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Bitstop Network Services, Inc. and Dun & Bradstreet Philippines, Inc. (D&B)
recently inked an agreement which authorizes Bitstop to market and sell
D&B’s suite of Online Trust Solutions (OTS) as an affiliate partner.

“We believe that a synergy exists between D&B and Bitstop,” says Jennifer
Non, D&B’s Marketing Manager. “Bitstop is an established player in the IT
space, offering a wide range of products and services including web hosting.
OTS is a complementary, value-add service that Bitstop can offer to its web
hosting clients.”

Enhancing trust and confidence in online transactions

With the explosive growth of the Internet and e-commerce, businesses are now
faced with the pressing dilemma of reassuring its customers regarding the
legitimacy of its existence and its ability to provide the products and
services that they claim to offer. Recognizing this need, D&B launched the
Online Trust Solutions offering in May 2011 to the Philippine market.

Quite simply, D&B’s suite of Online Trust Solutions offers the business
community the opportunity to enhance the trust and confidence in the online
space by displaying verified and validated information through the display
of a D-U-N-SR RegisteredT seal on their website, emails, and other
electronic documents. “D&B’s Online Trust Solutions provide a way for
companies to communicate to their website viewers – who are basically their
potential clients, suppliers and partners – that their company’s identity
and information has been verified by a third party, and that the website
being viewed is actually owned and maintained by their organization,” Non
explains.

*****

About Dun & Bradstreet (D&B): Dun & Bradstreet is the world’s leading source
of commercial information and insight on businesses, enabling companies to
Decide with ConfidenceR for 170 years. D&B’s global commercial database
contains more than 190 million business records. The database is enhanced by
D&B’s proprietary DUNSRightR Quality Process, which provides our customers
with quality business information. This quality information is the
foundation of our global solutions that customers rely on to make critical
business decisions.

D&B provides solution sets that meet a diverse set of customer needs
globally. Customers use D&B Risk Management SolutionsTM to mitigate credit
and supplier risk, increase cash flow and drive increased profitability; D&B
Sales & Marketing SolutionsTM to increase revenue from new and existing
customers; and D&B Internet SolutionsTM to convert prospects into clients
faster by enabling business professionals to research companies, executives
and industries, over the web

Johar Alam is a “Philippine-educated” Chairman Internet Data Center Indonesia, OpenIXP Administrator, Junior Internet Indonesian who helped setup one of the most successful internet exchanges in the Asia Pacific region.

He will be going on a vacation in Manila next week. Sir Bayani Benjamin Lara requested him to give a short talk about their experiences in running one of the Indonesia’s Internet exchange, and to give some insights on how it has helped improve domestics routing in their country. Also he will be discussing how he was able to build a very tight “community among the ISP’s there.

He will also be talking about how they built IDC Indonesia, one of the “hippest” places to do network deployments and maintenance.

Check the profile of Johar Alam at http://id.linkedin.com/pub/johar-alam-rangkuti/19/169/4a3

The Philippines, which holds the record for the best participation in Earth Hour since 2009, will again go dark at 8:30 pm on March 31.

This year, Earth Hour will have switch-off ceremonies in three major cities: Makati, Cebu, and Davao. Other cities and towns will also have their own ceremonies.

“To commemorate our country’s fifth Earth Hour, we thought it high time for WWF to observe the movement across the archipelago – which has always been what we’ve aimed for,” lawyer Angela Ibay, Earth Hour Philippines national director said.

The ceremony in Makati, to be held at Ayala Triangle Gardens, will feature an Earth-themed parade led by glow-in-the-dark dance troupe Bailes de Luces and the Caracol dancers. The ceremony will also feature performances by El Gamma Penumbra, Brigada, and other groups. WWF-Philippines national ambassador Rovilson Fernandez will host the Makati City ceremony.

In Cebu City, the ceremony will be held at the Plaza Independencia. The Sinulog Dancers will lead a parade from Fuente Osmena to the plaza, where a candle lighting ceremony will be held. This will be followed by the release of biodegradable sky lanterns.

SM Davao will meanwhile host the switch-off ceremony for Mindanao. Black-light and fire dancers will perform while the city’s lights are turned off. WWF-Philippines national ambassador Marc Nelson will be in Davao to host the ceremony.

With the number of Philippine towns and cities participating in Earth Hour growing each year, the Philippines may get to keep its record as the official Earth Hour “Hero Country” again. Fifty Philippine towns and cities joined Earth Hour in 2007. By 2009, there were 647 participants, and by 2011, Earth Hour had support from 1,661 towns and cities.

If you’re thinking of cheating on Earth Hour, don’t bother. Astronaut Andre Kuipers will be watching you from space.

Kuipers, a Dutch astronaut with the European Space Agency, will be watching the Earth on March 31, when entire cities are expected to switch off their lights for 60 minutes. According to the World Wildlife Fund for Nature (WWF), Kuipers will be sharing photos and live commentary during Earth Hour.

During Earth Hour, an annual event since 2007, towns and cities across the world switch off their lights for an hour to raise awareness of environmental issues and to save energy. This year, Kuipers will watch 135 countries and territories across the world go dark at 8:30pm on March 31.

“Working to understand our planet is what ESA does every day, and taking part in Earth Hour enables people to join us in this commitment,” he said in a statement from the space agency.

But you don’t have to be in space to help save the environment. WWF-Philippines president and CEO Jose Maria Lorenzo Tan said at a press conference for Earth Hour that “we can start where we are.”

On the fifth year of Earth Hour, people should go “beyond the hour,” Ibay said. She said Earth Hour is a symbol of commitment for more sustainable living. “Beyond that, real work begins.”
“If you are online anyway, then pay your bills online,” Tan said. This will cut down on carbon emissions, paper, and will also save you time. You can also set up a rain catchment system to help save water, he said.

“There are many, many things you can do,” he said.

I Will If You Will

Among the many things you can do is to dare your friends to do something for the environment.

WWF-Philippines national ambassador Marc Nelson, for example, has promised to swim with sharks while wearing a panda costume and plant trees underwater while munching on a carrot if 5,000 of his Twitter followers pledge to reuse their shopping bags.

Rovilson Fernandez, also a WWF-Philippines national ambassador, has dared WWF-Philippines’ 23,000 Facebook fans to use the stairs instead of elevators. In exchange, he will wear a panda costume in all the races that he will run in April.

The city government of Makati has promised to lower the city’s carbon emissions if residents agree to step up participation in its solid waste management system.

“The concept of ‘I Will If You Will’ centers around providing a social contract between two parties – connecting one person, business or organization to a ‘promise’ and their friends, family, customers or members to a ‘challenge’ – uniting them behind the common goal of creating a positive environmental outcome,” WWF-Philippines said in a statement.

You can participate through Twitter by tagging the friend you’re challenging. It can be as simple as “I will reduce my water consumption if you will  pledge to support Earth Hour.” At the end of your dare, write “Let’s support #EarthHour” the hashtag #IWIYW, and mention @WWF_Philippines.

“I Will If You Will gives every individual the opportunity to inspire their friends, colleagues, and neighbors to take sustainability actions not just on the hour, but beyond the hour,” Earth Hour co-founder Andy Ridley said. Ridley will be in Makati City for the switch-off ceremony for Earth Hour 2012.

source: http://ph.news.yahoo[dot]com/can-philippines-keep-earth-hour-top-spot-.html

Over the weekend a vulnerability was discovered in the TimThumb image resizing script. On Monday Mark Maunder, the CEO of Feedjit and the one who originally discovered the issue, blogged about his site becoming compromised and how he discovered TimThumb was the weakness that allowed it to happen. Since that blog post the issue has been confirmed by TimThumb’s creator and patches have been published in an attempt to fix the problem.

TimThumb is a script primarily used for on-the-fly resizing and cropping of images, though another feature allows images from remote websites to be fetched and cropped as well, storing them on the server. The list of allowed remote websites is listed within the plugin, and checked against any fetched files.

As John Ford explained on the VaultPress blog, TimThumb’s vulnerability “allows third parties to upload and execute arbitrary PHP code in the TimThumb cache directory.” This file would allow the attacker to further compromise the site in any way. VaultPress further recommended deleting the TimThumb file from any sites that don’t explicitly require them, and updating it in cases where they do. Ford also recommended using the built-in WordPress functions such as add_image_size to resize images, avoiding TimThumb entirely.

Sucuri Security’s David Dede echoed Ford’s statement, saying “if theme/plugin authors were properly leveraging add_image_size vs. adding TimThumb they would be in a safer position today.”

Sucuri also provided a list of a few dozen themes within the WordPress.org theme directory that are using the TimThumb script in some way. According to achat in the wordpress-dev IRC channel yesterday, TimThumb may be explicitly restricted via the theme review guidelines soon. Authors of any compromised themes were going to be contacted, and if necessary, their themes updated by the team at WordPress.org.

TimThumb can be used in any PHP environment, on any content management system, though it is known for being extremely popular in commercial WordPress themes. As the news has spread this week a number of WordPress theme shops have responded.

WooThemes published instructions for updating the TimThumb scripts within their themes. Their themes were updated, though version numbers weren’t bumped. Graph Paper Press, ThemeShift, and ThemeLab have updated the versions of TimThumb within their themes as well. Elegant Themes has published updates to their themes to remove TimThumb from them entirely.

TimThumb was originally developed by a friend of Darren Hoyt’s name Tim, though development is currently run by WordPress developer Ben Gillbanks. Since the news of the vulnerability he has been working to update it via its Google Code Project.

Security issues are never fun. Have you used TimThumb in a client’s project, or used it within a theme of your own? Have you spent any time this week updating sites to repair this vulnerability?

source: http://wpcandy.com/reports/timthumb-security-vulnerability-discovered

BNS Hosting attend the Digital-Filipino E-Commerce Summit at The Peninsula Manila, corner of Ayala Avenue and Makati Avenue, Makati City last February 24, 2012.

The topics that had been tackled are:

• E-Commerce, Search, Local, Mobile, Social Models and Trends for 2012
  • Gillian Muessig, Founding President of SEOMoz
• State of E-Commerce in the Philippines
  • Jack Madrid, Founding President of E-Commerce Merchants Trade Association of the Philippines and General Manager of Multiply Philippines
• State of Digital Marketing in the Philippines (Making Customers Buy)
  • Donald Lim, Managing Director, MRM Worldwide
• PANEL: Using Local Payment Platforms and Financing Methods in 2012
  • Erick Kaludan, CEO of ShopInstallment

One of the attendee’s is owner of the sulit.com.ph  Mr. RJ David of  Sulit.com.ph attend Digital Filipino E-Commerce Summit