It’s good to know the bad guys are finding less rocks to slither under these days. Unfortunately, Six Apart and its related properties Typepad and LiveJournal were taken down recently no thanks to a DDOS launched against their host. They weren’t the only hosting company impacted by a much larger target.

Company officials said a spammer who goes by the name “PharmaMaster” and is believed to be based in Russia orchestrated attacks that brought down its site and those of several firms affiliated with Blue Security.

“He basically bribed somebody at a top-tier ISP,” said Eran Reshef, Blue Security’s founder and CEO. “He was basically able to breach into the backbone of the internet.”

Six Apart sites were down for some eight hours because of this attack which brought out the age old discussion about third party hosting reliability. Of course any other clients of these same hosting companies would have been equally screwed (assuming they were on the same backbone).

Warner wonders what about Web 2.0 which relys on the web as the OS. This will change when the web becomes more omnipresent, but as of this writing I’m generally against relying on (third party hosted) web apps, even though we are wired pretty much 24/7 all year long, save for vacations. We do power down during vacations, which last summer at home yielded a $40 electric bill when we normally run over $200 (over $300 in the winter some months).

Michael Parekh:

I guess this is the new reality we’ve got to live with here on in, where critical, mainstream services on the internet are attacked and/or crippled on a random, ad hoc basis, for uncertain motives. Not sure if there’s a solution, but there needs to be a broader discussion of the problem and the options.

Vengeance appears to be the M.O of this particular attack and there is a solution: abstinence. If not enough people use a service it makes the bullseye smaller. I chuckle every time these ridculous my-app-is-more-secure-than-yours claims rear their domes.

In our business we still rely on local storage for important documents. We use multiple dedicated servers to host (most) our websites. Still use POP3 as primary email method. We do use some third party hosting and apps, but only with the understanding that it might not be here tonight or tomorrow or for experimental/testing purposes (the VTOR group blog I contribute to, for example). Firefox extensions, widgets and the aforementioned aside, I can’t think of a single third party web application we currently use regularly. And yes that includes Flickr and Del.icio.us. Ok, wait, I can think of one (sort of): MyWeb for bookmarking, but I’ve even fallen off using that as much lately. Guess I’m still hanging onto CoComment, too. There are probably a couple others.

Save the share functions?
While talking about regular use — or lack thereof — it’s a good time to mention a feature here at the end of each post. Do you really like/use the share it link section after each post here at Hmm? This test has almost run its course, so now is the time to tell us if you actually use/care about these links? Hardly any newsgator ratings have been made so that almost certainly is getting axed.

I don’t see any point in adding something to each post stuff that doesn’t get much use or isn’t fulfilling some specific, important purpose. There are widgets, toolbars or bookmarklets for all those applications anyway, so having them on the page seems redundant to me. Still, if Hmm readers really like these being there, feel truly passionate about having them, then that warrants further consideration. Think we’d rather use that real estate for something else. Probably should have put this in its own post, but what fun would that be?

BTW, I noticed earlier Sterling added that long icon bar plugin of share it style apps when he switched over to Wordpress (good move on the switch, mon, now hurry and change out that ugly default template — you deserve better). I thought about that once upon a time and decided against. I think that icon bar is cool the first time you see it but it seems very cluttered in the ensuing posts and nevermind what it does to readers who have no idea what function most of those icons actually perform. I’m not criticizing Sterling or others that use that, I just couldn’t get over that being too much information on each post. Folks who regularly use those type apps already know how to deal with the deluge of web pages they come across which don’t give them a handy way to save them. I don’t care for posts with a bunch of tags at the beginning or end either, which has been one of numerous disappointments with tagging [related: To space, comma, or quote, the tagging quandary] Something else Sterling will like about Wordpres is that any category he defines automatically becomes a tag. I like subtle but effective organization like that.

You heard that right, abstinence
So, abstinence it is, Michael. Maybe I should put it in all caps since he likes to scream out his talking points at his blog: ABSTINENCE for Web Pooh Point Oh

Perhaps not complete ABSTINENCE, but almost complete abstinence (what an oxymoron).

Unfortunately that solution won’t please all those unwise VC dollars being thrown around on these next generation slick designed web apps. However, I can predict with 99.9999999% certainity the vast majority of them won’t be here in five years. Despite the insane amount of hype and complete misuse in too many cases AJAX isn’t going to cure cancer. Heck, I don’t even think it will survive the rest of this decade. At least with the same name anyway. Maybe in 2010 it will be called something more abrasive like DECOMPOSE. Something else will come along if history is our guide.

Something new always does.

Hmm, maybe we should mark this one and come back and see what really has happened on May 4, 2011? Will my crystal ball be right or wrong? If so, you just saved a few bucks not calling your favorite per-minute psychic.

• Wordpress and TypePad add ‘widgets’
• The downside of embedding video posts from third parties using third party hosting
• Ill-advised RSS duplicate post solution in IE7 and Outlook 2007
• Rubber band form reply to spam technique
• Yahoo! Widgets is live
• How to add Sphere It function based on number of words in post