through social engineering tactics too. “Cryptolocker” is ransom-ware that can spread quickly through email a affects a person’s file that on drives that are mapped to a hard-drive (of SSD) using the drive letters D: , E, or F:. This can also include USB memory sticks, ext. hard drives, or from a network or cloud folder. Paying the criminals, which we don’t advise, may or may not let you access to your system or your data back, but there have been plenty of cases where the ranson-ware’s decryption key isn’t emailed or when sent doesn’t even work. Tens of thousands of machines have been affected in the past couple of years – after the ransom-ware pirates have sent millions of emails. So what can be done about ransom-ware? read_more Ransom-ware is is not only disruptive and intimidating, your subsequently encrypted files can often be considered damaged and oftentimes beyond repair. But if you have adequately safeguarded your system, then it is becomes nothing more than a nuisance. Here are some methods to negate the threat of ransom-ware. Mirror your drive to a backup drive at least once a month. Having a regularly updated backup is essential. If your computer is infected with ransom-ware it may cause you to lose work-in-progress documents. To avoid this it it better to use an external drive or backup service, particularly one that is not assigned a drive letter or is often not plugged in. Patch or Update your software Malware authors rely on people running outdated software with known vulnerabilities, which they can exploit to silently get onto their system. Updating your software often will...

February 23, 2015

Domain Related, Hosting Related, Security, Security Related

Reading Time: 5 minutes

What happens if we simply allow governments to make all the regulations and rules, not us, and let corporations argue about it, not us? That would be the clear merger of state and corporate power, which are the only two ingredients in the recipe for fascism; which has always occurred through all of the past two centuries of history under similar circumstance. Our case in point for this article is: Google Claims Opposition to New (without public consent) Rule that Gives American Federal Judges and their Government Omnipresent-Global Search Warrant Powers. The American “Advisory Committee on the Rules of Criminal Procedure” is quietly and slying consider changing a rule would allow judges to issue “ global warrants” to search computers (ie. your/anyone’s computer) and networks which are outside of the judge’s district. So, they wish to give the already outrageous NSA-spylike powers to all of their federal judges? If so, shouldn’t the American people be having some say on that particular huge issue? But they seem so utterly passive. Do the American people really need a “congress” to echo their concerns and trust that their elected officials vote likewise -> when today people can theoretically all take a vote simultaneously on the internet? The simple point is that individual citizens should claim their right to express their opinion publicly or privately over the internet without government suppression of it, nor interference. And why should we care? Because what happens in America certainly affects us here too; especially when pertaining to the internet. Back to the current scoop... Google has again surprised us all by just suddenly announcing an always-untimely proposed change to a procedural rule; which the google representative says could have “profound implications for the privacy and security of all web users”. read_more Into the nitty-gritty - American Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 41 dictates that federal judges cannot issue warrants to search things outside of their district, with specific exceptions. The US Department of Justice asked the Advisory Committee to make changes to allow the government to conduct “remote access” searches of content stored in a location “concealed through technological means,” { they are also saying they don’t...