Just thought I’d bring this up here to find out what people think about it.
Even you non-techie people have probably heard about this in the news lately, but in case you don’t know what I’m talking about, I’ll give a brief overview of what it means (at least my understanding of it). Some people (or more accurately, companies, specifically large ones and internet service providers [ISPs - from here on out]) would like to start giving certain types of internet traffic from certain sites/domains higher priority than other traffic. The company that wants their content delivered to the customers more quickly can pay the ISP to increase the priority of their traffic, and it would then get more bandwidth allocated than some site that will not (or cannot) pay a similar fee. Proponents of “net neutrality” want to get a law passed that would prevent the ISPs from doing this. Read More »
December 3, 2004 – 10:41 pm
Dan caught what I did, so here is the full explanation, along with my explanation/theory of how spammers work: Read More »
November 21, 2004 – 1:20 am
As I noted below, I’m looking for help and/or feedback on designing my own blog software that will eventually be offered (for free - open source) to the public.
This is for you non-technical people out there as well! I’m still looking for general suggestions on features you’d need or want in a blog system, as well as more specific suggestions on things like a name for the system. Also, once there is a name established, I’ll be looking for a logo (that’s for you artists out there) . The only caveat is that you won’t receive any payment for anything you contribute, other than an entry in the “credits” indicating your participation in the project and what you provided.
Thanks.
November 21, 2004 – 1:15 am
[Expired link to a blogcity error message - sorry]
That said, I realize that it’s not feasible for most people to host their own, so here is some of my advice for service providers like blog city who would post messages like this:
- That is way too much downtime for a database recovery. Implement a half-way decent backup strategy, which should include a recovery plan. If you can’t efficiently recover your data from your backups, they aren’t worth much are they?
- How about some consistency in date formatting?
- It always bothers me to see what I consider to be a positive term (”hacker”) being used as a negative label, and don’t even get me started on the lame alternate labels that the media has made up to use instead (”crackers”, “script kiddies”, “white hat” vs. “black hat”, etc.) My opinion is that if someone is committing an actual crime, try using the label “criminal”, instead of creating a negative association with a peripherally related group of people. I don’t go around calling murderers who shoot people “gun owners”, I call them “murderers”. In the same manner, don’t lump in the people who happen to posses the “skills” (or probably in this case, the commonly available tools) required to breach your security with the small subset of those people who would do so with malicious or criminal intent.
- That being said, don’t blame “hackers” (or whatever you want to call them) for your poor security standards. Whatever happened to your site was the direct result of either ignorance or negligence on the part of your developers or system administrators, plain and simple.