Everything Great is *Nixbased

Cybersquatting is a topic which recently came up on Slashdot in the form of an Ask Slashdot article “Buying a Domain From a Cybersquatter“. The writer of the original topic mentions that:

“since we don’t own a trademark on this name it doesn’t qualify as bad faith”

This in it’s self means legally they are not a cybersquatter. Using the term cybersquatter to describe someone whom has legally purchased a domain name which does not infringe on a trademark is a large deviation from it’s actual meaning and should be avoided. Let’s think about this for a moment; squatter as defined on http://dictionary.reference.com/ in this scenario means

“a person who settles on land or occupies property without title, right, or payment of rent.”

Prefixing cyber to squatting changes the meaning slightly as it then deals with occupying a domain name without rights to the trademarked content (the name). Never was “cybersquatting” meant to apply to non-trademarked names. How can someone “settle on or occupy property, esp. otherwise unoccupied property, without any title, right, or payment of rent.” if the domain name is not trademarked or otherwise owned by anyone when they paid the fees for that domain?

Note; domain tasting is a whole other issue.

Think I’m wrong? Do your research, the term was coined in the early days of the Internet and was never intended to be used in the generic way which some people are now using it. Another term “parkhole” fits the scenario mentioned in the article much better.

Slashdot is comprised of technical people yet the comments by these people also incorrectly use the word. Sometimes it really is amazing that some people don’t know what specific terminology means in their own area of expertise. An example of not having a proper level of understanding is this comment by Overzeetop. The fact that this comment is marked as insightful pretty much proves my point about the mass of ill informed and/or illogical people. This isn’t to say that everyone on Slashdot lacks an understanding of the word, some people such as noundi understand the meaning perfectly based on his/her commentary located here.

The other issue I have noticed is the assumptions about domain resellers in general, again I will use the original article mentioned above as an example but this isn’t a Slashdot only issue. Even though tasting is another issue all together as mentioned, in this comment the commenter says:

“in most cases, these idiots haven’t even purchased the domain names”

This commenter is stating that the domain resellers are all idiots and then mentions that “most’ of them are tasting, but he does call them all “idiots” which to me is a pretty wild and inaccurate assumption. With a similar demeanor but possibly less tact hyades1 says in this comment that:

“Offering these scumbags money just teaches them that they’re on the right track. If you’ve got money to burn, why not throw a little at some of the many groups that are trying to outlaw this practice?“

First off nobody is trying to outlaw buying and reselling domains as far as I know and secondly why the assumption that someone not breaking the law is scum? It’s a supply and demand thing, the domain name is unique, if you want that domain over the ones available for lower prices you will need to pay more. Nothing is scummy about someone buying a domain before you ever wanted it and than selling it to you for more than they paid for it. People buy and resell things all the time, a great example are Ebay sellers. These people often buy an item on Ebay and later resell it for more than they paid for it, is this a scumbag thing to do? If so why? It is the basis of commerce, a company sells it’s products for more than they paid to acquire said products.

If people started thinking before stating opinions much more time would be spent on the improvement of everything from the economy to the environment and less time would be spent trying to find ways to screw those people whom they feel are screwing them. I’m not a domain reseller or anything of that nature so this is just my opinion based on two parts logic and four parts research.

As we all know the Terms of Service (ToS) and Terms of Use agreement has become commonplace on websites as a means to govern the way these sites are to be used and the rights to user submitted content are to be handled. From the small forum based websites receiving traffic in the range of 10-20 unique visitors per day to the large social media sites serving millions of visitors in the same period of time one often overlooked similarity is almost guaranteed to exist, the all too often gigantic legal monster known as the Terms of Service agreement. These agreements are, much like End User License Agreements (EULA) skipped by the majority of visitors even if a mechanism is in place to try and encourage the visitor to read them. With headlines in recent history involving ToS terms however it may be in the visitors best interest to read these agreements and see for themselves the lengths some websites will go to when trying to impose terms and conditions upon their users. These terms and conditions are often largely overstepping the boundaries of common sense and sometimes go as far as to violate the rights and freedoms of the user, this is especially common where the terms within the agreement are pertaining to user submitted information and content.

From the age requirements in Google’s ToS as pointed out here, the issue over their Chrome browsers ELUA here and the uprising over the Google Maps API ToS here one would think that large corporations would think twice before changing their Terms of Service or End User License Agreements but apparently the social media giant Facebook didn’t get the hint, as seen here.

Google has always been quick to fix their ToS agreements and EULAs when under pressure from the masses but Facebook and other sites seem to do just enough to fool a large percentage of their userbases into thinking the issue has been resolved. Lets not take their rebuttals at face value and keep in mind the possibility that they may just be cash generating machines with possible ethical and moral issues, with that in mind we can move on to the reality, legality and understanding of Terms of Service agreements.

The first thing to to keep in mind is that everyone needs to read the ToS of a site before using it, I know the scroll ‘n click without reading method is popular but it may some day land you in hot water if you continue to use said method. Terms of Service agreements are often thought of as fragile in a legal sense and because of such many technologically gifted internet users believe that they can bypass reading them due to the fact that they didn’t physically sign anything to state they agree. The problem with such mentality is that in a legal sense in most countries and jurisdictions by using the site it is assumed that you agree to the terms governing that use, it is up to you as the user to read and understand them. This is often the case whether the agreement is a clickwrap type or a page requiring no actual interaction to bypass.

Their are instances however when clauses in a Terms of Service contract are not legally binding, this does not automatically mean all clauses in the ToS are void and can be broken but it can mean that a possible action against a user could be proven illegal in a court of law depending on what clause the justification for said action fell under. An example of such a ToS agreement made news around the web in 2006/2007 when Marc Bragg sued virtual reality giant Linden Research and eventually settled out of court. Though this did not set a legal precedent it did show that when a ToS is a contract of adhesion it is not legally binding. One must remember that contract law is contract law no matter if it is online or off. If an online contract imposes terms which would not be legal in a paper contract than they won’t be legal in one online, this extends to your rights as a human being and your rights to possessions (rights to data are iffy at best so you better hope you get the right judge).

The biggest issue with most ToS agreements is that they are overly lengthy and fraught with legal jargon not to mention the use of repetition within which I personally believe shows that these legal departments have the view that mere mortal website visitors could not possibly understand a ToS clause and must be treated like children. The use of this jargon along with the aforementioned length and repitition is often employed to create an element of confusion and even encourage the reader to skip over the agreement and just click the “I agree” button. For that reason it is recommended that you look up any terms in the contract you do not understand just as you would with a paper contract before signing it. One way around some sites terms of service is to license pictures and other content to someone else before making it available on a website, however some online agreements safeguard against this by disallowing such content to be posted within their website. Remember when you do not agree to the terms of any contract it is best just to walk away, by not using a specific website you probably aren’t losing out on much but by agreeing to a strict Terms of Service agreement you do not plan to follow you may be opening yourself up to future legal recourse and a high level of financial loss. I am not a lawyer but this is how I see it based on past cases and a great deal of research.

Conclusion? Read every ToS agreement before using a website because you never know just how far someone may go to defend it. The web isn’t quite the wild west some people seem to think, your actions can land you in a courtroom.

It amazes me the amount of people who still use Godaddy as their shared hosting provider. They never were a great host, they have always oversold and had lackluster customer service but lately things have been getting even worse. I have had and currently have several clients on Godaddy’s shared hosting service and each and every one of them have had problems, now I know the odd problem is to be expected with any host but lately these problems have been more frequent.

As part of my service for my customers I am often the one to call Godaddy’s “tech support” on their behalf to notify them of a problem or to find out what is going on with that problem. My experience with the tech support has left me with a bitter taste in my mouth. From claiming they have no experience with phpMyAdmin (a simple test question I posed after getting the distinct feeling that the person on the other end of the line was inexperienced and not qualified to be in a tech support roll at any company) to telling me “They are working on the problem, if I knew what it was I’d be back there helping”, these people are under qualified and ignorant, all that is needed in such a position is to have a little tech knowledge, speak clearly and be polite which seems beyond them in my experience. The willingness to help also depends on which representative you get, something as simple as importing a database which is too large to import via phpMyAdmin (due to their own settings) can be painless with one person but denied by another. The first person may tell you to upload the dump via FTP and call back where as the person you speak with when you call back may tell you that they are not allowed or are unable to do it. It is just plain old horrible tech support and lack of uniform training as well as policy….but Godaddy does get points for not outsourcing that department to India.

The plans are also not competitive on the shared hosting front when you compare them to Host Gator or Surpass Hosting. They offer somewhat similar pricing to Surpass although only allow one site to be hosted, limited space and bandwidth as well as lack of shell access etc. It really isn’t a great deal which is odd considering their size.

I did at one point have a Godaddy Virtual Dedicated Server running CentOS, to put it bluntly, it was WAY over sold and memory is not as advertised, even when the server was using much less than the amount guaranteed (256MB guaranteed, 1 GB bursted) running a backup would tell me it failed due to lack of free memory available. This issue was reported, noted as a problem but never resolved as at the end of my 12 months of service during final backups the issue persisted. The default hosting control panel is also rather clunky and uses illogical placement of links and such but going on about that could probably do my head in all on its own. The bottom line is: AVOID GODADDY HOSTING.

I used to host everything on my own home servers but I have since grown the sites too large to continue to do so. Due to said growth I have moved pretty much everything over to SurpassHosting which gives rather great package deals if you sign up with them on a long term basis. So far the Surpass tech support has been much better than Godaddy’s although not perfect, they at least attempt to help and explain themselves well. I have yet to see any downtime and the speed of the service seems adequate. This is quality hosting at economical cost. To be fair I have heard horror stories about pretty much every host whom has become large enough to be worth talking about so I can only speak from personal experience but I do know Surpass was highly recommended to me (it was 1st recommended I use them in 2004 but had no reason to at the time), where as Godaddy is not often recommended by anyone whom knows what they are talking about. In my personal opinion, if you want domains Godaddy is a fine choice, if you want hosting choose a company like Surpass Hosing instead.

As many of you have probably been reading Google has released a web browser called “Chrome”. It first caught my attention due to the innovative way in which Google accidentally announced the launch on September 1st, via a comic book illustrated by Scott McCloud and designed to show the positive features and architecture of their new product. The 38-page comic landed in the mailboxes of a few Europeans due to a “mailroom error”, was scanned and then uploaded to the unofficial Google blog Google Blogoscoped for all to see. As if a browser by Google wasn’t enough to get people talking, using a new approach like a comic book to make product announcements and explain it’s features is great for visibility in the blogosphere. Google released a blog entry later the same day confirming that “Chrome” was not a hoax and in fact would be released on September 2nd.

The browser which can be downloaded from Google’s Chrome page, is based on the open source web browser engine WebKit, the same browser engine that Safari uses. It is a browser truly fashioned with the Google mindset as it is light weight, using a smaller memory footprint than both Firefox and Internet Explorer (this can be compared by typing “about:memory” into the address/search bar)  and is very clean  from a user interface perspective.

The install process is straightforward with almost no need for user intervention, only needing the user to to close their current web browser so it can import bookmarks and passwords which is an inspiration to other developers when it comes to install processes, not to mention it lends it’s self well to those whom are new to computers.

The only thing I am REALLY missing with Chrome is the Add-ons and Greasemonkey scripts I have become so accustomed to in Firefox, well that and the fact it doesn’t have a Linux or Mac version. It is however much better than IE 8. All and all considering it has only been out less than 24-hours I think Chrome has an amazing shot at consuming a large part of the web browser market if the ability to use add-ons is incorporated. To see a more in depth (and informative) first look at chrome visit the Lifehacker entry titled Google Chrome First Look.

So I haven’t been writing on here but allot has been happening. For now I’m going to talk about torrents and Oink among other trackers. OiNK as you probably all know was taken down not so long ago and two new trackers popped up attempting to fill the void while other established trackers seen a huge increase in members as well. The two new trackers are Waffles and What. I am not a member of Waffles as of yet but am a member of what. From what I hear both trackers complement each other very well so I will be checking out waffles in the future.

Demonoid was also taken offline recently, with the troubles concerning the CRIA earlier this year and no word from Deimos nobody can say for sure if Demonoid is down for good or if this is just temporary. Currently the page displayed on the Demonoid domain reads as follows:

“The CRIA threatened the company renting the servers to us, and because of this it is not possible to keep the site online. Sorry for the inconvenience and thanks for your understanding.

We have brought online a forum in order to help the community stay together. This forum is not file sharing related in any way, it’s just a mean to help the community stay together – please read the forum rules before posting.

You can visit the forum by clicking here”

To top it all off the “Web Sheriff” has decided to team up with Prince and attempt to sue The Pirate Bay. Have fun with that one Prince. After this long you would think artists and others would get the hint that A) shutting down a BT tracker hurts their record sales and lowers the respect their former fans had for them and B) TPB has been approached and sued by more then 1 person/organization and is still there so one person isn’t going to take them down.

There is more BT news such as how to get around Comcast’s Sandvine setup but I’m tired of writing. I promise updates will be more frequent from now on.

How many of you remember a time when the Internet wasn’t cluttered with intrusive ads and lame phishing attempts? I do, and I wish it could go back to that state. Recently I have noticed a major increase in popup, pop under and animated ads on websites with large user bases. As you can see from this site I have nothing against using ads, I just wish Webmasters would do it in some sort of ethical manner. Statistics show that intrusive advertising does NOT work so why do these Webmasters continue to load even more of it onto the web?

Due to these annoying ads I am now forced to implement ad-blocking solutions on my home and work networks. It sucks because I like to support sites that use non-intrusive ad methods but some people have ruined that for everyone, at least in my case. For those of you who need an ad-blocking solution I have outlined the methods I am currently using below.

The 1st step is to change the DNS servers your network is using over to OpenDNS. Though not directly related to ad-blocking OpenDNS is generally a faster DNS then the DNS servers provided by your ISP and protects against phishing attempts. Corrects misspellings and allows you to block sites easily via their online interface among other things.

To setup OpenDNS visit http://www.opendns.com/ and follow the instructions for the hardware you are using. In short all you need to do is change your networks DNS servers to 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220 (on your computers network connection if you are directly connected or via your routers admin interface if you are on a network) and optionally create an account via the OpenDNS website for all the bonus features the service provides.

Now if your not using Mozilla Firefox as your browser I suggest you start doing so. Mozilla has pretty good built in popup blocking and two great extensions called Adblock and Adblock Filterset.G Updater. If Firefox is already installed type “about:config” into your browser and in the filter box type dns, it should return a result of network.dns.ipv4OnlyDomains along with a few others. Change the value of network.dns.ipv4OnlyDomains from .doubleclick.net to true.

Now go to https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1136 and
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/10 and grab the Adblock and Adblock Filterset.G Updater extensions. If Firefox isn’t installed, install it, follow the steps above and then grab the extensions. This extensions are an optional step as the next step accomplishes the same task (in some ways) but I like to have as many layers of protection as needed within reason. Avoid Adblock Plus as it has some memory management issues.

The SafeHistory extension for Firefox is another worth mentioning, it allows control over cookies and allows you to defend against some web privacy attacks. The extension can be found here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1502

In Firefox, Tools>Options>Privacy tab> you can manage how the browser deals with cookies as well, for those of you who are really paranoid, set the cookies to be deleted when the browser closes. You can also mange what sites are allowed to set cookies within Firefox.

The next step that is needed is to go to http://everythingisnt.com/hosts.html and grab the installer for “Mike’s Ad Blocking Hosts file” (if your using *nix grab the file for manual installation) The site explains installation in a rather simple format so let’s skip ahead. So you have the ad blocking hosts file installed but you notice the surfing is a little slower. What you need to do is browse to the directory where the file is installed and modify the entries in the hosts file, for those of you who used the Windows installer the directory is:

XP: c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc
2000: c:\winnt\system32\drivers\etc
95/98: c:\windows

Open the hosts file with your favorite editor and change all instances of 127.0.0.1 to 0.0.0.0. On Linux I use vi, on Windows I use Editpad lite as it is free, lightweight and has the search and replace functionality. This will stop the looping connection attempts to your local machine when you browse to sites which contains ads blocked via the host file. One thing to note is that using 0.0.0.0 may cause issues with some applications. If you notice an issue you can always change it back to 127.0.0.1.

Depending on your setup there are other ways to accomplish ad blocking on a network wide basis such as blocking via an internal DNS server. I may cover solutions like this if there is a interest, until then this should help the average user block ads and some malicious traffic.

Lately life has really kicked it into high gear. The business is coming together, the projects I volunteer on are buzzing with activity and on the downside the family is dealing with some stress due to some medical issues (not myself). In the midst of all the chaos my better (this can be debated) half has taken on a new pastime. She’s now playing Second Life.

So what is Second Life and why do I feel it is important enough to write about? Second Life is a Online game that simulates a world controlled by the players themselves. You are able to own land, build structures, and make clothes to sell to other players and so on. The world operates on it’s own currency which can be exchanged for real cash. My better half really wants to make a go at trying to get an income out of this game. Others have done it so it is possible and the concept is great but there is a not so pleasant side to all of this.

This “game” is extremely adult oriented. There is everything from sex toys to escort services. Often times as a new player your only choice for income is to become an escort. Lucky for my better half she met some people and bypassed this step. What is rather disturbing to me is not the escort services as I believe people can do whatever they please. It is the fact that some people are taking it a step further and doing web cam shows for the in game currency. From what I have been told some of these players are quite obviously underage.

I’m all for making money on a game via making clothing or avatars (this is currently what the woman in my life is focusing on) but you must not think much of yourself if you are doing live cam shows for what equals about $6 an hour at best. I’m curious if it’s considered prostitution or how that falls into some of the legal systems around the world.

I hope this little venture does work out for her but I sure am glad she has self respect.

As my day perusing the WWW begins I find myself thinking about what I do most and what enables me to do it. The conclusion of such thought is that I mainly use Email and Search. For E-mail I use an IMAP account on one of my domains. For search, I use the giant monstrosity known as Google.

Personally I love many of the products that exist in the Google arsenal. Google is such a big part of the online experience. Millions of Internet users search using their #1 product, the Google Search Engine, use Adsense to earn income from their blogs and websites, receive email using Gmail and enjoy all the other products Google has brought to us over the years. Some of us whom are more interested in technology and time saving techniques have read books to help us use Google products more efficiently such as Google Hacks: Tips & Tools for Finding and Using the World’s Information as well as Google Advertising Tools: Cashing in with AdSense, AdWords, and the Google APIs.

Some Google product users however, have for one reason or another not read the many publications focusing on Google products. For these people I am posting here a few decent links to some helpful tools to streamline the Google experience. Though nowhere near a full list these are the ones I personally use. It is possible I will update this page or add new blog entries as I find new things or think of information to add,

http://www.google.com/intl/en/options/ possibly the most important link, this page allows you to see and use all of Google’s features.

Googlebar Lite: A light-weight Google search toolbar for the Firefox browser.

GooglePreview An an add-on for Firefox which inserts preview images of web sites and Amazon products into Google and Yahoo search results.

Gooscan is a Linux based tool that automates queries against Google search appliances, but with a twist. These particular queries are designed to find potential vulnerabilities on web pages. Think “cgi scanner” that never communicates directly with the target web server, since all queries are sent to Google, not to the target.