Blog posts tagged "internet" – Posts 11..15 of 23 posts found:

Just recently, MPAA/RIAA sock puppets Brein managed to convince some clueless judge to order two of the largest ISPs in the Netherlands, XS4ALL and Ziggo to block (in)famous torrent website The Pirate Bay. TPB have put up a message that is shown to anyone visiting from a Dutch IP address, as shown below. XSALL and Ziggo have both announced they will appeal to a higher court, which is a good thing. I don't even use TPB myself and wouldn't really miss it, but I do care deeply about worthless assholes doing anything limiting my internet access. So, how would this work and what can I (or anyone) do to give these lying thieves the finger and circumvent these blocks if they are upheld by the higher courts?
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You may have seen the latest well-publicised PayPal horror story. I've seen plenty of them too and was never really bothered about them, figuring those people might have brought it on themselves. Well, not anymore. Now that I have my own experience to add to the list, I'm done defending PayPal and have actually closed my account. PayPal not only inconvenienced me in several ways, but their communication actually contained blatant lies, not to mention the whole thing being drenched in incompetence. I have zero tolerance for that kind of crap from any company that has anything to do with my finances. Here's what happened.
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It's not something many people will notice, as most of the difficult bits will have to be handled by the ISPs, but it's going to get more and more important for web developers and hosting providers to allow IPv6 access to their services. We've effectively run out of IPv4 addresses. As more and more people bring more and more devices online every day the common technique to share IPv4 addresses, NAT, even carrier-grade NAT which share a single IPv4 address among a large part of a provider's customer base, is not a sustainable solution. In the future, there will be people who can access the internet solely through IPv6. At first, it will be in the areas with the fastest-growing number of people online, particularly Asia. If you want those people to be able to access your website and services, make sure your servers respond to IPv6 traffic.
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This past week, Google has rolled out a new feature for Google Image Search. Now, you can search the web for images similar to one that you upload yourself (or by simply entering the URL for an image that is already online). I love that feature, but it occurred to me there could be some interesting side effects. It will now be much easier for photographers and other artists to see who is using their images without being properly licensed.
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Web development is something I've been doing for the past 15 years, and it's been my day job for the past 8 years. I've also done quite a lot of server administration tasks since then, even if that wasn't part of my actual job description. While there's probably a good economic case for outsourcing hosting and support duties, it can get to be quite frustrating when things simply don't work as intended. This is even more the case when you're a more technically savvy user (and I count myself among those, even if I'm no guru) and you have to deal with a poor hapless tech. You know what it is needs to be done and they just don't seem to be able to do it.
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