Web Shorts

Reeling NASA must deal with lab hacking, too
The crash of the space shuttle Columbia has cast light on two types of morally-challenged internet citizens: people trying to sell shuttle bits on eBay and the ones who hacked into NASA’s computer hours after the disaster. The British security firm mi2g issued a report Wednesday stating that a hacker group called the Trippin Smurfs had disabled nine servers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory Saturday. The attack only happened to coincide with the tragedy – the Smurfs allegedly were protesting the U.S. position on Iraq. The attack, which lasted about 90 minutes, affected servers running on the Sun Solaris operating system. The group bombarded the server with political messages, the third time in the past three weeks that the Smurfs have targeted the Jet Propulsion Lab. This is the first time the political messages have been employed. The Trippin Smurfs have been targeting Unix-based systems since 2001. Although NASA’s web site slowed by more than half the usual speed Saturday due to increased traffic, none of its internet sites were impacted by the hack. Officials did not comment on the allegations.

Internet sees traffic spike in Columbia queries
Predictably, concerned citizens turned to the internet last week to find information on the Columbia space shuttle crash. The number of Saturday queries drove “space shuttle Columbia” to the No. 2 ranking in Lycos.com’s weekly top 50, even though traffic is measured Sunday to Saturday. File-swapping site Kazaa maintained its top position. But on Saturday, Columbia received four times as many hits as Kazaa and seven times as many as No. 3 IRS. Many of the searches were accompanied by queries about the last NASA disaster, the 1986 Challenger explosion. Of the seven astronauts killed, the two getting the most queries were the first female of Indian descent to go into space, Kalpana Chawla, and the first Israeli, Ilan Ramon. Meanwhile, though viewers seemed apathetic to MSNBC’s televised coverage of the event, they did log onto its web site. MSNBC.com saw the biggest numbers and the biggest surge on the day of the shuttle disintegration, improving by 182 percent on its Friday numbers. The site registered nearly 2.25 million visitors, more than 1 million better than the network managed on TV. Yahoo News was second with 1.7 million hits and CNN.com ranked third with 1.6 million, a 144 percent improvement on its Friday traffic.

FBI targets financially fuzzy America Online
If no news is good news, woe to America Online. The company seems to make dubious new headlines every day. The FBI continues investigating AOL’s advertising deals, according to the Wall Street Journal. The latest development is the questioning of several former PurchasePro.com officers, who may have been involved with a questionable AOL ad deal in March 2000. The FBI has focused on former America Online executives Eric Keller and David Colburn. Charges may be brought sometime this year in the case. Perfect Commerce purchased PurchasePro, which had since gone bankrupt, in January. Keller and Colburn are gone, but AOL’s money woes continue. Earlier this week, parent company AOL Time Warner told credit rating agencies that it would increase its $25.8 billion debt by several billion dollars this year. Standard & Poor quickly warned that the company’s creditworthiness will likely drop as a result. Part of the restructuring is because the company must pay up to $800 million in debt to buy an outstanding stake of AOL Europe operations.

TiVo edits itself out of United Kingdom market
British television watchers apparently don’t mind watching the commercials. Digital video recording company TiVo has stopped making DVR set-top boxes for the United Kingdom and will scale down its U.K. business. Last month the company closed most of its British operations. TiVo will allow remaining stock to be sold and will continue to provide service to customers who have already bought the device. The TiVo automated program guide also will continue to be updated. The good news for British consumers who never got around to buying TiVos is that a new PC may work just a well. A new line of computers with built-in DVR capabilities will be released this year.

AAA offers free online spots for offline advertisers
AAA has decided to buoy its online advertising with an assist from its offline industries. The company will give free online space to companies that buy ads in its TourBook guides. AAA says that 38 million of its 46 million members have internet access, and nearly two-thirds of them search for travel information online. The AAA web site handles about 18,000 lodging details views per day. Online versions of the ads will incorporate roughly the same creative as appears in the book. The online listing will contain a TourBook icon that opens the ad. The online TourBook was launched in 2001 to provide additional information that wouldn’t fit in the book itself.

Employees work less at work, more at home
Employees apparently have gotten less efficient at work and more efficient at home. A new study from the National Technology Readiness Survey conducted by the University of Maryland finds that although employees may suck up at-work time by surfing the internet, they are more apt to work from home. The study found that those with home and work internet access spent an average 3.7 hours surfing for personal reasons at work. They made up for it by working an average 5.9 hours from home. But some companies have already begun monitoring at-work surfing for pleasure. Companies are beginning to block dating, gaming and instant messaging sites, which also take up a lot of company bandwith. Not everyone makes up for at-work surfing at home anyway. The results were reversed for those who did not have internet access at home. They spent 6.5 hours using the internet for personal reasons at work while working just 3.7 hours from home.

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