Hello Anonymous. Some people have criticised your actions, called you a "kiddie script" and/or claimed you have hurt "the cause". I tend to disagree because:

• You made noise and raised awareness
• Nobody was hurt and no credit card numbers stolen
• You have been trying other things as well, faxes, phones, videos, paper etc. this shows your goal is not to simply take down web sites
• When things are so openly absurd reactions cannot be avoided
Oh and:
• "They" started it..

Some say you guys are a bunch of kids, if it is true it only adds to your credit.

DDOS does seem to be illegal in many places, but it is definitely not the worst thing that has happened to our world. For me (and many others) these actions were closer to protest then to attacks.

The past week or so has been quite interesting and seems this pending issue will not simply "go away", at least not that easily. I have gathered a few interesting links about what's up and down, I will try to update this.. (there are so many pages about this it's out of control).

Wikileaks

• Petition to governments
• Mass-mirroring Wikileaks - Become a mirror
• twitter.com/wikileaks
• Mirror list status
• Australia blames the U.S.
• Don't shoot messenger for revealing uncomfortable truths - a word from Julian Assange
• WikiLeaks Shines a Light on the Limits of Techno-Politics
• DataCell's word on Visa's behaviour
• Dear PayPal: Wikileaks is not a terrorist organization
• OVH and Wikileaks - "That's how it should work under the rule of law.
• Federal Bureau of Irony
• Bolivian government publishes cables related to them ! - AWESOME !

Internet Protests

• Cyberattacks Are Retaliation for Pressure on WikiLeaks
• Visa.com taken down by botnet volunteers
• MasterCard attacked by voluntary botnet after WikiLeaks decision
• Wikileaks Twitter account (while it lasts ?)
• Hacker toolkits attracting volunteers to defend WikiLeaks
• Tis the Season of DDoS – WikiLeaks Edition - good ddos timeline with crispy details
• Thousands download LOIC software for Anonymous attacks
• A message from Anonymous
• 2600 Magazine condemns DDoS attacks - It's the comments that I like
• Netcraft attack summary: Part 2

Anon sites/channels (many down)

A few Anonymous channels have been taken down, there are plenty of others coming up, going down, moving around etc..

• AnonOps communication - active
• twitter.com/Anonops - active
• facebook.com/anonops - active (if you happen to use facebook....)
• anonops.net - Seems like Enom has removed the name server for the domain on Dec 8 2010: Domain Name: ANONOPS.NET Registrar: ENOM, INC. Whois Server: whois.enom.com Referral URL: http://www.enom.com Name Server: No nameserver Status: ok Updated Date: 08-dec-2010 Creation Date: 26-oct-2010 Expiration Date: 26-oct-2011
• anonops.info - domain has been de-activated today (Dec 14 2010): Domain ID:D35610231-LRMS Domain Name:ANONOPS.INFO Created On:29-Nov-2010 18:03:09 UTC Last Updated On:14-Dec-2010 01:08:48 UTC Expiration Date:29-Nov-2011 18:03:09 UTC Sponsoring Registrar:eNom, Inc. (R126-LRMS) Status:INACTIVE Status:TRANSFER PROHIBITED
• twitter.com/Anon_Operation - suspended
• twitter.com/Anon_Operationn - suspended

Some people have been deleting their Paypal accounts and leaving a comments about how they feel.

Today I would like to talk/rant about URL shorteners, these things that take a good old link and turn it into something short and obscure.

One day people realised that sending long links over some mediums such as email or instant messaging could be a pain as the link would sometimes be cut up into pieces, and lose clickability. One of the reasons (IMHO) was that in those days fancy clean URLs were not so common so it would be easy to come across some of those crazy long links.

Then came the tweeting days, when the Internet decided it was time that everybody published content, and because most people have difficulties with literary expectations that exceed one sentence they came up with the brilliant 140 character limit (also to be compatible with SMS). In this situation even a normal optimised pretty link looked super fat, it's like putting a normal healthy human being next to Kate Moss..

This was already becoming a problem but then people took it to the next level, links nowadays get shortened even when posted on websites.. It makes absolutely no sense.. .

So what is wrong anyway ?

• It hides the destination of the link
• It adds a layer of failability, now you depend on the url shortening service, if they go down or moderate/filter your link.. .
• There is a major leak of privacy
• The clicker generates statistics at the URL shortener's service
• The statistics are linked with the person who generated the URL and all the others that have followed the link

These statistics are available to whoever creates the link (you need to create an account generally for this function), there could be more things done with them. I am sure it can be quite interesting to see how a link gets propagated especially if you include IPs, User-Agents and most interesting maybe: the referrer (the site where the link was posted). I am sure with this kind of information you could map a viral movement of clicks a la Hans Rosling.. But as we all know, the Internet is power tool for marketing and the knowledge gained from these services will not benefit science nor the general public, au contraire.

So why ? Why do people use such things ? Even on those Twitter/Identi.ca type things I found that most links can actually fit and with room for a short description. I've even seen some privacy rights organisations who cannot restrain themselves from the urge to use such links, in emails and on their websites. Hello, it's like a vegetarian protesting in leather boots !

I am surprised to be writing this in 2010, I thought this obsession with having the shortest URL would have passed a few years ago.. . What next, maybe The Pirate Bay will start using Bit.ly as well ?

If you live in the U.S. (I guess) you may wish to put your efforts into keeping the Internet as neutral as possible.. go sign the petition to put some weight on the correct side of the balance.

If you are in the petition signing mood today OR you just do not feel very comfortable with the idea with the government reading every email (the ones they actually can read of course) as well as all facebook transmissions (for those still using it) and other online communications (where possible).. . OR if you just feel like the money could be better spent on other matters.. then sign the Open Rights Groups petition.

Something is very wrong on the Internet, very. When people work on a server many tend to use a workstation, open a terminal and connect to the server and then open a browser to look for various information and eventually a file/package to download. What we would normally should do is find the link to the file we need, then go to the terminal where we are connected to our server and use something like wget to get the file downloaded where we actually need it to be... .. Well my friend, little by little those links are disappearing, you now need to have JavaScript activated to download source code from some of the biggest "open source code sharing lol" sites..

What can we do ? Create a mirror site whose sole purpose would be to contain wgettable links ? Or petition until they put normal transferable download URLs so we can get some work done and not have to transfer files one time to many. And yes, it is not even eco friendly as these bits of code need to be transferred at least twice before getting where they need to be.

What do you think ?

A while ago I ranted about Turnitin pirating copyrighted content, meaning (IMHO) they copy content of peoples websites or student's work and store it in a database for an unlimited time. They then use that content as a means of earning money, there whole business is based on other peoples work, and not just by referencing them like a search engine.

So I emailed them and it turned out that after years and years of doing this never has anyone complained. I asked nicely for them to remove my content from there database and after being asked if I was really really sure they said they would have to write some scripts to automate the task.

The guy I was in contact with was actually very nice so no complaining there of course, I think he was simply surprised but he did get back to me with this:

So now they have a script to automate this task, if you would like to get your content removed from their database you just need to ask. If you run into anything weird let me know.

Stupid anti spam services, that is the future of the Internet, everyone delegating their email filter (and comment filtering as well) to third parties. Well guess what is happing people, the filtering systems are lazy and now it's simple: If your domain does not generate enough traffic or is not "important" enough then your emails just get junked. Done. You can be as careful as you want, as strict as you can possibly be it does not matter. After 8 years of operating my mail server, not 1 spam has been sent and yet my emails get tagged and junked half the time while at the same time I receive so much spam from actual verified hotmail accounts (that have been hacked of course) as well as from other domains.

What can you do ? For starters you can contact your email provider, tell them you would like to know how their filters work, on what basis does a domain become a suspected spam source ? Ask if you can change the level of filtering and such (I offer this to my users, they chose if they filter and to what extent). Oh but wait, because it's all free (and you are too cheap to consider email services worth any of your money) I don't think you have ANY say in that. So maybe you could get a real email service, you know the thing that you pay for and that owes you some kind of service and such things. I only say this because I have sent many emails to hotmail and apart from the auto-replies I have received nothing. The situation has changed, back in the olden days I'd get the AOL people on the phone and we'd solve things (like adding my static home IP to their whitelist), (never thought I'd say anything good about AOL).

So there are now 2 solutions for me, 1. give up and get a gyahoomail account, or 2. or start rejecting emails from servers/domains who don't have any respect for proper SMTPing. This is the price of a privatised Internet.

Finally Diaspora is ready, after 3 months and 200 000 dollars it is finally ready for pre pre alpha beta alpha testing. It seems they have kept it to the strict minimum, I mean no extra features, plugins or add-ons or fancy poking beer racing card games, I like that. So after installing about millions of software and then starting the server I logged in and found that basically nothing works, then some things did work, and then uploading photos did not and then with some browsers weird things happen. I think there has been alot of work on the interface.. . maybe that could be a problem.

This still led me to wonder what else has been going on, and after stumbling on jappix and appleseed I found the truth, of course, that is where my search should have started: GNU-Social. I am going to say that I did not see the benefit of projects like StatusNet until now. They have developed ways to connect nodes. Without having to open extra ports and install half of the internet and steal CPU.. This is like Diaspora but in Php/Mysql ! You can sign up, upload photos and connect with other instances of GNU-Social. So you don't have to build a dedicated (v)server just for this to reserve certain ports and block others etc (and keep your other systems clean), all you need is a basic LAMP setup.. . I like. (it's still in beta but it works.)

With all these open/free projects, some even a bit old, I do still think we can has cheeseburger one of these days.

/addon:
I just realised today why I was not getting anything from the mailing list I signed up to. Because the real mailing list is somewhere else, it's on.. google mailing lists !

So Google and Verizon want to be business buddies, I do not understand how anyone can think this is good.. . detailed official crap here.

In short this all about saying that net neutrality isn't necessary on wireless (mobile) networks. This is very smart on their behalf because so many humans believe that Google will do no evil however as we may already know, the future Internet may have most of it's traffic come from mobile networks. Preparing the terrain while claiming that mobile networking is still beta might actually get them to finish killing off the Internet we love. Oh, and all this while confusing the non-Internet-savy by stating how much neutrality and accessibility to The Network is important (as long as it's by wire (*DSL/Fiber/cable/RTC).. .

The other day I was running some tests because it seemed that my VPN traffic was being slowed down quite alot. One of the tests was plain FTP, that went at about 1mbyte/sec, then FTP via VPN, that seemed capped at around 200kbytes/sec. Some say "overhead because encryption", and I believed it, until I tested between two weak machines (VIA 2ghz) on a LAN:

• FTP: 10Mbytes/sec
• FTP/VPN: 6.5Mbytes/sec

obviously 200kbytes is a joke.

I of course suspected one of my ISPs (ADSL or dedicated server provider) of doing something uncool.. this lead me to discovering two things:

• Some ISPs openly cap VPN traffic like PlusNet. They actually have a whole timetable with various speed limits for various services ! You might have noticed P2P gets the lowest speed ever and youtube is way up there.... ..in short, the client's needs are not important, what is important is who's paying.. anyway.
• a cool tool called shaperprobe. This tool helps detect if there is any packet shaping happening on your network.

I soon after figured out where the issue was, my ISPs who say they don't throttle or shape etc are correct. : ] The issue was with this WAG54GS I hooked up temporarily that has this super cool option called "SPI Firewall", it's sole purpose is to slow down your VPN traffic, that's all it does.

In the end I learned that there are many bad ISPs nowadays that decide what's good for you, I am glad mine(s) don't, but how long will this last ? As they say, it's the consumer who decides, so if this matters to you, pick an ISP that doesn't shape their bandwidth.

Today I notice a new bot called "turnitinbot" crawling my site and not for a new search engine.. this one is different. There is a new site called turnitin.com which sells a service to students and schools to prevent plagiarism, the idea is that students submit their work to Turnitin who then verifies it against their databases. According to the Wikipedia/Turnitin page the databases are composed of:

• content from, books, newspapers etc
• already submitted work to Turnitin
• anything submitted to "other" sites like GradeGuru
• etc etc
• Result's from spider crawling

For me this whole things seems very dirty, the only small part I can do is add this to robots.txt User-agent: turnitinbot Disallow: / I don't want people to take credit for my work but I even less want a company to push the education system into their control and make big money out of it. Is Turnitin paying you or me for our work ? No. Are they making money out of it ? Yes.

For those who submitted their work to GradeGuru and are regretting it, please understand that when you submit content to a third party you should always read and agree with their terms of service, I'm sure they mentioned that one day the free service will benefit themselves alot more than yourself.

Actually, here goes Article 14 from the Terms of Service http://www.gradeguru.com/sps/communitystandardmessagenlu.htm?tandc=tandc : Proprietary Rights in GradeGuru Content. GradeGuru does not claim ownership of the text, files, images, photos, video, sounds, musical works, works of authorship, or any other materials (collectively, "Content") that you may post to the GradeGuru Services. By posting any Content on or through the GradeGuru Services, you hereby grant to GradeGuru a non-exclusive worldwide perpetual license to use, modify, publicly perform, publicly display, reproduce, and distribute all or part of such Content on and through the GradeGuru Services and through GradeGuru and its affiliated entities, other off-line services and products and to charge for access to and/or use of Your Content. This license granted by You to GradeGuru to use Your Content (including that supplied prior to the version date of these Terms) includes (without limitation) the right for GradeGuru supply Your Content to providers of anti-plagiarism tools at our discretion, so that such providers may, amongst other things, check the integrity of Your Content. I was going to put the important/shocking part in bold, but then I figured the whole article should be bold, emphasized and blinking...