The 2004 saw the 'Net get its first official cyber-vicar when the Church of England appointed a Web-pastor to look after the online flock it hoped would congregate at its new and rather disappointing Ichurch Web site. Distributed denial of service attacks were on the increase last year, thanks mostly to an ever-increasing army of zombie PCs.
The Chinese calendar may have had 2004 down as the year of the monkey, but in the IT world it will be remembered as the year of the fox.
Last year Mozilla released its free Firefox Web browser, giving the security liability known as Internet Explorer some competition and restarting the browser wars.
2004 saw the release of Service Pack 2 for Windows XP and Microsoft's attempt to reclaim the security high ground. Swiftly dubbed Security Patch 2, as it included rudimentary firewall software, it left a world that mostly runs Windows 98 still unprotected.
Google, Spyware
It was the year when Google floated, then exhibited signs of megalomania by announcing it was developing its own browser and asking us all to install its search bar on our PCs -- which for some reason most of us did.
2004 was the year the hackers went "phishing" to con us into handing over our online banking details and despite belonging to the species allegedly at top of the food chain, an astonishing number of people obliged.
The world woke up to spyware, and proved that the paranoid among us were right all along. Shame more people didn't go to see the flop-buster, Troy to find out what a Trojan horse was, and that free software doesn't necessarily have to be equine in shape to be one.
It was also the year an appalling refereeing decision forced "In-ga-land" out of Euro 2004, leading many to take their revenge on the Swiss referee electronically by bombarding his inbox with abuse.
DDoS, Anti-Spam
2004 saw the 'Net get its first official cyber-vicar when the Church of England appointed a Web-pastor to look after the online flock it hoped would congregate at its new and rather disappointing Ichurch Web site.
Distributed denial of service attacks were on the increase last year, thanks mostly to the ever increasing army of zombie PCs left permanently online and infected with malware controlled remotely by hackers.
Lycos Europe sought to harness the same idle distributed computing power for the good of humanity, by asking people to run its screen saving software, which it would use to bombard spammers, but few felt like handing them such a weapon of mass bandwidth destruction, even if their intentions were good.
The must-have item of 2004 was the mini iPod, and Apple also launched its iTunes Europe Web site, allowing us Europeans to join the legal digital music download revolution and buy music that can only be played on the iPod!
What's Next?
Most significantly, my mother finally got online in 2004, and finally worked out what her son, a "Web site developer," did for a living. And what does 2005, the Chinese year of the rooster, have in store for us?
Will Firefox win the browser wars and Microsoft finally secure Windows? Will Google take over the world, Lycos eliminate spam and the Church of England bring salvation to the surfing masses?
And will my mother like any of my Web sites? I'll keep you posted.
Source: Ecommerce Times
Available 9am - 6pm EST, Mon-Fri