Here are the links to the series:

• The Dimensions of a Successful Website (Part 1 of 4): Content
• The Dimensions of a Successful Website (Part 2 of 4): Design
• The Dimensions of a Successful Website (Part 3 of 4): Organization
• The Dimensions of a Successful Website (Part 4 of 4): Functionality

“WordPress.com is currently being targeted by a extremely large Distributed Denial of Service attack which is affecting connectivity in some cases,” Sara Rosso, a representative of WordPress owner Automatic, said in a statement released to customers. “The size of the attack is multiple Gigabits per second and tens of millions of packets per second.”

The attack later subsided, but the vast amount of junk data being thrown at the company’s servers while the DDoS, or distributed denial-of-service, attack was ongoing made it hard to defend against using standard countermeasures.

Rosso said WordPress was working with its upstream providers to mitigate any further attacks. She also said WordPress “will be making our VIP sites a priority in this endeavor.”

While significantly smaller than Google-owned Blogger and other hosts, WordPress is nonetheless a crucial platform for a large amount of the Web’s population. In July Drupal estimated WordPress powered 8.5 percent of websites.

Read more from The Register

This release features a lightning fast redesigned linking workflow which makes it easy to link to your existing posts and pages, an admin bar so you’re never more than a click away from your most-used dashboard pages, a streamlined writing interface that hides many of the seldom-used panels by default to create a simpler and less intimidating writing experience for new bloggers (visit Screen Options in the top right to get old panels back), and a refreshed blue admin scheme available for selection under your personal options.

There’s a bucket of candy for developers as well, including our new Post Formats support which makes it easy for themes to create portable tumblelogs with different styling for different types of posts, new CMS capabilities like archive pages for custom content types, a new Network Admin, an overhaul of the import and export system, and the ability to perform advanced taxonomy and custom fields queries.

With the 3.1 release, WordPress is more of a CMS than ever before. The only limit to what you can build is your imagination.

Read more from WordPress.org

Encryption provides the ability to use mathematical algorithms to protect the confidentiality and integrity of information transmitted via insecure means or stored in an insecure location. While the detailed mathematics underlying encryption may be intimidating, the basic concepts are quite accessible, and all technology professionals should have at least a basic understanding of how encryption provides these security benefits.

In this article, we take a look at how you can use encryption algorithms to protect confidential information and prove to a recipient or third party that you are the undeniable sender of a message. You’ll also learn the basic principles that should guide the selection of an encryption technology.

Encryption and Decryption

Encryption takes cleartext data and uses a mathematical algorithm, in conjunction with an encryption key, to convert it into a form that is only readable by someone who knows the algorithm that was used and has access to the proper decryption key. This encrypted data is often referred to as the ciphertext. The encryption algorithm may be from one of two classes: symmetric algorithms and asymmetric algorithms.

Symmetric Encryption

In a symmetric encryption algorithm, both the sender and the recipient use the same key (known as the secret key) to encrypt and decrypt the message. One very basic symmetric encryption algorithm is known as the rotational cipher. In this algorithm, the sender simply "adds" the key to each character of the cleartext message to form the ciphertext. For example, if the key is 2, "A" would become "C", "B" would become "D", and so on. The recipient would then decrypt the message by "subtracting" the key from each character of the ciphertext to obtain the original message.

Read more from informIT

Psychologists from Edinburgh Napier University quizzed* around 200 students on their use of the phenomenally successful site, which now has more than 500 million users worldwide.

And they concluded that for a significant number of users the negative effects of Facebook outweighed the benefits of staying in touch with friends and family.

“The results threw up a number of paradoxes,” said Dr Kathy Charles, who led the study. “For instance, although there is great pressure to be on Facebook there is also considerable ambivalence amongst users about its benefits.

“Our data also suggests that there is a significant minority of users who experience considerable Facebook-related anxiety, with only very modest or tenuous rewards.

“And we found it was actually those with the most contacts, those who had invested the most time in the site, who were the ones most likely to be stressed.”

An online survey of students’ attitudes towards Facebook made up part of the study. Of those surveyed:

• 12 per cent of respondents said that Facebook made them feel anxious.  Of these, respondents had an average of 117 ‘friends’ each.  The remaining 88% of respondents, who said that Facebook did not make them feel anxious, had an average of 75 ‘friends’ each.
• 63 per cent delayed replying to friend requests
• 32 per cent said rejecting friend requests led to feelings of guilt and discomfort
• 10 per cent admitted disliking receiving friend requests

“An overwhelming majority of respondents reported that the best thing about Facebook was ‘keeping in touch’, often without any further explanation,” said Dr Charles.

Read more from Edinburgh Napier University

After the single-page signup, a Congratulations page shows the service’s features, and then you can take a first look at your new inbox. If you keep the default "Stay signed in" checkbox checked, once you sign up and log in, every time you go to gmail.com, your inbox will load quickly, with a progress bar showing as it loads. One option that’s also checked by default may be a privacy concern to some—"Enable Web History." This keeps a record on Google servers of any Web browsing you’ve done for 180 days.

Interface

Gmail’s interface has all the charm of a spreadsheet—lots of text, lines, and links. There are no tabs like you find in Yahoo Mail to help organize replies, searches, and more, and no preview panel, such as you find in the new Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, and AIM Mail. Clicking on an e-mail entry in Gmail means your inbox view disappears, and some of us like to have that list in view while skimming through e-mails. Just finding the Forward button in Gmail can be a scavenger hunt, and the thin ribbon indicating there’s another message in the conversation pales next to Hotmail’s clear implementation of conversation view.

Read complete review from PC Magazine

The company recommends users install Java 6 Update 24 as soon as possible, but before readers follow though, allow us to offer this modest proposal: Try uninstalling Java altogether. This will dramatically shrink the attack surface of your machine, and unless you use a handful of specific applications, you’ll never notice the difference.

Once upon a time, Java, with its mantra of write once, run anywhere, was the white knight that was going to save the mankind from the predatory clutches of Microsoft Windows. It never quite worked out that way – at least on the desktop – but the prospect was enough to “scare the hell” out of Bill Gates (your reporter’s byline used to accompany that CNET exclusive but it was removed years ago for reasons that are unknown).

Read more from The Register

Here’s what we know will happen in the short term: There are 5 RIRs (Regional Internet Registries) for different parts of the world — AfriNIC, APNIC, ARIN, LACNIC, and the RIPE NCC. These organizations get address blocks from the IANA and dole them out to ISPs and other entities in their regions based on their own policies.

Each of the RIRs still has some IPv4 addresses left, but various models show them starting to run out within about a year. After that, at some point, ISPs will begin to run out. The models are less clear on this. Stephan Lagerholm’s ipv4depletion.com calculates that the first RIR to run out will be APNIC (Asia-Pacific Network Information Centre) in 228 days (as I write this), but it has the last RIR depletion date in December, 2016. That may sound odd, but there still are over 500 million free addresses by his calculation and it’s not hard to see that these things get consumed faster in different parts of the world.

Read more from BetaNews

On Tuesday, Microsoft began pushing an update that changes the way Windows Server 2008 and earlier versions of the OS respond when USB thumb drives and other portable media are plugged in. Until now, those versions dutifully executed code embedded in autorun.inf files without first prompting the user. The default behavior provided a convenient way to propagate malware such as Conficker, which hijacked the feature to spread itself each time an infected drive was inserted.

Microsoft finally nixed Autorun in Windows 7, but until now, users of earlier versions had to muck about in the Windows registry or install a special fix it to turn it off. Adding the change to the official Windows Update mechanism means millions of users will turn it off automatically.

“We feel like now is the right time across the industry to be able to push this change out and have a pretty substantial impact on how malware spreads,” Jerry Bryant, group manager in Microsoft’s Response Communications, told The Reg. “This is really something that will help to further protect the ecosystem.”

Read more from The Register

WordPress 3.0.5 is now available and is a security hardening update for all previous WordPress versions.

This security release is required if you have any untrusted user accounts, but it also comes with important security enhancements and hardening. All WordPress users are strongly encouraged to update.

The release addresses a number of issues and provides two additional enhancements:

Two moderate security issues were fixed that could have allowed a Contributor- or Author-level user to gain further access to the site.

One information disclosure issue was addressed that could have allowed an Author-level user to view contents of posts they should not be able to see, such as draft or private posts.

Two security enhancements were added. One improved the security of any plugins which were not properly leveraging our security API. The other offers additional defense in depth against a vulnerability that was fixed in previous release.

Thanks to Nils Jueneman and Saddy for their private and responsible disclosures to security@wordpress.org for two of the issues. The others were reported or repaired by our security team.

Download 3.0.5 or update automatically from the Dashboard > Updates menu in your site’s admin area. Please update immediately.