Computer Repair Experts in Phoenix, Arizona. my PC Techs Presents:

GoDaddy, an Arizona web hosting company, experienced severe outages yesterday. The massive Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) began late Monday morning, and the GoDaddy.com site itself went offline. Twitter user Anonymous Own3r, a member of the Anonymous hacktivist group, is claiming sole responsibility for the attack. According to the twitter account, Anonymous Own3r is an official member and security leader of the famous hacktavist group Anonymous, and claims the move is a reaction to the company’s support of the U.S. government’s efforts “to censor and control the Internet,” through its support of the Stop Online Privacy Act (SOPA).

GoDaddy is currently the largest domain registrant in the world, and is four times the size of its nearest competitor. GoDaddy reportedly manages more than 48 million domain names and serves more than 9.3 million customers. The outage affected not only those sites hosted by GoDaddy, but also those registered with the company which includes thousands of websites, big and small. Reports also show the FBI and DOJ, the Recording Industry of America, Motion Picture Association of America, Universal Music and BMI.com websites were also attacked by this movement. The hacking group is trying to claim retribution for anti-piracy efforts by both the government and the entertainment industry.

Who is Anonymous you might ask…..
Anonymous is a loosely associated hacktivist group. It originated in 2003 on the website 4chan.com, an image sharing website where a large number of online community users simultaneously exist as a “digitized global brain”. It is also generally considered a term used for members of certain Internet subcultures, where their actual identities are not known. In its early phase, the concept had been adopted by a spread out online community acting anonymously in a coordinated manner against a loosely self-agreed goal, and was primarily focused on entertainment. In 2008, they began increasingly associating with collaborative, international hacktivism. Although it’s not necessarily tied to a single online entity, many websites are strongly associated with Anonymous. This includes popular imageboards such as 4chan, their associated wikis, Encyclopedia Dramatica, and a number of other forums.

Anonymous has claimed involvement in a number of cyber-attacks in the past including attacks against the Pentagon, News Corp, Monsanto, Visa, MasterCard, PayPal, GM, and other Government websites. They have even threatened to destroy Facebook. Their coordinated community is not only involved in cyber-attacks, it has also partly organized activist movements such as Occupy Wallstreet, and have been responsible for tracking down wanted criminals that lead police to an arrest.

A recent statement by Anonymous read: “We will continue to attack those who embrace censorship. You will not be able to hide your ludicrous ways to control us”. So now the question is: Who will be the next target of Anonymous, and how long before we see another attack?

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We now have another tool in the shed for tracking the effectiveness of social media marketing campaigns. Google has a new search page, Google Realtime, that allows a search of social updates, news articles and blog posts about hot topics around the world.

This tool gives you an easy way to find hot companies offering products and services on the social web. This beta project could very well be a testing ground for something much bigger down the road. Google has tried several times to integrate real time social web search results into standard Google searches, but nothing much has come of those efforts. If this tool takes off, I believe the research they gain from the project will lead to bigger things down the road. Specifically, the merging of standard web search results with results from Facebook, Twitter, news sites, and other social networking sites.

One other lesson that this experiment can teach us is the importance of a deep online marketing approach for your business that doesn’t focus solely on pay per click advertising to get the word out. In addition to SEM, proper SEO and social media marketing methods continue to gain ground as cost-effective ways to put products and services in front of prospective clients.

Get searching now and see if your company rates well in realtime.

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For those of you that just can’t Tweet enough, Twitter has followed Facebook’s lead and has created a new Tweet Button for the internet. Similar to the way many news articles now offer a button to “Recommend” a page, Twitter’s Tweet Button will allow website users to Tweet and share content.

The following websites have already integrated the new Tweet Button. Expect to see many, many more soon.

AddThis
Arizona Republic/azcentral.com
Ask.com
CBS Interactive
CNN.com
Cracked.com
Detroit Free Press
eHow.com
Eventbrite
Gawker Media
HuffingtonPost.com
Hulu
LIVESTRONG.com
Redfin
SFGate.com
ShareThis
Sky News
The Cincinnati Enquirer
The Des Moines Register
The Indianapolis Star
The Onion
The Tennessean
Threadless
TIME.com
TV Guide
USA TODAY
WordPress.com
WUSA 9
Yardbarker
YouTube

Take a look at this mashable video for a demonstration of how it works:
http://mashable.com/2010/08/12/tweet-button-official/

Now to start working on my own version of a WordPress interface for this. 🙂

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Log of Tweets and Links from my PC Techs Twitter for April 9 – 22, 2009:

1. @cactusjoe1 It’s a real bummer when web application developers don’t take the time to make their applications cross-browser compatible.
2. New botnet identified with 2 million infected computers, could you own one of them? http://www.darkreading.com/security/attacks/showArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=J2N12SRZKGSNIQSNDLRSKH0CJUNN2JVN?articleID=217000166
3. "The Cyber Command", cool movie title? Not quite: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2345781,00.asp?kc=PCRSS05079TX1K0000992
4. Don’t need to go very far, very fast? Get a Peapod: http://www.businesspundit.com/chryslers-peapod-car-now-for-sale/
5. Earthlink suffers Earth Day crash: http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9131976
6. How to fix iTunes error 5002: http://www.it-echo.com/2009/04/23/how-to-fix-itune-error-5002-problem.html
7. Apple to shareholders: "What recession?" http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/apr2009/tc20090422_557162.htm?campaign_id=yhoo
8. A collection of 94 Photoshop tutorials: http://www.bukisa.com/articles/71956_94-exclusive-photoshop-tutorials
9. Hackers in tax season, how IRS refunds vanish: http://www.sdnn.com/sandiego/2009-04-21/news/tax-refunds-can-vanish-through-your-computer-2
10. Display your total number of Twitter followers on your WordPress blog: http://onguides.net/display-the-total-number-of-your-twitter-followers-on-your-wordpress-blog/
11. Woohoo! I’m an official victim of the ‘Missing User Images’ bug! http://status.twitter.com/post/98960090/missing-user-images
12. Powering the entire state of Texas with the sun? http://cleantechnica.com/2009/04/22/entire-state-of-texas-could-be-powered-by-solar/
13. Be sure to update your Firefox browser to version 3.0.9: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-10224719-83.html
14. The iPhone for $23/month: http://mediumjones.com/my-23month-iphone/249
15. A net quote about Tweepular, "This is quite literally one of the best Twitter management tools I’ve ever used." http://www.tweepular.com/
16. 10 Twitter tool evaluations plus Tweepular: http://www.dailyseoblog.com/2009/03/10-twitter-tools-to-effectively-manage-your-followers/
17. iBotnet targets the MAC, is no one safe? http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/04/22/first.mac.botnet/index.html
18. Look out pagerank, Google to change search algorithms: http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/04/20/google-set-to-change-ranking-algorithm
19. 20 Most Important Inventions of the Next 10 Years: http://tech.msn.com/products/slideshow.aspx?cp-documentid=18821223&gt1=40000
20. RT @ManiKarthik: Are Re-Tweets the new Backlinks ? (DailySEOblog) http://www.dailyseoblog.com/2009/04/are-re-tweets-the-new-link-backs/
21. Informative review of the Google App Engine: http://blogs.zdnet.com/Hinchcliffe/?p=362
22. Stay away from the crippled Windows 7 "Starter Edition": http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/windows-7-starter-edition.html
23. More analysis on the Sun buyout, is MySQL doomed: http://blog.internetnews.com/skerner/2009/04/oracle-buys-sun-is-mysql-doome.html
24. Is your data safe from the mob, malware and SQL injections? http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/163387/are_hackers_working_for_the_mob.html
25. Big funding for artificial intelligence and more: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8010075.stm
26. What will happen to MySQL? Oracle buys Sun Microsystems: http://gigaom.com/2009/04/20/oracle-to-buy-sun-for-74-billion/
27. Are you about to be taxed on products purchased online? http://www.cbsnews.com/blogs/2009/04/15/business/econwatch/entry4948813.shtml
28. Epson Unveils Multitouch X-Desk: http://www.gearlog.com/2009/04/espon_officially_unveils_multi.php
29. A look at 15 WordPress plugins: http://www.thisismyurl.com/tutorials/wordpress-help/the-best-wordpress-plugins-and-why-to-use-them/
30. Giveaway of the Day – Sothink JavaScript Web Scroller 2.1: http://www.sothink.com/product/javascriptwebscroller/index.htm
31. Racetrack, computer memory of the future? http://www.montrealgazette.com/technology/Racetrack+speeds+memory/1488396/story.html
32. Viruses and the spread of malicious software doubled in 1 year: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2345234,00.asp
33. Leisure Suit Larry online: http://sarien.net/larry
34. Adobe leads the way to net apps on the television with Flash in set top boxes: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8008070.stm
35. Help us come up with a new slogan, win $100. https://www.mypctechs.com/tshirt
36. In the shadow of the iPhone. Top Apps for the Tmobile G1: http://www.kellbot.com/2009/04/day-1-with-the-g1/
37. Technical report on ‘wiping’ hard drive data: http://sansforensics.wordpress.com/2009/01/15/overwriting-hard-drive-data/
38. How is your computer security? http://bitsnbytes4biz.wordpress.com/2009/04/08/alert-how-is-your-computer-security/
39. RT @CameraFraudAZ: AZ Republic Reports: Expansion of Speed Cameras Halted – http://www.azcentral.com/news/election/azelections/articles/2009/04/07/20090407photosuspend0409.html
40. Dirty IT jobs http://www.infoworld.com/d/adventures-in-it/even-dirtier-it-jobs-muck-stops-here-002
41. Love him or hate him? Bill Gates donates over 1 million dollars to childhood pneumonia research: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/scienceandtechnology/science/sciencenews/5122033/Bill-Gates-donates-1.3-million-for-childhood-pneumonia-research.html
42. Did Apple steal touch screen technology? http://www.geek.com/articles/mobile/apple-accused-of-touch-screen-patent-infringement-2009048/
43. People who make posts saying Captcha is doomed are? You guessed it, doomed! http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09
44. 10 Places to Find Absolutely Free Vector Graphics: http://tutorialblog.org/10-places-to-find-absolutely-free-vector-graphics/
45. Free tools that every windows programmer should install: http://ianhickman.blogspot.com/2009/04/6-free-tools-that-every-windows.html
46. Just listed myself in the http://localtweeps.com local Twitter directory in ZIP 85048

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my PC Techs: Professional Computer Repair and Website Development

This guy truly has no fear. http://twitchhiker.wordpress.com/ He’s going to try to travel around the world using nothing but the generosity of Twitter users as transportation. I’ll be pulling for him to make it, I think he will!