Posted by ljmacphee on April 17, 2008 under in the news | 
If you have anything left, domains, hosting, etc at Network Solutions I strongly urge you to move it elsewhere.
This week they’ve been caught using your subdomains as spam sites.
Earlier this week, a man named Win Betteridge told TechCrunch that Network Solutions pulled this clever little trick with his “social gaming” site, GotGame.com. Betteridge hosts GotGame with “NetSol,” and somewhere along the way, he realized that his unused GotGame sub-domains resolved to ad-infested “parking” pages.
“For instance, app.gotgame.com resolves to a Network Solutions page with text links, including ‘Poker Tournaments’ and ‘Texas Holdem Games,’” he said.
As pointed out by ArsTechnica, the Virginia-based Network Solutions reserves the right to do this with every site it hosts. The company’s terms of service include this:
You also agree that any domain name directory, sub-directory, file name or path (e.g.) that does not resolve to an active web page on your Web site being hosted by Network Solutions, may be used by Network Solutions to place a “parking” page, “under construction” page, or other temporary page that may include promotions and advertisements for, and links to, Network Solutions’ Web site, Network Solutions product and service offerings, third-party Web sites, third-party product and service offerings, and/or Internet search engines. You agree that Network Solutions may change the content and/or appearance of, or disable any of these temporary pages at any time, in its sole discretion, and without prior notice.
Yes, you can opt out this questionable program. But first you have to know about it. The EULA housing the above paragraph is 59,000 words long. [ read more The Register: Network Solutions hijacks customer sub-domains for ad fest]
Not so long ago Network Solutions made the tech news about domain front running:
Domain registrar Network Solutions has come under fire this week for what some believe is “domain name frontrunning.” The practice resulted in Network Solutions registering a previously-unregistered domain to itself immediately after someone searched for it, then holding the domain for four days before it could be purchased by someone else or at another registrar. But the company claims that it’s merely trying to protect customers from others doing exactly that. Until there is more regulation over frontrunning from ICANN, this is the best it can come up with.
News circulated about Network Solutions’ controversial practice over the weekend and built momentum throughout the week, as the company gained more and more bad press. Critics said that Network Solutions was holding domains hostage—the policy forced people to become Network Solutions customers instead of being able to go to another registrar after searching for domain availability. [ read more ArsTechnica - Network Solutions defends frontrunning ]
Until ICANN grows a backbone the only protection webmasters have against this type of behavior is to publish it far and wide and take our business elsewhere.
Posted by ljmacphee on February 1, 2008 under in the news |
I myself am a big fan of Creative Commons Licensing and use it on my websites and my Flickr photos. But you should read the articles and decide for yourselves.
Broadly speaking CC works well, but with photography, it’s a particularly thorny issue because there’s a lot more complexity in how copyright and other legal issues work with a photo. The problem you tend to run into with CC is that people use it pretty liberally without thinking about the consequences of it. The vast majority of people generating all this media under a CC license don’t really understand all the ramifications of it. A case that recently came up was that somebody took a photo of a kid, and then that photo was picked up by a company that used it for commercial purposes. The child’s parent never signed a release for the photo.Now, this isn’t a problem with CC per se, but people will often license content under CC without realizing that, technically they may not have all the rights to do what they are doing. When I take photos, I put them on Flickr under a CC license but I use the no commercial use clause. This simplifies matters because, given that it’s not for money, there’s far less implications for somebody using my images.Now why is this different from using the default copyright license? Because in that case, the areas that tend to get you into trouble are not permitted by default. If you go to my site and take a copyrighted image and use it commercially, you’ve clearly broken the law. If you go and take my CC licensed image, you’re okay with me, but it doesn’t mean I was okay in the first place. Nobody’s likely to sue you for just showing an image on your Flickr account, but it’s very different when you’re talking about using an image in marketing materials, etc.Slashdot is reporting problems with the Creative Commons License and photographs.
If you have a photography website or put photos on Flickr with CC licensing be sure to check out these articles.1 ) The Creative Commons and Photography2 ) Follow up: Creative Commons and Photography3 ) Gaming the Creative Commons for ProfitMore information:Creative CommonsCopywrite.org
Posted by ljmacphee on January 24, 2008 under in the news, security |
This would be a first. There are scattered reports of Apache servers that have become compromised. ( Mystery Malware Affecting Linux/Apache Websites).
If you are unable to create a directory beginning with a numeral, say 2008_reports, you are infected. No one knows for sure how the server are infected, early reports are pointing to passwords that have been compromised.
-Mystery infestation strikes Linux/Apache Web sites
-Finjan Uncovers Insidious New Variant of Crimeware Toolkit Infecting More Than 10,000 US Websites in December
-E-commerce sites invaded
Posted by ljmacphee on November 30, 2007 under in the news |
Domain hijacking doesn’t seem to be as large of a problem as it was five or ten years ago, but still a story here and there make the news. The moral of the story below? Pay your bills on time or early, especially when it comes to domains. As David Solomon can tell you praying won’t bring it back
Small business owner David Solomon was hijacked online.
Or rather, his company’s online address was claimed by someone else after he’d already moved in, leaving his business locked out of the Web home it had built for itself.
Solomon said his more than year-long experience was “horrific,” causing him to stay up nights praying for a resolution to the situation, wringing his hands and fretting over finances. . . .
It’s a long, complicated story as Solomon tells it. But in a nutshell, MotorWatch’s claim to one of the two URLs — nutzandboltz.com — was dropped, either by accident, miscommunication or both. As soon as it was released, a domain-name bandit grabbed it “and things just kept getting worse,” said Solomon. [ read more Mastering your own domain ]