redirection

Where's My Water? is a charming physics puzzler, in which you funnel clean water to the bathtub of a fastidious little alligator named Swampy.

Where's My Water? ranks among the better arcade puzzlers, sharing some similarities (fast-paced levels, an intuitive interface, and a winningly cartoony protagonist) but with a central schtick that's mostly all its own: you dig paths through dirt, creating channels for liquid to flow from one place to another. Ideally, you'll get enough clean water into a pipe to fill Swampy's tub, but along the way you have to contend with various … Read more

Someone is having a little fun at Newt Gingrich's expense.

Visitors to newtgingrich.com, who probably are looking for information on Gingrich's campaign to become the Republican nominee for president, are instead being automatically redirected to other sites.

For instance, I just tried to reach newtgingrich.com and was sent to an article on The Atlantic Wire with the headline "Gingrich's Campaign Still Looks an Awful Lot Like a Book Tour."

Earlier, the .com address sent me to the site for Freddie Mac. And Mashable reports that other destinations for the redirects have included Tiffany &… Read more

Where's My Water? is a charming physics puzzler, in which you funnel clean water to the bathtub of a fastidious little alligator named Swampy.

Where's My Water? ranks among the better arcade puzzlers, sharing some similarities (fast-paced levels, an intuitive interface, and a winningly cartoony protagonist) but with a central schtick that's mostly all its own: you dig paths through dirt, creating channels for liquid to flow from one place to another. Ideally, you'll get enough clean water into a pipe to fill Swampy's tub, but along the way you have to contend with various … Read more

A report delivered today to Congress by a commission on U.S.-Chinese relations is pointing the finger at the Chinese government for continued hacking attempts and computer exploits.

"Recent high-profile, China-based computer exploitations continue to suggest some level of state support. Indicators include the massive scale of these exploitations and the extensive intelligence and reconnaissance components," noted the report from the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission's (USCC).

The report specifically concluded that the Chinese government, Communist Party, and Chinese individuals and organizations continue to hack into computer systems and networks in the U.… Read more

A Chinese state-run telecom provider was the source of the redirection of U.S. military and corporate data that occurred this past April, according to excerpts of a draft report sent to CNET by the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission.

The current draft of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission's (USCC's) 2010 annual report, which is close to final but has not yet been officially approved, finds that malicious computer activity tied to China continues to persist following reports early this year of attacks against Google and other companies from within the country.

In several cases, Chinese telecommunications firms have disrupted or impacted U.S. Internet traffic, according to the excerpts.

On March 24, Web traffic from YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and other popular sites was temporarily affected by China's own internal censorship system, sometimes known as the Great Firewall. Users in Chile and the United States trying to reach those sites were diverted to incorrect servers or encountered error messages indicating that the sites did not exist. The USCC report said it was as if users outside China were trying to access restricted sites from behind China's Great Firewall.

Then on April 8, a large number of routing paths to various Internet Protocol addresses were redirected through networks in China for 17 minutes. The USCC identified China's state-owned telecommunications firm China Telecom as the source of the "hijacking." This diversion of data would have given the operators of the servers on those networks the ability to read, delete, or edit e-mail and other information sent along those paths.

The April incident affected traffic to and from U.S. government and military sites, including sites for the Senate, the Army, the Navy, the Marine Corps, the Air Force, and the office of the Secretary of Defense, the USCC said. Rodney Joffe, senior technologist at Domain Name System registry Neustar, also confirmed in a recent interview with CNET that the data diverted to China came from Fortune 500 companies and many branches of the U.S. government.

Evidence didn't clearly indicate whether this diversion of data was done intentionally or for what purpose, according to the USCC. But the capability alone raises a red flag.

"Although the commission has no way to determine what, if anything, Chinese telecommunications firms did to the hijacked data, incidents of this nature could have a number of serious implications," said the report excerpts. "This level of access could enable surveillance of specific users or sites. It could disrupt a data transaction and prevent a user from establishing a connection with a site. It could even allow a diversion of data to somewhere that the user did not intend (for example, to a 'spoofed' site)."

The report also commented on an incident in April in which a China-based spy network was accused of targeting government departments, diplomatic missions, and other groups in India. The activity, which also compromised computers in at least 35 other countries, including the U.S., grabbed sensitive documents from the Indian government.… Read more

An attack on the main domain name system registrar in Puerto Rico led to the local Web sites of Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Coca-Cola, and other big companies being redirected for a few hours on Sunday to sites that were defaced, according to security firm Imperva.

Those sites and others including PayPal, Nike, Dell, and Nokia, were redirected to sites that were black except for messages in hacker lingo saying that the sites had been hacked. However, the sites themselves were not hacked, Amichai Shulman, chief technology officer at Imperva, said on Monday.

A group calling itself the "Peace Crew&… Read more

Search engine optimization is one of those ongoing tasks. SEO only has two directions...forward or backward, and the day you stop paying attention to SEO is the day you start moving backwards.

If you are one of the so-called little guys, you may feel overwhelmed with how you can ever compete against the big guys. Well good news, as you'll see, even some of the big guys miss the mark on some of the most basic concepts.

Canonicalization

Simply put, in regards to SEO, we might describe "canonicalization" as identifying and consolidating to one, definitive source. … Read more

Blogger users have gotten a few new treats in the past day or so:

Feed integration Blogger users can now redirect their Blogger feeds through FeedBurner by simply copying and pasting it in the Settings menu. Once FeedBurner is activated, Blogger users will be able to track how their content is being consumed, using tracking and metrics services. It's the first implementation of FeedBurner's technology in a Google product since the company was acquired in early June.

Polls Polls were a feature made available first in Blogger in Draft, before "graduating" to the regular version of … Read more

Here's a terrible idea that's a fantastic business: TelID. What the company does is simple. It creates Web pages or redirects for phone numbers. If you register your number with the service, when users go to the Web address telid.com/[yournumber], they'll get redirected to your site, or to a single page that TelID will host for you.

The pitch, which I heard here at Launch Silicon Valley event, is this: you can print "Tel ID:" in front of your phone number on your business cards or in your phone book listing, and then … Read more