I've now moved from a web hosting provider that offered "unlimited" resources (I'd name and shame because they suck so bad, but I won't even give them that publicity to the search engines) to one that has specific monthly limits. As a result, I've been going through two-and-a-half years of apache logs and implementing various filters to cut down on spammers, scrapers, bots, and snoops. There are two major groups of pests: there are the "illicit" ones, the comment spammers, script kiddies, and so on. And there are the "legitimate" ones - corporate/government entities, and the ones who do the ...
Archive for the ‘Tech & Science’ Category
The BBB: Part of the Problem
Tuesday, January 31st, 2012Investigate Chris Dodd!
Thursday, January 26th, 2012There's a petition to investigate that Friend of Angelo, Chris Dodd, at whitehouse.gov, that exceeded 30,000 signatures as I was writing this. The petition is a reaction to Chris Dodd having said this on Fox News: Those who count on quote 'Hollywood' for support need to understand that this industry is watching very carefully who's going to stand up for them when their job is at stake. Don't ask me to write a check for you when you think your job is at risk and then don't pay any attention to me when my job is at stake." You can't be more ...
Justice For Who?
Thursday, January 26th, 2012From "Joint complaint of those affected by the closure of Megaupload service" The FBI has caused incalculable damage, far in excess of the losses claimed by the content lobbies, in a fruitless attempt to prevent access to the media content hosted on Megaupload, some of which they claim to have been infringing copyright under US law. ... The widespread damage caused by the sudden closure of Megaupload is unjustified and completely disproportionate to the aim intended. For this reason Pirates of Catalonia, in collaboration with Pirate Parties International and other Pirate Parties [including the Pirate Party of the United Kingdom], have begun investigating ...
Some More Perspective On Online Piracy
Tuesday, January 24th, 2012I've read through the Megaupload Indictment, and I'm not terribly impressed by the case presented by the U.S. government. Not when there are items like these to be found throughout it: In approximately April 2006, members of the Mega Conspiracy copied videos directly from Youtube.com to make them available on Megavideo.com. So? Were these copied videos copyrighted and the licensing ignored, were the licenses followed, or were they in the public domain? On or about August 31, 2006, VAN DER KOLK sent an e-mail to an associate entitled “lol”. Attached to the message was a screenshot of a Megaupload.com file download page for ...
Some Perspective On Online Piracy
Tuesday, January 24th, 2012Now, it may seem like SOPA is the end game in a long fight over copyright, and the Internet, and it may seem like if we defeat SOPA, we'll be well on our way to securing the freedom of PCs and networks. But as I said at the beginning of this talk, this isn't about copyright, because the copyright wars are just the 0.9 beta version of the long coming war on computation. The entertainment industry were just the first belligerents in this coming century-long conflict... But the reality is, copyright legislation gets as far as it does precisely because it's ...
The Pirate Bay SOPA Statement
Sunday, January 22nd, 2012From The Pirate Bay's press release about SOPA: Over a century ago Thomas Edison got the patent for a device which would "do for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear". He called it the Kinetoscope. He was not only amongst the first to record video, he was also the first person to own the copyright to a motion picture. Because of Edisons patents for the motion pictures it was close to financially impossible to create motion pictures in the North american east coast. The movie studios therefor relocated to California, and founded what we today call Hollywood. The reason was mostly because there ...
Modern Entertainment Industry Logic
Saturday, January 21st, 2012First, here's a great quote, from a thoughtful blog post that questions the wisdom of letting Hollywood's "legal arm" dictate to the justice system: Surely Hollywood wouldn’t try to suspend due process, would they? Or create a parallel enforcement system? Or take away citizen recourse if they were unfairly silenced? They wouldn’t imagine the possibility of a longer jail term for streaming a Michael Jackson video than Jackson’s own doctor got for killing actual Michael Jackson? Would they? That was written in response to this NYT blog entry, in which the author makes a few somewhat valid points about there being two ...
Modern Legislative Logic
Friday, January 20th, 2012Reuters reports that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said he was postponing a test vote set for Tuesday "in light of recent events." I don't know what a "test vote" is, but it definitely reinforces the perception I already have that Congress wastes a lot of time. "The day will come when the senators who forced this move will look back and realize they made a knee-jerk reaction to a monumental problem," [The main Senate sponsor, Judiciary Committee chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt.] said. Criminals in China, Russia and other countries "who do nothing but peddle in counterfeit products and stolen American content ...
Why Google Sucks
Wednesday, September 22nd, 2010Today I needed to change a web-server config so a given directory, and all of it's subdirectories, couldn't be listed, as well as disallowing access to all but html and jpg files in that directory structure. No problem, I've done this before, but it's been awhile, so I needed to look at the relevant Apache documentation. I couldn't remember the exact URL, so I did like everyone else in the Western World would do - I turned to Google. At Google, I tried the query "apache Files directive". The first result returned was the Core features page for Apache 1.3. At ...