Care in the Community

Just a day after ICANN opened up domain rules, a Turkish group of hackers has messed with some of the Internet body's sites, according to a report on Zone-H.

The report says that the NetDevilz group redirected visitors to "icann.net" and other ICANN sites to a hosting space that carried the following message:

"You think that you control the domains but you don’t! Everybody knows wrong. We control the domains including ICANN! Don’t you believe us?"

In addition to targeting ICANN, which looks after administration of top-level domains, the hackers also went after sites belonging to IANA, which oversees IP addresses and DNS root management, Zone-H said.

But it doesn't look like the organisations' main URLS, &mdash: "icann.org" and "iana.org" — were affected, just less alternatives such as "icann.com" and "iana.com". Which makes you wonder: Once businesses are able to use any domain suffix, as approved yesterday, won't that give hackers even more scope for hijackers?

Today we're launching a new group blog dedicated to servers--those essential but maybe unglamourous workhorses of the enterprise. It's called Uptime and you can find it here. (We reluctantly rejected 'Farmers Weekly' as someone had already nabbed that title...)

We're sure that many of you are dealing with server management as a part of your job, that you are thinking hard about which trends you need to keep on top of, and that you'd like to know what others are thinking. The Uptime blog is a place to share those thoughts and decisions, whether you're running two machines or two thousand.

We got a snapshot of what's going on in server rooms in a couple of recent ZDNet UK surveys — take a look and see what you make of the results. Make a blog post, and tick the checkbox for the Uptime server management blog. The post will appear in the group blog as well as in your personal blog.

To get the ball rolling, we'll give an iPod to the member who makes the most useful contribution in the first few weeks. That's not bad, is it?

Did you see the traffic cones on the site last night? Apologies to anyone who tried to post a comment or find an article — ZDNet UK had some downtime so that the Ops team could move our co-location facility. It's all up and running now, and it's business as usual.

Those of you who've done a similar switch — with all the server, email and other services to wrangle — know that this is the cue for a Very Long Night. Still, the photos below show the guys managed to resist the lure of curling up in the coils of cable:



Can't see any cans of Red Bull...how did they do it?



So thanks to the Ops guys for hard work and successful switch. I'm sure that such jobs don't always go smoothly…

Is this a genius way to get students to remember basic web design principles or a joke?

The SEO Rapper, a Houston-based hip-hop music maker who also goes by the Poetic Prophet or Chuck, is starring in a YouTube video on the principles of online marketing — done in rhyme. Here he tells it like it is — how web standards and correct design can affect the ranking and conversion of pages on a site.



The Poetic Prophet's day job is in social media consulting and SEO, so the rhymes are likely to keep flowing. Right now, there's also the "Link Building 101 Rap" and "Paid Search 101 rap", a video response to "Comparing Paid Search and SEO with Abe Mezrich" from Web Marketing Today. Let the SEO video rap battle begin.

Tis the season for us at ZDNet Towers to start thinking about planning the CNET Networks UK Business Technology Awards, which celebrate the past year's tech successes (and are an excuse for a great party). This year, we're adding a new category: the IT Community Hero, given to reward community efforts within the tech industry. While we have our ideas, what are yours? Here are the criteria:

The winner will be the person, team or organisation who has done the most to make the lives and jobs of people in IT easier and more productive through building connections and fostering a sense of community. The judges will be looking for a strong community focus on IT through inclusivity, outreach and collaboration. Evidence of actual benefits to and active participation by community members is important.

You can suggest anybody you can make a case for--from a usergroup admin to a top exec, from an open-source leader to a corporation. Just post a comment under this blog with your suggestion, with any URLs that we can check out. If you really appreciate the work someone's been doing, this is your chance to tell everybody about it.