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Category Archives: Internet

Welcome to the Darkside…

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So last week A Girl made a comment about something going wrong with blogger.  I made a comment which resulted in an email.

The email basically said, I would love help.  Not that she really wanted to completely blow this popsicle stand, but well there have been some issues with Google as of late.  I promptly said, I’ll just get it all set up and surprise her.  Well about an hour of my time and I had it relatively ready.  Then all we needed to do was port everything over from Blogger and redirect the traffic headed to blogger.

This morning she finished the last step which was a redirect.  She has herself a new shiny blog that even still has the new blog smell.  That’s not to say that any of the content is gone it’s all there.

She thought she may have messed something up when blogger all the sudden started sending everyone to blogspot, but nope, it’s working just as intended.  She now has freedom and power at her disposal.

So go give her a nice house-warming.  We’re still unpacking, but she’s enjoying the new place.

Welcome to the Dark Side A Girl, we have cookies, they’re on the counter!

*If you would like to ditch blogger, I am more than happy to help.  At this point though I do not want to be buying everyone and their mother a domain name.  If you have a domain and want to move, contact me, we can hash something out.  I’m not going to do everyone’s for free, hours of time do add up.  That said, this weekend I’m going to kick off a site for gun bloggers that will behave much like blogger.  You get a sub-domain and I will help your migration if necessary.  That keeps my costs to purely time, and a minimal amount at that.

If you want full hosting though, please do contact me, we can probably work something out.

 

CloudFlare Review

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So a friend of mine ended up having his site offline last night after a DoS attack took his web hosting offline.

About 3 months ago I decided to give CloudFlare a shot.  After 3 months I thought I would give a quick overview of how it went and what differences I have actually seen.

Page load speeds, there was a noticeable difference when I migrated the site.  I left a archived version of the site available for tracking down broken links and the like.  So this was equivalent of me flipping the off switch.  Using the archived site is unbelievably slower than what it was prior to migration to Word Press.

Bandwidth usage proves this.

image

I did the change over in the beginning of April.  Sitemeter and Google Analytics both have shown at least a steady and slightly increasing traffic over those months, with January being the largest.  So I could say that effectively CloudFlare has cut my bandwidth down by 1/3.  CloudFlare’s analytics are accurate as well and provide some extra differentiation.

image

One downside though is as you can see above, AWstats is no longer accurate.  You can see the number of Unique visitors is no longer accurate, however you can see that the number of visits does reflect that number.

When I first did the change over I did have some weirdness and problems.  Mainly that my hosting provider was reacting to CloudFlare like it was a DoS attack.  The majority of the requests are forwarded through their network for speed reasons.  So the number of high hits from their services made them look suspect.  I got the issues straightened out and things have been much more stable since.

When my hosting provider did have a hiccup, the site content remained available.  While I couldn’t post new content, I wasn’t loosing viewership which was a huge plus.

There are also numerous apps that can be installed with CloudFlare to aid in thinks like link tracking and malware detection.  There is also a service to help monitor for people scraping content, including people hot linking images.

Overall I have found the service worth the setup time which actually was amazingly simple.  I’m not quite big enough to find their pro services worth it, however I do see how they might be beneficial if I had considerably more traffic.

The only setup required is to point your root DNS entry to CloudFlare and enter your DNS info that your hosting provider has into CloudFlare.  If you have a full website and you’ve had downtime from service issues, CloudFlare can help mitigate that.

For those of you using Google reader…

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I apologize.  I don’t know what the hell just happened but for some reason Google reader appears to have “reposted” a bunch of older content.  This may be because I finished at least getting temporary categories in everything tonight so clean URLs was turned back on.

I checked both the raw feed and feedburner, neither has all the “new” posts in it.  So I’m sorry if this threw you off or was a disappointment.  Hopefully as I continue getting the bugs squashed in this new toy things will be more stable.  Overall I’m liking WordPress considerably more.  Doubly so with the much better integration with Live Writer.

If you see weird behavior though, please let me know so I am at least aware to look out for it and I might be able to fix it.  This migration has caused some weird issues.

The Streisand Effect Strikes Again…

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If you’re unaware of the Streisand Effect, please educate yourself before reading further.

This isn’t a full blown drama llama, but we’ll call it a baby drama llama*.

Drama Llama Baby

So for those unaware, some idiot lawyer went and demanded money from The Oatmeal because The Oatmeal pointed out in a blog post that his client was stealing copyrighted material.  The Oatmeal replied in classic Oatmeal fashion.  You can also read a legal synopsis and prediction from the opening shots here.

Then FunkyJunk’s lawyer, a supposed whiz with things related the internet acted surprised at the response.  Charles Carreon then continued to flap his wings faster and with such ferocity that a hummingbird would not know how to keep up.  Though as of last Friday I figured the weekend would swallow him whole and that would be the end of his 15 minutes of fame caused by his stupidity.

I was wrong.  It appears that attempting to shutdown a collection for two non-profits wasn’t enough.  He now intents to force them to waste funds in frivolous litigation.  There’s a term to describe individuals who do things such as that, I believe it begins with a D and ends with a K.

Seriously, in what world where you commit numerous public relation disasters at the beginning is it a good idea to file lawsuits against two non-profits?  It is not a non-profits job to filter who and who does not raise funds on their behalf.  If I say I’m raising money for Soldiers’ Angels, that is me telling you where I’m sending the funds, that is not an endorsement by the non-profit.

So Charles Carreon feels it’s a good idea to sue the American Cancer Society and the National Wildlife Federation and then wonders why the internet has reacted the way it has.  Well, he’s wondering because he’s a clueless moron that wouldn’t know how the internet actually worked if all it was is two cups with a string in-between.

If Mr. Carreon feels that people are dehumanizing him, maybe it’s because those people don’t feel he’s actually human.  I think he’s a giant troll who bullies people and organizations with frivolous litigation without thought for the effect it will have on his fellow man.  His only thoughts are focused on how he can get people to stop pointing out how he’s an idiot.

If he hadn’t done anything this whole incident would have faded into obscurity but instead he doubled down on stupid.  Heck even after the response from the The Oatmeal just shutting up would have worked in his favor in allowing it to quickly blow over.

So in closing, Charles Carreon, you sir are a giant STD encrusted dick.  You’re actions and frivolous threats at the beginning were bad enough.  Now though you have proved your dickishness to the world by attacking two charities, one who’s sole goal is to the betterment and health of your fellow man.  Yeah, you’re not human, you’re a big fat dick.  Thank you for playing.

No I will not take this down because legally this is acceptable under the first amendment much to your dismay and displeasure.  I have provided facts and evidence to support my position, you and your legal threats amount to you throwing a tantrum like a 4 year old in a supermarket.  Grow up and act your age you spoiled rotten brat.  Besides the way to make stuff like this not happen to you is actually quite simple.  Don’t be a dick!

*I got pictures of llamas over the weekend and I need to use them so they get into the wild.  Winking smile

Quote Of The Day – Tam (06/18/2012)

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I toyed with the idea of setting up a bogus profile as a 22-year-old named Tiffani-with-an-“i” myself, but figured that I’d run afoul of the Department of Natural Resources for hunting over bait.

Tam – findavictim.com
June 18th, 2012

[I have mixed feelings about Foursquare and for the most part still haven’t figured out the purpose.  I will say it was nice when Ry and Joe came over for testing since it let me know Ry had arrived in town.  Just the same that’s a bit creepy.

I have disabled geo-tagging on the pictures on my phone and have otherwise disabled the location tracking in any application I do use.  I don’t let Facebook or Twitter tell people where I am when I push a status update.  It is amazing though the amount of information people will push out into public and then act surprised when then figure out bad people can do bad things with it.

Ars Technica wrote up two articles which I highly recommend reading.  The first was hardening your Android smart phone from stalkers.  The second was the same but geared towards you folks with your iPhones.

I have had many conversations with an individual directly tied to the Windows Phone 7 location system.  Bad people doing bad things was of serious concern during development.  However standing out in the open while willingly telling your phone, “Yes, tell everyone on the internet exactly where I am right now” kind of defeats their work.

Be safe out there and remember the following:  Anything that goes on the internet is ultimately public, especially those things tied to social media.

All that said, I have at times thought the same thing as Tam.  Hell when there was a supposed serial rapist on campus I was coming up with ingenious ways to go hunting while not getting caught.  I think that was probably a trait inherited from my father, I distinctly remember hearing about him wanting to drive around Tacoma during a rash of car jackings.  Maybe if law enforcement would actually catch criminals people wouldn’t think about catching the predators on their own.

Then again, with the attitude that everyone is responsible for crime prevention that could be encouraged.  It is merely the job of professional law enforcement to solve crimes after they have happened.  Ultimately I don’t have a problem with hunting two legged varmints over bait and find it perfectly fair and ethical.  They can remain unharmed quite simply by not trying to victimize someone.  -B]

Pardon the Nuclear Fallout

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So I spent yesterday and today migrating my blog to WordPress.  This while mostly successful has had a few minor hiccups.

First up, clean URLs is currently broken.  For some reason I have to manually touch every blog post *merely clicking update* for the clean URL to work properly.  I haven’t found the PFM in the database that is changing to allow it to work.

While doing that would be an inconvenience there is another issue which makes me want to touch every post.  None of the categories imported correctly.  The database and content nodes appear to line up correctly but alas the rendering fails for some reason.  Updating the content by hand again fixes the problem.

So the wife and I are going to work on going through all 1171 posts updating their categories and getting the clean URLs straightened out.  I did spend a decent amount of time creating a list of 301 redirects for all my previous posts.  Any and all previous incoming links should still be going to their respective content.  They will just have the ugly ?p=xxxx at the end instead of the nice clear /2012/05/23/This-Post-Is-So-Awesome/ url.

The last problem was brought on by my use of Disqus.  I wanted to get an export of my comments so I could reimport them into Drupal and then import those comments into WordPress.  Disqus would be used on all future content.  Well I didn’t get an export of the comments this weekend and I got tired of waiting.  If and when they come in, I will work on getting a snap shot of the database and migrating those into the system.

I was going to leave a domain up with the Drupal blog intact, alas for some reason I have not been able to make a subdomain.  Why I do not know other than Murphy hates me with a passion.

So yeah, if you notice other stuff that’s broken let me know.  I’m working on cleaning up the mess.  On the upshot I can blog from my phone now.

If you’re feed broke, let me know.  The feedburner feed should have continued uninterrupted.  I am working on getting the contact forms back up tonight.  Any of you who have my contact info in your address book, bump me a line if you notice anything grossly out of place.

For the Sake of the FBI, Stop Innovating!

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So I came across a nice article today.  The FBI was pissing and moaning about how the switch over to IPV6 is a problem for them to be able to do their job.  For example:

Any computer with IPv6 has built-in encryption called IPsec (which can also be available with IPv4). The New York Times reported in 2010 that the FBI was lobbying for a law requring telecommunications companies offering encryption to build in backdoors for law enforcement, a requirement that would likely cover IPsec, but the bureau distanced itself from that idea a few months later.

“The frequency of use should increase with IPv6,” predicts a network engineer at Sonic.net, an Internet provider in Santa Rosa, Calif. “None of this is good news for law enforcement organizations.”

But some of the technical details are challenging, and IPsec is still not widely used. Neither are HTTPS encrypted connections; Arbor Networks estimates that only 2 percent of native IPv6 traffic is HTTPS, not counting file sharing traffic.

The quick and dirty is that IPV6 has native support for IPsec, Tunneling, and a couple other things.  While bitching about IPv6, the also bitch about running out of IPv4 addresses and how that is causing problems using an IP as the identifier for the owner of traffic.

So let me get this straight, they bitch about network address translation, the end result of running out of IPv4 addresses.  IPv6 is made to help alleviate that problem gives them heartburn because it can make their job more difficult.

Well tough, you’re job isn’t supposed to be easy.  Though it’s not as if the boys in blue, especially at the federal level, really think the law applies to them anyway.

I for one welcome the transition to IPv6 and if they dislike it so much, I figure it is nothing but good for the continuing health of the internet.  The internet which gives everyone who wants one their own pulpit to speak their mind.