St. Petersburg Web Design Blog

In the war against free speech on the internet the Telcos are quietly winning. Here’s the latest blows:

• In December, Rogers Communications ( a Telecommunications and Internet Service provider), essentially hacked Google, adding a message to Google’s home page that appeared to it’s customers that where getting close to the ISP’s bandwidth limit.
• Comcast has admitted to blocking file-sharing traffic. link
• Comcast is discovered to blocking non file-sharing software as well. link
•      – BTW, the methods they use are illegal (packet forging and/or spoofing) are not just illegal but felonies (each act) under federal law.
•      – Ironicly, comcast reported this story on their own site, I quess they are proud of their censorship efforts
• Time Warner/AOL blocked e-mails from and to subscribers that were critical of thier “pay-to-send” (a method that ensure that spam will reach AOL users for a fee) email plan. link
• Verizon prevented the abortion rights group Naral Pro-Choice America from getting a “short code” that would allow the group to send text messages to supporters. They claim they have a right to block anything they’d like.link
• Comcast blocks other companies VOIP traffic a few days before they begin offering their own VOIP services for twice as much as others. link
• Telus (an ISP in Canada) blocked 766 websites in an effort to block one Pro-Union web site during a lock-out by the company. link. NOTE: This is a very extremely sloppy and lazy way to block one site.
• AT&T cut off the webcast of a Pearl Jam concert just when lead singer Eddie Veder was critical of U.S. President George Bush. link

The Telco’s argument in justification of all this is twofold as is their battle plan:

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The Church of Scientology, whom has their worldwide headquarters near St Petersburg Florida, in Clearwater Florida, has has their official web site hacked. On Jan 19th a group of hackers, naming themselves “Anonymous” knocked the Church’s Web site offline with a distributed denial-of-service attack.
A “Distributed Denial of Service” (DDOS), attack is one of the most common types of attacks against well guarded web sites, servers and computer systems. When it’s an attack against a web site, it involves having millions of computers request a web page over ad over again. So many of these requests come in that the machine that hosts this file cannot keep up with these requests and does nothing. It’s hard to block because of the distributed part, which means it not several computers in one location but computers from all over the world.
How do they get people from all over the world to sit in front of their computers and request pages from the same web site over and over again? They don’t! That where spyware, viruses and trojans come into play. Software containing these forms of malware are installed on millions of computers all around the world when their users install them unknowingly by opening the wrong e-mail attachment, visiting the wrong web site or installing software that has been knowingly (or unknowingly) infected with these programs. This malware then gives the infected computer to start requesting a certian web page over and over again starting on a certain date (usually).
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Sun Microsystems said on Wednesday that it will pay $1 billion to buy MySQL, the provider of a popular open-source database.

In case you’re not a Web Developer (because if you are you are certainly at least familiar w/ mySQL), MySQL is thew most common open-source databases out there. It’s the database behind most custom web applications and many of the open-source web applications out there like Joomla, Drupal, almost every blogging system (wordpress, etc.), php-Nuke and many many others.

MySQL CEO Marten Mickos had previously said that the company intends to go public rather than be acquired. Its business model is to give away the source code and its database for free, and to charge customers an ongoing subscription fee for support and services.

read quoted news story

The very first time I bought a domain name (in 1995) I knew this would happen eventually. Domain name registrar, Network Solutions LLC, is now locking domain names after people type them in their webform to see if they are available.

Here’s how their scam works:

• someone visits a site in their network of affiliates or their main site looking for a domain name.
• You type the domain name in their form to see if it’s available for purchase.
• If it’s available they show you the price and you realize (after you fill in all kinds of info on several pages), it costs more than a domain name should so you leave their site and go to or somewhere else.
• Network Solutions LLC “locks” that domain name making it unavailable for purchase through anyone else but them and also triples the price for the domain name.

Network solutions LLC is trying to say this is a public service. That’s like Dick Cheney trying to say we went to Iraq to fight terrorism (hint - their was no terrorism in Iraq before we came). This servers the public in no way and in fact just lines Network Solutions pockets by guaranteeing you buy from them and at 3 times the already overpriced price.