1&1 Hosting is Against SOPA

Being Dump Godaddy Day (apparently), I figured it fitting that I received the following quite-excellent email from my hosting provider 1&1, regarding their stance on the Stop Online Piracy Act. Heartening that they actually took a stand on this, as opposed to the support and then we-neither-support-nor-oppose stance Godaddy took.

Good to hear, though, that my hosting company is one of the good guys:

You may have heard about Protect-IP (PIPA) and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) currently under consideration in Congress. If passed, among other things, SOPA requires Web hosting companies like 1&1 to police websites in order to prevent them from communicating copyrighted information on the internet. We would like to make sure you are aware of 1&1’s official position on SOPA.

As a global provider of domains and hosting services, we oppose the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) or Protect-IP (PIPA) Acts currently under consideration. While we observe the concerns of those who are troubled by the potential impact on protecting intellectual property online, 1&1 feels there is an urgent need to strike a balance between dissemination of and access to information and protection against its illegal use within the public domain.

The US government is currently reviewing SOPA and PIPA as possible ways to prevent unlawful distribution of copyrighted materials available on the internet. These current proposals, if passed, would allow for significant interventions into the technological and economical basis of the internet. This could put the vast benefits and economic opportunities of entirely legal and legitimate e-business models at risk. Generally, companies offering technological services should not be forced to be the executor of authority in such matters. If they were to act upon every implication of content infringement without any judicial research into the actual usage of its customers, the integrity behind their customer’s freedom of information and speech would be enormously harmed.

1&1 Internet, Inc. has worked through associations and with related companies to ensure that these aspects are taken into account. Thus, we welcome the serious consideration by the US Congress of the potential harmful effects on Internet freedom should SOPA and / or PIPA be passed as law, and hope the stability of the Internet’s domain name system (DNS) remains intact.

We encourage every Internet user concerned about these plans to contribute to the debate and to raise their voice with their local representatives in the House or Senate. One way to express your concerns could be to use one of the websites that emerged to protect user interests in the current legislative debate, such as http://fightforthefuture.org/.

At 1&1 we support you, our customer, and an open internet. If you find that you are supporting a company that encourages SOPA and wish to drop them as
a provider, please follow the simple instructions contained on the website linked below.

Thank you for being one of our extremely valued customers, and for taking the time to read this.

Being a Scientologist I’m of course opposed to folks who assert that because “it’s the Internet” that they can blatantly do whatever they want, abuse copyrights, “expel from the Internet” religious groups, use the web as a platform for harassement, etc.  But there is absolutely due process of law, and that due process gets served (sometimes slowly – but it does get served) for folks that break the law.   And, like 1&1, Google, Craig Newmark, and others, I feel that a policy like SOPA will simply be a platform for unnecessary government censorship (or worse, corporate censorship) of the Internet.

What if, in the process of blogging about the dangers of psychiatric drugging & labeling of children, Eli Lilly or Shire Pharma say I’m infringing on a trademark by using their names in the article, and shut my website down without due process of law?    It’s a nasty thought, and I’m glad internetfolk are banding together to make sure it doesn’t come to pass.

Nothing Like the Smell of a New Server

Nothing Like the Smell of a New Server, a photo by tadnkat on Flickr.

Via Flickr:
Just racked up a trio of new servers at my work today – nice new 24GB RAM / 8CPU Dell R710s for a testing environment. They smell so nice when you first turn them on!

Fellow sys admins would understand…

Testing out new Photo Quickpost



Testing out the new photo quick post functionality on the WordPress Android app.  Photo taken on the DC metro on my way home.

Another Late-Night Code Deployment

Late-Night Code Deployment, a photo by tadnkat on Flickr.

The organization I work for has been fervently retooling processes, technologies & culture to move toward a continuous-delivery model as opposed to the old-skool monolithic-deploy, all-or-nothing, bite-your-fingernails deployment methodology.

Google HTTPS Search Results for Logged-In Users

I saw this post today on Google switching to HTTPS search results, referred from my trusty Slashdot.

Obviously, I didn’t like it – mostly because, from a website owner perspective, it eliminates the ability to get real-time reporting on keywords, which makes response to media events and such where mass keyword-driven traffic to your site all of the sudden requires proper response & content.

Curious as to whether sites would show up as “no referrer” (i.e. with referrer data totally stripped out) or if they’d show up redirected like Google+ links, I did some tests.  They do show up with a Google referrer – just one that has the search keywords obfuscated:

Clicking through a link from HTTPS Google:

I searched for “These Terrible Twos Aren’t Too Terrible“, clicked on the top link which is from my parenting site.

The log line I get resulting from this click through is:

4.2.2.2 - - [19/Oct/2011:11:26:48 -0500] "GET /these-terrible-twos-arent-too-terrible/ HTTP/1.1" 200 66517 http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved= 0CB0QFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.scientologyparent.com%2Fthese-terrible-twos-arent-too- terrible%2F&ei=OfqeTpH2B4Pi0QHBoI2SCQ&usg=AFQjCNHBqTWXZLEY0uBUia1-l7RegVujXA" "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686) AppleWebKit/535.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/14.0.835.202 Safari/535.1"

It obviously then obfuscates the search terms, but still at least tells you it was a Google organic result.  I’ve yet to see how Google plans to deliver these 30-day Keyword digests, but now that will obviously become another staple of daily analytics.

Update:

Curious as to how the rest of Google & Facebook services handle HTTPS links, I ran the same test on HTTPS Gmail, Google+ and Facebook.  Results:

Clicking through a link from HTTPS Gmail:

4.2.2.2 - - [19/Oct/2011:12:01:21 -0500] "GET /these-terrible-twos-arent-too-terrible/
HTTP/1.1" 200 66517 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686) AppleWebKit/535.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/14.0.835.202 Safari/535.1"

Clicking through a link from HTTPS Google+:

4.2.2.2 - - [19/Oct/2011:12:01:21 -0500] "GET /these-terrible-twos-arent-too-terrible/
HTTP/1.1" 200 66517 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686) AppleWebKit/535.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/14.0.835.202 Safari/535.1"

I had earlier done some tests on Google+ HTTPS, and clicking through links in G+ would send you to an intermediate HTTP page which then would send you on to the target link.  This way, one could at least tell if traffic was coming to your site from Google+.  It seems they’ve done away with that, which is unfortunate.  I haven’t seen any traffic appear in my stats from Google+ since shortly after launch — I always attributed that to low takeup on G+ compared to my followings on Facebook & such, but now it appears that it’s simply because the referring info was stripped out.

Clicking through a link from HTTPS Facebook:

4.2.2.2 - - [19/Oct/2011:12:02:33 -0500] "GET /these-terrible-twos-arent-too-terrible/
HTTP/1.1" 200 66517 "http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.scientologyparent.com%2F
these-terrible-twos-arent-too-terrible%2F&h=tAQA11y3eAQBsxDhnT7lzULhrGsW4OkAZv30JIUOUOuUTlA"
"Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686) AppleWebKit/535.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/14.0.835.202 Safari/535.1"

Facebook is the only other service that actually redirects you to an intermediate HTTP page that at least discloses where the traffic came from.

 

Uncovering New States of Matter by Packing Lunch

My daughter, holding her hermetically-sealed lunchbox

 

When I was in engineering school, lab experiments we conducted at Oregon State were able to unveil some shocking discoveries about phases of matter, proving that matter did indeed pass through several phases as temperature is increased, including:

1. Solid

2. Liquid

3. Gaseous

4. Plasma

5. Burger King Coffee

But now, after packing my daughter’s lunch each day, and being responsible for her classroom’s snacktime snacks on a rotating basis, I’ve rediscovered something I happened upon in grade school but was have to this date been unable to explain:

Bananas possess a property which allows their essence to pass through any solid matter containment system, and will then make EVERYTHING in a 18″ radius smell and taste like bananas.

I’m sure many of you have had a similar experience, but if not, try it. Cut up a banana, and put it in a thick-plastic, vacuum-packed, hermetically sealed, weapons-grade nuclear storage unit by tupperware. Pack that along with the rest of your lunch items.

I guarantee you, that due to the fact that banana essence meta-particles can actually warp through any solid matter, your graham crackers, PB&J, cookies, yogurt and even the soup you put in a bloody triple-layer stainless-steel thermos, will all TASTE LIKE BANANA.

Any physics types out there have a theory they’d like to put forth on how this is?

Why I Got My Wife a Linux Laptop

First:

Got my wife a Linux laptop EXPRESSLY so when it fails, she can call @ work and I can talk her through an fsck & it sounds like I'm working.—
Tad Reeves (@TurboDad) June 14, 2011

Besides, I love the sound hearing my wife tell me about failed inodes and orphaned clusters. —
Tad Reeves (@TurboDad) June 14, 2011

The iPhone & iPad Flash Debate: It’s NOT just about Video!!

Every time I read an article about the iPhone and iPad and the spurning of Flash that Steve Jobs & Apple has decided upon, the conversation is always just about video.  Video, video, video, and the differences between Flash Video and h.264 video played on the iPhone and so forth.

The Apple response to this is a seemingly well-intentioned suggestion that everyone just use HTML5 instead of Flash.

Now, as a web guy, I loathe the idea of someone blithely and sometimes gleefully informing me that I’d love to re-code my whole app in HTML5 when (a) HTML5 isn’t even supported remotely standardly across browsers yet whereas Flash is, and (b) there are tons of things you simply CAN’T DO in HTML5 yet – for example PixelBender effects in Flash.

So PLEASE can we stop talking about video!

Whether you like it or hate it, Flash is an established programming platform which has been used for a MASSIVE number of apps that we love & use on a daily basis.  Not just YouTube and Zynga games, but for a bazillion other things that transparently just work on the Desktop (as 98% of you have Flash installed already).

Examples of some of my favorite websites that totally don’t work, or have seriously degraded performance or features on the iPad due to the lack of Flash:

Picnik:

An AMAZING application that lets you just upload your photos to Flickr or Picassa and then tweak them from any browser.  You can blur/sharpen/tone/vignette/etc your photos, and make tweaks in a faster flowline than even Photoshopping on the Desktop.  ALL DONE IN FLASH and completely not available on the iPad.  Try replicating some of those graphics filters in HTML5, and then try doing it across browsers & platforms.  Picnik works for me right now on PC, Mac and Linux, flawlessly.  But not on iPhone or iPad.

Google Analytics:

Like any website owner and administrator, I look at my analytics all the time, and would love to be able to use tools like Google Analytics when I’m on the go on a slick tablet device like the iPad, or on an iPhone.

Google Analytics renders nearly all of its graphs, and its neat-o map overlays using Flash.  The widgets for changing date range, etc all of them done in Flash, which makes the whole tool basically unusable on the iPad.   Could Google re-code the whole app to work with HTML5 or JS image & graphing libraries?  Sure, nothing stopping them particularly except that it’s a huge amount of work for little return except to satisfy iPad users.

Gmail & Flickr Photo Uploaders:

Both Gmail and Flickr have great Flash-based file uploader tools that allow you to upload large numbers of photos at once, and see great little progress bars on their upload progress.

Doesn’t work at all on the iPad.  Without Flash, you’re forced to upload one file at a time in a time-consuming & infuriating procedure.    Could that be re-coded in HTML5?  Perhaps.  Would it work seamlessly in all browsers? No way.

HotPads:

When looking for a new condo recently, the best site I found by far is a site called HotPads, that uses a flexible and intuitive map control to let you dynamically select what you want to see on the map, price range, type of unit, etc.

Could they re-code their mapping app in JS and HTML5?  Sure.  Why would they want to though?  The map currently works for 98% of users when done in Flash and they have the performance and features they want.

There are a ton more, and I’d love to have your commentary on any other apps you use that aren’t just video, but which would need to be completely re-done from scratch or would not be doable at all given the current state of HTML5.

So please, the battle about iOS devices on Flash is NOT about video.  It’s about a retrograde step in the usability of web applications on the net.

Google +1 Button Doesn’t Get You Crawled

I was doing some testing this morning with the new Google +1 button.   One of my first tests was to see if Google immediately did anything with a +1 vote, and oddly, the answer is no.

As a test, I used my forum on the Scientology Parent site.  I already know that when I make a new forum post, nobody spiders the article until I do something to make the article get seen.

I then pressed a +1 button that I just added to the article.   No effect at all.

I then posted the article to Twitter via a bit.ly link.  Not surprisingly, that immediately resulted in no less than 13 different bots crawling the article before the first real user hit it.  Only then did Google’s spider crawl the link.

Curious.  Just a note.  I know they say that you don’t get crawled any faster with the +1 button, but just wanted to check.

 

Gnome 3 & Fedora 15 on VirtualBox 4

I’ve been running Fedora on VirtualBox as my main desktop environment for the last year or so.  Company requires that I have a Windows XP desktop, so I just virtualize to get the environment I want, and don’t have to use Windows at all.  That said, I just upgraded to Fedora 15, running on VirtualBox 4.08.  Having a few issues getting Gnome 3 to be usable for me, and below post is (mostly) for my own benefit in keeping track of issues.

• VirtualBox 4.08 required:  First lesson – make sure your VirtualBox is updated to 4.08 or better.  The VirtualBox folks released a fix with 4.08 to make sure it works with the new Gnome 3 shell.
• Install w/Dev Libraries:  You need to have the VirtualBox guest additions installed to make the new Gnome 3 shell work (3D/GL) and to get those extensions to build, you need to have the kernel headers & kernel sources on the box to build the kernel modules.  Had a rough time with the Fedora 15 beta, even after yum installing kernel-devel, kernel headers, etc – so just check off the dev libraries on your initial install.  I did so with the last final version, and building the VirtualBox guest additions worked just fine.
• Issues with package installer: First thing I went to do with the new Gnome 3 install was to install flash-plugin from Adobe’s site, and Chrome from Google.  For some reason, the package installer in GNOME 3 just hangs and doesn’t install packages.  Had to install them from KDE Plasma and it worked.  (yes, I know I could have done it manually, but I like having the GUI package manager resolve deps for me).
• Wacky White-Out Graphics Issues: Over the last hour, I’ve now had 3 times where the entire interface has gone white, with bizarre little square squiggles outlining some illegible text.  Had to do a ctrl+alt+backspace to restart x & go back in, as couldn’t do anything.  Was just in Chrome the first time, and was just trying to navigate system settings the other time.  So, graphics rendering is not stable on VirtualBox.
• No Desktop?  Still getting used to the fact that there is no desktop.  I.e. no place to just drag/drop items onto & use them.  I doubt my wife will want to use Gnome 3 as she’s so used to being able to plop things on the desktop.
• No widgets?  Hate lack of widgets.  Yes, I know their design people say that we don’t need them, but first thing I always do on Gnome 2.x was to put a system monitor in the panel so I can see CPU utilization, load & N/W usage.
• No minimize?  Don’t like the inability to minimize.  And if you do right-click/minimize, where does the window go?  No visible way to get it back.

I think there are a lot of slick things about Gnome 3, but still looks like a technology preview to me rather than something I can use on my daily desktop for work.  Switching back to my Fedora 15 / Gnome 2 desktop for now.