At a panel being moderated by WebWare’s Rafe Needleman, former VP Search Quality at Google Santosh Jayaram announced that Twitter is to start crawling and indexing the links people place in tweets.  This move is a game changer and catapults Twitter in the heat of the search battle.  No longer will Twitter simply provide a stream of tweets, but it will also have access to a massive body of human approved, quality web pages – in real-time!

Jayaram also mentioned that Twitter is working on a reputation system.  Searches for trend topics highlighted in the sidebar will use this reputation metric to partially rank results, bringing more authoritative tweeters to the top.

Lets just hope that Twitter has time to make good on these promising features and isn’t acquired by a jealous Google.

Whilst the phish gains no extra credibility by being hosted on the Home Office’s website, it does raise serious questions about how it got there in the first place and the security of the government’s websites. This is the department that knows everything there is to know about UK citizens after all and hackers have obviously found a back door somewhere!

“This is very embarrassing for the Home Office, having the Crime Reduction website hacked by cybercriminals is a bit like having a mugger hiding in the local police station nicking people’s wallets when they come in,” said Jacques Erasmus, head of malware research at Prevx.

May we suggest the web developers working for Her Maj’s government take time to read up on SQL prepared statements and how to properly escape SQL queries to prevent such attacks in the future.

Update: The Home Office removed the phishy content from the site early on Monday morning.

Update 2: The Government IT bods have been caught with their pants around their ankles again, this time with an editable interface left open to the public.

We named the Netcraft Toolbar as one of our Top Web Browsing Extensions and are delighted to be able to continue using it with the lastest version of our favourite web browser.

Thank you Netcraft

This is a delightfully ironic story on the back of news that Paypal is planning to block ‘unsafe’ browsers that do not implement a variety of security features to help prevent phishing. Perhaps they should try looking a little close to home first!

Potential for Phishing

The vulnerability allows a malicious attacker to construct an entirely new page which will appear to be on the paypal.com domain name. This fraudulent page could mimic the PayPal login and harvest account details.

And with a little more imagination you can do funny things like putting the WikiPedia XSS page onto PayPal:

The vulnerability has been reported to PayPal, lets hope they close the hole before people fall victim to this.

Digg, the quintessential Web 2.0 social news site has released an update to its comment system. This is a much needed update to a crumbling system. The previous incarnation use to kill my browser if their were more than a couple of hundred comments, the new system is faultless – even on the announcement of this news, which had almost 2,000 comments.

Overview of Changes

The new system is fairly comprehensive and leaves little untouched. The changes can be broken down into 4 key areas:

Presentation

The new comment system pages the comments in blocks of 50 and only shows the first level of conversation by default.

“The display of each page of comments is now managed by a processing queue, which allows the pages to load quickly without hammering your browser with all of the discussions and replies at once”

The new system also hides comments by un-important users, highlighting the interesting comments and “you can now click the Digg count to see the total number of Diggs and buries for each comment”.

Sorting

The Digg team have added an fascinating new sort order. Controversy.

“Controversial sort … highlights comments with the most divergent ratings from Digg users”

It’s also possible to filter comments made by you or your friends – very handy for finding the opinion of people you know among a sea of dross.

Posting

Posting is now easier than before. A bigger, expanding text area and larger font size make posting a comment more accessible and a 5 minute edit window lets you tweak your opinion.

And for the indecisive among you, you can also now change your up/down vote for any comment as much as you like.

Preferences

Logged in users can customise the default comment display to their hearts content.

“you can now choose how many discussions to initially load as well as whether discussions should be collapsed or expanded by default”

Congratulations to the Digg team for listening to the community and delivering a much needed improvement! Digg might not quite be dead. Yet.

However, the most interesting statistic can be found if we look back to the February 2007 results: the Internet has added 49,399,068 hostnames in the past 12 months, growing from 108,810,358 to 158,209,426 websites! This represents an enormous year-on-year increase of 46%.

How much more growth can the ‘net withstand? How many more websites do we really need? The key to this can also be found within Netcraft’s survey data. They make a second count of ActiveSites – ignoring parked domains, unused blogs and other Internet garbage that nobody is cleaning up – and this figure show that the proportion of worthwhile sites is actually falling, down to under 40% of total hostnames. So, with a large proportion of the growth currently being rubbish perhaps we can hope that future changes like the outlawing of domain tasting will help to slow the growth and return some quality to the WWW.