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The popular blogging-site hoster WordPress.com was hit with another distributed denial-of-service attack this morning, the second in two days.

"Unfortunately, the DDoS attack from yesterday returned in a different form this morning and affected sitewide performance," the company said in a notice on its Automattic site, which serves as a dashboard for the service. "The good news is that we were able to mitigate it quickly and performance returned to normal around 11:15 UTC. We are continuing to monitor the situation closely."

Stats on Automattic.com show that the site was affected for about … Read more

Blog host WordPress.com was the target of a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack earlier today described by the company as the largest in its history.

As a result, a number of blogs--including those that are a part of WordPress' VIP service--suffered connectivity issues. That includes the Financial Post, the National Post, TechCrunch, along with the service's nearly 18 million hosted blogs.

According to a post by Automattic employee Sara Rosso on the company's VIP Lobby (which had been down at the time of the attacks, though was archived by Graham Cluley over at Naked Security), the size … Read more

If you travel around the world, you sometimes find yourself marveling at just how many different cultures can intersperse every second word with an expletive.

It's a talent that some might say the British have turned into something resembling an art form, as long as you have a refined interpretation of what constitutes art.

I am therefore expleting with joy that an English city has been named, by the politically correct techies at Foursquare, as the world's rudest.

How did Foursquare come to this conclusion? Well, in a post on the the company's engineering blog, Matthew Rathbone, … Read more

When you initially set up your Mac, you will be asked to select one of several supported languages as the default language to use. This will set the system-wide spell checker to the desired language, and also cue other applications such as Microsoft Office to set their languages accordingly at installation time, if supported.

The language setting will not only set the system's display language, but also set up the various spell checkers used in word-processing programs like TextEdit, Pages, and Safari. Though this is convenient, there may be times when in typing documents you will need to use … Read more

FirstWords Deluxe is a reading game for toddlers that helps teach letter recognition. This deluxe version combines all the words from the original FirstWords apps (for Vehicles, Animals, At Home, Colors, and Shapes, giving you 147 words in all) into a single app.

The friendly, cartoony interface is simple: once you tap one of the categories on the front page, you're shown a page with an object (such as a taxi or a color or a cat) along with scattered letter tiles that make up the object's name--which a toddler can then drag and drop into the correct … Read more

Some readers took exception when I stated in a post from last month on future-proofing your data archive that Microsoft's proprietary Office file formats may not stand the test of time. Well, compatibility problems have already surfaced between the two most recent releases of MS Word.

Several people report spaces being dropped randomly from documents created in Word 2010 when the files are opened in Word 2007 on another machine. (A post on the Microsoft Answers forum explains the problem in more detail.)

The quick fix is to set both systems to use Adobe PDF as the default printer … Read more

Novell will soon cease to exist as its own company.

Shareholders of the former network-software giant voted in favor of Attachment's intent to acquire the company to the tune of $2.2 billion.

At a special investor meeting held yesterday, almost 99 percent of the shares voting approved the takeover, representing a majority of about 66 percent of all of Novell's outstanding stock. Once the merger is completed, Novell shareholders will be able to receive $6.10 in cash for each share of Novell common stock owned.

But the deal is not quite done. Novell said the merger … Read more

We remember a time--not so long ago--when translating a text between two languages required a dictionary and a lot of patience. But now we have things like Tirgumit Right Click Free Dictionary. This handy utility makes translating between languages a breeze, whether you just need to know one word or want to translate an entire block of text.

The program's interface is attractive and intuitive, and there are several ways to access its features. If you're reading something in a foreign language and need to quickly translate a single word you don't know, simply hold down the … Read more

Dodge's Challenger is a modern muscle car. The Challenger explosion 25 years ago was a tragic moment. Other than the name they don't have much in common, but for several hours Friday morning, Google's AdWords system considered them linked.

That's just one example of a weak spot in Google's famous AdWords system, which turned an interesting Stanford science project into the world's most powerful Internet company. Simply put, it takes some time for the AdWords system to determine whether an ad triggered by a search query is truly relevant to that query, meaning that … Read more