Global Quality Journal

Twitter Blocked, Briefly

ABCNEWS.com:

Hackers briefly blocked access to the popular Internet messaging service Twitter, steering traffic to another Web site where a group reportedly calling itself the "Iranian Cyber Army" claimed responsibility.

Users trying to reach Twitter early Friday were redirected to a Web page that CNN reported had a picture of a green flag and a message that said, "This site has been hacked by the Iranian Cyber Army. [link]

posted by: gqpartner

T-Mobile Outage

www.wsfa.com:

T-Mobile outage prompts frustration across Southeast

Posted: Dec 18, 2009 8:30 AM Updated: Dec 18, 2009 8:30 AM

Montgomery, Ala. (WSFA) - Folks with T-mobile cell phone service upset over outages Thursday.

After several calls to the WSFA 12 Newsroom, we found a statement on T-mobile's web site showing customers in the Southeastern U.S. and Puerto Rico were experiencing intermittent service problems.

At last check, we're told customers in alabama, Tennessee, and Georgia are still experiencing problems.

The company says it's working to fix the problem. [link]

posted by: gqpartner

Blackberry Outage

Morningsun.net:

By MATTHEW CLARK

The Morning Sun

Posted Dec 18, 2009 @ 12:17 AM

PITTSBURG —

Users of the popular BlackBerry smart phone device spent most of the morning without the ability to receiving personal e-mail on the mobile phone.
Research in Motion, Ltd. (RIM), the company that makes the popular messaging phones, said in a release Thursday afternoon that they had resolved the problem.
“RIM has isolated and resolved the issue that was impacting some BlackBerry customers earlier this morning. Some customers may still experience delays as e-mail queues are processed. RIM is continuing to investigate the cause of the issue and apologizes for any inconvenience.”

Locally, emergency services and law enforcement were not affected. [more]

posted by: gqpartner

Chrome's Performance -- Competitive Threat to Firefox

Matt Asay writes in The Open Road blog:

As I type this, I have 15 tabs open and have 22 add-ons installed. As a result, Firefox is eating up roughly 30 percent of my CPU, even beating resource hog Java.

(Credit: Matt Asay)

That's a lot of juice to power my browser, even when considering that most of my work is done within the browser (from common browsing to Zimbra e-mail to Google search to...you name it).

According to TechCrunch, development of add-ons for Google Chrome is much easier than it is for Firefox, and those add-ons apparently no longer constrain Chrome's performance in the same way that Firefox add-ons do for Firefox.

If true, then Mozilla needs to be doing a lot more than simply opening up a Firefox add-on marketplace in 2010, as The Register reports it will. Instead, Firefox should be heads down on improving browser performance. [Read the rest]

posted by: gqj

Most Reliable Hosting Providers for 2009

Netcraft published a list of most reliable hosting providers for 2009:

Rank	Company site	OS	Outage hh:mm:ss	Failed Req%	DNS	Connect	First byte	Total
1	Swishmail	FreeBSD	0:00:00	0.025	0.391	0.020	0.040	0.104
2	Verio	Linux	0:00:00	0.025	0.380	0.087	0.176	0.176
3	www.hosteurope.de	Linux	0:00:00	0.030	0.294	0.116	0.614	1.066
4	www.dinahosting.com	Linux	0:00:00	0.030	0.488	0.121	0.244	0.244
5	DataPipe	unknown	0:00:00	0.035	0.265	0.023	0.047	0.047
6	iWeb Technologies	Linux	0:00:00	0.035	0.164	0.041	0.084	0.084
7	www.hostway.com	Linux	0:00:00	0.040	0.608	0.006	0.012	0.037
8	New York Internet	FreeBSD	0:00:00	0.040	0.385	0.019	0.044	0.113
9	www.netcetera.co.uk	Windows Server 2003	0:00:00	0.040	0.453	0.076	0.155	0.363
10	www.aplus.net	Linux	0:00:00	0.045	0.327	0.057	0.267	0.301

See full table

In November, Swishmail and Verio had the most reliable hosting company sites. [link]

posted by: gqj

Unforgettable: Data Center Outages of 2009

Data Center Knowledge rounds up major outages of 2009 and stresses the role of Twitter and other social media in service monitoring and customer support communication.

• Lengthy Outage at Fisher Plaza
• Michael Jackson’s Death Slows The Web
• The Sidekick Snafu
• Total Data Loss for Ma.gnolia
• Twitter Felled by DDoS
• Amazon Cloud Glitches
• Downtime at Rackspace 
• Fire at 151 Front Street
• Gmail is Down! Gmail is Down! 
• Paypal Down, and the Meter is Running
  
• Air New Zealand Travel ‘Chaos’

[Read the whole piece]

posted by: gqpartner

AT&T San Francisco 3G Voice and Data Network Outage

COMPUTERWORLD:

          By Stephen Lawson

DG News Service - A hardware problem in downtown San Francisco caused an outage on AT&T's 3G voice and data network Friday evening, but the carrier expected the problem to be fixed by about 6:15 p.m. Pacific time, an AT&T spokesman said.

The problem was widely reported by AT&T customers in the area on Twitter, some of whom said they had not had voice, data or SMS (Short Message Service) capability for several hours. AT&T spokesman Mark Siegel said he did not have information about the length or geographic scope of the problem.

The outage came at an embarrassing time for AT&T, which has acknowledged coverage limitations in San Francisco and New York City that have generated many complaints. AT&T Mobility CEO Ralph de la Vega said earlier this week that the company is working hard to improve the quality of its service in those cities, according to news reports.

The failure did not affect the carrier's older, slower GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications) or EDGE (Enhanced Data Rates for GSM Evolution networks, according to Siegel. [More]

posted by: gqpartner

Gartner: Two-Factor Authentication No Longer Sufficient

eWeek:

Gartner points out where strong two-factor authentication is falling short when it comes to preventing fraud and online attacks.

Strong two-factor authentication is falling short, and businesses need to take notice, according to a report from Gartner.

In a new report, "Where Strong Authentication Fails and What You Can Do About It," Gartner analyst Avivah Litan contends that Trojan-based, man-in-the-browser attacks are circumventing strong two-factor authentication and proving that any authentication method that relies on browser communications can be defeated. This includes chip cards and biometric technologies.

“Fraudsters have been raiding user bank accounts that seemingly were protected by strong two-factor authentication, but any sensitive Web application is similarly vulnerable,” she wrote. “In some cases, the malware copies the user's ID, password and OTP, and immediately uses them. Other times, the malware overwrites user transactions with the crook's transactions, unbeknownst to the user or service provider, e.g., the online bank.” [Read the whole article]

posted by: gqpartner

TPC Benchmark And Cloud Based Service Performance Compared

Heads in the Cloud compares standard database TPC benchmark to cloud based service performance, below is the main point, but it is worth reading the whole post:

And this is the BIGGEST issue. TPC tests assume full utilization of the computer. Everyone knows that in the real world you (a) only use at most 80% of the CPU to accommodate usage growth and extreme peaks in performance; (b) between typical peaks and valleys in the remaining 80% your average usage in the real world is typically 10%-20% of the server’s capacity. The cloud, on the other hand, provides an elastic environment where you only pay for what you use. If you use a cloud-ready database that scales elastically, an average load factor of 10%-20% per server translates into saving 80%-90% of the costs versus a dedicated machine. In other words, an elastic cloud environment should reduce cost/transaction by 80%-90%, relative to a dedicated machine.

The cloud provides a normalized cost structure that reflects a more realistic total cost of ownership (TCO). It bundles costs like networking, personnel, electricity, internet access, and more, all in a pay-per-use model. But most importantly, we can get a transactions/instance, and then we elastically scale the instances as needed. This elastic pricing model gives us a real world cost scenario, instead of assuming that a single server is utilized at 100% capacity, which never happens in the real world. [More]

The post above also includes a very interesting link to tpcc-mysql rough benchmark for Amazon RDS

posted by: gqpartner

eBay Unique Visitors Down 7.72% for November 2009

Good question about the role of November outage below. What kind of lingering effect such outages have on user traffic?

AuctionBytes blog reports Nielsen data:

"Unique visitors to eBay dropped in 7.72% in November 2009 compared to November 2008, while Amazon.com's unique visitors rose 5.57% for the same time period. It looks like Amazon.com is on track to have a very good December.

"It's not certain the exact effect of eBay's search outage on Saturday, November 21st on traffic and if   it had a lingering effect on consumer traffic." [link]

posted by: gqpartner