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Google’s Panda update kills many Sites

Imagine waking up one day and finding out that the world as you know has crashed,  thats what happened to many publishers, SEO companies and Publications on Monday April 11, thats when Google started rolling out its Panda update globally. Some of the sites have found their way up the results but many others have been hit hard some popular sites have lost 95% of traffic virtually signalling an end to their glory days.

The update was targeted at content farms which have increased in the recent years  details from groceries to Robotics and giving a high level view of many topics. They were the worst hit and there were other sites which had reviews and user contributed information were also affected.

Though Google might have done this to increase customer satisfaction it might raise anti competitive practices over its recent actions. Among the sites impacted was Microsoft Ciao.co.uk  which had filed a case against Google with European Commission for unfair monopoly. And not surprisingly content farms owned by Google like Youtube and Blogspot have seen over 20% increase in traffic due to the Panda update.

Affected in this update include original content sites like British Medical Journal, probably Google will add an exception for a site like this, but there may be many more small vendors,publishers who might have been affected and many of them might not even know the reason for the reduction in their business. With the sudden and widespread nature of this change it makes one wonder whether Google is targeting content farms or if this is one of its Business tactics to bring in more advertisers.

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Japan crisis could cause severe delays in iPad 2 deliveries

Apple’s much awaited iPad 2 was launched  last week, but then luck isnt favoring the Cupertino company, after the iPhone 4 antenna gate and the missing white iPhone this time its the nature who has played spoilsport in the launch. With Apple sourcing some parts exclusively from Japan,  delays are expected in future batches of iPad 2. It is not known if Apple  if the parts in question are only supplied by a single vendor for iPad 2.

In the past Apple is known to source same parts from multiple vendors to add redundancy and avoid vendor problems impacting Apple’s schedule.  If Apple does have such an option, the delay will be considerably less, but it still remains to be seen. Currently Apple website says that the earliest they can ship iPad 2 is in 4-5 weeks time.

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RSA security not forthcoming on security breach

RSA security based out of San Francisco, whose networks and several workstations were compromised few days ago, hasn’t released much information about the level of information obtained by the attacker. RSA Security which provides two level authentication for many company’s intranet access from outside office premises  with a combination of  random number generated by Security Key fobs ( SecureId )  and user generated passwords.

RSA is probably the biggest name in Secure Access for work from home setup in many Fortune 500 companies and others.  RSA security is the data security arm of EMC storage group and was founded by the famous RSA ( Rivest, Shamir and Adleman) public key cryptography.

The way RSA has handled the issue has caused alarm in many quarters, without the details of what and how information was compromised many of its clients are afraid that the hacker(s) could target their infrastructure without warning. It appears that hackers had access to see key, which allows the attacker access to the random number generated by SecureId and also allows them to change user generated password as well.

Some of the financial institutions might disable the remote access for their users to prevent any attacks based on the compromised information.