Internet


On Slashdot, alien88 writes:

“Late last week, the Washtenaw County Board approved Wireless Washtenaw Advisory Board’s recommendation of 20/20 Communications to cover the entire county with wireless by the end of 2007. This includes Ann Arbor, the home of University of Michigan and future home of Google’s Adwords division. The wireless network will be free for speeds up to 85kbps and $35/month for 500kbps. 20/20 Communications estimates it will take around 6,000 radios to cover the county.

This initiative is being funded without taxpayer dollars and is one of the most ambitious wireless deployments in the US. Will it succeed or will it fail? Check out the county’s wireless website for updates on the project.” Of course, the real reason this is worth posting is it’s because this is the county where Rob, myself and a number of the others live in.

On #pfsense (FreeNode)

5:05 PM
MxxCon: what about elacoya
ttub: your isps using it?
MxxCon: don't know
MxxCon: they are fucking around w/ bittorent traffic
ttub: well that stuff is killing things for us good citizens

What is Elacoya?

Thomas Mennecke, Slyck.com, reports:

On May 31, 2006, BitTorrent as many people know it came to a grinding halt. The Swedish National Criminal Police raided Rex|Port80, the home of The Pirate Bay and at least 200 other domains. The raid disrupted The Pirate Bay, throwing much of the BitTorrent community into chaos.

However, this bewilderment would prove temporary as The Pirate Bay is once again online. True to its defiant nature, The Pirate Bay is again indexing many of the same .torrent files that made it wildly popular.

News of The Pirate Bay’s resurrection comes as little surprise. The Pirate Bay spokesperson “brokep” promised Slyck.com the site would resolve under a different country’s flag if an immediate resolution could not be reached in Sweden.

“We are not sure when it will return, but we are moving it to another country if necessary,” brokep told Slyck.com.

It appears The Pirate Bay has made good on its promise, as it has reestablished itself in the Netherlands. Currently, its indexing capabilities are somewhat reduced from its former self, however should improve once news spreads of its resurrection.

Slyck reports:

In their native Sweden, ThePirateBay.org enjoyed a level of immunity from copyright prosecution rarely seen in the file-sharing world. Often defiant in the face of those wishing to enforce their intellectual property rights, ThePirateBay.org would go on to become one of the premier BitTorrent indexing and tracking sites.

As one of the largest trackers, ThePirateBay.org largely replaced the search engine SuprNova.org. SuprNova.org met its demise in late 2004, when it was under pressure from the entertainment industry to shut it operation down. Conversely, such pressure has been ineffective against ThePiratebay.org.

When such political pressure fails, the use of force is typically the next course of action. In a move that many thought would never come, Slyck.com learned this morning that ThePirateBay.org was raided by Swedish police.

“…The police right now is taking all of our servers, to check if there is a crime there or not (they are actually not sure),” ThePirateBay.org spokesperson “brokep” told Slyck.com.

The seizure of ThePirateBay.org’s entire server farm will guarantee this BitTorrent tracker will remain offline until the police complete their investigation. The uncertainty on the part of the police may stem from the fact ThePirateBay.org’s servers only host .torrent files, not actual copyrighted material. As a tracker, ThePirateBay.org’s function is to index .torrent files and to direct BitTorrent traffic and maintain the swarm (uploads and downloads.) The downloaded .torrent file contains all the necessary information to locate and download the queried file. The legality of indirectly linking to copyrighted material has yet to be tested by Swedish courts.

Whether this will keep ThePirateBay.org offline indefinitely is another matter.

“We are not sure when it will return, but we are moving it to another country if necessary,” brokep said.
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Poul-Henning Kamp, Slagelse, Denmark, writes:

When I contacted D-Link back in November 2005 about the way D-Link products abused my NTP-server, I expected to get in touch with somebody who understood what they were talking about, I expected them to admit that D-Link had made a bad decision and I expected that D-Link would make good on the damage they were responsible for.

For the last five months I have wasted a lot of time trying to reach some kind of agreement with the Californian lawyer which D-Link put on the case. I can’t quite make up my mind if D-Link’s lawyer negotiates in bad faith or is merely uninformed, I tend to suspect the latter, but either way, as of this morning I decided to cut my losses.

Since no one else at D-Link has reacted to my numerous emails, I have no other means of getting in touch with D-Link other than an open letter. I realize that it will be inconvenient and embarrasing for D-Link to have this matter exposed in public this way, but I seem to have no other choice.

I will now lay out the case below in such detail that any moderately knowledgeable person should be able to understand it, and hopefully somebody, somewhere in D-Link will contact me so we can get this matter resolved.
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Google Maps: Target Store

BoingBoing reports:

Some commercial outfits are painting giant ads on their roofs for the benefit of the aerial/satellite photos used by services like Google Earth/Google Maps

Google, via Slashdot, :

It turns out that looking at the aggregation of billions of search queries people type into Google reveals something about our curiosity, our thirst for news, and perhaps even our desires. Considering all that has occurred in 2005, we thought it would be interesting to study just a few of the significant events, and names that make this a memorable year. (We’ll leave it to the historians to determine which ones are lasting and which ephemeral.) We hope you enjoy this selective view of our collective year.

A look back at 2005 wouldn’t be complete without some lists. Here are three from us to you, representing some of the most popular searches this year on Google.
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Jonny Evans, Macworld.co.uk, reports:

Microsoft has killed Internet Explorer on the Mac.

The software giant will end support for it at the end of the year (i.e.in 13 days) and will make no additional security or performance updates available from that point.
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joris Evers, Staff Writer, CNET News.com, reports:

A new worm that targets users of America Online’s AOL Instant Messenger is believed to be the first that actually chats with the intended victim to dupe the target into activating a malicious payload, IM security vendor IMlogic warned Tuesday.

According to IMlogic, the worm, dubbed IM.Myspace04.AIM, has arrived in instant messages that state: “lol thats cool” and included a URL to a malicious file “clarissa17.pif.” When unsuspecting users have responded, perhaps asking if the attachment contained a virus, the worm has replied: “lol no its not its a virus”, IMlogic said.
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God Bless the Internet. Just when you think you’ve seen it all, along comes this…

Girls Crushing Cars

Sandra Jontz, Stars and Stripes, reports:

On Tuesday, the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps blocked all access to commercial e-mail services, such as Yahoo!, Hotmail, America Online and Google, from overseas government computers.

And not just at office workstations.

The block includes access to e-mail services from computers at base libraries and liberty centers that are connected to an official government network.
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Wolfgang Gruener, Senior Editor, Tom’s Hardware Guide, reports:

London - Ebay today announced that it will purchase VoIP company Skype in a deal valued between $2.6 and $4.1 billion. The acquisition will allow the online auction leader to access Skype’s 54 million users and further diversify its revenue streams with Skype’s VoIP services - while free PC-to-PC-based calls will continue to be offered.

The acquisition comes after rumors about a possible deal between the two companies surfaced in the past week and confirms the mainstream appeal of VoIP communications for the business world. According to a statement released on Monday, Ebay intends to integrate Skype into its marketplace and payments platform. “Skype, Ebay and PayPal will create an unparalleled ecommerce and communications engine for buyers and sellers around the world,” a statement said.

Skype, barely two years old, did not come cheap for Ebay. The online auction house pays $2.6 billion in cash and stock - roughly 371 times the revenue Skype achieved in 2004 - plus a performance-based bonus, which could amount to $1.5 billion and will be due in 2008 to 2009 time frame.
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Duane DeFreitas and the Rupununi Express
Duane DeFreitas and the Rupununi Express

Paul Rubens, BBC NEWS, reports:

Taking a break from setting up a small network, I head outside to see if the nearest building is likely to be able to pick up a wireless network signal. “Make sure you turn right at the bottom of the stairs,” says my host, “or the jaguar will eat you.”

Welcome to the surreal world of Duane DeFreitas, an adventurer and guide living in the tropical rainforest of Guyana.
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Kate Palmer, Foreign Policy, writes:

People can get almost anything on the black market—drugs, passports, even human organs. Now add Web sites to the list. Inside many authoritarian regimes that closely monitor and censor the Internet, access to blocked Web sites has become a black market commodity like any other. Typically, the process is simple: Savvy black marketers in cybercafes, universities, private homes, and elsewhere exploit technological loopholes to circumvent government filters and charge fees for access. According to the OpenNet Initiative (ONI) (www.opennetinitiative.net), a research organization devoted to tracking blocked Web sites, black market access to filtered pages in Saudi Arabia runs anywhere from $26 to $67 per Web site.
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Jesse James Garrettwrites:

If anything about current interaction design can be called “glamorous,” it’s creating Web applications. After all, when was the last time you heard someone rave about the interaction design of a product that wasn’t on the Web? (Okay, besides the iPod.) All the cool, innovative new projects are online.

Despite this, Web interaction designers can’t help but feel a little envious of our colleagues who create desktop software. Desktop applications have a richness and responsiveness that has seemed out of reach on the Web. The same simplicity that enabled the Web’s rapid proliferation also creates a gap between the experiences we can provide and the experiences users can get from a desktop application.

That gap is closing. Take a look at Google Suggest. Watch the way the suggested terms update as you type, almost instantly. Now look at Google Maps. Zoom in. Use your cursor to grab the map and scroll around a bit. Again, everything happens almost instantly, with no waiting for pages to reload.

Google Suggest and Google Maps are two examples of a new approach to web applications that we at Adaptive Path have been calling Ajax. The name is shorthand for Asynchronous JavaScript + XML, and it represents a fundamental shift in what’s possible on the Web.
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You are looking at the VERY FIRST photo ever published on the web!


Silvano de Gennaro writes:

Back in 1992, after their show at the CERN Hardronic Festival, my colleague Tim Berners-Lee asked me for a few scanned photos of “the CERN girls” to publish them on some sort of information system he had just invented, called the “World Wide Web”. I had only a vague idea of what that was, but I scanned some photos on my Mac and FTPed them to Tim’s now famous “info.cern.ch”. How was I to know that I was passing an historical milestone, as the one above was the first picture ever to be clicked on in a web browser!”

Posted by timothy on Slashdot on Monday February 21, @09:28PM:

Baricom writes “Just a few weeks after a major power outage took out well-known blogging service LiveJournal for several hours, almost all of Wikimedia Foundation’s services are offline due to a tripped circuit breaker at a different colo. Among other services, Wikimedia runs the well-known Wikipedia open encyclopedia. Coincidentally, the foundation is in the middle of a fundraising drive to pay for new servers. They have established an off-site backup of the fundraising page here until power returns.”

Lawrence Kiminski, The New York Daily Times staff reporter, writes:

Remember Enron? Fade to black. Now think iBill, that is, Internet Billing Company, the world’s largest online credit card processor, and apparently one of the largest purveyors of false promises mixed with alleged criminal theft on a massive scale.

iBill processes online credit card orders for thousands of websites around the world. These are generally small businesses that cannot generally afford to obtain their own merchant account, or businesses operating in a high risk online market, who have hired iBill to process their orders. In return iBill takes up to nearly 20 percent off the top for themselves, plus another 10 percent for reserves, for a whopping 30 percent that iBill removes from the customer. And for what? The process takes only a minute and a third of the gross sale is gone, eaten up by iBill. Okay, that leaves around 70 percent for the small business to operate. Right?

Wrong. How about ZERO percent? iBill is now taking all of the money, including that 70 percent, for a total of 100% and giving the starving client, the business which earned all of the money from their own customers, zilch, nothing. Oh, iBill promises to pay but those promises have been empty for months. iBill breaks those same promises weekly, daily, without shame and without any believable explanation. iBill’s clients have no choice but to sit and wait to be evicted from their shots, or from their home in the case of the mom and pop home business, or find another processor. Unfortunately, that change can take up to four months and the prospects are dim. iBill knows this and is cashing in at the expense of the unsophisticated website business. From what we have learned, iBill has an incredible distaste for any small businesses. They take their hard earned bucks and leave them out in the cold. Yes, I know this sounds inflated, but it is not. As far as trust goes, iBill is the epitome of evil in the online processing market.

iBill was told early in 2004 by First Data (the company which controls iBill’s account) that iBill’s merchant with First Data would soon be terminated and that they, iBill, should make plans to find another relationship with another bank. iBill ignored the warning from First Data until it was too late. iBill lied to their customers about what had happened and ended up with little or no money to pay their website businesses (webmasters), mostly small businesses where their online sales account for 100 percent of their income which is no zero. iBill is forcing an incredible number of businesses into financial ruin and bankruptcy.

iBill is not paying clients, and they are now under investigation by the US Justice Department. iBill has always refused to take responsibility. However, there is overwhelming evidence to the contrary. An Appellate Court has, in essence, indicated the problem was iBill’s alone. There is really no doubt that iBill is the guilty party here, responsible for thousands of their clients going unpaid, lying to them, secretly planning to coax these same clients to hand over more of their money but with no plan but promises to replay them. There’s a word for this. THEFT. Felony theft. If iBill is not stopped, they will undoubtedly continue to lie and steal from their customers, from their clients, and from their stock investors. But the equally important problem is that iBill refused to communicate with their client in any meaningful manner. That problem also continues.

Initially respected, iBill has become one of the most reviled, despised, mistrusted, and suspicious companies on the Internet, with business practices reminiscent of Nazi Germany.
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Posted by michael on Fri Jan 14, ‘05 10:30 PM:

Wind writes “According to any journal hosted off of LiveJournal.com, the LiveJournal data center Internap has suffered a critical power failure, leaving all of LiveJournal and its content temporarily offline and requiring the revival of 100+ servers.”

Derek Sooman, TechSpot, reports:
American software pirate Kishan Singh, from Lanham in Maryland, has been jailed for 18 months after running a website offering illegal copies of a range of business software. Singh, who had earlier pleaded guilty to a charge of copyright infringement, was found guilty of running a website offering illegal copies of software that was valued at up to $120,000. Singh operated a pay-for-access site offering software from companies including Adobe, Autodesk, Macromedia and Microsoft. Frequently, all copy-protection and other counter-piracy measures had been removed from the software.

“Evidence revealed that thousands of pirated software programs were downloaded from Singh’s website by users from around the world during the six-month period charged.” - Spokesman for the US prosecutor’s office.

The Ann Arbor News Staff and The Associated Press report:

CHARLOTTE, N.C. - A Whitmore Lake man was sentenced to nine years in federal prison Wednesday for hacking into the national computer system of Lowe’s hardware stores and trying to steal customers’ credit card information.

The government said it is the longest prison term ever handed down in a computer crime case in the United States.

Brian Salcedo, 21, who was already on probation for hacking into an Ann Arbor Internet provider’s system four years ago, pleaded guilty in August to conspiracy and other hacking charges.
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Alex Bradbury writes on Slashdot:

“Members of the Bits of Freedom group conducted a test to see how much it would take for a service provider to take down a website hosting public domain material, and have published their results. They signed up with 10 providers and put online a work by Dutch author Multatuli, who died over 100 years ago. They stated that the work was in the public domain, and that it was written in 1871. They then set up a fake society to claim to be the copyright holders of the work. From a Hotmail address, they sent out complaints to all 10 of the providers. 7 out of 10 complied and removed the site, one within just 3 hours. Only one ISP actually pointed out that the copyright on the work expired many years ago. The conclusion of the investigation is definitely worth reading. The three providers who didn’t take down the material are XS4ALL, UPC and Freeler. The company that came out the worst was iFast, who forwarded all the personal details of the site owner to the sender of the fake takedown notice without even being asked to do so.”

Tony Long, Wired News, via Ditherati:

Effective with this sentence, Wired News will no longer capitalize the “I” in internet.

At the same time, Web becomes web and Net becomes net.

Why? The simple answer is because there is no earthly reason to capitalize any of these words. Actually, there never was.
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HurricaneMB writes:

Federal charges were filed against Adam McGaughey, creator of the popular SG1Archive.com website - a fan website devoted to the MGM-owned television show Stargate SG-1. The charges allege that the website engaged in Criminal Copyright Infringement and Trafficking in Counterfeit Services. The charges were the culmination of a three-year FBI investigation, set in motion by a complaint from the Motion Picture Association (MPAA) regarding the content of the SG1Archive.com website.

SG1Archive.com is one of the most popular fan-run websites among the Stargate community. In addition to providing very active fan discussion forums, broadcast schedules, production news, and episode guides, the site heavily promotes the sale of the show on DVD. As of this writing, direct links from SG1Archive.com to Amazon.com have resulted in the sale of over $100,000 worth of DVDs. Many more DVDs have been sold to international fans of the show through sites like Blackstar.co.uk. Upon hearing this news, Stargate executive producer Brad Wright called the site “cool” - which Adam took as an endorsement of his work.
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The Internet Archive reports:

The Live music archive just received its 10,000th concert recording! Congratulations and thanks to the etree community and the artists and bands that have a made this a fantastic repository of creative works.
http://www.archive.org/audio
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