• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Internet
    • Browsers
    • Cloud Computing
    • Online Video
    • Search Engines
    • Web 2.0
  • Mobile
    • Android Apps
    • Apps
  • Software
  • Funny Stuff
  • Social Networks
  • Web Tools

Daily Bits

  • Home
  • About
  • Archives
  • Contact
  • Advertise

Top 6 Bizarre Online Gaming Incidents

December 4, 2007 by Admin 104 Comments

People stabbing each other (in real life) for magic swords (inside an online game); men kidnapping a top player to steal his game password; a girl that dies after playing her favorite multiplayer game for several days in a row….

It is a crazy (virtual) world, what can I say! Below you will find the 6 most bizarre online gaming incidents in history:

1. Lengend of Mir 3 player stabs fellow gamer to death

legendofmir3.jpg Back in 2005 Qiu Chengwei, a 41 years-old Shanghai resident, stabbed fellow gamer Zhu Caoyuan repeatedly in the chest, causing his death. The reason? Zhu sold the “dragon sabre,” a weapon that they won jointly in the MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game).

According to the China Daily, Qiu Chengwei went to the police first, but after being told that virtual items were not protected by law, he decided to make “justice” with his own hands.

Qiu Chengwei received a life sentence.

2. Brazilian gang kidnap top GunBound player

gunboundplayerkidnap.jpgEarlier this year four Brazilian men, with ages between 19 and 28, developed a plan to steal the game password of a GunBound (an online multiplayer game) top player. The objective was to sell the game account on the Internet for $8,000.

The first step was to get the girlfriend of Igor, head of the gang, in contact with the GunBound player. They accomplished that via Google’s social networking site Orkut, which is extremely popular in Brazil. After exchanging messages for a couple of days, the girl asked the boy to meet her at a shopping center.

He went, but instead of the girl he found Igor waiting for him, armed with a gun. They took the GunBound player away, and here comes the bizarre part. After five hours of interrogation at gun point, the boy was still determined to not reveal his password, so the four men released him.

The boy went to the police, who arrested all the gang members.


3. Girl dies playing World of Warcraft

girldiesplayingworldofwarcraft.jpgBack in 2005 a Chinese girl nicknamed “Snowly” died of exhaustion after playing the MMORPG World of Warcraft for three days in a row. She was preparing to kill the Black Dragon Prince, other players explained, hence why she had no time to rest between the game sessions.

Interestingly enough, her fellow game players held a virtual funeral inside the game, as reported by Yahoo News China.

4. Teenager arrested for stealing virtual furniture

habbohotelarrested.jpgA couple of weeks ago a seventeen year-old boy stole almost $6000 worth of virtual furniture in the online game Habbo Hotel. Habbo is a virtual world where people can create houses and other scenarios, but the items need to be purchased with real money.

The company alleged that the boy, with the help of some friends, created a website to lure other players into revealing their passwords. After that it was just a matter of logging into the game and transferring the furniture into his own room.

It would be a perfect crime, except that the police (the real one) was called and the boy was arrested.

5. Belgian Police decides to patrol Second Life after virtual rape case

secondliferape.jpgThe details about the case were not revealed, but two Belgian newspapers reported early this year that the Belgian Police would setup an in-game patrol unit to investigate virtual rape incidents.

Absurd as it sounds, the event spurred a myriad of discussions around the web, from sexologists arguing that even virtual rape can be a traumatic experience to online gamers that wondered the technical details that enabled a virtual rape to occur in the first place (in fact it is hard to conceive how someone would not be able to simply turn the computer off…).

6. A plague ravages World of Warcraft

worldofwarcraftplague.jpg In the middle of 2005 Blizzard introduced a new area to its popular MMORPG, World of Warcraft. The boss of the area was able to cast a spell called Corrupted Blood, which was supposed to infect and cause damage to all the players nearby.

Contrary to what Blizzard planned, however, the players remained infected even when they returned to their towns, contaminating pretty much everyone around them. The plague spread through the game servers and thousands of players died.

Blizzard manage to create quarantine zones within the game, and shortly afterwards it introduced a “cure” for the infection. Despite the remedies the event created a lot of buzz in online forums and community websites.

In one word: bizarre!

Filed Under: Internet Tagged With: 5, bizarre, gaming, incidents, online, top

Do You Smell Something Burning? Tech Jobs That Sizzle!

December 3, 2007 by Stephen 3 Comments

In case you didn’t already know, it’s a good time to be in information technology. That’s because, next to the health care industry, tech jobs are booming. The number of job opportunities, and the salaries of those jobs, is expected to rise substantially over the next few years. Here are some interesting facts.

According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, six out of 30 of the fastest-growing jobs in the United States are computer-related. For the tech industry as a whole, the BLS says that the number of employees is expected to grow more than 60% between 2004 and 2014. Only one other field (home health care services) is growing faster.

And it’s not just job availability, either. Tech industry salaries are also on the rise. IT jobs placed 8th on CNN Money’s list of fastest growing salaries. Here’s a quick rundown of jobs with the hottest demand (and their average salaries).

Network Analysts ($64,600)
On a slightly higher level than their system administrator cousins, network analysts evaluate and plan out networks, researching and recommending the hardware and software required to get the job done.

Software Engineers ($79,780)
It doesn’t take a genius to know that computer programs don’t magically appear out of thin air. Software engineers analyze user needs and develop applications and systems from the ground up.

Systems Administrators ($62,130)
Ever curse at your computer when the internet isn’t working or the network is down? Well, it’s usually a systems administrator that gets to fix that sort of problem. Whether it’s LANs, WANs, intranets, or the internet, systems administrators keep computers talking to each other.

Database Administrators ($64,670)
If you think of a computer program as an office assistant, organizing and processing information in a presentable manner, then a database would be the filing cabinet where all of the raw data is stored. Database administrators design, test, and implement these information storage systems.

Systems Analysts ($69,760)
When it comes to computers, it’s easy to get bogged down in the technical minutiae. Systems analysts look at humans and computers as parts of a larger system, ensuring that they work together effectively.

Filed Under: General Tagged With: jobs, network, salary, tech

Going Beyond Google

December 2, 2007 by Admin 4 Comments

We all agree that Google is the single most important source of information these days. Sometimes, however, it could be a good idea to go beyond the websites that big G will show you for specific terms and search queries.

There is an interesting article on CIO.com covering exactly this topic. The article is titled “Six Techniques to Get More from the Web than Google Will Tell You,” and it lists sources and tips that you can use to find specific information or to complement your researches. The six tips are:

  1. Use search engines and Wikipedia to find quality research sources
  2. Search blogs for specialized experts who sift through the Web for you
  3. Study business school websites
  4. Find statistical data on government sources
  5. Research trade groups and online publications for current topics and best practices
  6. Visit the library for more research sources and online data

Now, you might ask yourself, isn’t Google supposed to find all the stuff on blogs, business school websites and governmental portals anyway? The answer is yes, but these websites will not necessarily appear in the first page of Google, and people rarely go beyond these initial results.

That is why it might be a good idea to explore some of these sources directly.

Filed Under: Internet Tagged With: google, Internet, search, sources, wikipedia

Of Computer Fires and Firewalls

December 1, 2007 by Loki 11 Comments

So there you were, working in the office, tired of the sound of your fingers tapping at your every press on the keyboard. You suddenly grew tired but too lazy to stand up and fetch a cup of coffee at the pantry. You got more bored, so you decided to open an Internet browser and visit your favorite website. However, after clicking on the browser icon, you got something like this:

windowsfirewallpic.jpg

Surprised, baffled, and wouldn’t spare some time to read and understand what’s going on, you clicked the Unblock button and surfed away. That is the common action taken by people upon seeing such warning messages. However, alerts like this weren’t created for nothing, right? If so, then let’s get to know what this message is all about by knowing what a firewall is and why firewalls block programs.

A firewall, as the name implies, protects you from the “fires” of the computer world. It regulates traffic between computers on a network, and even signals from the Internet. Named from the brick walls of houses of over a century ago that prevent the likely spread of fire, computer firewalls prevent unauthorized access to their hosts’ private networks. But surely, computer firewalls didn’t originate from the physical, fire-preventing firewalls of the olden times. Then where, exactly, did firewalls originate?

History of the Beloved Computer Wall

With network security breaches increasingly growing in number back in the 80’s, people then found themselves being attacked by the Morris Worm that wreaked large scale Internet security havoc.

In 1988, engineers from a digital company created the first generation of firewalls known as packet filters firewalls – inspectors of packets sent from one computer to another. A packet (a block of data used for transportation and data exchange between computers in a network) had to “pass” a filter firewall’s set of rules for it to be accepted by the receiving computer, otherwise, it will be rejected, returning an error message to the sending computer. This method, however, disregards the relationships between different packets, as it treats packets individually. This posed some dangers to a rejected packet’s control data, which contained important information like the packet’s source and destination addresses, and sequences.

After some time, three colleagues from AT&T Bell Laboratories developed their own type of firewall based from packet filters, and called it circuit level firewalls. This kind of firewall did not only examine packet contents but also even compared packet relations with records of all connections that passed through the firewall. A circuit level firewall can determine whether the passing packet is the start of a connection or if it is simply a part of a connection. Also, it can protect the computer from connection attacks like receiving packets of a wrong sequence to consume a computer’s processing time and memory when it tries to figure out and correct packet sequences. Still, packets have to undergo a set of rules from this generation of firewalls, with the additional criteria of checking the state of the connection where the packet belonged.

The third generation of firewalls was a product of different studies from Purdue University, AT&T Laboratories, and an independent researcher. The application layer firewall or proxy-based firewalls can detect unwelcome protocols (instruction sets that control connections and data transfers between computers) sent to the private network, and even harmful exploiters of protocols. This is because this firewall generation is familiar with the application layer, where manipulation of protocols takes place.

The firewalls that we know today comprise the fourth generation of firewalls, complete with a user interface and easy access through the computer’s operating system. Our present-day firewalls function similarly to that of their ancestors, but with a more sophisticated process, which we will discuss next.

How Firewalls Protect Computers

As defined earlier, a firewall protects your computer from network hazards. But no matter how simple its definition sounds, a firewall’s activity is far too complicated. To illustrate this, let’s assume that we are part of a computer-laden company whose staff amounts to a hundred or so. Each worker has his own computer terminal connected to a network, where all processes and file transfers happen. Let’s also assume that the company is web-oriented, so the company also has an Internet connection. If there were no firewalls configured, our company’s computers are accessible to the entire population of Internet users! Even an outsider who has basic knowledge on virtually connecting computers can easily probe or even access our computer files. Further, if one of our fellow employees left a security hole, it will be the greatest Christmas gift ever for hackers.

What if, instead, our network security department decided to install firewalls beforehand at every connection to external networks and the Internet? That would be a very different scenario than the first one. If firewalls were implemented, the company will then be secured from external accesses through, say, alert or warning messages.

Actually, with firewalls in place, a company can implement security rules that range from selected access to the Internet to company-wide ban to access a certain computer.

Security rules can affect anywhere from File Transfer Protocol servers to servers accessible to the Internet, in the private network’s perspective, of course. They can also control a computer terminal’s connection to anywhere in the private network, like whether it should be allowed to access a computer with higher security levels or not.

In our sample setting, firewalls certainly give our company both authoritative control over their employees and protection for its private network.

As written down in history, a firewall protects its host computer network simply by checking all kinds of data that passes through it. From its first generation to its third, a firewall utilizes all kinds of security measures that its ancestors.

Firewalls act as middlemen that retrieve data from either the Internet or the private network before sending it to the other end of the connection. Also, firewalls implement packet filters that flag those that shouldn’t enter the network and discard it. Even further, packet sequences are also examined to check for logical matches using a trusted database that records characteristics of traveling packets. If there was a match between traveling packets and the entries in a firewall’s trusted database, the information passes through. If there was none, the information is rejected.

However complicated and important a firewall’s functions are, they are often bypassed because of faulty configuration and, often, misinformation. And firewalls often end up with a very loose configuration, primarily allowing all traffic from different networks to the computer until explicitly blocked by the user. Often, your system is being compromised with some unintended, sometimes harmful, network connections. To avoid this, we must know what a firewall protects us from.

The “Fires” of the Computer World

With different levels of security, firewalls can protect your computer. Turning your security to the highest level will block everything, defeating the purpose of having your own Internet connection. On the contrary, setting it at the lowest level will expose you to the whole virtual world, as if you are animatedly saying “hi” to intruders and hackers alike.

Here are some of the most common intruders that a firewall can stop:

  • Through an unprotected network, a person can infect your computer with a virus or its disciples: Trojan horses and computer worms. Being the well-known computer risk that it is, a virus can do damages ranging from simply irritating you through repeated message pop-ups to deleting all of your computer’s data.
  • Remote logging happens when a person outside your private network connects to your computer, viewing files and possibly accessing your programs.
  • Programs with special features can allow remote access to your computers. They can provide hidden access, known as application backdoor, to your computer especially when they have bugs that can gain a certain control level over your computer.
  • Applications aren’t the only ones that can have backdoors. Even some operating systems can have opened backdoors that allow remote access to your computer. Such operating system bugs nullify your computer’s security to an extent, which a hacker can exploit.
  • Macros, user-created scripts that applications can utilize, are a hacker’s best friend when it comes to exploiting through a network connection. Malicious hackers can take advantage of macros and create their own to do their bidding, which is either manipulate your data or, ultimately, crash your computer.
  • Harmless as it may seem, a spam often contains links to nasty websites with equally nasty plots: to expose your computer to the world and abuse it. Such kinds of websites, when visited, may open a backdoor to your computer via cookies, text parcels sent by the servers of websites you access for tracking and authentication purposes.
  • An e-mail address sends junk e-mail or spam to several users, cloaked by a Simple Mail Transfer Protocol server of an innocent host, so as not to leave traces. Through e-mail session hijacks like this, unaware users are prone to opening spam, usually out of curiosity.
  • Mostly a one-on-one attack, an e-mail bombing happens when somebody bombards your e-mail address with a message sent hundreds or even thousands of times until the system that handles your e-mail services can no longer receive and store any more messages. This act consumes your e-mail system’s resources, killing all its connections.
  • Routers determine the path a packet takes within a network. They also provide arbitrary data about the packet’s source. In source routing, hackers use such arbitrary data to conceal malicious information that they send through the network, as if the packets they sent came from a highly trusted source.
  • Further, information sent via network has to keep its destination address to guide it while “traveling” the network. Hackers target those “traveling” information by using redirect bombs to change the information’s path to a different one.
  • Redirect bombing, in a way, opens doors for the occurrence of a denial of service attack – a very wicked computer exploit wherein a hacker slows down servers by sending unidentified requests. A hacker sends external, unanswerable requests to, say, a certain server, asking for connection. Then, when that server responds to the request, the server’s responses to its regular network traffic weaken. Through this, the hacker either eats up all the resources of a server or computer, forcing it to halt operations and restart, or impedes communication between his victim and the other users in the network by trapping the “attention” of the server.

With various network hazards above, you need to at least know how to protect yourself from them, and the succeeding section explains how.

Your Firewall of Choice

Firewalls are still programs themselves, and customizing them based on your needs is possible, or more significantly, essential. The succeeding paragraphs detail some conditions to consider before building your firewall.

Serving a purpose similar to your home address, an IP address is your identification in the network, or, more commonly, the Internet world. Firewalls can limit an IP address’ access to the Internet to loosen network traffic, as that address might be accessing too much information via the network.

IP addresses, which often look like unintelligible strings composed of numbers and dots, surely are hard to remember, giving birth to humanely understandably addresses known as domain names. For a firewall to protect a company from malicious software, the domain names of pornographic websites, home of several “computer world fires,” are often blocked.

Firewalls can also protect you from computer protocols as some of them might bring damage to your computer. Serving as mobile bridges for computers in a network, protocols can be used maliciously by hackers. With firewalls, you can simply assign a computer to handle a specific protocol for easier supervision.

Furthermore, firewalls can block ports, an outgoing channel used by servers to send you the services you requested from them, which can further regulate network traffic. Usually, in a company setting, File Transfer Protocol (FTP) servers are blocked from most computers’ access, while web servers aren’t, because FTP servers are the common providers of uploading and downloading activities.

And since the firewall acts as the gateway of your computer in one way or another, it also filters the information entering through it. The largest form of information it filters is the greater content of websites and files: text. A firewall can entrap an exact word or phrase from a passing data. Common types of words and phrases that firewalls treat as malicious are “porn,” “x-rated,” and “xxx,” all of which are related to commercial pornography, one of the most oppressing and malicious type of website.

As seen above, firewalls put information to certain “tests” before letting them pass. They actually assign certain trust levels to entities connected to their computer in order to determine which signals to accept and which ones to block. Usually, the Internet has no trust level while the computer’s internal network has the highest. Zones whose trust levels lie between the Internet and that of an internal network are regarded as Demilitarized Zones or DMZ’s, which comprises our final section.

DMZ’s: To Trust or Not To Trust

There are times when you should allow users to access your private network for certain reasons. However, with many notorious risks involved, you can’t help but think twice. What should you do then?

DMZ’s will answer your problems. If you have a DMZ, you can put computer files in it for others to access, without fully exposing your computer to the world. As mentioned earlier, a DMZ stands between the Internet, the “no trust” zone, and your private network, the zone with the highest trust level. It is actually an area outside your firewall but very close to your private network.

To put simply, a DMZ is similar to a garage sale, standing between you and your buyers. In a garage sale, all items you display are still yours, only, they are for sale. You allow people to see what you are selling, and they can look at them and, more importantly, examine them.

DMZ’s save you from most of the network risks out there. Try it out. Most firewall softwares already contain DMZ setup options so there’s no trouble looking for one.

We often take firewalls for granted because we feel like they are doing nothing more than just sit on our virtual space and irritate us with various alert messages when we do something pretty risky. In the course of my research on firewalls, I realized that they are more than just an obstacle to our surfing joy. It actually is our best ally against all the “fires” that may have spread through computer networks.

Filed Under: Security Tagged With: computer, firewall, online, protect, Security

The State of Blog Search

November 30, 2007 by Ryan 6 Comments

Blog search is an industry in a state of transition at the moment. A few years back, it appeared as though Technorati had successfully positioned itself as the dominant blog search engine among the Internet-savvy crowd.Then a growing number of smaller, sometimes more innovative options began to appear and nip at the heals of Technorati. But now those smaller blog search tools, as well as Technorati, are starting to give way before the simplicity and ubiquitousness of the master of information brokerage – Google.

The latest victim is Feedster, which has had a “We’re Changing” notice up on their frontpage for a number of weeks now with no visible signs of life. Further feeding the rumors that Feedster is a goner is the fact that its accompanying company blog has been removed.For its part, Technorati is still very much alive, but some worry that it is trying to move too far outside its original purpose.

Efforts to become more than just the best blog search and filtering service resulted in Technorati burning through its investment money with little to show for it, losing a CEO and being forced to downsize. Today Technorati still offers a decent search option, but gone are many of the result filters and other features that made it the go-to search service during the early days of blogging. I personally turn to Google (both Google BlogSearch and the main Google index) for blog search for the simple fact that it’s right there; no, check that, it’s everywhere.

Competitors cannot merely be comparable faucets of information. They have to improve on that information stream that Google increasingly controls and delivers with unmatchable speed and convenience. Sometimes I open up a browser tab for Ask.com and their blog search because the results are often less cluttered with irrelevance and spam than are Google’s, though the slight improvement in result quality is not enough to cause me to switch to Ask as my primary blog search engine.

Bloglines, which is owned by Ask, may currently offer the best alternative. Bloglines is first and foremost a personalized online RSS feed reader. Searching for blog results from among the feeds you have personally subscribed to is the best way to eliminate search result spam, and both Bloglines and Google Reader allow you to do this. However, this option precludes discovering new sources of answers to your questions. Understanding this limitation, Bloglines also allows you to search through all of the feeds subscribed to by all of its users.

The results may come from feeds you did not choose, but you know that someone did subscribe to them (you can even see how many people subscribed to each individual feed via the “preview feed” link), so the likelihood of a spam blog being indexed and showing up in the results is extremely minimal. The other benefit of Bloglines is the ability to read your feeds and conduct searches outside your own subscriptions from within the same service.

The downside of using Bloglines for blog search is that its users have indexed a far smaller percentage of the blogosphere than Google.There are several good options out there for blog search, as well as a lot of room for growth and innovative development. As on most fronts, Google appears to be leading the way at present, but future surprises can probably be expected from both Technorati and Ask/Bloglines.

Filed Under: Internet Tagged With: blog search, blogging, Media

8 Bad Decisions When Starting a New Website

November 29, 2007 by Steven 47 Comments

baddecisionswhenstartingawebsite.jpgWhen starting a new website there are a number of decisions that you will make that can have a huge impact on the long-term success of the site. Many times these decisions don’t seem as important as just getting the site up and running and as a result they don’t get the attention they deserve. Here are 8 decisions that can cripple your chances of building an effective website.

1. Free or Cheap Web Hosting – Many aspiring website owners are tempted by low cost hosting options. It’s understandable that someone would want a low-priced or free hosting company when starting a new website, but this can have serious consequences. Free hosting will be slow and will most likely include ads on your website that you have no control over. Even low-priced hosting tends to be slow and the customer service and support will almost certainly be inadequate.

You don’t need to spend a fortune on hosting. In fact, quality services are very reasonably priced . What you will quickly learn is that your hosting company will strongly influence the performance of your site. When your website goes down because of inferior hosting you’ll understand the true cost of not spending a few more dollars each month for a better option.

2. Not Buying a Domain Name – If you want your online business to be taken seriously, you need your own domain name. Many free hosting services, including blog platforms like WordPress, offer the option of having a website without needing to buy a domain name. Domain names are so inexpensive (can be less than $10 a year at GoDaddy.com) that there’s no reason to not buy a domain. Your domain name is crucial for being able to brand your website.

3. Not Getting the Right Domain Name – Buying the wrong domain name is almost as bad as not buying one at all. Unfortunately, finding the right domain name today is not an easy task. With millions of websites online your first choice will rarely be available. Your domain name should be easily remembered and relevant to your site. Very long domain names can be difficult for visitors to remember, and they increase chances for typos from potential visitors. If possible, choose a .com without hyphens (if it’s not possible to avoid hyphens, don’t use more than one) that contains a keyword. There are a number of tools available to help you to quickly find the right domain name.

4. Designing Exclusively for Search Engines – In attempt to gain strong search engine rankings, the human visitor is sometimes forgotten. Don’t prioritize search engine spiders over your visitors. It’s possible to design a user-focused website that is still search engine-friendly. If your website satisfies its visitors the traffic will come, and most likely so will search engine rankings.

5. Prioritizing the Look Over the Content – A lot of new website owners get excited about the new site and forget that the content is what will ultimately determine it’s success. Sure, a website should look good. But the content and usability of the site shouldn’t suffer at the expense of its appearance. Minimalistic designs are becoming increasingly popular, and one of the biggest reasons is that they allow for the content to be the focal point. Just as much time and effort should go into creating the content as goes into creating the design.

6. Forgetting About the Target Market – Every website is created for some target market or target audience. Try to always keep them in mind as you are creating the site. In order to succeed, you’ll need to provide them with what they want. It’s easy to forget about your target market and design the site how you like it, but what really matters is what your target market will think. Anticipate what they will be looking for at your site and find a way to meet their needs.

7. Poor Navigation – One of the most frustrating experiences for a website’s visitors will be trying to find something specific with poor navigation. The pages and sections of the site should be easy and logical for visitors to maneuver. For larger sites a sitemap and site wide search can be very helpful.

8. Ineffective Keyword Targeting – Part of attracting new visitors is using the right keywords and phrases. In most cases some research will be necessary to find the best words and phrases to target. There are a number of tools available to help with this research (some free and some paid). Google’s keyword tool is one of the better free options.

Filed Under: General Tagged With: decisions, domains, hosting, mistakes, Web Design, website

  • « Go to Previous Page
  • Go to page 1
  • Interim pages omitted …
  • Go to page 297
  • Go to page 298
  • Go to page 299
  • Go to page 300
  • Go to page 301
  • Interim pages omitted …
  • Go to page 303
  • Go to Next Page »

Primary Sidebar

Privacy Policy

Copyright © 2021 · News Pro On Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in