Android smartphones outranks iPhones, BlackBerries

Android smartphone has outranked iPhone and BlackBerry devices for the first time in U.S market. According to latest Nielsen survey, Android devices were used by 29% of the U.S. market in the November to January period whereas Apple iPhones and BlackBerry devices had a 27% share, Nielsen reported.
According to Nielson’s report of December, the top three smartphone operating systems are in a direct competition to each other. They further added that “It is the first time that Android is in the lead”.
Microsoft's Windows Mobile and Windows Phone 7 smartphones had a 10% share of the U.S. market from November to January, while Web OS from Hewlett-Packard had 4% and Symbian from Nokia had 2%.
Nielsen relied upon 14,701 postpaid mobile subscriber surveys to obtain its latest results. In contrast, Gartner, IDC and other analyst firms use sales and shipment figures for their analysis.
The Nielsen blog uses guarded wording to describe Android's position at the top, which some analysts have also pointed in recent months. "Android appears to be pulling ahead of RIM BlackBerry and Apple iOS," Nielsen said.
Still, RIM and Apple came out on top compared with competing device makers such as HTC and Motorola. That's because RIM is the only maker of its BlackBerry devices, and Apple is the only maker of iPhones, while the Android OS is used by several manufacturers. For Android smartphones, HTC had 12%, Motorola had 10%, Samsung had 5% and all others had 2% of the market.
In another finding, using the same sample, Nielsen found that Android "seems" to be attracting more younger consumers. Among smartphone customers aged 18-34, Android was used by 14%, while the iPhone was used by 12% and the BlackBerry was used by 11%.
Customers aged 25-34 years constitute the largest smartphone user group, slightly ahead of the 35-to-44 age group. The third-largest smartphone customer group is aged 18-24, according to Nielsen.

WordPress blog service down: Huge DDoS attack

WordPress: blogging service has been extensively hit by denial of service attack. Large no of blogs were unavailable for most of the time on Thursday.
WordPress currently hosts 30 million publishers and serves 10% of all websites in the world and have about 300 million unique visitors monthly.
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Automattic and WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg tells us that this is the largest attack WordPress.com has ever seen, and is likely to be politically motivated.

The amount of junk data that was thrown at the company's servers while the DDoS ... attack was ongoing made it hard to defend against it using standard countermeasures.

Although it is smaller than Google-owned Blogger and other hosts, but it is a crucial platform for large amount of Web’s population ( 8.5% of websites)..
WordPress which is used by over 13 percent of the 1,000,000 biggest websites, was hit today by an "extremely large" distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack.

The size of the attack was multiple Gigabits per second and tens of millions of packets per second large enough to impact all three of the company's datacenters in Chicago, San Antonio, and Dallas.
DDoS attacks typically involve botnets of compromised computers around the world, bombarding a site with traffic - effectively "clogging it up" and preventing legitimate users from accessing its content.
It's unclear what has motivated the DDoS attack, but ... WordPress has just notified that their systems are back to normal.
As of now, the attacker has not been identified but is believed to be a politically motivated assault. The recent unrest in the Middle East has led to a greater use of Blogging to inform the world and fellow protesters of the various revolutions taking place. Pro-Government supporters could have targeted non-english Blogs in an effort to silence them.