If you have personal or business contacts from the Middle East or India, don’t expect to hear from them via-electronic mail or private messages coming from them for a week or so. The reason being that they have been disconnected from the World Wide Web; it’s not because of some strict government crackdown or terrorist activity, but rather because of two damaged undersea cables in the Mediterranean.
There was disruption to 70% of the nationwide network in Egypt, and India suffered up to 60% disruption.
UK firms such as British Airways have told the BBC that call centres have been affected by the outage.
Industry experts said it could take up to one week to repair the damaged cables and resume full service.
International telephone calls, which have also been affected, are being rerouted to work around the problem.
Repairs are currently being done as we speak. In the meantime, go out and experience real life for a change.
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For one, nobody really knows beyond Microsoft’s official reports and scattered information from beta testers around the world – the final version will be the basis for the final verdict. Although people are somewhat hopeful that Internet Explorer 8 will at least be up to par with it’s contemporaries like Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, and even Opera, as the Windows’ default browser has long been frowned upon for its instability, resource hogging, and general inefficiency and slow speed.
With easier to use parental controls, as well as a sleeker, more elegant look and user friendly interface, Microsoft also believes that IE8 will perform and browse considerably faster than any other browser – although again, that is something we will all have to see when the final version is released sometime in March of this year.
Are people actually clicking less on risky online sites or is it the search engines themselves taking them out of the list?
The investigation, conducted by McAfee(R) SiteAdvisor(TM), studied the five major U.S. search engines (Google, Yahoo!, MSN, AOL, Ask) and found that the overall chance of clicking through to a risky site declined by 12.0%. Still, McAfee estimates that consumers click through to risky sites more than 268 million times each month.
“It’s good to see that clicking on search engine results has gotten modestly safer,” said Chris Dixon, director of strategy, McAfee SiteAdvisor. “But when almost one of 12 sponsored links still clicks through to a risky site, there remains significant room for continued improvement.”
Whatever the reason for the declining percentage, whether it be the user being more vigilant or the search engines taking care of what they list, we hope it will even get smaller next year.
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