In a historic move, AOL has announced the end of the line for Netscape. Support for the browser will cease from the 1st of Feb, 2008.

A US federal grand jury in Detroit on the 3rd of January, 2008, indicted 11 people over a wide ranging international fraud. The people included: several Americans, a Russian and a man with Canadian and Hong Kong citizenship. The fraud involved spamming, sending out millions of messages in a "pump and dump" scheme.

Internet Explorer 7 marks the first major update to Internet Explorer in several years. Explorer 6 has been a bane to us as a web developer. We've been forced to compromise a standards compliant design in order to accommodate an aging browser. IE7 marks some considerable improvements

First off is tabbed browsing. Here, Explorer is playing catch up to Firefox which in turn borrowed from the underrated browser, Opera.

The new IE gets a big tick for the zoom feature which allows users to zoom in on web pages. This is along overdue feature, if you ignore the fact Opera has had that feature for a while.

IE has also enhanced security considerably. Like the new Firefox, it warns of cross browser scripts.

IE 7 has improved it's adherence to web standards. It does a better job than IE6 which plagued designers with a annoyances like the peekaboo bug. IE7 renders this site properly- just like Firefox. However it is not quite there. See how IE handles pure CSS drop down menus at http://meyerweb.com/eric/css/edge/menus/demo.html IE6 changes the colour when you hover a mouse over it. IE7 shows the menus, but it's a mirage; you can never get to the menus that expand out. Load the
same page in Firefox and you'll see how a pure CSS menu should work.

IE7 requires you to reboot your computer unlike Firefox. That suggests to us that IE7 is tied into the operating system. You won't get IE7 on a Mac or Linux like Firefox or Opera. IE7 still has a way to go to meet web standards but we think it a considerable improvement and a worthwhile upgrade, but we'll still recommend Firefox or Opera over it.

The nature of the computer virus has changed over the years. It used to be that the humble floppy disk was the vector for transmission. Now that has changed . The number one vector is email.

Over the last couple of years a number of people have been caught out by "Renewal Notices" for Australian .com.au domain names being sent out. Some of our customers lost their .com.au domain names because they paid a "renewal notice". The company took the money but soon after cashing the cheque went belly up. The result was that the domain name was not renewed and it lapsed. The flow-on was that the client's website went off air.