The Hypocrisy Weblog

Via slashdot: xseedit writes “The RIAA has moved their main Web site www.riaa.com from IIS on Win2003 to Apache 2.2.3 on Red Hat. It appears that the move did not go smoothly as it resulted in an 8-hour downtime starting yesterday around noon, according to Netcraft. And the RIAA is still showing a ‘temporarily under construction’ page. They also moved their DNS from the small company that had been hosting them for the past 4 years, Tomorrow’s Solutions Today (TST Inc.), to Mindshift Technologies. One can only guess what happened here, but the move seems to have been sudden and unplanned. They still haven’t moved the riaa.org, riaa.net, and musicunited.org domains — those are still pointing to the TST nameservers that no longer accept queries for those domains. TST Inc. deserves credit, however. They seem to have managed to host the RIAA quite successfully for the past 4 years. Will Mindshift do a better job hosting one of the most reviled, and therefore most attacked, Web sites in the world? I wonder if anybody at the RIAA or TST would care to comment on the reasons behind this sudden move. Could it be that the RIAA is being sued by its hosting provider? Or perhaps the sue-happy organizaiton is suing its provider?”

As seen above, RIAA’s website has moved both server environment as well as ISP (Internet service provider). Comments on slashdot express the irony they see of RIAA moving from the closed-source environment being Microsoft Windows Server 2003 to the GPL:ed ditto of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.RIAA is probably one of the prime targets for various attacks (code, ddos, dos) on the Internet, and the move to a more resilient environment such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux was probably a necessity in the end. Also, one can figure that they grew out of the resources that their old ISP, Tomorrow’s Solutions Today, could provide.

What do you think was the reason for switching both server-environment as well as ISP?

A new mashup-service has opened up on http://www.ip-adress.com , which combines the geographical IP-address database (stores the geographical information for the IP-address your computer uses right now on the Internet) from MaxMind and Google Maps.

The site is worth a try, if not for the novelty of it! If you have never used a trace-tool, this is an easy start to discover the “hidden” world of the Internet.

According to swedish IT-news agency “IDG“, a third of the broadband giant Telia Sonera’s customers email-services are down since yesterday. However, reports speaks of trouble since last thursday.

I don’t want to be a “I told you so”-kind of person, but if your email is truly important for you – then spend 10 euros a year on a commercial service at an email-provider of your choice.

Not only do you get independent of your broadband company, you also get to keep your email-address if you ever switch providers of your broadband.

The co-founders of Dreamhost, Josh&Dallas, gets interviewed by the ISPcon-moderator Joey deVilla, where Dallas&Josh talks about Dreamhost’s brilliant affiliate program, and how it gives them revenue despite their crazy offers and high affiliate payout.

A personal reflection on this is how friendly and down to earth they both seem, it is such a relief to see a bunch of “caring geeks” (yeah yeah, I know… ) doing what they love, and making money out of providing the Internet community with such a great service!

The Registry writes:

“Level 3, the supposedly secure back bone provider, has lost all services at its Braham Street data centre thanks to a robbery.

The company refused to speak to the Register this morning but many of its customers have been in touch.

According to Level 3 customers thieves got into the building on Braham Street, E1, and stole core router cards.

An email sent by Level 3 to its customers said only: “There was a security breach in our Braham St gateway early this morning. A number of service affecting cards were removed without authority from live equipment. This has resulted in the loss of IP and voice services to a number of customers at Braham St. We are currently attempting to restore service as quickly as possible. We will issue further updates as information becomes available.”

We were told no spokesperson was available or likely to be available.

Other technology companies hit by the downtime include easyspace.com.

The theft has raised fears that data centres and large IT departments in the City of London could be the target of an organised gang – last month Easynet’s centre on nearby Brick Lane suffered a similar robbery.

In other news BT Broadband suffered a major failure last night.

A spokesman for BT told the Reg: “About 100,000 BT Retail customers lost access late last night but normal service has now been restored. There was an authentication problem with our servers and it was not related to events at Level 3.”"

The above is a warning sign to all of you whom is looking for the cheapest deal possible. When you pay a little bit extra you not only pay for better network accessibility, but you also pay for physical security at the datacenter where your equipment is standing.

It is most unfortunate if thieves start to target datacenters, as this will bring the costs of hosting and co-location up, as well as it will bring uncertainty for us customers of these datacenters.

One of my sites, located at Easyspace, was down during a long night because of a said power-failure, though this article “Mystery surrounds Easynet ‘robbery’” and the attached customer letter really makes me wonder. I know that Easyspace and Easynet aren’t the same company(?), but I can’t help but put two and two together. Perhaps I’m conspiracy-minded, but it is a very fitting co-incident…

Perhaps the problems at Easyspace was linked to the issues with Easynet, I am not sure. But what is serious is that customers were in fact lied to regarding the status of their services. I can understand the “cover-up” from Easynet’s view point, but they will only lose in the long term by hiding the status of their organization’s services.

Boing Boing picked up on the story of Canadian Internet Service Provider Shaw blocking iTunes store and / or their podcasts due to the content coming from multiple sources.

Over the past month Rogers (ISP) in Canada has put some software on their networks that prevents activity for BitTorrents, P2P, IRC, and also along with that is a rule that if you are trying to download a large media file from more then 1 server it will be dropped. When you download a Podcast from iTunes it downloads that file from multiple servers in the background (I confirmed this by watching my cable modem logs). As soon as it tries to use more than 2 different servers for the download, it just stops. That’s the reason why Podcast downloads stop at random places – it’s the point where a 2nd server is involved in the download. The same issue causes timeouts and cut-offs in the iTunes music store.Here is the problem – when anyone calls Rogers about the problem they say it is either a router, firewall or Apple problem and they shrug you off.

Hundreds or thousands of people in Canada can no longer get Podcasts or purchase music from the iTunes Music store. This is BAD. Please, Apple, contact Rogers and sort it out. So many people have called Rogers with no luck.

The question I ask myself is why an Internet Service Provider should be capping bandwidth or limiting net-services in any way?! For security issues I do not mind certain restrictions, such as blocking port 25 for outgoing email to reduce spam coming from the network, and/ or blocking the ports135 to 139 in order to reduce common worm-threats – but there should always be some kind of user agreement where the advanced user should be able to sign a paper and taking all responsibility for unlocking these ports.

What your Internet Service Provider should do is to deliver you an unfiltered Internet-connection, if you choose to have this. With no traffic limitations or other restrictions. What you do with your Internet connection should be your business and responsibility, no-one else should be able to dictate what sites you surf to, what content you choose to download and so on. What should be applicable is the laws of the country you reside in, not the arbitrariness of your Internet Service Provider.

So, if you are a customer of Shaw or any other Internet Service Provider that is limiting your Internet-access, vote with your feet and with your wallet: switch to a provider that will provide you with un-filtered access. Sooner or later, your old provider will be forced to change their policy.