Surprise this morning: Accessing my two Google mail accounts this morning, I noticed that something has changed. My available space was 1,067Mb for the first one, and 1,071Mb when I logged on to the second one (instead of 1,000Mb for both accounts previously).

In fact, Google is continously increasing all mailboxes storage capacity (you can see the current value on their home page), until the value reaches 2 Gb!!
This story is also available on news.com.

Gmail likes to make announcements on Fool's day apparently!

By the way, they also improved the composition window a few days ago, by allowing rich text formatting (not for me, anyway, I use only plain text mail!).

Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0, the email client, was released yesterday, one month after its cousin, Firefox.

It is not sure it could have the same success (Firefox was downloaded more than 9,000,000 in four weeks), but at least it could help some people sick of Microsoft's Outlook Express to switch to a more secure (and more powerful!) product.

Reading Thunderbird's web site, you will understand that Thunderbird is probably one of the most complete email clients (especially when compared to Bill's favorite virus/worm spreader):

Safe and Secure
Thunderbird provides enterprise and government grade security features such as S/MIME, digital signing, message encryption, support for certificates and security devices.

Packed with Features
Thunderbird gives you IMAP/POP support, a built-in RSS reader, support for HTML mail, powerful quick search, saved search folders, advanced message filtering, message grouping, labels, return receipts, smart address book LDAP address completion, import tools, and the ability to manage multiple e-mail and newsgroup accounts.

Unlimited Features
Thunderbird lets you add additional features as you need them through extensions. Extensions are a powerful tool to help you build a mail client that meets your specific needs.

Still not interested? Just try it, and let me know what you think!

Mozilla Firefox 1.0 is out!

The Preview Release having being downloaded 8 million times, we could expect some interesting numbers with the long awaited final version!

The 6 years old Internet Explorer could have some trouble: Not only new flaws are discovered nearly every day (yesterday's one), but also M$ decided to stop the developments on the standalone version.

If you never tried a real browser, you should really have a look on this one... It's time to switch!

I wonder how long many companies will still consider IE as a standard, despite its long history of critical flaws.

The latest flaws discovered should make anybody aware of the dangers of using this old browser, but even security teams are silent... Imagine that even over a secured connexion, your keystrokes could be recorded when you connect to your bank!

But nobody is going to put his balls on the table for a fight against corporate standards, I guess. Even (with knowledge!) IT teams go on buiding IE-only sites (the easy, lazy, and dangerous way).

Bill has trouble: Windows NT and W2K source code are available on the internet!

As Microsoft always pretended that closed source is better for security, I wonder what they think about this leak. Will we see hundreds of new worms/viruses appear in the next weeks? This could be funny anyway ;-)

Less than one year later, the free wikipedia encyclopedia doubled its number of articles, to reach 200,000 entries!

This number is for the English version. The next languages in terms of number of entries are German (around 49,000 entries), Japanese (~29,000), and French (~26,000).

All latest statistics are available here. They decided

N'oubliez pas une chose: Vos connaissances groupées valent beaucoup que celles d'un Larousse! Qu'attendez-vous pour publier?

FYI, on their 200,000 celebration page , the last message is currently: Well, we're getting slashdotted now. Of course, this should happen!

According to news.com, the announced website defacement contest is currently taking place, but there are chances that "web site attacks was mainly a flop".

The zone-h.org website is not accessible anymore, after it received 500 defacements links. As h-zone is the "official" repository of the contest, it is unclear how many sites have really been defaced ;-)

Due to h-zone.org trouble, the person running the challenge extended the contest for another day.

news.com reports that a website defacement contest will take place this Sunday. The winner will be the crackers group to get the more points with a maximum of 6,000 defaced sites. The points are given as following:

• Windows system defaced: 1 point
• Unix, Linux or BSD system: 2 points
• IBM's AIX: 3 points
• HP-UX or Apple's OS-X: 5 points

zone-h.org expects 20,000 to 30,000 defacements during this contest. They also noticed that the number of defacements decreased the recent days, while the scanning of web servers increased. They think that the crakers are currently looking for targets, and are waiting the contest time to launch the real attacks. This is not really surprising, for such a serious matter: It is really important to know who is the best :-)

If you want to have fun, just have a look on Zone-H defacements archives, and on their Hall of Shame!

It is interesting to compare the latest Netcraft web servers survey to the January ones.

In terms of active sites , Apache has now 67.54% market share (66.42% in January), and IIS has 23.98% (vs 24.79%).
Open source is going well in some areas!

Another interesting point of this survey is that Network Solutions is moving back a quarter of a million sites to Solaris after they moved them to IIS one year ago. Hum... I wonder why they come back ;-)

Mozilla 1.4 and Netscape 7.1 (which is based on Mozilla 1.4 too) have been released yesterday. Mozilla is available first for Linux, MacOS, and Windows. Other versions (Solaris, OpenVMS, etc...) should follow soon, as usually.

Unisys's US patent 4,558,302 expired today. This was the LZW compression algorithm, which is used (among others) by the GIF format, created by Compuserve in 1987.

Europe: June 18th, 2004
Canada: June 6th, 2004
Japan: June 20th, 2004

More information about this subject on kuro5hin.

The question is: What will happen to the PNG format now?

Mozilla Firebird 0.6 has been released a few days ago. Firebird is the new name for the phoenix project, but, as next versions of Mozilla will be based on this branch, it is likely that Firebird will soon be renamed again (probably -and simply!- Mozilla Browser).

Firebird is certainly the best browser available today!

The standalone equivalent mail application, thunderbird, can also be downloaded, but I will wait a little before using it (I need at least GnuPG support, which is not yet included). Thunderbird will be the official mail application for Mozilla too, and will probably be renamed too (Mozilla Mail?)

Ten years ago, in April 1993, the first release of Mosaic was released. It was developed at the NCSA, at the University of Illinois.
All current browsers take their roots in Mosaic. Even IE has licensed code from this university!

If you consider that NCSA also created a web server (curiously called NCSA!), which was used as a starting point to create the Apache server, and that Netscape was created by some developers coming from the NCSA team, we can surely credit this university for the current development of the WWW.

Netcraft announced in January that they found a Windows 2000 server up and running for more than two years on the internet.
First, this information was funny itself: One unique server worldwide with a good uptime seems worth a notice when it is Windows :-)

The hilarous part of this story is that this nice uptime went to a tragic end just a few days after this announce. As a coincidence, this was exactly when the SQL Slammer worm came to life, end of January.

See you again in two years? LOL ;-)

For those who don't know yet, have a look on Bellaminettes!!. They are sexy, and I guess you will have the same pleasure as me looking at them.

The IT news information site, News.com, wrote in this article today:
Microsoft's policy of relying on software patches to fix major security flaws was questioned Monday after a series of internal e-mails revealed that the software giant's own network wasn't immune from a worm that struck the Internet last weekend.

Eehh!!! So do you still believe the "users not installing patches are the main problem" statement? Does it look serious to you?

If even M$ does not [install patches], who should? Maybe there could be a deeper problem?

By the way, even if they will never announce it clearly, their internal network got infected.

It appears to me that this news.com article could say the truth:
"Seems like every time I install a system patch, something else goes wrong with my system," said Frank Beier, president of Web design firm Dynamic Webs. The designer said many system administrators won't patch for many months, because they don't trust Microsoft to fix the problem without breaking some other function of the software. "In most cases, I'm better off just playing Russian roulette with the hackers until our servers are broken into."

On Jan 23, 2003, Bill Gates promised better security:
"Microsoft has a responsibility to help its customers address these concerns, so they no longer have to choose between security and usability."

On Jan 25, 2003, two days later, a massive DDOS attack was launched on the Internet, using Microsoft SQL Server flaw, by the SQL Slammer worm.

Up to 20% of the internet traffic was lost in transit, South Korea whole internet services were off, Bank of America teller machines stopped working, etc...

My network received 1200 attacks so far.

Whose fault?

Of course, M$ is not responsible for damages coming from a flaw for which a patch exists for 6 months. Not directly at least. The mistake comes from lazy & ignorant people who manage these systems.
As said in another page of this site, putting a Windows CD into a PC does not make anybody an administrator. Nor getting these funny 5 days MSCE certifications ;-)
This is where M$ is wrong and has responsability, as they go on arguing that "Windows administration is easy, anybody could do it!"

Waooo... At least this was a funny week-end ;-)

Netcraft Survey gives monthly statistics on web servers in the world.
This January, the number of active sites running apache server has 66.42% market share, with a total of 11,178,715 sites (my server counts for one!!).
The second one, Microsoft IIS, has 4,172,101 sites (24.79%).

According to slashdot, the english edition of wikipedia, a community-built multilingual encyclopedia, has now more than 100,000 articles online, after just two years of work!

Wikipedia is a website where anyone can edit any article at any time, and where anyone could use the content as they wish, if they follow the GNU Free Documentation License. Generally speaking, to re-use the content, you only need to give the same rights to your own copy, and you must credit wikipedia as the original source. That's it!