I have been working with AT&T to complete our bandwidth upgrade at the home office. The project took a lot longer than I had originally hoped and we ran into several unforeseen issues. It’s finished now though. It’s fast too!
That's fast!
13 Jan
Google Stands Up To China
Google is taking a courageous stand against China. Good for them!
We launched Google.cn in January 2006 in the belief that the benefits of increased access to information for people in China and a more open Internet outweighed our discomfort in agreeing to censor some results. At the time we made clear that “we will carefully monitor conditions in China, including new laws and other restrictions on our services. If we determine that we are unable to achieve the objectives outlined we will not hesitate to reconsider our approach to China.”
These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered–combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web–have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.
13 Nov
Chrome OS Coming Soon
It looks like Chrome OS will be launching within the week!
Google’s Chrome OS project, first announced in July, will become available for download within a week, we’ve heard from a reliable source. Google previously said to expect an early version of the OS in the fall.
Hardware support is a problem with all operating systems upon launch. I hope the Mini 9 is supported soon…
What can we expect? Driver support will likely be a weak point. We’ve heard at various times that Google has a legion of engineers working on the not so glamorous task of building hardware drivers. And we’ve also heard conflicting rumors that Google is mostly relying on hardware manufacturers to create those drivers. Whatever the truth, and it’s likely in between, having a robust set of functioning drivers is extremely important to Chrome OS’s success. People will want to download this to whatever computer they use and have it just work.
We expect Google will be careful with messaging around the launch, and endorse a small set of devices for installation. EEE PC netbooks, for example, may be one set of devices that Google will say are ready to use Chrome OS. There will likely be others as well, but don’t expect to be able to install it on whatever laptop or desktop machine you have from day one. Google has previously said they are working with Acer, Adobe, ASUS, Freescale, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, and Toshiba on the project.
9 Nov
Goodbye Geocities
I remember setting up my first Geocities webpage back when I was in college. In 1995 anyone who could make their own webpage was some kind of technical wizard. I spent a lot of time hand coding html files with a text editor. Creating a website is a completely different process now.
This is the week that Geocities went dark forever. There is no backup or spare copy. It’s simply gone. With it goes a big portion of the history of the internet. That is a true shame. Lucky for us some people saved at least some of it for historical purposes.
When Yahoo! switched off the servers for GeoCities, the Web posting service, on Oct. 27, some 7 million of the Internet’s first websites went dark forever. The bulk of these were people’s personal home pages, which were pulled offline with no backup and no permanent record of those users’ frenetic early forays online.
Now a ragtag effort by several groups of budding computer historians is feverishly — and angrily — trying to bring as much as they can back online.
…
ArchiveTeam is still sorting through the data, but Scott estimates that he was able to save more than a million accounts, which translates to more than 2 terabytes of data (about 20 average computer hard drives). And he wasn’t alone — Scott says that four or five others were working to save GeoCities. One of these people, Jacques Mattheij, managed to get nearly 2 million accounts, operating just eight machines out of the Netherlands.
I’m surprised there wasn’t some deal struck with Archive.org or some other institution. At least someone is doing something. Kudos to the Archive Team!
5 Nov
Google Dashboard
Have you ever wondered how much data Google stores in your account? Check out the Google Dashboard, a new tool that shows you a list of every service that you use and provides links for managing your preferences. This tool will be tremendously helpful in figuring out exactly where your data is. Check it out!
17 Oct
The Dangers Of Not Paying Attention
This blog post from the Internet Storm Center over at SANS highlights the need to pay attention to the setup of your server systems. We aren’t using this particular blacklist but it still highlights the point. This is why I spend so much time following mailing lists and keeping up with my feed reader. This kind of thing is easily avoidable.
Aaron let us know about a discussion thread on the NANOG mailing list about issues with the blackholes.us DNS block list (DNSBL):
The issue is the maintainer of the blackholes.us DNSBL shut the list down some time back and the IP address space that the DNS servers for it were on was given back to ARIN. That address space has since been re-allocated to a new company and they are getting tired of the continual inbound DNS queries to the IP address of the old server. Apparently they have now stood up a DNS server to answer those queries with a wildcard record that effectively returns “yes, the IP you are inquiring about is a spammer”. As a result, lots of mail relays that are still configured to do lookups against this DNSBL are now being told that everyone on the Internet is a spam source.
According to this post in the news.admin.net-abuse.email Usenet newsgroup, the DNSBL was shutdown 2 years ago.
If you are an email administrator, please check your RBLs to see if you are still submitting queries to blackholes.us and remove it from your configurations if you are. You should also review any other RBLs you are using to ensure that they are still in operation as well.
27 Sep
Targeted Advertising
Looks like this ad company doesn’t know their target audience that well…
20 Sep
FCC To Propose New Network Neutrality Rules
The FCC will be unveiling new rules on network neutrality at a presentation for The Brookings Institution tomorrow. This is a very exciting development for the protection of consumer rights on the Internet. It was also a major plank of President Obama’s technology platform. We should all be watching the outcome of this important development.
The top U.S. communications regulator plans to unveil proposals Monday for ensuring Web traffic is not slowed or blocked based on its content, sources familiar with the contents of the speech said on Friday.
Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski will announce plans to ask his fellow commissioners to adopt as a rule net neutrality and four existing principles on Internet access issued by the agency in 2005, one of the sources said.
