Broadband Reports

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Broadband Reports, located at the web URL www.dslreports.com (mirrored at www.broadbandreports.com), is a North American-oriented information and review site based in New York City. The site's main focus is on high speed Internet services in the United States and Canada, and other countries (United Kingdom and Australia) such as DSL, cable Internet, and fiber optics. As of February 2014, dslreports.com is the second result which shows up on Google when searching for the term "broadband". Although the site is still called Broadband Reports, it is located at dslreports.com due to issues with Google's PageRank.

Broadband Reports was created by Justin Beech in June [1] According to Alexa's pageranking system, dslreports.com went online on May 28, 1999. As of March 2006, Alexa showed that it was within the top one thousand most visited websites on the Internet.[2] See the Alexa article for information regarding possible inaccuracy in these figures.

April 27, 2011 Major Event

Over a period of 4 hours on Wednesday April 27, 2011 an automated SQL Injection attack occurred on Broadband Reports website that was able to extract 8% of the username/password pairs: 8,000 random accounts of the 9,000 active and 90,000 old or inactive accounts.[3][4][5]

Outage

On Monday, April 16, 2012 at 1:50 PM EST Broadband Reports (DSLReports) went offline due to a serious power failure at their host's datacenter. While Net Access Corporation did temporarily have power with battery backup, the gas generator failed to come on, thus exhausting battery power. Due to this unusual power failure, it knocked out the database server, rendering the site useless. The main problem is that Net Access Corporation didn't have any "snapshots" of DSLReports data, and although all data was intact, the SQL servers had no access to the database. By May 3rd, 2012 some site features had been restored, including the ability read posts, receive instant messages, and create posts. At that time, only posts, news articles and ISP reviews created before about September 17, 2010 could be read as well posts and news articles created after May 3rd, 2012. On May 11, 2012, at around 10:00 PM EDT, the site went offline temporarily as the final restoration of the site was implemented. It has been estimated by the site owners that the cost of the recovery was in excess of $28,000. The site was not 100% glitch free immediately after recovery, but most bugs were virtually undetectable by most users. [6]

Site features

Broadband Reports allows its users to submit reviews of their Internet service provider (ISP), Web hosting service, and digital phone service (VOIP).[7] Users may also read reviews written by others. Many large ISPs have over a thousand reviews on the site. Reviews may be filtered for the user's location and/or connectivity preference.

Broadband Reports Homepage

The site is also a source of HSI (high speed Internet) related news[8] sometimes being the first to report a story about a broadband Internet service provider.[9] BBR's editors post HSI-related news items on the site's front page throughout the day. Common topics of news items and features include wireless technologies, peer-to-peer filesharing, upgrades and new offerings from high speed ISPs, legal/regulatory issues, and security issues.

Other site services include speed tests, line monitoring (more accurately, IPv4 address monitoring), tweak testing, and packet loss testing.[10][11] Some of these services are provided free of charge, but others require the user to purchase "tool points".

Community

Broadband Reports operates over 200 forums, many of which focus on Internet and computer-related topics. Other forums are dedicated to general conversation, political discussions, do-it-yourself projects or regional discussions. There are also well hidden private invitation and very controversial forums such as the "meatlocker" which can be seen by adding the /forums/meatlocker suffix to he website address. It is said this private area is for nude and pornogrhapic material submitted by the moderators and special guests. There are over a million total registered users on the Broadband Reports forums, with about 10% of those active participants.[12] A discussion forum is automatically created for every news article posted on the front page, which allows members to discuss the article in question. The members of the Broadband Reports community usually use the acronym "BBR" to refer to the site,[citation needed] although members who registered prior to the name change still refer to the site as "DSLR".

References

  1. ↑ http://www.dslreports.com/faq/8098
  2. ↑ http://www.alexa.com/data/details/main?q=&url=dslreports.com
  3. ↑ site user password intrusion info
  4. ↑ "DSLReports says member information stolen". Cnet News. 2011-04-28. Retrieved 2011-04-29. 
  5. ↑ "DSLReports.com breach exposed more than 100,000 accounts". The Tech Herald. 2011-04-29. Retrieved 2011-04-29. 
  6. ↑ https://docs.google.com/document/d/1kll86bDn_MgWoo6Ja7oHo_yvI0SCqggEvNWwPWIcrHY/edit = http://www.webcitation.org/67XYjWbyG
  7. ↑ http://www.dslreports.com/reviews
  8. ↑ http://gigaom.com/2008/08/28/comcast-makes-metered-broadband-official-beware-what-you-download/
  9. ↑ http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=9837
  10. ↑ http://www.dslreports.com/tools
  11. ↑ http://www.thenakedpc.com/articles/v03/08/0308-02.html
  12. ↑ http://www.dslreports.com/who

External links

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