I’m happy to announce that Gerry Shanahan has recently been appointed as Managing Director of boards.ie Ltd. We are also now looking for a full-time tech developer with LAMP expertise.
boards.ie has increased its daily visits from 30k per day in November 2005 to around 60k per day at present. Thanks to all our readers, posters and moderators for your continued support.
What a stressful but productive afternoon / evening. We migrated boards.ie’s MySQL databases to our new database server, and took the opportunity to upgrade the site to the latest version of vBulletin.
Our new server is a bit of a beast - it has two 1.86GHz quad-core Xeons (eight processor cores), 16GB of RAM, and six 146GB SAS 15k rpm hard drives in RAID 1+0.
Thanks to regi and all at boards.ie for their support and patience today.
Firstly, thank you to all our social.ie beta testers to date. The site has been nominated in the IIA Net Visionary Awards 2007 for “Web Developer Excellence”! Voting is now open if you want to support us…
Secondly, I am happy to announce that social.ie’s event creation now incorporates Google Maps and sign-up functionality. You can view the screenshots below for examples of each.
social.ie aims to be a social networking service for Irish communities. On the site, you can create your own group around your community of interest, and you can then attach events, images and also blog entries to whatever group you form. If you need help with the site (since it is still quite new), please use our support forum or put issues, bugs and feature requests on our wiki. We are currently working on other features including the promised advanced social network browsing functionality and other custom user profile fields such as external RSS feeds.
From http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/frontpage/2007/1002/1191223002351.html:
Security flaw leaves Eircom customers open to hackers
Up to a quarter of a million Eircom customers could be inadvertently sharing their broadband connections with strangers due to a security flaw in products supplied by the telecoms company.
The security problem could allow hackers to access wireless connections in buildings up to 30m (100 feet) away, without the knowledge of the Eircom account-holder.
As well as allowing free access to the internet, the flaw could in theory permit a hacker to engage in illegal activity that could then be traced back to the Eircom customer.
The problem relates to broadband routers, supplied to Eircom by Motorola subsidiary Netopia, which can connect computers to the internet via Wi-Fi, a wireless technology commonly available on the average PC.
Due to the way security has been implemented on these products, hackers and anybody with a reasonable computer knowledge can freely use them to access the internet.
The wireless routers use a security protocol called Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP). This protocol requires anybody accessing the wireless network to enter a 16-digit password.
This code is generated from the serial number of the router as well as some text which is converted to numerical values.
The text used includes eight snippets of lyrics from guitar legend Jimi Hendrix.
The security problem occurs because the unique eight digit number that is broadcast as the name of the network is also derived from the serial number.
As a result hackers simply have to look at the name of the Eircom network to get access to it. Both downloadable tools and websites have emerged which automatically create the 16-digit key when the network name is keyed in.
Eircom issued a statement yesterday saying it is aware of the issue and is contacting all affected broadband customers.
The Netopia routers in question are the 3300 and 2247 series.
Users who have changed the default set up are unaffected by the problem.
All new modems sold by Eircom will have instructions on how to change the default WEP key while existing customers are advised to visit www.broadbandsupport.eircom.net for instructions.
Eircom pointed out that accessing wireless networks without permission is a criminal offence under the Criminal Damage Act 1991 and the Criminal Justice (Theft and Fraud Offences) Act 2001.
The problem was first revealed on a post to the popular Boards.ie discussion website over the weekend.
“This raises a number of issues, not least that my neighbour could use my broadband connection,” said Brian Honan, a director of security specialists BH Consulting.
Mr Honan said unauthorised users could use a wireless network to download illegal content or even to access other computers in the premises or home.
Motorola, whose subsidiary supplies the routers, declined to comment on the matter.
(Aside: As you can expect, we had a busy day on boards.ie today, necessitating a database server restart at one stage when our web node requests became too much for our database to handle. But you may have seen in my recent presentation about boards.ie that we are purchasing a new database server to help resolve this limitation. The story also made it onto The Register via ENN.)
Meant to quote this interview with Marie Boran that was published last week about our forthcoming social.ie site…
Online networking for the Social.ie challenged
27.08.2007 - Social networking fans in Ireland can look forward to a site catering especially for them, as John Breslin, creator of the popular Boards.ie portal is currently working on a platform that will combine all the spin-off functions including blogs, ‘friends’ lists, events and photo albums.
“There are a huge amount of social networks, maybe even an overabundance of them, but at the same time there isn’t any dedicated one where you know you will find things of an Irish interest,” said Breslin.
Breslin, who is also a researcher with the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) in NUI Galway, talked about how his team is developing social.ie while looking at how online communities connect – namely, through shared objects, not people.
“If you look at sites like Flickr and del.icio.us and so on, people are connected through photos and bookmarks and events,” he said.
In parallel with that Breslin started working at DERI three and a half years ago and was introduced to various elements of social networking by his boss Stefan Decker and began thinking about how he could apply this functionality to boards.ie.
He introduced a ‘friends’ function to the boards site three years ago which has led to over 15,000 links between users. With this success his team is now working on bringing this to social.ie, planning to plug the social networking site it into the existing boards user base.
A part of the design which is unique to social.ie is an interactive graph visualisation model, with the user shown at the centre and a graphical display of the offshoots of friends they are linked to.
Boards.ie, said Breslin, has been a part-time project for the five main directors of the company, himself included, but this year for the first time due to its growth and revenue the team is now actively looking for full-time staff.
There is no exact timeframe, however, for the launch of social.ie, although it is in development right now.
By Marie Boran
As mentioned previously, I will be taking part in the “Talk Digital” panel discussion on “Social Networking in Games” on Monday at 1 PM, which is part of the GAME :ON Cyber Games Festival in the Digital Hub, Dublin next week. The panelists are:
The event will be chaired by John Collins from the The Irish Times, and the where and when details are:
Does anyone have a good resource for listing the top Irish websites? All I have to go on at the moment are Alexa’s Ireland listings (which has boards.ie at #9) and the Top 100 Irish Sites (boards.ie is at #6).
As you probably know, we’ve been planning to spin off various boards.ie services (blogs, albums, events, friends functionality) into a separate social networking site for nearly a year now. Unfortunately, time and effort have been against us, but I’ve started on this again and hopefully we can launch a beta version within the next few weeks.
The result will be called social.ie (pronounced “socially” :-)). It will leverage our existing boards.ie userbase and the social network connections that have been formed on the site since I added friends functionality three years ago (so far, there are 15335 links between users, 6347 of those are reciprocated). The screenshot below shows the buddylist functionality in vBDrupal that has been hacked a little to be a bit more graphical.
Will post more as it happens…
I’ve re-run our statistics gathering queries, and produced three new graphs showing boards.ie’s growth in terms of users, posts and threads. Currently, boards.ie has 111350 registered users, and 6931221 posts on 596763 threads in 671 forums.
User growth
Post growth
Thread growth
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