A hacker going by the handle Casi dumped information from the United Nations Web site yesterday that contained many vulnerabilities that other hackers could use to get inside the UN’s database to cause some real damage.

I guess the question here is why did Casi hack the UN? Well, he tells us himself:

I fuck actually system… I fighting for Internet Freedom, equiality & rights for all. You’re FREEDOM my brothers & my sisters ! <3

What does it mean? I don’t know, but it must have been a pretty good reason to expose almost every weakness currently in the UN’s database.

Similarly, the reason behind listing the vulnerabilities is just as cryptic:

I give vulnerabilities because it’s fucking asshole ! We are FREEDOm !

We are clearly dealing with a criminal mastermind here, or maybe not according to Aaron Titus, Chief Privacy Officer for Identity Finder. Speaking to Fox News’ New York affiliate, he said that the breach was a “very simple attack” and that the UN “could have prevented this very easily and should have prevented it.”

So it seems that the UN just has bad cyber security. It must be embarrassing for the them to be hacked by such a basic SQL injection attack.

Passwords were not exposed, but the real danger lies in what other hackers can do with the information. Identity Finder has reached out to the UN to alert them of the potential danger, but the organization has not replied.

With all these hacks, it’s just a matter of time until every governmental organization’s Web site is laid bare for the world to see. I personally can’t wait to see the database for the White House’s Web site. It must be so scandalous, probably full of photos of the President’s pet.

In September, the company released Chatter Mobile, and announced Chatter 2, which includes a desktop app. Now, Salesforce has announced Chatter Free, which the company says will accelerate adoption of social collaboration throughout the enterprise.

With Chatter Free, any Salesforce user can invite colleagues to collaborate with Salesforce Chatter. "The industry’s reception of Salesforce Chatter has blown away our expectations," said CEO Marc Benioff. "The fact that more than 60,000 enterprises have deployed Chatter within the first five months is amazing and the Chatter Free social invites are going to take Chatter enterprise-wide."

"With Chatter Free, salesforce.com is using the same social invitation model popularized by Facebook," the company says. "Now any Salesforce user can invite any colleague — even those who aren’t already Salesforce users — to collaborate with Chatter. By its nature, this social invitation creates a network effect, as the pool of Chatter users widens and deepens across a company."

With Chatter, employees can follow documents, people, business processes, and application data. Features of Chatter Free include: profiles, status Updates, realtime feeds, file sharing, groups, filters, invitations, Chatter Mobile, and Chatter Desktop.

Chatter is included for free with all paying user licenses of Salesforce CRM and Force.com. Chatter Free is available to all employees of paying salesforce.com customers.

Also today, Salesforce revealed a new attempt to take on Oracle in the database market with Database.com, which includes a social data model, file storage, user management, authentication, and development tools. In the video above, SoftwareAdvice CEO Don Fornes interviews Salesforce’s Senior Director of Product Marketing Eric Stahl about database.com. 

Here are the 7 Proven Ways to get Your Website on Page 1 Organically & then Convert as stated by the presenter Shawn Moore.

1. Content is King
   What your content says, what your images and video show not only give users a first impression, but those items are also important to how a search engine is going to interpret your website.
2. Navigation and Architecture
   Looking into the way that your menus and internal linking structure are important. Can the web crawlers see and index your navigation? Or is it in JavaScript or Flash that may not be as search friendly?
3. Blogs
   Using a blog is just another way to generate more content for the search engines to index and use to rank your website.
4. Quality and Keyword Rich Inbound Links
   The number of links you have is important, but the quality of those links is more important. Get links from relevant sites and ensure that those links are using keyword phrases and not just your website address or business name.
5. Database
   Shawn said that choosing the right database for your site is important. Some are not search engine friendly and that choosing the wrong one will cause lots of issues down the line.
6. Electron Press Releases or Optimized Releases
   These releases give your site more exposure in search engines and the keyword rich links in the content can help increase your rankings.
7. Domain Name Strategy
   It was recommended that, if you can, choose a domain name with keyword phrases in it as it’ll give an added boost in search engines. You can also purchase additional domain names and forward them onto your website. Try thinking about what a user may type into the address bar of their browser and then register that domain for easy access.

Some of the tips are well known, others were a bit questionable to me. I’m still trying to figure out how a certain type of database can hurt a site as it’s all about how the content is displayed on that page and the URLs used that is the part to be concerned with.

Overall, the session was a good one for those just starting out in the industry.

Comments

Today marked the debut of Blist as a publicly available product in beta, awaiting the testing and feedback of a broader audience. The company launched at the DEMO 2008 conference, and wrapped up a Series A round of venture capital financing to the tune of $6.5 million.

We interviewed Blist’s Mathew Johnson ahead of this newest phase in Blist’s existence. Among the features opening up, Blist added site search to help with finding existing databases their creators made available through sharing on the site.

Johnson said opening search for other documents and their authors will make it easier for people to build a Blist when they give it a try. He gave the example of the wine fan who wants to use Blist to organize a collection, and would like to see how another Blist-using oenophile did so.

“Specific applications aren’t as popular as spreadsheets,” Johnson said. “They need to be as easy for databases to catch on.”

Among their top use cases, Johnson said task list management has been popular with Blist’s users. Others, likely small business types, use Blist for tracking groups of people, such as sales leads for a company.

In its new feature set, Blist offers its Dashboard, which gives a snapshot of what is happening in the user’s network, and with the site’s community:

Permission-based controls allow creators to designate who can do what with their Blist:

Those who use productivity suites, notably Microsoft Office, likely tried turning their habit of creating Excel spreadsheets for various needs into Access databases. Even for someone who received instruction on working with Access, or similar desktop products, the learning curve has no barrier to keep people from careening over the edge.

People seeking inspiration from those publicly available databases created and shared in Blist may search for them to find ones that may help with a current project:

The service’s focus on making database creation and management a straightforward process built as an always available, rich Internet application suggests it can fill a niche. Demand will prove the depth of such a niche, but if it grabs enough people as regular users, look for the takeover rumors to get underway at some point soon thereafter.

The private beta of Blist kicks off on January 29th, as a first step in determining whether Merritt’s database service will find a niche among the online audience. He chatted with WebProNews ahead of the company’s debut during the DEMO conference in Palm Desert, California.

He cited how people start with a spreadsheet, usually Excel, in establishing a table of data. Over time, those tables grow, driving a need for a product to manage the data better.

Though Microsoft Access looks to be the likely upgrade path, and Microsoft would certainly hope so, Merritt said that migration gets complex. People give up and go back to Excel, no matter how clunky the tables and sheets become.

Merritt finds other solutions, like Dabble DB and Zoho, aimed at an audience of programmers and DBAs, people who don’t need a simpler approach to creating a database. List management products aren’t up to the challenge of complex data, either.

That brings us back to Blist, for which Merritt took us through a demonstration. Visually, Blist compares favorably with Buzzword, the online word processor Adobe purchased.

Merritt said Blist will help build a “community around data.” Blist has tools for creating and sharing data. Its tools include drag and drop datatypes, and enables people to have multiple entries per cell.

A neat visual query builder lets the user drag a column of a database to create a quick filter. The builder includes the ability to make and save nested queries. Someone can craft logic in short order with the tool.

That builder and other facets of Blist include visual hints to users, letting them know how they can interact with parts of Blist in certain contexts. Eventually, users will be able to widgetize what they create with the service and publish the data they placed in Blist.

Merritt said the Blist team has former Microsoft and Amazon.com people on board. We asked if something like database reporting tool Crystal Reports had some influence on Blist, but Merritt said they worked at making the service a unique product from the ground up.

Blist will start as a consumer version, with a premium edition for the SMB market planned for a later release.

]]> http://www.webpronews.com/blist-seeks-mainstream-database-audience-2008-01/feed 1 http://www.webpronews.com/amazons-open-infrastructure-2007-12 http://www.webpronews.com/amazons-open-infrastructure-2007-12#comments Mon, 17 Dec 2007 19:46:54 +0000 Robert Scoble http://www.webpronews.com/?p=42747 Dave Winer: Amazon removes the database scaling wall.

Resource Shelf cited a recent update to the searchable Earmarks database. OMB added a couple of features that should make earmarking activity easier to follow:

The first change is that the database will now show earmarks as they move through the FY08 appropriations process. The number of earmarks and the dollar value of those earmarks can be viewed as a bill moves through the legislative process.

The second change is that earmarks for selected authorization bills resulting in expenditures in 2005 have been posted to the database. This is an expansion beyond appropriations legislation, recognizing that while most earmarks appear in annual appropriations bill, some appear in authorization legislation.

Instructive time can be spent with the Earmarks database. Voters who want to understand just how their Congressional representatives have been complying with a White House call to cut the number and cost of earmarks by half may see the results for themselves.

Climate change and land use are just a couple of the topics listed as part of the SustainLane database. The Resource Shelf website highlighted the opening.

Shirl Kennedy, senior editor as Resource Shelf, cited SustainLane’s director, Warren Karlenzig, on what visitors to the site could expect to find:

Now you can read full documents submitted by urban planners and sustainability managers from across the country. Find out what cities, counties, and states are doing to improve their carbon footprints, quality of life and resource efficiency. Find the latest programs in urban ecology.

Visitors can browse the knowledge base of topics for more information on best practices for economic development or energy efficiency, among others. City-specific documents, with recent entries from Kansas City, Minneapolis, and Santa Barbera, show how those municipalities wish to address a particular issue.

Kennedy said these resources would be updated regularly as people submit more information. We would be interested in seeing Yahoo and its green-minded efforts take notice of SustainLane, as the site seems to fit in with the message Yahoo wants to communicate about environmental issues.

“GoDaddy And Friends Rescue RegisterFly Database”

Yet, for the uninitiated, that phrasing makes the act sound like a hostile acquisition, and it was really more of a rescue mission.  As the Channel Register’s Burke Hansen notes, “RegisterFly controlled two million domains, but a bitter personal breakup between the two founders led eventually to bizarre personal attacks, acrimonious litigation, and ultimately to the loss of ICANN accreditation.”

So when GoDaddy stepped in, “[I]t’s what many RegisterFly customers asked us to do,” says Bob Parsons, the company’s CEO and founder.  In an official statement, he also adds, “We worked with ICANN to effect a migration of the RegisterFly domains to GoDaddy.com and help those customers left in limbo.”

But ICANN and GoDaddy aren’t the only ones behind this benevolent act.  “Afilias and VeriSign, the two registries with the most RegisterFly names, have forgone considerable fees for transfers,” according to a press release.  “The gTLD registries GNR, NeuStar and PIR also acted to prevent deletion of names.  As well, Tucows took uncompensated effort to provide data and pursue a solution that would protect registrants.”

So all appears to be well in regards to the RegisterFly fiasco; those affected domain names should be safely within GoDaddy’s grasp by the end of next week.  GoDaddy does, of course, stand to profit as those domains get renewed, but it was still nice (and interesting) to see everyone pull together on this one.

It took five years to collect some 80,000 incidents from 1970 through 2004 and assemble them into the Terrorism Knowledge Base, at The Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism (MIPT).

Resource Shelf noted the unveiling of the Terrorism Knowledge Base. The National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism based at the University of Maryland put it together.

"We’re not just counting up the number of attacks. We’re looking at a long list of specific details, as well as social and economic considerations that may help us understand the ‘whys’ and ‘hows’ of terrorism," Gary LaFree, director of START, a University of Maryland professor and a criminologist by training, said in the announcement.

Some interesting facts have emerged from early searches of the database, according to LaFree:

Already, searches of the database have offered some myth-busting findings: average age of a terrorist group is one year or less; 74 percent of all groups known to launch attacks between 1970 and 1997 lasted for only 1 year or less; majority of attacks resulted in zero fatalities; 1.2 percent of cases resulted in the death of 25 or more people. Terror incidents began rising some in 1998, and that level remained relatively constant through 2004.

While a lot of information is now open to the public, some data will be limited to access by the Department of Homeland Security, which funded the project, and other elements of the Intelligence Community.