Soulmath

Posted at April 4, 2007 12:03 PM - Category: The Web

I normally hate these kinds of things, but this was written by a bunch of Harvard and MIT math nuts. So, see if you match me

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I've been dugg

Posted at August 27, 2006 01:05 PM - Category: The Web

I didn't even submit this

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Rails upgrade

Posted at August 10, 2006 11:09 AM - Category: The Web

There's apparently a big security hole in Rails right now. We've upgraded to the latest version over at ASO, but they won't tell us exactly what was fixed. Luckily, most people know how to use diff and can figure it out on their own.

Here's the best part. It doesn't look like their main site is affected: http://www.rubyonrails.org/index.php

;)

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I am...

Posted at August 1, 2006 12:16 PM - Category: The Web

TDO30-ARIN!

That is all.

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Scammah!

Posted at June 13, 2006 11:50 PM - Category: The Web

Well, in addition to the setting up of things at AtlantaNAP, these have been an interesting last two days. Sometime last week (I think Monday, but it may have been the Friday beforehand), I got a phone call about someone complaining about a scammer running most of their operation on A Small Orange's servers. I looked at the account and they had 56 Super ($30/month) accounts with us. That is the single largest customers of ours I'd seen, but at the same time I could see nothing specifically wrong on the surface with their sites. As a result, no action could be taken by me without violating our own Terms of Service and thereby putting us at risk of being sued by the customer. It's a sucky problem with our ToS, and one I'm going to go over with our lawyer to fix. If we feel someone's site is a threat to us or our customers, we shouldn't have to host it.

In any case, I had to put the issue further down on my queue of things to do, as I was (and still am) exceptionally busy with work at the new datacenter. However, on Monday, we got a second complaint and I couldn't ignore the issue any longer. Upon looking into it with a simple Google search, I came up with an extremely large thread on the topic of this MoreThanTraffic scam, as the "company" is called. It is clear to me that a number of fraud complaints where valid, and therefore they were running an illegal business (Title 18 Chapter 47 of the US Code). That does violate our ToS, so I was free to cancel their account and did so immediately.

I made a post about it on the scam.com forums and got some almost immediate responses. There's a healthy about of skepticism on those forums, and it's with good reason, given the content. After posting, we got our response back from the account owner. Their first reaction was to threaten to sue us (of course). They later demanded 3 days of service from us in order to make a proper transition over to their next victim host. Given that I don't respond well to threats, I refused. So, we left it with the threat of a suit over my head. But then I had a moment of clarity and realized something: They can't sue us.

Their "business" is based around the idea of you paying them money and them getting you a ton of traffic. They claim to have software that "gathers" this traffic over the course of 60 days and then diverts it to your site. As no surprise, it's nothing of the sort. All they do is use thousands of domain names and engage in spamdexing to build links towards a customer's site, which should, in theory, increase their rankings in the search engines. There are several things wrong with that they are doing which make it an almost useless practice. 1) They are doing this on only a few of our servers, and it is known that Google picks up on link farms that share the same block of IPs. 2) Google is smart enough to determine the similarity of content between these sites and penalize appropriately. 3) They create the risk that a user's site will be blacklisted by Google. As a result, they run a pretty fraudulent business, because they cannot offer the services they claim.

Now, back to why they can't sue us. The survival of their activities requires that they maintain a high degree of anonymity. If we all knew who they actually are, legitimate fraud complaints could be filed and they would be arrested. However, if they were to sue us, their identities would have to be revealed. You can sue a "John Doe", but you cannot be sued by one. As a result, if they brought a suit to us, no only would it be shot down in court, they'd also be opening themselves up for being charged with fraud and throw in jail.

Their main site appears to be hosted by a company within GNAX, so I'm going to talk to Jeff or Henry (the owners) tomorrow about getting their main site shut down. I'm sure they'll be right back on track the next day, but it should be enough of a damper to make an impact.

In other non-ASO non-scam news, I got my Nintendo DS Lite on Sunday and it rocks. I previously had a PSP, but sold it once I heard about this. My main problem with the original DS was it's size, but this one has basically fixed that completely. It's now 40% smaller and in one hell of a stylish case. Plus, the big sell for me are the games. The DS has a touch screen (knew about that) and a microphone (didn't know about that). Both are used a fair amount in most games, in particular with the Brain Age game I purchased. What I love is the originality with these games. The PSP's games were basically the same ones I've always played but shrunk down for the portable. The DS is really about rethinking what gaming is. For instance, one of the mini games in New Super Mario Brothers involves rolling a snowball down a course by pushing it with the touch screen. Another involves floating Yoshi to the top of the screen while avoiding enemies by blowing into the mic (got a little dizzy with that one). It's stuff like that which makes me really excited about the Wii and much happier with this system over the PSP. Plus, it's less than half the price and plays all my old GameBoy and GBA games. If you haven't picked one up yet, do yourself a favor and get it. It's the best portable system I've ever played.

P.S. I'm tired, so excuse the spelling and grammar.

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ABC Gets It Right

Posted at May 1, 2006 01:15 PM - Category: The Web

ABC launched their streaming TV service this morning, and it's awesome. While I would have prefered a downloadable version, we all know that would have to be encumbered by heavy DRM or some other rediculous restriction. What we do have is a nice little Flash player that works on Windows and the Mac. The commercials are also one of the best parts, too. That may be odd to hear, but they're much less intrusive then I had originally anticipated. Just three 30 second clips and that's it. That's less commercials than one break on normal TV. While they're just testing this out, I'm pretty confident they're going to keep it around afterward. Exciting times.

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#008000

Posted at February 27, 2006 11:53 AM - Category: The Web

That's the color of search. Ask.com unveiled their new site today, sans the Jeeves mascot. Jeeves or no Jeeves, it does look good. But at the same time, rather familiar. Take a look at some search results and you'll notice some similarities. Just to be crystal clear, I took some screen shots of a few of the bigger search engines out there:

Wow, they almost all look exactly the same! You can't really blame them, since they all want to be as big as Google. But being Google isn't going to make you as big as them. In fact, it would be much more effective to be different from Google, I think. Of course, I'm sure they have plenty of usability testing to back up the fact that people like their bold title, description text, green URL format. It even goes further than visual presentation to the actual functionality of the application itself. You'll notice in all the URLs for searches, sans Yahoo!, they use q as the search variable in the input. Yahoo! uses a p, but it's still a single letter. Of all people, you'd figure MSN would have something a little more complex...

In any case, I'm kind of sick of the search engines all trying to copy Google blatently. I've seen some neat apps built on top of Yahoo!'s search APIs which I wish the big guys would pick up on. God knows they're good enough at copying as it is.

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