Posted in
Main on April 28th, 2008 by Pingdom
The first hacker attack ever to cause physical harm to its victims may have taken place this year. It happened over the Easter weekend, but barely got mentioned around the web, which is surprising. Maybe it happened too close to April Fool’s Day for journalists to believe it was for real.
Here’s what happened:
Hackers planted flashing animations that triggered headaches, seizures and lockups for visitors to an online support forum for epileptics. The attackers posted hundreds of flashing gif images, and also injected Javascript into some posts that redirected the visitor’s browser to a page specifically designed to trigger seizures in epileptics.
Similar things have happened before, but unintentionally. Maybe some remember the incident in Japan back in 1997, when an animated Pokemon cartoon caused seizures in epileptic kids watching the show on TV. Since then, animated movies and video games often have disclaimers that they may contain flashing images and content that can cause seizures.
Fortunately not all epileptics suffer from this problem. Only 3-5 percent of epileptics are photo sensitive, meaning they can experience seizures from flashing images or certain patterns. However, with approximately 3 million epileptics in the US, that is still up to 150,000 people in the US alone.
You can read more over at Wired, which seems to be one of the few that covered the forum incident, and also the resulting press release from the nonprofit Epilepsy Foundation, which hosts the attacked forum.
Want to test your site every minute?
Posted in
Main,
Mobile podcast on February 9th, 2012 by Pingdom
Pingdom’s Podcast is a weekly show about Internet, web, security, and mobile stuff.
In this show, Saleh also gives us an update on the pending approval of his Carbon for Windows Phone Twitter client. We also talked about Nokia’s recent financial results, if Google Chrome can hit more than 50% market share this year, and the recent privacy-blunder by the guys behind the Path mobile app.
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Posted in
Main on February 9th, 2012 by Pingdom
There’s no denying that Google Chrome continues to be the darling of the web browser market. And as we predicted in July last year, Chrome overtook Firefox around November 2011.
So now the question is, when will Google also wrestle down Internet Explorer, and become the undisputed king of the browser world? In December 2011, Chrome 15 became the most popular browser in the world, beating Internet Explorer 8, but if you combine all IE versions, Microsoft still holds the number 1 spot.
Equipped with the latest web browser statistics from StatCounter, we set out to see when Chrome is likely to achieve more than 50% market share.
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Posted in
Main on February 8th, 2012 by Pingdom
Want to see how your favorite US sports site is doing, if it has a perfect 100% uptime score or not? If you want to check the latest scores and it isn’t working, could it be a problem with your computer or connection, or the site? We’ve got the solution for you!
For some time now we’ve been monitoring 34 major US sports and news sites related to sports. Our recent articles on the Super Bowl are a result of that monitoring.
Now you can look at how these sites are doing yourself on the public reports page for this list of US sports websites.
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Posted in
Main on February 8th, 2012 by Pingdom
Who has not used Google Maps? Raise your hand! Since the launch 7 years ago, Google Maps has become the de facto map service that users around the world go to for all their mapping needs.
As we say Happy Birthday to Google Maps, read on to find out some of the critical milestones in its history, and some amazing numbers and statistics.
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Posted in
Main on February 7th, 2012 by Pingdom
In 2010, there were just over 1 million secure Internet websites worldwide. Almost half of those, or 446,992 to be exact, were located in the United States.
But in which country can we find the most secure websites in relation to population? The answer may surprise you.
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Company
March 12th, 2009 at 2:33 am
I can’t add your rss feed to my reader, what could be the problem?
Pingdom
March 12th, 2009 at 5:51 am
@company Do you think you could provide some more details on your problem so we can look into it? For example which feed reader you are using, the URL you tried to add and what the issue is. Do you get any error message?
Our main feed is provided through Google Feedburner at http://feeds2.feedburner.com/RoyalPingdom and we haven’t noticed any issues with it, so it would be really helpful if you could give us some more information regarding this.