Techie :: Techno ::: May 2007 Archives

I mentioned that I was having issues with content theft the other day, however I did not want to name names until I had received some form of response from the perpetrator. After 5 days I have finally received a reply from them and I am now more than happy to name and shame. As regular readers to this blog may know I also maintain several other blogs on specific themes. One of them is ISquattedYour.EU, which deals primarily with domain industry related content. I am involved with several registries (we're an accredited registrar for several) and keep an eye on movements at ICANN, so it was only natural that the financial issues that may impact on the .travel registry would catch my eye. On that basis I wrote a short article on this on the I Squatted blog: Tralliance in Trouble - .travel could die Which was published on 20th May 2007. Two days later DomainNews.com published an article entitled "Is the .travel Registry broke?" which bears more than a passing similarity to my article, as it's basically a direct rip of mine. I had been in contact with the editor of DomainNews.com previously and had explicitly told him that I did not grant them permission to republish my articles:

With regard to my blog posts I have no issue with you referencing me, or quoting me, however I do not grant anyone permission to republish my posts in their entirety

(email 3rd April 2007) They replied:

I will respect your wishes not to copy entire posts from your site of course.

Yet, when I became aware of their recent infringement of my copyright it took them 5 days to reply and the reply that I got was hardly satisfactory:

Actually I did not get that article from your site... someone else must have copied it and posted it on their site where I got it from.

(email May 30th 2007) Interesting. So basically they don't admit to ripping the content from my site, but from someone else's? And where is the reference to the source in the republished article? Could anyone be expected to believe that anyone other than DomainNews wrote the article? Have a look at a screenshot to see what I mean (sorry if it's a bit big): To add insult to injury the ripped off article is now being cited as the source by several other sites that cover the domain name industry. Of course their attitude does make you wonder how much of their content is their own and how much they have been blatantly stealing from other blogs and websites. Their attitude to copyright is laughable:

Many sites do not put copyrights on their publications and I was unaware that this article had a copyright.

(email May 30th 2007) So what are you meant to do? Put a great big "hands off" on all your content? Since when do you have to do this with original works? I am not a lawyer and would not pretend to be one, however my understanding of copyright and fair use is quite clear on this point. My interpretation would also seem to fit with that of professional journalists, such as the comments on my previous post on this subject by ENN's Ralph Averbuch and The Sunday Business Post's Adrian Weckler. Copyright theft is wrong. There's no two ways about it. And what makes it even more annoying is when you know that other people are profiting from your work (ie. selling advertising on their site based on your content!) While this may not be as abhorrent as the recent case of a 14 year old's photo ending up on the cover of an adult DVD, it's still morally indefensible.

Dell has launched its range of Ubuntu powered desktops. At present the product range is only available for purchase in the US. If you go to the dedicated OSS site you will be greeted with this (click to enlarge) : and the product page has the following: (click to enlarge) The introductory text is pretty clear:

ou asked, we listened. For advanced users and tech enthusiasts, we’re happy to offer a new open-source operating system, so you can dive in and truly enjoy a PC experience just the way you want it. In addition to the FreeDOS systems we already offer, we are proud to announce PCs with Ubuntu. Not sure Open Source is for You? The main thing to note is that when you choose open source you don’t get a Windows® operating system. If you’re here by mistake and you are looking for a Dell PC with Windows.....

I wonder how long before we'll be able to order these from Dell in Europe ....

Cormac moved over to using a Mac a couple of months ago and has just setup a blog to help people with the transition. Interesting idea.

Yesterday there was a general election in Ireland, so the count is on today. While independent sites, such as IrishElection.com are making full use of online media, the party websites are relatively static:

• Fianna Fail
- no update in the last two days
• Fine Gael
- same as FF
• Sinn Fein
- seems to have some video from yesterday
• Labour
- is being updated

Next week will see the official launch of Enum in Ireland. So what exactly is enum?

ENUM unifies traditional telephony and next-generation IP networks, and provides a critical framework for mapping and processing diverse network addresses. It transforms the telephone number—the most basic and commonly-used communications address—into a universal identifier that can be used across many different devices and applications (voice, fax, mobile, email, text messaging, location-based services and the Internet).

See enum.org Over the past couple of years there have been trials in many countries, including Ireland, with some countries taking the service to a commercial level. In the UK for example Nominet will be involved, while here in Ireland IENum LTD won the bid. So what's happening next week? It's the official launch. The registry will start accepting applications from companies that wish to become accredited as tier 2 registrars and offer enum services to their clientele. (Disclosure - I sit on the policy advisory board for Enum353)

I was just playing around with the new interface for Google Analytics and decided to email myself a report. It's a nice little feature, but there is a serious downside to their implementation. Instead of sending the email from a Google domain (it's not as if they have a shortage) they send it from your email address. While this may seem logical at face value it has serious implications for email security, as you are effectively allowing Google to send mail purporting to be from your domain. If you have been avoiding DKIM and SPF, then this probably won't be a problem for you, but if you have actually implemented it using a relatively strict, and therefore useful policy, then you are going to run into problems. Of course this isn't the first instance of a Google implementation flying in the face of common sense. Their Gmail service has been severely criticised in email filtering circles on may occassions since its introduction due to the lack of a vital part of the email header - the source IP. Whereas other services such as Yahoo! mail or Hotmail / MSN include the sender's actual IP in the email header, Google decided not to. If they'd stopped there it wouldn't be too bad, but they've applied the same logic (or lack of it) to their Google Apps services, so you could easily end up discovering that your mails are being blocked due to abuse of the Google SMTP by others.

I get alerts when certain keyphrases are mentioned in articles, so this morning I was drawn to SiliconRepublic.com. SiliconRepublic.com fancy themselves as being a competitor for the likes of eWeek and other well known and respected online publications. However, unlike eWeek, SiliconRepublic's writers don't seem to have "got" the entire concept of hyperlinks. An article I was reading this morning mentioned at least 4 separate companies and 3 other organisations. Not one of them was hyperlinked, even though the body of the text actually included the domain name! It's almost as if SR hasn't quite understood that it's an online publication and that hyperlinking is "allowed". Even the review of muse.ie doesn't include a link to the site! What use is a site review without a link? Talk about frustrating!

In the random topics category:

< Colm> the only thing going down in ireland is me || < talideon> Nipples leave your index finger sore after you've been using them all day.

Out of context they sound incredibly odd ....

Following on from a recent discussion on the Enterprise Ireland e-Business mailing list about hosting and domains I offered to draw up a comparison list. The list, which is available here, is of the top 10 or so companies as listed by WebHosting.info. The pricing listed is for the following items:

• IE domain registration
- there maybe a lower cost for a transfer, but this is ignored
• .com registration
• .co.uk registration
• .eu registration
• entry level hosting plan
- basically the cheapest on they offer

The list is split into those with servers in Ireland and those without. I may do another more detailed breakdown of these, but the work I did this weekend is just a starting point. EDIT: Actually including the link might help! EDIT 2: At Keith's suggestion the columns are now sortable and a bit of CSS magic makes this all the more obvious. Thanks to Keith for the code (and links)

The Optimus keyboard has been hyped a lot. For a product that you can't even purchase yet the amount of hype surrounding it is impressive. The price was announced a couple of weeks ago and it is equally impressive in a sort of "Oh my God you'll need a bank loan to get this" sort of way. The price for the keyboard (presumably excluding shipping etc.,) is $1564!! Ouch!

From time to time I like to give away stuff. Some people probably think this is a little mental :) I don't really mind .... Anyhow .... Today's little offer.. To celebrate our introduction of a nice new web frontend to MS SQL 2005 (see here ) we're giving away a couple of ASP.net hosting plans with MS SQL 2005 support. First 3 people who contact me via email (michele@blacknight.ie NOT my personal address please) will get one of these: Asp.net Standard Hosting Plan I'll even throw in a free domain (com/net/org/info/biz/mobi/eu/at/co.uk) EDIT: All gone now. For those of you who missed the freebie use the coupon code "blog07" to get a 20% discount on the same hosting package. The coupon will be valid for the next 24 hours

If you don't know who is visiting your site,

how they got there and what they are up to you might as well close up shop. That is why so many of us spend so much time with web log analysis. There are essentially two types of traffic analysers:

• Log based
• Javascript based

Log based analysers, such as webalizer, sawmill and awstats work on the logs that your web server has collected. You can garner a lot of information from web logs (and other types of logs too), but you won't be able to get certain types of information easily. With the Javascript based analysers you don't even need to worry about your web logs, as the system reports to a remote server / service. While Javascript cannot detect every single aspect of the device browsing your site it can give you a lot more information about the browser being used, such as screen resolution etc., I've been using Awstats for a long time. It's handy and fairly intuitive. I've also been using Urchin since before its acquisition by Google and its subsequent transformation into Google Analytics. I loved Urchin, but had a lot of reservations about the system once Google made it a free for all (the entire system fell over). Over time they seemed to have got their act together, but the user interface was always a mess. Trying to find out relatively simple things like "referrers" involved a lot of clicking about and changing user types. It was anything but intuitive. Yes it is free, but as I've said more than once I don't mind paying for things that make my life easier and had been paying for Urchin before the Google move. In any case Google have just unveiled a new version of the interface and it is a significant improvement. For the first time you can get to the information you want quickly and easily: Compared to the old version: Of course, as I am a cynic, I'll probably discover that they've removed some key features, but for the moment I am impressed. There are some nice little touches like the option to compare traffic for different periods. So I can now see easily how much traffic I get on a site for a period this year compared to last year. The one issue with that part of the interface is that they've set it to use American date format. Hopefully that will be rectified, as it's quite confusing. You can also export to PDF now. The option to export to Word and CSV seems to have been removed or hidden on the main screen, though you can opt for those formats on the email report option. I'm still exploring, but I like what I've seen so far. It's a lot more intuitive, so you don't spend as much time clicking around randomly in the hope of stumbling on the report you're looking for. Other reviews: Peter Knight IQ Content

Firestats 1.2.4 has been released. It's not a major upgrade, but it does bring a few new features.

It seems that a lot of people develop Ruby On Rails using Windows. I suppose that makes sense (to a point), so it was only inevitable that O'Reilly (or someone else) would get round to publishing a book / pamphlet on setting up a development environment. In this case it was O'Reilly with "Rails on Windows" - it's a PDF download, so you get to download and make the trees suffer later :)

The other day I went to a meeting of INEX - the Irish Internet Neutral Exchange - of which we are members. Apart from the standard updates etc., there were also a number of talks including one by Colm who now works for Joost. His talk was fascinating, as he explained not only what Joost is, but also how it actually works and what kind of network infrastructure they need to run it. I like the idea of being able to watch music videos, tv, film and more on my desktop PC legally, which is exactly what Joost allows you to do. Unfortunately the only way you can get into Joost at present is via invite, but luckily someone was kind enough to send me one, so I got in and downloaded the software yesterday. Once downloaded it was simply a matter of setting up a basic profile and then I could watch TV. The Joost system works on a peer to peer basis, so the more popular shows are a lot faster to stream than the less popular ones. I didn't spend too much time watching it last night, but I did get to see enough to be impressed. The picture quality is pretty good. While it's nowhere near DVD quality it's perfectly acceptable. Sound quality is fine, though anyone with a finely tuned ear would probably find the compression a little annoying. Downsides? At present the client software is only available on Windows and Mac.

According to an article on eWeek, Dell are planning to offer Ubuntu preinstalled on some models from later this month (it doesn't say if it's a global decision or US market only). It seems that Mr Dell runs Ubuntu on his own PC!