I remember when Telus shut down thousands of websites to take down their union’s website. Serverloft might have just done the same. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer has an article on the takedown of the Yes Men site. I did find an article from straight.com which claims to have the original complaint. The IP address in the complaint there is the same one that ec-gc.ca is currently hosted on. Ole Tange is the contact for PiWeb listed in the IP address for that whois.

At first I was convinced that Serverloft did in fact pull the plug on PiWeb’s netblock. A slashdot comment gave me pause. After all, the message from Mr. Tange is on a website controlled by the Yes Men, and his contact details are publicly available. As of this writing, the PiWeb status page makes no mention of related downtown. Maybe the Yes Men took down their own site as a PR stunt. Here’s a paste from the disputed website.

Website suspended

Serverloft blocked the IP-range for this server because of the content of the client’s website and would only unblock the IP-range if we suspended the website. The website was used in a spoof by The Yes Men.

Serverloft blocked the IP-range without a warrant and without calling us and thus affecting servers hosting 4500 of our customers’ websites until we ourselves discovered the problem, and convinced Serverloft to unblock. Serverloft did send us an email explaining that they would not unblock the IP-range until the websites were taken offline. The email was sent 5 minutes after they cut of the access to the mail server, so we only received the email after the 4500 websites were back online.

Convincing Serverloft that their systems had blocked access on purpose was hard because Serverloft frontline support claimed that all their systems were working fine and they therefore assumed that the problem was a configuration problem on our server. They refused to help troubleshooting the issue.

Serverloft could simply have called us and asked us to deal with the situation. We would then have asked the Canadians for a warrant. If the Canadians had shown us a warrant we would have taken down the site immediately. As others have pointed out the Canadians could probably just have gone through CIRA and have the domain suspended, which would not have affected any of the other 4500 websites.

As we cannot go through every single page that our customers put on their websites we anticipate a similar situation may arise again. We have therefore asked Serverloft to revise their procedures so we at least would get a phone call before they cut our connection. They have so far refused to do so. They have answered:

your net was blocked because of hosting phishing sites. I’ve attached the information, we have, below our signature. I’m sorry, but we cant call every costumer for abuse. In some cases we’ve to respond very fast and have to block the net or server.

While I appreciate Serverloft respond fast, it is no good if the collateral damage is more than 1000 times as big. Had they called I am sure we would have found an arrangement that would satisfy both of us.

For more information: contact Ole Tange <ole@tange.dk>

The only other website I can find running on the listed IP is good-cop15.org, which is also the default vhost for that IP. It’s a site about the Copenhagen conference and links to the Yes Men hoax. Judging from the reverse lookup on the address it’s probably a virtual machine, quite possibly run by the Yes Men. It turns out that there is actually a Bruce Moore at CCIRC, but he wasn’t on duty when I called. Ec-gc.ca isn’t on any phishing list that I can find so that charge was overblown.

I don’t particularly like the Yes Men. They go from satire to impersonation. I’d have loved to see CIRA close down their ec-gc.ca domain but the domain dispute takes a long while. I can understand the letter from the CCIRC. The Yes Men website will do the most damage now, not in the time after CIRA is through with its dispute process. I find it very plausible that the Canadian Government would send such a request.

I also find it very plausible that Serverloft would issue a knee-jerk takedown. It’s relatively common for service providers to take down material immediately after a complain, especially among low margin resellers. From the WHT opinions, it sounds like that fits Serverloft. If that IP address was limited to a virtual machine run by the Yes Men, and Serverloft was okay with risking their reputation by acting on the complaint rather than following up with PiWeb, they could have at least minimized damage by only nullrouting the VM’s IP address.

There’s enough negative material on WebHostingTalk that I wouldn’t want to use Serverloft regardless of the outcome of this case. I’d like to see some official statement from PiWeb on an official channel before I believe the details though.

Update Jan 2nd 2010: It looks like Ole Tange has updated his personal website with details of the takedown.

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I put in a support request on the forum but got no reply. I could put in a support ticket, but I won’t bother. I’m just going to switch to dropbox.

What’s that you say? “But dropbox doesn’t have Windows Mobile support!” Well, I’m not convinced that SugarSync has it either. I installed their client and it crashed on launch. No error message, it just dies. I put in a support request and I’m told to reinstall. Okay, I use Remove programs, delete the CAB file from my downloads, clear my browser cache, redownload and reinstall. The issue persists. I reply to the ticket, and I’m told to reinstall. I use Remove programs, dig through the registry with Resco Registry Editor, delete any key that looks related, delete the CAB file, clear my cache, redownload and reinstall. The issue persists. I reply to the ticket.

What do you think I’m told in response? Yeah, reinstall.

SugarSync now has no advantages to Dropbox for me. I can see how the Magic Briefcase is useful for recovering files after a crash, but not the machine specific folders, and I might want to keep backups of folders without sharing them over all computers. I’ve already seen that their support is poor, so it’s time to try the other guys.

Long story short, sign up via my referral link and sign in via the client and we both get a bonus of 500mb if you sign up on the free plan, or 10gb if you sign up for one of the paid plans. Then you sign up your friends for more bonuses. There’s a promotion going on where the rewards are doubled until August 31st, 2009. Once that date rolls over the 500mb of extra storage turns into 250mb.

And if you missed it, here’s my referral link again: https://www.sugarsync.com/referral?rf=bprro2ephcy59

Having my phone sync my photos automatically makes me nostalgic for the Hiptop days. Once again I curse Fido for scrapping it. Here’s hoping that the Palm Pre can hold a candle to it once it hits Canada.

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I decided that I would install my own copy of Weave because I’d rather store my information on machines I own. The Mozilla folks are very unlikely to let my passwords get stolen or misused but that bit of paranoia hasn’t let me wrong so far. The installation of the Weave server scripts isn’t for the uninitated. Since it requires modification of apache configuration files you won’t be able to do it on a shared hosting plan, though you might be able to get around the aliases with some mod_rewrite voodoo.

It turns out that my paranoia isn’t warranted in this case. You only upload encrypted data. The data is encrypted with a passphrase separate from the Weave login, and the server never knows it. I don’t know how they implemented their encryption (other than the cipher is aes-256-cbc according to about:config) but I imagine the data is safe. The Mozilla folks say they can’t get at your data.

Weave is still too new to have a plan set in stone but Mozilla does have an idea of what they want it to do. The preferences for the client side extension list these as syncable items, though some are greyed out and don’t work: Bookmarks, cookies, extensions, forms, history, input history (location bar), microformats, passwords, plugins, preferences, tabs, and themes.

It looks like they’re trying to support OpenID too, but unfortunately it didn’t work on either my Basecamp login (it actually prevented me from login) or my WordPress install. The OpenID text field actually disappeared and was replaced with a “Sign in using Weave” button. I took a look and as it turns out, Weave assumes that you’re using Mozilla’s OpenID provider with the same username that you’ve signed in to Weave with. Not very helpful when I run an openid provider on imaddicted.ca and use tail.recursing.org for Weave. Fortunately you can click “(revert)” next to the button to get the OpenID text fields back. If you don’t use Mozilla’s OpenID provider you may as well change extensions.weave.openId.enabled to false in about:config. I’m sure that this behaviour is just a temporary thing while Weave is in alpha.

Fennec in need of Weave. Image by Getty Images via Daylife

The client side extension will also install in Thunderbird and Sunbird but won’t do anything as of yet. Fennec support is underway. Thunderbird would be easy to sync, keep your passwords in the cloud and let IMAP worry about which messages have been read. Sunbird is a little trickier. Will they sync calendars, or just the login details for shared calendars? Weave was intended to sync just metadata but calendars are more data than meta.

Weave has me intrigued. I see a lot of potential, especially in having a single sign-on for OpenID. What I’d like is for all Mozilla products to ship with Weave support. I want to be able to sit down at a friend’s desk, sign in to my Weave account (hosted on my own server, naturally) and have all my extensions plus settings and bookmarks at my disposal. I want Sunbird to snag all my calendars. I want Thunderbird to work. I want my Mozilla experience to be easily accessible whatever machine I’m on. I want to get rid of my USB key that contains Portable Firefox. I want it to work on Linux, OS X and Windows.  This is somewhat similar to Dion Almaer’s take on Weave in Ajaxian, although in its current form Weave is still useful to me.

Take a look at the screencast demo. Want to give Weave a go? Check out its Mozilla Labs page.

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My favourite story is how Jon Postel took over the internet by asking eight maintainers of root DNS servers to stop listening to Network Solutions and instead listen to to his own. He was shortly told to revert the changes and that any similar attempts would result in him being charged. Why did he do it? Was it a simple test, as the official story goes, or was it a way of showing that the US government did not have sole power? Perhaps a protest of the Network Solutions monopoly? Unfortunately he passed on nine months later so we’ll never know.

The short of the book is that every country has some control through pressuring intermediaries within its control. It may be local ISPs, or local subsidiaries. France was able to impose its law on Yahoo by threatening a subsidiary in France. The US DOJ was able to seize domains of sites it couldn’t control because the registrar was located within the US. It’s the same way that multinationals can be threatened by countries they’re located in, and if you don’t have a multinational presence you don’t need to worry. (Note that having your registrar in a country other than your own can count as multinational presence!)

Kieren McCarthy has a fantastic, detailed review. He as a domain expert he explains the strengths and adds a piece about ICANN. What I’d like to add is a context to an offhand comment within the book about Landslide being a purveyor of child pornography. Landslide was instead a payment processor and I believe that they were taken advantage of by fraudsters and are themselves victims. The website Operation Ore Exposed tells the story from Landslide’s point of view.

The book gives a clear view of the complex power structure that governs the internet and proves that cyberspace is dead. What ought to be the next big question? My guess is “who owns your data?”

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I discovered Ohpan by A Type Studios through Twitter and decided to give it a go. You can too if you check out their latest blog post to find one of the beta keys. The ones that work as of this writing are ATYPE1 and GENYTO.

It’ll ask you to log in through an OAUTH provider like Facebook or Gmail. Once you do that it’ll create a user name for you, as well as check your contacts to see if you have any friends on the service so you can forward news to them.

Once you’re in you’ve got a two column news feed filled with rectangles that scroll leftward. You can change direction and speed using the left and right arrow keys, and you can generate new columns by using the search function. When you hover over the news boxes you get two options: star (vote up) or slash (vote down and remove box.) When you click on the box it creates a pop-up that shows you the entire RSS item which could be the entire story. It also has a link to the page.

The user interface looks very slick but the UI could use a few tweaks. Understandable since it’s a beta. Here’s what I’d change: Add a pause button (apparently a frequent request.) Turn off the arrow navigation when the search bar has focus, and allow the enter key to work on the search field. Lastly, allow a vertically scrolling ticker for those of us who still have a 4:3 monitor.

There are still a few kinks to work out. I downrated thirty sports articles hoping to get rid of the sports category only to find that it gave me nothing but sports entries for an hour after that. It doesn’t allow you to add feeds yet since it’s in early start-up phase, but they’re willing to take e-mailed OPML files in the short term.

It seems that they have an iPhone version coming up. I hope that they’d bring out a Windows Mobile version too, I’m sick of using reddit when killing time on the go.

ReadWriteWeb just posted a blog entry that also includes more beta codes.

LeVar Burton was in Toronto today for an interview with CBC‘s The Hour. With about an hour’s notice he posted a Tweetup. I was there, with about thirty others, including someone from CityTV.

I grew up watching him on both Reading Rainbow and Star Trek: The Next Generation. I didn’t take any convincing to head over to Hemmingway’s to meet him. On the way I was working up questions to ask him, and I had the chance later.

Early in the evening he asked how many of us were Reading Rainbow fans. The entire audience cheered and put up their hands. He was startled but grinned afterwards. Someone admitted that he didn’t watch it alone, it was with his daughter, and after finding out that some folks there who grew up with the PBS show were in their late twenties and had kids of their own he said he felt old.

When I got a chance to speak to him I told him that there were hearings underway to try to understand the Canadian content situation and potentially regulate. I posited that quotas would not work on the internet, he didn’t seem to disagree, and then I asked if he could tell me from the standpoint of a director or an actor what these artisans would need. He said he didn’t want to give a statement since he didn’t know enough about the situation. Fair enough.

I understand his hesitance and felt guilty for asking afterwards. I’d thought that as someone who wasn’t beholden to the local unions he could give me a candid understanding from either the director or actor’s standpoint. The locals aren’t very accessible, I’ve found. Once that was over I became part of the audience asking about his new movies.

I milled about and got to meet some cool people. The folks from Torontoist and blogTO come to mind first, but also the gentleman whose name escapes me (Dan?) with whom I discussed the return to tribalism and art returning to the common person on the walk home.

After the success of this tweetup with only an hour’s notice, and his burst of views after claiming his Twitter account, I think Mr. Burton is seeing the value of social media. I’m happy to have met one of the artisans who I grew up with.

Mr. Burton, I hope you enjoy your stay in Toronto.

Update April 8th 2009: There’s a Bell autodialer reporting that Twitter charges will be refunded.

I’ve been experimenting with Twitter‘s resumed SMS service in Canada. Right now it only works with Bell Mobility and, well, I’m a Bell subscriber. Twitter claims the service is free but I quickly heard reports of fifteen cent charges cropping up on the #belltwit hashtag. I decided to do my own experiment while waiting for Twitter’s correction.

Yesterday at about four o’clock I sent a message to 21212. I forgot to input my PIN, so I got back an error message. I sent another message with my PIN this time and it got posted. Next, I got someone to DM me so that I could receive a SMS, and then I got the same person to post a public message after I enabled “device updates” for his account. I received both the DM and the public message, then called *611 to see what the charge was.

Long story short, I was told to call back today. I logged in to my Bell account and saw six new charges. One was “text message from internet” and five were “txt message – short code programs.” So I called *611 again.

Total charge: $0.45. I asked them to look up the Twitter short code as a biller and apparently it’s not there as a subscription service, so you’re not being charged for incoming messages.

Bell has since confirmed that they won’t charge for incoming messages from Twitter. This is consistent with what I found out through billing. I sent two messages, so get charged $0.30, plus I got a message from Google Calendar, adding the other $0.15. I didn’t realize that Google Calendar messages costed so I’ll be cancelling those today.

Update: Original Bell press release says charge was intended to be incoming and outgoing.

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The CRTC held day two of their new media hearings today, with more to follow in a week. The goal is of the hearings is to figure out just what to do with this new fangled media, to discern whether incentives or regulation is required to encourage the spread of Canadian content.

They heard proposals about a levy on ISPs, and applying the same content regulations to the internet that are applied to broadcasts. The latter is ludicrous since you can’t put content quotas on the internet. The most serious recommendation is a levy, though I feel the target is misplaced. The levy could be $5 according to SOCAN, or it could be 3% according to the Canadian Conference for the Arts or Tac.TV.

I’m reminded of a report titled Changing Channels that was posted much earlier and taken into consideration by the CRTC.

Even the major U.S. television network offering the least content (CBS at 55%) offers twice as much programming as the Canadian network offering the most content (CTV at 24%). The CW (80%) offers about three times as much content as CTV, and five times more than Global TV (15%).

…

There was a clear predominance of domestic content at both U.S. and Canadian broadcaster websites, although Canadian broadcasters had much more American content than American broadcasters had Canadian content.

With the lack of availability of “professionally produced content” available I question ACTRA’s figure quoted from their Harris poll which pegs the number of Canadians who watch video online at 70%. I’d like to see the phrasing of the questionaire. I suspect that most video viewed by Canadians is ephemeral video on YouTube and alike. The rationale behind levying ISPs to pay for the production of professionally produced Canadian content is that they profit off of it, but I want to see a breakdown of how much of that video is user generated content first.

Twitter is active on the #crtc hashtag. Here’s a few choice tweets:

drewmack: @mathewi Fact CRTC not on Twitter probably a bad sign for attempt to regulate the internetz. Can we confirm they’re not using dialup? #crtc

hartleyglobe: Just a thought. Maybe instead of applying the Broadcast Act and the Telecom Act to the Internet, perhaps we need a new Internet Act? #crtc

Michael Geist has writeups of day one and day two.

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Most people I talk to hear “microblogging” and put too much emphasis on one of the two benefits of blogging. Blogging is a printing press in the home of everyone with an internet connection and it’s also a conversation.

It’s hard to say much of worth in such short confines when you look at it alone. A stream of posts from a single author would have been much more conveniently read in a small blog posting. To think of microblogging only as a publishing tool is to overlook other areas of value. The problem I see is while there’s a blogsphere, there’s no microblogsphere.

Conversations on Twitter happen in through tracking keywords and hashtags.  Back when Twitter had an official IM client I used it to track dozens of keywords and hashtags. Tracking meant that Twitter would notify me the instant one was used, and I’d be able to respond instantly through my phone or IM client. Unfortunately that was killed off.

There’s still a few easy ways to track keywords on Twitter. You can subscribe to an RSS feed of a search query and mash it up any way you want or you can use Tweetdeck.

The problem so far is that this all relates to Twitter. Right now I can think of at least two open source microblogging applications, laconi.ca and OpenMicroBlogger. Jaiku will eventually be open sourced. There’s already dozens of proprietary ones and the number of installations of open ones is slowly growing. The community is too fragmented.

The two open source applications support the open micro blogging specification which lets you subscribe to microbloggings of users of another site, similar to how users of a Jabber IM can usually add someone to their list who’s on another server. It’s not implemented on the most popular servers, but it fixes half of the problem with conversation.

What it doesn’t fix is being able to reply. Since addressing a reply is done in-band, that is inside the message itself, including the server the recipient is on robs you of scarce message space. If you don’t include the server then you run into name collissions. Am I addressing a message to lance_ on Twitter or identi.ca or Jaiku or what?

The proposed OpenMicroBlogger 0.2 spec might solve that by including a hidden out-of-band variable  to the message, similar to how Twitter did so with the specific message ID that you’re repling to.  Each time you do something like this you’re fragmenting the users into “users of clients who support that feature” versus “users of clients who don’t support that feature.”

What’s it going to take to have a microblogsphere? Communities will need top open up and support OpenMicroBlogging or similar, and some hard choices are need to be made to compromise between preserving message space and vital features.