Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by janrinok on Monday August 04 2014, @08:55PM   Printer-friendly
from the microsoft-and-deception dept.

Roy Schestowitz (TechRights.org)reports

Microsoft Windows is a malware farm, so it oughtn't be too shocking that Web spam ("link farms"), according to Netcraft's latest figures (via), is driving up Microsoft's share (along with what seems like bribed hosts of parked domains). "Microsoft spin" is what our readers called it. Here is what Netcraft says:

Microsoft's most recent growth in hostnames since mid-2013 has, for the most part, been caused by a large number of Chinese linkfarms. The sites in question provide advertising for gambling sites, online product listings, and normally make use of affiliate schemes. Yet they are hosted in the USA, on generic TLDs such as .com and .net to bypass China's TLD and internet content provider (ICP) license requirements. Unusually, each linkfarm makes use of a reasonably large number of domains and IP addresses, presumably making them harder for search engines to evade. This would normally be cost prohibitive for this kind of activity, however hosting and domain packages can be found advertised on auction sites specifically for this purpose, with packages of (random/unspecified) .com domains available for as little as 17 Yen (~ £2 / $3) each, guaranteed to remain yours for at least a month. It is not clear why IIS has been chosen for these sites, however it does have a considerably higher market share (for all of our metrics) in China compared to worldwide for example 59% of domains hosted in China use IIS compared to just 29% worldwide.

We previously explained the role of parked domains as well. Here are some posts from a few months ago:

Microsoft software is not only behind inactive domains; it is also running behind spam (link farms). What a source of pride, eh? Microsoft's real market share on the Web is ~10%, depending on how it's measured. Top sites hardly have anything from Microsoft in them, so the total active site/domain count can be very misleading. Microsoft's share on the Web (measured in terms of number of requests for a page) may actually be something far lower than 10%, and maybe lower than 5%.

This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 2) by VLM on Monday August 04 2014, @09:26PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Monday August 04 2014, @09:26PM (#77370)

    The techrights article has an interesting graph, looks like nginx is about to pull ahead and become the #2 server on the net.

    I haven't messed with it at all not even just screwing around at home, but probably will have to soon, to keep current with trends and stuff.

    From gossip I've heard it doesn't do anything fundamentally shocking. Less backward compatible for weird configurations, and a little faster in workloads carefully contrived to make it look better, and practically undocumented, all in comparison to Apache.

    I haven't found a problem with Apache yet, in the sense of "Oh s#!t I can't use apache and gotta install something else right now" but it'll surely happen sooner or later.

    In long term trends my annoyance is frameworks (I'm looking at you, Play!) refuse to cooperate with anything and just wanna be "the" webserver for your app, so especially if you have multiple "things" per server you end up running framework'd apps on port 8001 or whatever and then complicated and easy to F up rewriting rules to rewrite /somedamnapp to localhost:8001/ and I hope the framework toy server doesn't crash and I hope the framework isn't too pissed off that something in the middle is rewriting all the URLs making its forward and reverse routes look a little weird. Yeah yeah I know just link directly to whatever:8001/ would be simpler but good luck explaining to a security droid who still thinks netmasks are questionable new technology and the internet still routes on classful addresses to allow port 8001 access to your webserver "bububububu but, webservers use port 80 not 8001. Doesn't opening two ports make you precisely twice as open to attacks from cyber criminals? Thats what I saw on 24 and NCIS last night." And he owns the keys to the firewall so thats how life is.

    Would be interesting to hear any real world stories about nginx or Cthulhu Help Us nginx on a microsoft OS just to keep it on the article topic.

    • (Score: 2) by Marand on Tuesday August 05 2014, @03:16AM

      by Marand (1081) on Tuesday August 05 2014, @03:16AM (#77451) Journal

      I haven't found a problem with Apache yet, in the sense of "Oh s#!t I can't use apache and gotta install something else right now" but it'll surely happen sooner or later.

      Haven't tried nginx for anything, though experimenting with lighttpd in the past made me realise that I like using it more than apache. First experimented with it for use on a VPS with really tight memory constraints, and ended up sticking with it because I like the configuration more than Apache's pseudo-html structure. Apache's still great, there's just this whole "it's not you, baby, it's me, we should see other daemons for a while" thing between it and me now that I spent some time with an alternative.

      The config file grammar is rather simplistic, largely just namespace.variable = value type things, plus some other bits that feel right at home with anybody comfortable with curly brace languages, but what got me hooked was include_shell. With it, you can generate parts of the configuration dynamically; include_shell executes the script given and then treats its output like part of the static config file. Basically a config file equivalent of perl's eval() function, it lets you add complexity via your language of choice while still keeping the config files themselves clean to read.

      That plus the lightness was enough to sell me on lighttpd. I did miss apache .htaccess configuration a bit at first, though in retrospect I was mostly using it to be lazy rather than out of any real need of it. At the risk of veering even farther off-topic, I like using it plus eperl set as a cgi handler for an extension of choice. The convenience of PHP-style page creation, but with a language that (IMO) isn't as shitty.

      This is all just preference for personal use, of course. Making something for others usually means back to apache+php because it's what they expect.

    • (Score: 2) by tempest on Tuesday August 05 2014, @01:20PM

      by tempest (3050) on Tuesday August 05 2014, @01:20PM (#77582)

      The numbers are a little strange to calculate since it's common to use nginx in conjunction with something else. My own website would show up as nginx (95% of it is served by nginx), but there's also some dynamic content served by Apache behind it (bridged via proxy). Soylent news itself uses nginx for ssl termination for example.

  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Leebert on Monday August 04 2014, @10:35PM

    by Leebert (3511) on Monday August 04 2014, @10:35PM (#77387)

    "SPAM" is a canned meat. "spam" is misuse of electronic messaging systems to send unsolicited commercial e-mail. There's no reason to all-caps it; it's not even an acronym, and it cheeses off Hormel who has otherwise been fairly nice about the whole thing.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spamming#Trademark_issues [wikipedia.org]

  • (Score: 2) by aristarchus on Tuesday August 05 2014, @06:57AM

    by aristarchus (2645) on Tuesday August 05 2014, @06:57AM (#77503) Journal

    SPAM! Bloody Vikings! And Microsoft, for giving us Spam Spam Spam Spam Spam Green Eggs and Spam.
    (Year of the Linux Desktop! Is it finally here? I have been waiting in operating system purity since 1996! Finally!)
    Lameness filter encountered! Abort post! All insight and content are on their own! Pods away!

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 05 2014, @08:36AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 05 2014, @08:36AM (#77518)

    Netcraft! (confirms IIS is dead)

  • (Score: 0, Troll) by Hairyfeet on Tuesday August 05 2014, @11:08AM

    by Hairyfeet (75) <{bassbeast1968} {at} {gmail.com}> on Tuesday August 05 2014, @11:08AM (#77545) Journal

    Because NOW it doesn't matter how many webservers you have, it matters how many "good" webservers you have, with good = any arbitrary thing that makes the fanboy's OS come out ahead.

    Now does anybody here seriously thinks MSFT gives a rat's ass WHAT you do with that server license you just bought? MSFT don't care if you roll that piece of paper or CD and smoke the thing, they already have what they wanted. They also know anytime they want their numbers to surge all they have to do is lower prices as they saw a big bounce with Win 7 and Win 8 when they were both half price and the most recent surge in WinServers is clearly from them easing VM rules and offering deals to GoDaddy and their ilk.

    So you can spin like a top, move the goalposts all day long, won't change the fact that these numbers show something that should terrify the FOSS fanboys, which is that when MSFT adopts sane and affordable pricing Linux usage drops like a stone. We saw this when netbooks, a design practically built to cater to every strength Linux had at the time I might add, went to Windows almost instantly when MSFT adopted reasonable pricing on XP. This was extra damning of Linux because while XP was nearly a decade old and a version behind the latest and greatest versions of Linux were being used, and I have no doubt if the rumors are true that MSFT intends to clear out all those XP/Vista/7 installs by offering Win 9 Home for free we will see the same thing. Of course the drop will be much less as no OEMs sell Linux anymore so pretty much the only ones using it for a desktop are those using it for the political/religious belief in the OS. However even with this being the case I expect to see Linux desktops drop from the 1.4 or so its been for ages back down to 1.2 or even 1.0 thanks to those using Linux on price alone bailing.

    This is of course what we are seeing in the "unmassaged" numbers, that when "free as in beer" doesn't equal hundreds of dollars in savings the Linux users jump ship, including from the looks of it those that do most of the server buying. Of course if you spin the numbers and refuse to count installs that don't favor your OS then Linux is clearly winning, I can do the same with Vista and Windows 8 as long as I cherry pick what I want and ignore what I don't consider "legit",....yay for spin?

    --
    ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.