April Fool Zone has a list of simple computer pranks. They don’t require you to install any programs and can be done quickly. You can do these by changing settings in the control panel, their home page in their browser and plugging in an extra mouse to freak them out.
For an easy prank, Windows XP lets you flip the desktop. By pressing ctrl + alt + down arrow, the desktop will rotate about 180 degrees. You won’t be able to use the mouse or click on anything. To undo, just click ctrl + alt + up arrow and everything is back to normal.
April Fool’s Day a day celebrated with practical jokes and hoaxes. Companies like Google are participating in this celebration by renaming themselves to Topkea. Lifehacker has a list of April Fool’s Day Prank Spoilers. They talk about Google (Topeka)’s pranks and more. PC World has written about the Top 10 April Fool’s Day Fake News Items for 2010.
A new report from Websense says that a staggeringly small 5 percent of user content is not a part of some malicious plot or hacker ploy.
Well I’m feeling paranoid.
The report also found that 13 percent of searches for trending news lead to malicious code such as Trojan viruses or spam sites.
During the second half of 2009 Websense Security Labs discovered:
• 95 percent of user-generated comments to blogs, chat rooms and message boards are spam or malicious
• 35 percent of malicious Web attacks included data-stealing code
• 58 percent of data-stealing attacks are conducted over the Web
• 85.8 percent of all emails were spam
• an average growth of 225 percent in malicious Web sites
25 Years ago today the first .com address was registered. It wasn’t broadcast.com, sex.com, Microsoft.com or any well known address. It was Symbolics.com, the name of the company was…..well it was Symbolics. The domain name changed hands last year and is now something of a trophy domain for a domain investment company (XF.com).
When the .com domains first became available the internet was still restricted to non-commercial use and its users were mostly academic and research centers, there wasn’t a great land rush to secure the “best” domain names that came later.
In 1985, there were 6 domain names registered (source) ;
Note: Some of these companies no longer exist and some of these domain names no longer point at the original locations.
1. 15 Mar 1985 Symbolics.com
2. 24 Apr 1985 BBN.com
3. 24 May 1985 Think.com
4. 11 Jul 1985 MCC.com
5. 30 Sep 1985 DEC.com
6. 07 Nov 1985 Northrop.com
Some big names followed in 1986;
19 Mar 1986 IBM.com
19 Mar 1986 Sun.com
25 Mar 1986 Intel.com
25 Mar 1986 TI.com
25 Apr 1986 ATT.com
Apple first registered Apple.com in 1987 and Microsoft was a later comer to the internet registering Microsoft.com as late as 1991.
Since those days, of registering names that often matched your company name and that you were going to use, domain names have become a big business. Sex.com was sold for an estimate 14 million dollars and is about to go on the auction block again, domain investment companies buy thousands upon thousands of addresses, not because they have a good idea for a website, but because they think someone else might and would be willing to pay for their first choice of domain name.
In the last 25 years we have gone from 1 company having a domain name to most companies and a lot of people owning their own name. What will the naming system look like 25 years from now?
