Google+ is Google’s upcoming social networking service. It is going to be built as a layer that while it integrates different Google social services, such as Google Profiles and Google Buzz, will also introduce many new features including Circles, Hangouts, Sparks and Huddles. It has been said that this is Google’s biggest attempt to rival the social network Facebook, which has over half a billion users.

[ad#s-hr-strip]

Adblock Plus (ABP) is a content-filtering extension for Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome web browsers. ABP, a forked version of Adblock, allows users to prevent page elements, such as advertisements, from being downloaded and displayed.

How it works
Wikitravel with and without Adblock Plus

Like Mozilla’s built-in image blocker, Adblock blocks HTTP requests according to their source address and can block IFrames, scripts, and Flash. It also uses automatically generated user stylesheets to hide elements such as text ads on a page as they load instead of blocking them, known as element hiding.

Detection

Some webmasters have used JavaScript to detect the effects of the popular Adblock filters. This has been done by generating a honeypot-like URL and verifying its delivery and also by more advanced verification of the DOM after the web page is rendered in the web browser to ensure the expected advertising elements are present.

These methods do not detect the presence of the Adblock extension directly, only the effects of the filters, and are vulnerable to continued updates to the filters, and by whitelist-filtering web scripts with an extension such as NoScript.

An attempt was made to detect the plug-in itself but that detection method was rendered unusable by the 0.7.5.2 update of Adblock Plus

[ad#s-hr-strip]

A denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) or distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS attack) is an attempt to make a computer resource unavailable to its intended users. Although the means to carry out, motives for, and targets of a DoS attack may vary, it generally consists of the concerted efforts of a person or people to prevent an Internet site or service from functioning efficiently or at all, temporarily or indefinitely. Perpetrators of DoS attacks typically target sites or services hosted on high-profile web servers such as banks, credit card payment gateways, and even root nameservers. The term is generally used with regards to computer networks, but is not limited to this field; for example, it is also used in reference to CPU resource management.

One common method of attack involves saturating the target machine with external communications requests, such that it cannot respond to legitimate traffic, or responds so slowly as to be rendered effectively unavailable. In general terms, DoS attacks are implemented by either forcing the targeted computer(s) to reset, or consuming its resources so that it can no longer provide its intended service or obstructing the communication media between the intended users and the victim so that they can no longer communicate adequately.

Denial-of-service attacks are considered violations of the IAB’s Internet proper use policy, and also violate the acceptable use policies of virtually all Internet service providers. They also commonly constitute violations of the laws of individual nations.

[ad#s-hr-strip]

Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) is a combination of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol with the SSL/TLS protocol to provide encryption and secure (website security testing) identification of the server. HTTPS connections are often used for payment transactions on the World Wide Web and for sensitive transactions in corporate information systems. HTTPS should not be confused with Secure HTTP (S-HTTP) specified in RFC 2660

The main idea of HTTPS is to create a secure channel over an insecure network. This ensures reasonable protection from eavesdroppers and man-in-the-middle attacks, provided that adequate cipher suites are used and that the server certificate is verified and trusted.

The trust inherent in HTTPS is based on major certificate authorities which come pre-installed in browser software (this is equivalent to saying “I trust certificate authority (e.g. VeriSign/Microsoft/etc.) to tell me who I should trust”). Therefore an HTTPS connection to a website can be trusted if and only if all of the following are true:

1. The user trusts the certificate authority to vouch only for legitimate websites without misleading names.
2. The website provides a valid certificate (an invalid certificate shows a warning in most browsers), which means it was signed by a trusted authority.
3. The certificate correctly identifies the website (e.g. visiting https://example and receiving a certificate for “Example Inc.” and not anything else ).
4. Either the intervening hops on the Internet are trustworthy, or the user trusts the protocol’s encryption layer (TLS or SSL) is unbreakable by an eavesdropper.

Browser integration

When connecting to a site with an invalid certificate, older browsers would present the user with a dialog box asking if they wanted to continue. Newer browsers display a warning across the entire window. Newer browsers also prominently display the site’s security information in the address bar.

Extended validation certificates turn the address bar green in newer browsers. Most browsers also pop up a warning to the user when visiting a site that contains a mixture of encrypted and unencrypted content.
[ad#s-hr-strip]