In the aftermath of Michael Jackson’s untimely death yesterday, many people are noticing a general slow-down on the internet caused by increased traffic to news sites etc.

Google have reported that they actually feared that their network was under attack at one point yesterday due to the massive number of similar “Michael Jackson” search term look-ups around the time when there was still speculation about his fate.

The Twitter network crashed completely (again).

Many news organisations have experienced problems which appear to have continued into today : CNN, BBC, Sky, AOL, CBS, Yahoo and MSNBC all suffered slowdowns.

The additional traffic to these websites is having a knock-on effect on other internet traffic – infact average download times were doubled at around 2.30PM Pacific time yesterday.

This all just goes to show that world-wide news items can affect the fragile internet which we have all grown to depend upon. We all expect it to be there when we need it, but the fact is that the internet does have a finite capacity and it sometimes gets pretty close to being “full”.

It’s encouraging, therefore, that the UK government announced yesterday that a cyber-terrorism plan is in place now that the lack of access to the internet is seen as a potential terrorist target, but if million’s of people’s internet access can be affected by a single news story, are the Government’s plans going to be enough to counter a deliberate attack. What do you think ? Are you going to leave it to trust that the Government’s plans are going to be good enough or are you going to start making some fall-back plans for your business yourself ?

There are things which businesses can do to mitigate their company operations against internet failures – true, if the entire internet is down, many backup solutions will fail, but that’s why it’s so essential to have an up-to-date Disaster Recovery Plan with different options which has been throught-out in advance rather than at the time of most stress. As the saying goes “the best war plans are made in peace time” !

If your company still does not have a DR plan in place, call ACS for help, rather than leaving it to chance – after all, how many people predicted MJ’s sudden demise ? You never know when the unexpected is going to happen.

Webmail does pretty much what it says on the tin: access via a website to your NamesAndSpace e-mail account.  The Webmail service is available for all NamesAndSpace customers with POP accounts (If you are using an enterprise mail server like Exchange or Lotus Domino, this won’t apply to you) and allows direct access through a web browser to your e-mail currently stored on our servers.

To gain access, you will need your the username and password of the e-mail account you wish to access.  The username is your e-mail address (for example: test@namesandspace.net).  You should have your password on record, if not, you can reset it through the Hosting Control Panel.*

Once you have these details, head over to N&S Webmail at http://mail.namesandspace.net and log in.

There are a couple of things to note about Webmail.  Firstly, Webmail will only display messages that are stored on our mail servers.  If you have already downloaded a message to your e-mail program, the message has probably been removed from our servers.  Additionally, if you send any messages through webmail, they will not automatically be copied to your mail program for future reference.  If you want to keep track of messages sent through Webmail, simply BCC yourself into all messages.

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Apple has released a beta version of its’ Web Browser, Safari, for Windows XP and Vista.  Announced by Steve Jobs at the Apple  WWDC, the initial reaction has been muted.  One of the big questions is simply why?  The Windows web-browser market is pretty much sown up by the three big players (Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox and Opera).  For Apple to compete with these three, Safari at the very least needs to match their capabilities, and functionality.  This beta version does not include any Add-ons or Extensions capability; something de-rigeur for Firefox and IE for a while now.

We haven’t had an opportunity to download and install Safari yet, but screenshots and information we have read so far indicates that Safari for Windows looks, feels and operates pretty much like its’ Mac OS brethren.  However, it should not be forgotten that this is beta software, and is not a tested and finished product.  Several reviews and comments we have read have been less than complimentary about its’ stability and effect on system performance.

We shall download and investigate Safari over the next couple of days and report back on what we learn.  Until then, we continue to browse the Internet using the trusty tools of Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer.