Proxy server can be a very useful service, however like most useful tools or services, in the wrong had it could be misused. Proxy server is used by oranisations to conserve IP, accelerate access to the Internet or other resources on the Internet, LAN and WAN, but it is also a useful tool for criminals, it helps make it very difficult if not impossible to trace criminals who hid behind proxies.

Someone who fell very strongly about this is Michael Swan who has petition the government to change the laws governing proxy server in UK, Michael summarises his argument as follows :

Over many years, we receive lot’s of spam, scams and other malicious emails.People use proxies to send them and this makes them hard to trace.

If you would like to lend your wight to Michael’s petition you can do so by signing this electronic petition.

The Broadband Stakeholder Group recently released a  report which recommends upgrading UK Broadband infrastructure to deliver speed of up to 100 Mbps. This super fast Internet access is said to  bring significant benefit to UK businesses and home,  the benefit in financial terms, the report claimed could exceed £16bn.

Approximately  £16 billion is expected to be the cost of upgrade broadband infrastructure nationwide, economic benefit of the upgrade is not expected to filter back into the economy until  at least 80% of UK home have access to the new super fast broadband.

Antony Walker, head of the Broadband Stakeholder Group gave a rather interesting conclusion to the report, he is not recommending that the upgrades  starts right now, not does he want it to drag on, he was quoted as saying  “It is tempting to jump in feet-first, but it matters more to do this right than to do it now”.

About 2,600 Web sites are already running Microsoft Corp.’s forthcoming Windows Server 2008, a small but increasing number that indicates rising interest in the operating system, according to new statistics from Netcraft Ltd.

Microsoft is now using Windows Server 2008 and its Internet Information Server (IIS) 7.0 for its main Web site, www.microsoft.com, said Colin Phipps, Internet security services developer at Netcraft, a Bath, England-based Internet research firm that releases a monthly survey on what operating systems are being used for Web hosting.
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New webmasters tends to ask very important questions that experienced webmasters tends to forget how difficult such matters can be for new webmasters. A young webmaster recently found creating robots.txt file a challenging task, so a simple rough and ready robots.txt file was created for the young webmasters, here is a what a robots.txt file should contain for the benefits of those who may need some info on robots.txt

# robots.txt for www.SiteName
User-agent: *
Disallow:

The robots.txt above allows all robots to index all parts of your site, here is what you need to do if you want robots to leave some parts of your site alone. On the third like which says “Disallow:”  just add the folder you wish robots to leave a alone, lets say you cgi-bin folder, just add this:
/cgi-bin/

so the new robots.txt that allows robots to every part of your website except the cgi-bin folder would look like this:

# robots.txt for www.SiteName
User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/

O’Reilley is with coining the word Web 2.0, he is regarded as one of the foremost Internet thinkers, hot on his heels is UK Webmaster forums member Marketraise who published his manifesto for Web 3.0 a few but recently followed that up with a Web 4.0 manifesto, excerpts from Marketraise Web 4.0 manifesto follows.

I had previously posted articles on web 2.0 and web 3.0.The responses were quite similar.When I posted with web 2.0 the response was web 2.0 is finished and web 3.0 is in trend. When I posted on web 3.0 the response was web 4.0 is the current brand in software. This meandering article doesn’t really offer much in terms of defining what these various Web stages are.
I’ll give it my shot:
Web 1.0 was the Hypertext/CGI Web. (the basics)
- Web 2.0 is the Community Web (for people: apps/sites connecting them).
- Web 3.0 is the Semantic Web (for machines).
Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 are a fork we are moving into now, where one is focused on internet architectures for people/community/usability and the other is focused on internet architectures for machines.