Posts

I’m thinking about trying out Dreamhost for Web hosting. I’m definitely not staying with TextDrive – I had to wait two hours to post this because the server crashed again. Unacceptable. I’ve heard good things about Dreamhost and did the requisite “dreamhost sucks” Google search to find contrary opinons. There are definitely some customers out there who have had bad experiences, but they seem to be in the minority. The number one question for right now is, can I run my own install of Movable Type 3.2 that uses cgiwrap or suexec, so that I don’t have to make my directories world writable if I want scripts to be able to store files in them? ...

The Washington Post has a story today about a BellSouth proposal to allow ISPs to charge content providers for the privilege of getting their content to users more quickly. They claim that they won’t be slowing down the non-privileged traffic, only speeding up the privileged traffic, but I have a hard time understanding how that would work in practice. If the network normally makes its best effort to get content to me as quickly as possible, then how can they offer even faster access to some content providers without slowing down others? To me, this looks like a way for ISPs to extort money from content providers. ...

Joi Ito has a post explaining how domain squatters make money.

It all started when I couldn’t get Movable Type to work properly on my pair.com account. I started thinking about finding another hosting provider, especially when I started doing some stuff with Ruby on Rails and thought I might need a place to host those applications. Sure, pair.com had decent anti-spam software and had served me reliably for 8 years, but the grass was looking greener on the other side. ...

Well my current hosting provider, TextDrive, has been acquired. I’m sure the forums will be abuzz with discussion of what this means for customers. The fact that I missed the window for buying a lifetime account due to sheer procrastination is looking more fortuitous all the time.

I wasn’t able to find the mercenary video that I mentioned yesterday, but Andrew Brown did, and he describes the contents.

I’ve been thinking a lot about public choice theory lately. Public choice theory attempts to explain why government actions generally work to the benefit of special interests rather than to maximize public good. Here’s a brief description from Wikipedia: One of the basic claims that underlie public choice theory is that good government policies in a democracy are an underprovided public good, because of the rational ignorance of the voters. Each voter is faced with an infinitesimally small probability that his vote will change the result of the elections, while gathering the relevant information necessary for a well-informed voting decision requires substantial time and effort. Therefore, the rational decision for each voter is to be generally ignorant of politics and perhaps even abstain from voting. Rational choice theorists claim that this explains the gross ignorance of most citizens in modern democracies as well as low voter turnout. ...

Mercenaries in Iraq have posted a videos of themselves randomly shooting civilian vehicles in Iraq. The company in question has a contract with the US government worth over a million dollars. Here’s a description of the contents: The video, which first appeared on a website that has been linked unofficially to Aegis Defence Services, contained four separate clips, in which security guards open fire with automatic rifles at civilian cars. All of the shooting incidents apparently took place on “route Irish”, a road that links the airport to Baghdad. ...

Phil Ringnalda discovered a month ago that Bloglines is susceptible to a <a title=“phil ringnalda � Blog Archive � No, ask what Bloglines can do to you” href=“http://weblog.philringnalda.com/2005/11/21/no-ask-what-bloglines-can-do-to-you">cross site scripting attack that can expose your entire account to someone who has compromised a feed to which you subscribe. He notified the company a month ago and hasn’t seen any action on that front, so he’s publicizing the problem to alert Bloglines users. ...

Ben Edelman reports that there is a mechanism in the music player installed by Sony’s rootkit CDs that fetches messages from Sony and displays them when you open it. The mechanism is obviously intended for the distribution of marketing messages, but Sony could use it to tell users that their CD has been recalled and that they need to download an uninstaller for the rootkit. Keep this in mind when Sony says that there’s no easy way for them to let users know what’s going on. (Via Emergent Chaos.) ...