"The future masters of technology will have to be lighthearted and intelligent. The machine easily masters the grim and the dumb." -- Marshall McLuhan, 1969
Space Monster: Destroy Nashville
Topic: Miscellaneous
1:49 am EST, Jan 29, 2007
The true purpose for the BellSouth building revealed!!
More experiences with GoDaddy, free speech, and domain deletion [Politech]
Topic: Technology
2:39 am EST, Jan 28, 2007
Last your GoDaddy yanked the domain for the data center where my computers are hosted. (nectartech.com) They managed to take thousands of domains offline as a result. I helped get them back online by recording two phone calls to their tech support department.
GoDaddy shut down an entire internet provider overnight in January by killing their domain, which broke their DNS resolution. You can listen to phone calls in which their customer support people refuse to bring the domain back online in spite of the fact that 100s of customers are offline. Whats more, people who work for GoDaddy show up in the threads and start threatening the person who posted the recordings!! The fact is that $8 domain name registrations sometimes have millions of dollars riding on them. A company with this sort of flippant attitude about people's network infrastructure shouldn't be responsible for it.
I think it may be time to formally start a boycott of their services and get press around it. At a point when they are spending a ton of money on a Super Bowl commercial, and their marketing department is probably throwing it's big yearly bash, they should have another issue on their minds.
One big question remains.. What good registrars are out there these days? I have not had a chance to do any research.
GoDaddy pulls security site after MySpace complaints | Tech News on ZDNet
Topic: Computer Security
12:06 am EST, Jan 27, 2007
This is truly upsetting. I am seriously considering pulling all my domains from GoDaddy unless they reverse their stance on this.
Update:27BStroke6 has an audio recording of the voicemail Fyodor received as well as clear evidence that GoDaddy just doesn't get it:
I think the fact that we gave him notice at all was pretty generous.
Jesus. I think the fact that I'm going to contact them formally before pulling my domains is pretty generous.
Here is my original post:
This was extremely irresponsible! GoDaddy shoots first and asks questions in 1 to 2 business days!
A popular computer security Web site was abruptly yanked offline this week by MySpace.com and GoDaddy, the world's largest domain name registrar, raising questions about free speech and Internet governance.
I woke up yesterday morning to find a voice message from my domain registrar (GoDaddy) saying they were suspending the domain SecLists.org. One minute later I received an email saying that SecLists.org has "been suspended for violation of the GoDaddy.com Abuse Policy". And also "if the domain name(s) listed above are private, your Domains By Proxy(R) account has also been suspended." WTF??! Neither the email nor voicemail gave a phone number to reach them at, nor did they feel it was worth the effort to explain what the supposed violation was. They changed my domain nameserver to "NS1.SUSPENDED-FOR.SPAM-AND-ABUSE.COM". Cute, eh?
I called GoDaddy several times, and all three support people I spoke with (Craig, Ricky, then Wael) said that the abuse department doesn't take calls. They said I had email abuse_at_godaddy.com (which I had already done 3 times) and that I could then expect a response "within 1 or two business days".
1. This website is a major nexus for communication in the computer security industry. Having it down for an extended period of time likely had a greater negative impact on Internet security on the whole than the disclosure of a list of MySpace passwords that are already known to spammers.
2. It is totally inappropriate to shut down an entire site based on such a brief attempt to contact the owner and it is totally inappropriate to have a 1 to 2 day turn around time on review of decisions of this magnitude.
3. Godaddy has created a new denial of service attack that can be employed to shut down any website that allows public posting and employs them for DNS services: Step one: Post objectionable material. Step two: File complaint with GoDaddy. Step three: Website goes down.
4. They have the audacity to defend this decision!
GoDaddy's Jones said that "we're not knee-jerk--we try to be responsible about verifying complaints." There's a broad spectrum of policies among domain name registrars, she acknowledged, with GoDaddy "probably the most aggressive."
When asked if GoDaddy would remove the registration for a news site like CNET News.com, if a reader posted illegal information in a discussion forum and editors could not be immediately reached over a holiday, Jones replied: "I don't know...It's a case-by-case basis."
You DON'T KNOW if you'd shut down NEWS.COM based on a single complain with no prior notification!?!# Fyodor says:
Needless to say, I'm in the market for a new registrar.
If GoDaddy doesn't do something to address their policies I'll be in the same boat. What a major pain in the ass!
How to build a sword-wielding, tennis-playing, WiiMote-controlled, friendly robot
This is pretty cool... However, I do not feel their job is done yet..
They need to use what they have come up with to build a gigantic R.O.B. The Robot to play 8-bit Gyromite using the new Wii controler.
The original used gyros, a machine to spin them up, and a base to set them on that interfaced to the A and B buttons on the controller. Using gigantic gyros might be potentially disastrous, but I'm sure something with weights could be done. And using the Wii controller to control the robot would sure as hell be easier than the old R.O.B..
Leahy: "We knew damn well if he went to Canada he wouldn't be tortured. He'd be held and he'd be investigated. We also knew damn well if he went to Syria, he'd be tortured. And it's beneath the dignity of this country, a country that has always been a beacon of human rights, to send somebody to another country to be tortured."
My computer is my most private possession. I have other things that are more dear, but no one item could tell you more about me than this machine.
Yet, a rash of recent court decisions says the Constitution may not be enough to protect my laptop from arbitrary, suspicionless and warrantless examination by the police.
This alarm clock was covered on MemeStreams back when it was a prototype. Now its a product you can order!
The alarm clock that runs away and hides when you don't wake up. Clocky gives you one chance to get up. But if you snooze, Clocky will jump off of your nightstand and wheel around your room looking for a place to hide. Clocky is kind of like a misbehaving pet, only he will get up at the right time.
I might have to buy one of these. I often move my alarm clock to different places in my bedroom to break wake-up snooze-hitting habits. This is also small enough to toss into a suitcase when traveling.
This is your country on Medicare and Social Security.
The ratio of federal debt held by the public to GDP would climb from 37 percent currently to roughly 100 percent in 2030 and would continue to grow exponentially after that. The only time in U.S. history that the debt-to-GDP ratio has been in the neighborhood of 100 percent was during World War II. People at that time understood the situation to be temporary and expected deficits and the debt-to-GDP ratio to fall rapidly after the war, as in fact they did. In contrast, under the scenario I have been discussing, the debt-to-GDP ratio would rise far into the future at an accelerating rate. Ultimately, this expansion of debt would spark a fiscal crisis, which could be addressed only by very sharp spending cuts or tax increases, or both.
There is some very sound advice in here. The following statement seems so logical and obvious that one wonders why the Fed Chief has to say it.
Members of the Congress who put special emphasis on keeping tax rates low must accept that low tax rates can be sustained only if outlays, including those on entitlements, are kept low as well. Likewise, members who favor a more expansive role of the government, including relatively more-generous benefits payments, must recognize the burden imposed by the additional taxes needed to pay for the higher spending, a burden that includes not only the resources transferred from the private sector but also any adverse economic incentives associated with higher tax rates.
Unfortunately, there are a whole lot of people who are living in total denial about this.
