Discourse.net

Discourse.net '15th Most Visited LawProf Blog'

Paul Caron counts blog stuff, and he says that Discourse.net is 15th in the new Law Prof Blog Rankings.

I’m continually grateful for (and bemused by) the size the of the readership.

Readers are invited to describe themselves, and of course are always welcome to comment.

'Latest Visitors' Sidebar On Again

The folks at Mapstats seem to have fixed their visitor location reporter, so I’ve restored it to my sidebar. Hello to my visitor from Podhori, Hlavni Mesto Praha, Czech Republic! Please note that, unlike John McCain, I am aware that Czechoslovakia doesn’t exist anymore.

(And Happy Bastille Day to any French readers and Francophiles everywhere.)

This might be a good time to remind readers, especially those who read via the partial or full-text RSS feeds that I welcome your participation in the comment threads too.

Incidentally, why is that so many more users of RSS feeds choose the partial rather than the full feed? Not that I’m complaining, I’m just curious?

Please Welcome Guest Blogger Ben Depoorter

I’m pleased to announce that my brilliant young colleague Ben Depoorter will be guest blogging here until the end of the month. I may post occasionally, but my internet access will be erratic as I travel about for a while.

Ben is multi-lingual, multi-cultural, mutli-talented (he paints!), and a prolific writer, primarily in law and economics and property law. He’s also very funny – for an economist.

I’ve invited him to post on any subjects he likes; it should be interesting.

Is Mapstats Dead?

Mapstats, from Blogflux, the people who provide that nice little list of locations of recent blog visitors that runs in my right margin, seem to have had some serious problems this week.

For a while their widget was holding up the rendering of this page. Then that got better, but the actual cities being reported on the right didn’t change for almost a day. (It is possible I messed up the code in some way while trying to fix the problem, but I don’t think so.) Then it went back to not rendering.

So I’ve killed it off at least temporarily and sent an email asking what is going on. Pity. I liked it.

But Am I Big In Japan?

The folks at Wikio sent email saying

Wikio is the number 1 news aggregator in Europe, indexing over 55,000 English-language sources. We have only recently launched our Top Blog rankings … We have designed our rankings so as to make them the most comprehensive on the Internet - you can check them out in full and get more details on how they are compiled.

And they sent me this:

Now, in my view, being # 893 (which is what this showed on the day I posted this item) on almost any European blog list is pretty good for a small-time US operation like this one. But does it mean anything? Apparently, that number is a result of mating a Google-like ranking with a TLB Ecosystem-like ranking:

The position of a blog in the Wikio ranking depends on the number and weight of the incoming links from other blogs. These links are dynamic, which means that they are backlinks or links found within articles.

Blogrolls are not taken into account and Wikio only counts links from the last 120 days. We thus hope to provide a classification more representative of trends in the blogosphere.

Moreover, the weight of a link depends on the linking blog’s position in the Wikio ranking. With our algorithm, the weight of a link from a top blog is greater than that of a link from a blog that is less well ranked.

So it’s part popularity contest, and part weighted popularity contest. But does the attention of crowds measure wisdom?

Enough Already

April 22 is Enough About Me Day.

Please, if you have not done so before, visit this link and post something about yourself if only to satisfy my curiosity about what kind of people read this thing.

And, by the way, thanks for coming by.

Snap and It's Gone

In a comment on the previous post, “Asperger Syndrom DVD Available for Educators”, Brett Bellmore complains about the snap.com preview tool I installed on the blog. I think he has a point.

Back when I installed this thing, it had a one-click on/off toggle that you could invoke from the left margin of the blog. So if you didn’t like it, you clicked once, set the cookie, and it never bothered you again.

But that option seems to be gone: at least today, the toggle isn’t working right, so if you want to make snap stop snapping, you have to go to their page. That’s not nice.

I’ve disabled the snap, and will only bring it back if there’s popular demand in the comments below.

17 Is A Nice Prime Number

According to The Race to the Bottom: Faculty Blogs and Influence: The Top 50 Most Influential Law Blogs (In Order) this here blog is tied for #17 with Workplace Prof Blog, Prof. Rafael Gely’s far more serious production.

As you would expect, many of the top 50 are group blogs.

What shall I do with all this power and influence?

A Reminder About Discourse.net Feeds

This blog offers you a variety of different feeds for your reading pleasure.

There’s the partial feed, which just gives you the start of each posting. Currently that seems the most popular of the services.

There’s the full feed, that has the whole text of each posting. This feed has only one third as many subscribers as the partial feed, perhaps because autodiscovery services tend to find the other one.

And there’s also the (separate) comments feed which gives you all the comments on the blog (but doesn’t include the postings).

I also offer a suite of specialized feeds, one per blog category, and there’s a full listing of them below.

9/11 & Aftermath
Adventures in Remodeling
Blog Swag
Blogs
Civil Liberties
Communications
Completely Different
Cryptography
Dan Froomkin
Discourse.net
Economics & Money: The Mortgage Mess
Economics & Money
Economics: Social Security
Etc
FAQs
Florida
Food and Drink
Globalization
Guantanamo
ID Cards
Internet
Iran
Iraq
Iraq Atrocities
Kultcha
Law School
Law: Accounting
Law: Administrative Law
Law: Arbitration Law
Law: Civil Procedure
Law: Constitutional Law
Law: Constitutional Law: Marriage
Law: Constitutional Law: Reading the Constitution
Law: Copyright and DMCA
Law: Criminal Law
Law: Elections
Law: Ethica
Law: Everything Else
Law: Federal Govt Corporations
Law: Free Speech
Law: International Law
Law: Internet Law
Law: Practice
Law: Privacy
Law: Right to Travel
Law: Tax
Law: The Supremes
Law: Trademark Law2
Legal Philosophy
Linkorama
Meaningless Personality Quizzes
Miami
Miami: Wireless
Movable Type
National Security97
Padilla
Personal
Pets
Politics: FL-181
Politics: Impeachments
Politics: International
Politics: The Party of Sleaze
Politics: Tinfoil
Politics: US
Politics: US: 2004 Election
Politics: US: 2006 Election
Politics: US: 2008 Elections
Politics: US: GW Bush Scandals
Politics: US: Healthcare
Question Authority
Readings
Science/Medicine
Shopping
Software
Sufficiently Advanced Technology
Talks & Conferences
The Media
Torture
U.Miami
U.Miami: Strike’06
UK
Unspeakably Awful (Katrina)
Virtual Worlds
Writings

OK Web Hosts, But World-Champions at Apologies

I find Dreamhost to be pretty decent web hosts, although I also could give you a short but pungent list of complaints (timeouts, timeouts, timeouts). But give them credit, when they screw up, they are world champions at writing apologies.

This morning I got a large bill that clearly wasn’t due. I wrote back. They said it was my bill. I wrote back. Then I got The Apology:

Ack. Through a COMPLETE bumbling on our part, we’ve accidentally attempted to charge you for the ENTIRE year of 2008 (and probably 2009!) ALREADY (it was all due to a fat finger)!

I’m really really realllly embarassed about this, but you have nothing to worry about. Please ignore any confusing billing messages you may have received recently; I’ve already removed all those bum future charges on your account (######) and already refunded the $####.## charge on your credit card.

You should get the money back on almost immediately, within a day or two max, and there’s no need to contact your credit card company or bank for the refund.

Again, I feel terrible about this whole thing.. there will be a blog post soon at blog.dreamhost.com fully explaining how this bug was even allowed to happen..

Thank you very very much for your patience with this.. we PROMISE this won’t happen again. There’s no need to reply to this message unless of course you have any other questions at all!

Sorry again,

Josh!

And, indeed, a more detailed explanation is now on their blog, at Um, Whoops..

This sort of stuff works on me. It is very hard to stay mad.

Update: More at Unofficial Dreamhost Blog, DreamHost Accidently Bills Customers $7,500,000.

Trying to Make Comments Work Better

I’ve been trying a few small tweaks to fix the problem where comments time out just before finishing; the comment posts, but you get an error message anyway. This is why there are so many duplicated comments.

Please, if you do get an error message posting a comment, or if something new goes wrong, drop me an email letting me know the time you posted it and what happened, so I can look at the logs.

Two Million Views of Discourse.net

Some time in the last couple of days, while I was distracted, this blog had its two millionth page view according to the deeply flawed Sitemeter metric. The far, far stricter unique counter, which won’t count you more than once a day, hasn’t even hit a million yet. Then again, in this day of RSS newsreaders, I suspect that about half my readers never hit the blog at all but just take the full-text feed.

This blog is a strange enterprise: it’s neither narrowly focused on one subject, as are many of the best law blogs, nor is it run by a collection of interesting people as are many of the others. I suppose it’s a bit quirky. Perhaps that reflects something about the author.

I remain humbled by the wonderful people who seem to think my hobby is worth their time and especially those who write to me or post comments. Over time, some readers have been kind enough to describe themselves, and you, kind reader, are invited to join in (names optional) if you are so minded.

But Not R-Rated

That high?

As Bad as US News's Law School Rankings

Spurred by this post, I went to technorati.com to see what Discourse.net’s rankings were.

According to technorati.com, this blog currently has an “Authority” of 229, and a “rank” of 23,628.

Authority seems to mean no more than “the number of blogs linking to a website in the last six months”. That’s not “authority” — at best it is a measure of inter-blog popularity. And rank is just a measure of relative inter-blog linkularity: “Technorati Rank is calculated based on how far you are from the top. The blog with the hightest [sic] Technorati Authority is the #1 ranked blog. The smaller your Technorati Rank, the closer you are to the top.”

When I started blogging, I cared about this sort of stuff; now I can’t seem to care very much. Is that a sign of maturity, or that it’s time to stop?

Boo!

Happy Halloween.

Only scary posts today!

Library of Congress Collecting Law Blogs

This email I received today appears from the headers to be a genuine message:

To Whom It May Concern:

The United States Library of Congress has selected your Web site for inclusion in its historic collections of Internet materials related to Legal Blogs. The Library’s traditional functions, acquiring, cataloging, preserving and serving collection materials of historical importance to the Congress and to the American people to foster education and scholarship, extend to digital materials, including Web sites. We request your permission to collect your Web site and add it to the Library’s research collections. We also ask that we be allowed to display the archived version(s) of your Web site.

The following URL has been selected:

www.discourse.net

With your permission, the Library of Congress or its agent will engage in the collection of content from your Web site at regular intervals over time. The Library will make this collection available to researchers onsite at Library facilities. The Library also wishes to make the collection available to offsite researchers by hosting the collection on the Library’s public access Web site. The Library hopes that you share its vision of preserving Internet materials and permitting researchers from across the world to access them. If you agree to permit the Library to collect your Web site, please click the following link to signify your consent. This link also includes a separate consent for permitting the Library to provide offsite access to your materials through the Library’s Web site.

[very long url]

For several years, the Library of Congress has collected Web sites within certain themes or topics for which we were required to seek permission for each new collection developed by the Library, even if permission had been granted in the past. As our collections have grown, we have had to contact some Web site producers repeatedly. To reduce this duplication and to save site owners from having to respond to multiple requests for information, we are now requesting permissions for the Library to collect, over time and in varying frequency, sites of research interest. Your site has been identified as a Web site of interest related to Legal Blogs. If you grant this permission, we will capture your site for inclusion in our Legal Blogs Web Archive and may also include it in any future collections. If in the future you no longer wish to be included in the Library’s Web archives, please contact us and we will cease collection of your URL.

Our Web archives related to government and law are important because they contribute to the historical record of national events, capturing information that could otherwise be lost. With the growing role of the Web as an influential medium, records of historic events could be considered incomplete without materials that were born digital and never printed on paper. For more information about our Web Archive collections please visit our Web site at (http://www.loc.gov/webcapture/).

If you have questions, comments or recommendations concerning the Legal Blogs Archive project,please e-mail the Library’s Web Capture team at webcapture@loc.gov at your earliest convenience. For more information about other Web Archive collections please visit http://www.loc.gov/webcapture

Thank You,

Web Capture Team Library of Congress Washington, D.C. webcapture@loc.gov http://www.loc.gov/webcapture

———- LC Reference: Legal Blogs 90311 CD

What a great idea. I’m delighted to be a (tiny) part of it.

Where'd My Clock Go?

The clock in the left margin is (was?) powered by clocklink.com, which seems to be having some troubles today:

Unable to request URL from host www.clocklink.com:80: tried all of the host’s addresses:

1. www.clocklink.com/216.230.241.101: Connection refused
2. www.clocklink.com/216.230.241.102: Connection refused

I hope it’s temporary.

The Modem Died

The DSL modem on my home network died yesterday evening.

No postings until it gets replaced.

Numerology Fans Take Note

The ultimate pointless rating.

MT 2.6x --> MT 4.0x Anyone?

Has anyone actually upgraded a MT 2.6x installation to the current version?

The instructions suggest you upgrade to MT 3.5 first, and even have a link to the MT archive where it is said to reside. But when I go there it looks awfully blank….

I suppose it ain’t seriously broke, so maybe I shouldn’t try to fix it. But maybe a test site just to see….

Beats Me

I’ve given up trying to understand what all this means (especially as with RSS taking on more and more of the readership, hit counts become increasingly artificial).

But on this list, Most Popular Blawgs of All Time - Justia Blawg Search, I’m #143. While on one of these two lists, I’m chopped liver and on the other #18.

Spotted via Feminists Law Professors, How Big Is It?, where they care about this sort of stuff…

Perils of Ratings

Usually when I'm complaining about ratings it's US News or some such. But here's another bad ratings service:

This rating was determined based on the presence of the following words:

• torture (10x)
• hell (1x)

My personal homepage, however, is rated

Notes on High Finance

From today’s inbox:

Hi Michael,

I will send you $25 in exchange for placing a text ad for a telecom company on this page: [link]

Please let me know if you are interested.

Thanks,
[signed]

I don’t know how long the run was to be, so I can’t tell if this is a good offer, but in any case, I’m resolutely non-commercial for insurance reasons. So, dear reader, not to worry.

That post, incidentally, is still true, but I can’t help but wonder what search led him there.

Not If It Gets Elected to Something

Someone got to this blog by searching for “is it illegal to own a monkey in miami”. In fact, that phrase has been searched for several times in the last few days…

Weird.

(For a colorful list of what people have been searching for that leads them here, have a look at the discourse.net zeitgeist.)

Unintentional Weirdness

The blog is acting up in various ways. It’s slow, and the some of the stuff in the columns isn’t working. I’m going to put off trying to debug it in light of this announcement from No Uptime Hosting Dreamhost:

We are currently experiencing some networking difficulties which is causing parts of our network to be inaccessible. This is affecting everyone in a random manner. We are working hard to fix the problem right now and will have an update for you soon.

Please bear with me until this goes away.

How Much Is Enough?

Dreamhost is unveiling a new service with an unusual pricing model. DreamHost Private Servers will provide CPU and RAM a la carte. $1.00/month for each 10 MB RAM and 10 MhZ CPU, protected, on a shared server (there’s also a burst mode, but it’s not guaranteed). Unfortunately, you buy them together (I need CPU more than RAM).

So, how much is enough to run a blog?

Emergent Comments

I may have mentioned this before, but I continue to be amazed and bemused by the emergence of one comment thread on this blog, Type 1 Diabetes Cure?, as a sort of clearinghouse for diabetes patients to exchange their stories and seek advice.

I assume this has happened because Google has put that page high on the results list for ‘Type1 Diabetes Cure’. I usually close comments threads after a few weeks in order to keep down the robotic advertising attacks, but I intend to keep this one open as long as it has an audience.

Meet Guest Blogger Patrick Gudridge

Tomorrow, my family and I will be leaving for a week in Istanbul, which is a place I’ve always wanted to visit. Admittedly, this may not be the very best time in history to be visiting Turkey, given both the domestic tensions between secularists and Islamicists and the Turkish army’s provocative shelling across the Northern Iraqi border. We made the arrangements about a week before the current round of unrest began and have been watching developments, especially the bombings, with some concern. So far, however, there do not seem to have been attacks in Istanbul itself, and we haven’t called off the trip.

Our hotel in Istanbul promises wireless internet, but I’ve learned to be wary of such promises, and anyway, this is a holiday. So I’m turning the blog over to a guest until I get back on the 22nd (or more if he wants): my good friend and colleague Patrick Gudridge.

Patrick’s willingness to guest blog is a very good thing for readers. Patrick either embodies or exemplifies most of the best things about the University of Miami School of Law. He is intellectually omnivorous, deeply thoughtful, and irrationally charitable and optimistic — all the things that make him a superlative commentator and conversationalist. He’s also very nice. Best known, perhaps, for his recent Harvard Law Review article “Remember Endo?,” Patrick’s interests range far and wide, but often return to issues of federal and state constitutional law. On the faculty, in addition to his intellectual reputation, Patrick enjoys a special status as a sort of utility player, someone ready, willing, and able to teach almost any course in the curriculum. Patrick is also fond of dogs, having raised, among others, champion bull mastiffs.

Patrick O. Gudridge, Professor of Law, received an A.B. from Harvard College in 1972 and a J.D. in 1976 from Harvard Law School. Professor Gudridge served as a law clerk to Justice Mathew O. Tobriner of the California Supreme Court. He joined the faculty in 1977, and served as Associate Dean at the Law School from 1990 to 1994. He has published articles on the structure of legal interpretation and analysis. His teaching interests are eclectic, and have included courses in federal jurisdiction, U.S. and Florida constitutional law, jurisprudence, business associations, torts, and agency.

I have no idea what he’s going to say (I rarely do), but I’m sure it will be interesting (it always is).

Hacked

The site got very seriously hacked some time in the last 24 hours. As I’m going to be traveling home, there may be little I can do about this if they come back for second helpings, at least until I get back to a secure connection Wednesday night.

Grading Today

No blogging today: I’m grading.

Dan's Widget

I’ve added a Washington Post “widget” to the right margin that promotes my brother’s column. I like the column; I don’t like the widget very much — it blinks too much. But I’m going to try it for at least a few days before I decide if it’s too distracting.

It’s probably time to re-design the entire site, but I just don’t have the time.

Tagged

Thanks to Eric Muller, I’m it. Responsive post when I have time to make one, which may not be until tomorrow.

Blog Called on Account of Demonstration

Limited blogging for a while — the blog is being occupied.

Which beats the alternative.

(via Maxspeak. Poor guy.)

Busy

Probably too busy to post today, except to note for the record that FBI Outdoes Itself With “SafeSneaker” Plan was of course a feeble April Fools item.

Server Move

Some time between an hour ago and 23 hours from now, the blog will be moving (again) to a less congested server (cheerfully called “harpo”) within the megacluster operated by dreamhost.com. That means the blog should (at least for a while) be behaving better. Please comment here if you notice anything weirder than usual.

And if comments are not working, please e-mail me.

I Wish

My Site is worth
$6,712,728

How much is your site worth?

Update: In light of the first comment, I’d better explain: this is the result I got when I ran discourse.net through dnscoop.com. For some reason it thinks that discourse.net is actually the apparently valuable (why?) seorefugee.com.

Downtime Sunday

Saturday night, February 25th, at about 11:15PM PST (i.e. Sunday morning here on the East coast), this blog and everything else hosted at Dreamhost will go dark as Dreamhost is shutting down everything in its building.

With luck, it should be back up again by 4AM PST (7am Sunday over here). It seems that someone discovered of some super-dangerous wiring flaw in the building that hosts the servers and they need to fix it.

Our Server Is Having a Bad Day

Apologies for any troubles you have viewing the site and especially commenting today. In addition to a ton of spam, it seems that one of the other sites on the shared server I happen to be on — a site with the enticing name of “moneychump” — has got 1062 diggs and counting for a posting entitled 52 money hacks - one for each week!. (Please don’t click on it.) The flood of hits has driven server load up to a peak of over 105, and even with throttling of that site is hovering in the teens. My experience is that this blog is ok so long as the total server load is under five or so.

There are days when I think it would be nice to have my own managed server hosted somewhere. Then I look at the price tag…

Comments Are In Danger

For the past couple of days this blog has been under increasingly severe attack by sp**mers. Some are for notorious prescription drugs. Other are to garbage name sites (presumably in the hopes of creating a high search rank for later sale?) Still others are to hacked locations on message boards at institutions whose pages have been hacked.

I have wasted a lot of time deleting this stuff, and now am being driven to closing comments in the items that they most frequently target. I hope I can keep comments open — especially as one or two threads are quite active and interesting right now.

But there’s a limit to how much whack-a-mole I can play here.

Inflamatory Rhetoric Watch

I’ve been watching the Edwards blogger flap (Edwards Learns Campaign Blogs Can Cut 2 Ways) with great interest, but haven’t blogged it because I had nothing interesting to say.

It seems the Edwards staff hired to hard-charging feminist bloggers to help the campaign (which has a big blog operation of its own), but didn’t vet them as well as it should have. As bloggers sometimes do, they’d each said a bunch of dumb stuff. There were not only rude words but intemperate opinions.

Edwards himself had no role in the hiring and had never even met them — the campaign staff is already that big? — until the flap was well under way. At that point he found himself caught between the right-wing spin machine which was seeking scalps, and a very strong push from his early supporters and from the liberal side of the blogging community which wanted him to condemn this piece of what they somewhat mistakenly called Swift Boating (it was somewhat mistaken because while exaggerated, the charges against the bloggers had some more truth at their core than did the Swift Boat smears of Kerry). At least one of the new staffers had quit her job and moved hundred of miles to join the campaign, so any firing had a real human cost.

Edwards waited 36 hours before deciding, apparently so he could meet the people before making a decision — which could be spun as slow, unprepared, and indecisive, or as a resolute and patient commitment to doing the right thing on his own time.

And in the end, Edwards did something right: condemning the sins, but not the sinners.

You could say this is a sign that the blogs are flexing their muscles. Or that Edwards caved in to the left wing. Or that the right wing’s Mighty Wurlitzer (where smears start on the fringe and work their way into the mainstream) is losing its power to mesmerize Democrats. Or that Edwards is a thoughtful guy who wanted to look the two staff people in the eye, and hear them out personally, before trashing their lives and possibly careers.

But here’s why I mention it now: I couldn’t help but wonder, what if it were me? Not that I have any plans or desires to leave academe, but suppose someone were mad enough to appoint me to the modern equivalent of the Board of Tea Experts (now defunct). What, I wonder, is the most incendiary thing that I’ve blogged (or published elsewhere) that could be quoted in or out of context to make me look bad (fairly or unfairly)?

Emergent (and Non-Emergent) Behavior in the Comments

Once a great while, a comment thread on this blog takes on a life of its own. That seems to have happened to the thread at Type 1 Diabetes Cure.

I marvel at the emergent properties of this medium sometimes. And am not always sure whether to be pleased or terrified.

(Generally speaking, my readers don’t seem to be a loquacious bunch; the hits-to-comments ratio here is quite high. Not that I’m complaining — be yourselves by all means. I just wonder What It All Means: Do I have shy readers? Agreement? Disgust? People with better things to do?)

And given a choice between lots of comments seasoned with trolls and the present light but generally well-mannered discussions, there’s no question I’ll take what I’ve got. And thank you for your attention.

Planned Down Time Tonight

My ISP has warned me that we’ll be down for about 20 minutes some time tonight after 10PM PST. Apparently they are going to physically move the server from point A to point B.

If you just have to know more, there is a status page is at their blog, and I’m hosted on “millhouse,” yes, as in Richard M. Nixon [spelling, yech].

Why The Silence

I've been a bit under the weather since Friday night.

Please feel free to treat this as an open thread, and raise what you wish in the comments.

Take Once a Day

Blog Juice gives dailykos a 9.2, and Salon.com a 5.9.

Discourse.net gets 6.0:

About as meaningless as any other metric, I suspect.

In Which I Commit An Act of Recklessness

I've agreed to take part in the first-ever Miami Bloggers: Cross Blogination being organized by Greener Miami for September 19.

My guest poster will be from the comprehensive community site, Miami Beach 411, and I have to come up with something appropriate for the super-cool Critical Miami. Ouch.

Year Four Begins

I started this blog three years ago, accurately noting that, "The world needs another weblog like a hole in the head." Early on, I was already feeling pretty unhappy about the administration -- but, ever the optimist, while I was starting to grasp the full horror of their constitutional vision, I never imagined how incompetent and corrupt they would turn out to be.

I know people who treat their blogs as an important part of their professional career: as a way of making their name in their field, or as a way of creating a media presence in order to build a profile that might let them influence public policy, or as a serious scholarly endeavor. I've toyed with those ideas, but my goals are more modest. I'm having fun, I'm taking part in some small conversations, and I will have something to show to my children if they ever accuse me of being the 21st century US equivalent of what the last generation called "a good German."

Let the record show that many of us cared about torture, about our rights and liberties, and battled against the destruction of our fundamental institutions. And if enough of us care, perhaps we can ensure that it will all seem like quaint over-reaction to the next generation.

Welcome New Readers

That's some traffic spike.

Notes from the Usage Logs

Generally speaking, sp*m is down, especially as I have pretty much disabled trackbacks.

But "invalid login attempts" i.e. people trying to hack into the control panel are way way way up.....

I'm Back

Major thanks to George for all the interesting posts while I was away on vacation. If I wrote that much meaty stuff relating to my work … this blog would be work.

While in one sense this break was a true vacation — I had lousy internet access and didn’t even try to work except for the last couple days when I went to a meeting in Geneva — it was also more prone to minor disasters and discomforts than any family vacation in recent memory. These included a 24 hour airline delay, the airline losing my luggage, the airline computer choosing to delete my return reservation for no good reason (see a pattern yet?), unpleasant issues with our rented accommodations, and of course the biggest heat wave in modern British and Swiss history (“Genève n’en finit pas de cuire” said the hoardings, and they had it right.)

The highlights of the London part of the trip were meeting old friends and seeing the new Tom Stoppard play, Rock and Roll, a superb production of a very good play. I also enjoyed going to the reconstructed Globe Theater for the first time, although the production of Anthony and Cleopatra was too much of the ‘declaiming Shakespeare’ type instead of the more naturalistic RSC-style ‘acting Shakespeare’ which I like best. Then again, maybe that’s what you have to do in a big outdoor space like the Globe.

I’m not sure how much I’ll plunge straight into high-volume blogging this week, especially as I will be in DC Wednesday and some of Thursday. I have to work on syllabi, pay bills, fight with the city about a permit, and of course catch up on back emails.

Much was made last week of Stuart G. Baker’s job title: Director of Lessons Learned. But it turns out his job is neither some sort of namby-pamby new agey thing, nor a stealth White House inspector general position telling everyone what they’re doing wrong.

Instead, the title is an outgrowth of the White House’s ” Federal Response to Hurricane Katrina: Lessons Learned ” report. And Baker, a detailee from the Department of Homeland Security who worked on that report, is now charged with coordinating the response to the report’s recommendations.

Guest Blogger George Mundstock Returns

Tomorrow I'm going to be heading off for two weeks and a bit -- a couple of weeks vacation in the UK then a short meeting in Geneva. I will have pretty limited Internet connectivity most of that time, so my friend and colleague George Mundstock has kindly agreed to step in again as a guest blogger. You can read about George here and you can see many of his previous posts on tax law. George tells me that he plans to write primarily about law and accounting this time (I guess that means some post-Enron reforms?) -- but if we're lucky we might hear about his wonderful dog too.

I know that "accounting" isn't one of those words that makes most people quiver with excitement, but trust me, George is an interesting guy.

Temptation

This is sort of cute, but doesn't really fit this page's design:

Hi There

Just wanted to say Hi to my reader from Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. Whoever you are.

Dreamhost Lightens Up on CPU

Since I've posted before on Dreamhost's unfortunate CPU-throttling measures, it's only fair that I note their announcement relaxing the policy,

Well, we're sick and tired of people being sick and tired of getting disabled for "cpu minute" overages! ESPECIALLY when we don't even have any real set "cpu minute" levels for plans, or a tab on our web panel where you can track your usage.

So "guess" what?! We've changed our "cpu minute" "policy" "for the better!" We no longer HAVE any limits on "cpu minutes". Maybe it's just semantics, and maybe it's just "crazy overselling", but as long as your site or scripts aren't causing problems with the server, you are IN THE CLEAR!

Let's say you're not IN THE CLEAR though.. don't worry! We'll work with you! We're adding a BUNCH of new servers to help "get" the average load per web server down, and we'll work with high-load people to get their usage down or their butts onto a new server that can handle it.

... although according to the Unofficial DreamHost Blog, exactly how this will work in practice isn't 100% clear. I hope this isn't just a PR gloss on the same old policy, but since they told me I was stressing the server when I ran into the CPU limits...

Did Someone Say 'Tulip Bulbs'?

Someone wrote to me once hinting he might offer the high four figures or even five if I would sell him discourse.net. I had no idea if it was real, or some sort of scam, or an attempt to entrap me into something that might be used against me in some weird UDRP proceeding. And since I had no real desire to sell, it seemed safer not to reply and too much trouble to write back with the sort of NDA you have to have in hand before entering into domain name related negotiations.

If you believe this wacky site spotted by Alex Halavais, then it was a waay lowball offer anyway,

discourse.net    It has been determined based on search results that this name may be extensively valuable beyond the scope of the LeapFish.com domain analysis tool. It is recommended that you seek the services of a complete domain appraisal company rather than rely on this estimate. Thank You.

Combined Value Score: 309
Top Level Domain Score:  8
Unwanted Characters Score:  10
Dictionary Word Score:  100
Length Score:  10
Archive.org Score:  81
Google Search Results:  719,000
Yahoo Search Results:  0
MSN Search Results:  56,218
Search Engine Score:  100

---

Estimated Base Value: $927.00
Estimated Actual Value: $143,222.00

I don't myself have much faith in automated domain valuation, but if you do, and think something in the healthy six-figure range sounds reasonable, we should definitely talk.

Worst President Meme in Rolling Stone

No less than Sean Wilentz has an article in Rolling Stone, asking if Bush is The Worst President in History?

You saw it here (much less well) first: Worst President Ever?. Incidentally I agree with the commentators on that earlier post that the guy to beat is Buchanan. But GWB sure is making a run for it. One attack on Iran or a good big collapse of the dollar, and we're there, aren't we?

Here's one guy who is worrying that Bush will take the country down with him. When people start talking like that, it's a crisis, isn't it?

Hotline's Blogometer Spotlights ... Me

The National Journal's Hotline Blogometer turns its "blogger spotlight" on what it calls "not your everyday Froomkin".

The Dark Side of DreamHost (and Shared Hosting)

The Dark Side of DreamHost (and Shared Hosting) captures something true.

On the other hand, changing the names of some of my movable type modules so that bots wouldn't find them as easily had major effects: it reduced the CPU time I was using to a quarter of what it had been, and now I'm very comfortably under their limits again.

Losing Battle

I've had to change a few things under the hood to fight bots sending junk trackbacks and the like.

Please drop me an email if comments or trackbacks are not working properly for you.

Back From the Beyond

Something brought down my shared server today, and it had to be rebooted. Apologies for the downtime. What happened is completely opaque to both me and the tech support; the only mildly suspicious item in my recent logs is 627 recent access requests from 200.189.80.121, a Brazilian ISP. I don't have that many readers in Brazil, as far as I know.

But that alone really shouldn't have been enough to bring everything to a screeching halt.

Of course, it could have been something done by one of the people with whom I share the machine.

Go Eat Your Own Dog Food

We get e-mail. Today's seemed especially absurd. I've altered the domain name in the URLs and in the text, wouldn't give them the satisfaction, but the typo was in the original:

Hi,

I manage a website called [canine]foodlist.com and I think your site would be of interest to the visitors that regularly browse my site.

I have gone ahead and given you a link plus a description of your site from my page at http://[canine]foodlist.com/metalautomaticdogfoodfeeder and I'm just contacting you to check it is ok to have done this for you?

I would greatly appreciate a link back to my site and if you are happy to do this then to make it easy for you I have included the following code...

Dog Food List Everything about dog food from best dog food to wysong dog food.

Feel free to change the suggested code if you would like to. I look forward to a mutually beneficial link partnership and I wish you all the best with your site for the future. Please let me know if there is anything else I can do for you.

Kind regards

Greg

P.S. Keep up the good work!

Disclaimer: If this email has reached you in error or if you would not like to be contacted again then please accept my sincere apologies. Let me know by sending an email to remove@[canine]foodlist.com if this is the case and I will make sure [canine]foodlist.com never contacts you again.

//

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Market Manipulation in Discourse.net Shares? (Translation please)

It's probably been almost two years since I last looked at discourse.net's listing at blogshares. Shortly after registering there I decided this wasn't a game I was going to play, and more or less forgot about it without doing any transactions.

On a whim I looked at blogshare's discourse.net listing over the weekend, and found lots of strange stuff.

Can anyone please explain the meaning of multiple "press releases" by people I don't know that sound like the following,

Discourse.net suffered a huge setback with several analysts urging their clients to ditch the stock as it suffered a public relations disaster. The exact nature of customer dissatisfaction was not known but sara bear was rumoured to have had a hand in it. Industry insiders suspect a Star Spangled Banner (artefact) was involved. Discourse.net share price dropped from B$56,734.68 to B$32,906.11

sara bear declined to comment on the recent speculation.

"Huge setback"? "(artefact)"? "customer dissatisfaction"? And, how did one Matt Williams come to have what seems to be a controlling interest of 71.2%? Did I sell shares without noticing?

Not that I suppose it actually matters...

Big Fish, Small Puddle

Apparently, as law blogs go -- if this is a true law blog any more than Is That Legal? which gets excluded -- discourse.net is a popular blog (by all measures).

As I noted in a private comment to the original count at Opinio Juris, I think we should not take these measures too seriously. For one thing, they ignore readers via RSS feeds; I know many of you, like me, read most blogs via a newsreader. (FeedBurner claims there are about 750 850 of you, but that's just an estimate.) I give a full text news feed because I prefer readers to hit counts. If counts matter -- and why exactly do they matter? Isn't writing style, or quality of ideas what we in the academy should be praising in our top 10 lists? -- one might, for example, want to at least distinguish between blogs with a full text feed and those without.

However these words find you, thanks again for a few minutes in your busy day.

Milestones

Some time in the last 24 hours, this page recorded its 500,000th unique daily visitor according to a strict metric, and this site also recorded its millionth page view according to sitemeter, which although something of an industry standard is a less strict count.

Thank you for your kind attention, and especially for your emails and comments.

Dreamhost Thinks I Use Too Much CPU

Ominous email:

PLEASE READ THIS ENTIRE MESSAGE VERY CAREFULLY!

If you have read everything and have any questions, please let us know.

Unfortunately it appears that your site is using more than your fair share of system resources on your shared hosting machine dawber. Our system has flagged your account because it is using a large number of CPU minutes per day on dawber. We need you to trim down your resource consumption considerably. Should you ignore this or subsequent warnings your account may be moved to an evaluation server which could cause downtime.

Specifically amf's CPU minute usage for today is 56.70.

(What does this mean? Read this: https://panel.dreamhost.com/kbase/index.cgi?area=3079)

* To understand exactly which of your scripts is using what resources, please examine /home/amf/logs/resources/ starting tomorrow morning. This file can also be downloaded via ftp or accessed via the stats page at http://domain.com/stats/resources .

* Every day at 8AM PDT, a new file named "amf.sa.analyzed.0" will be created in the resources directory, and contains a breakdown of your usage. Older files are kept as "amf.sa.analyzed.1", "amf.sa.analyzed.2" and so on, for 7 days.

* If you only see php.cgi in your report, you can find out how to get more fine detail at:

https://panel.dreamhost.com/kbase/index.cgi?area=3080

* You may also want to evaluate our dedicated server offerings at http://www.dreamhost.com/dedicated/, which we recommend for busier sites, sites which experience extremely high volumes of traffic and / or use a lot of resources. Plans start at just $99 a month.

You will continue to receive this warning message until your resource usage goes down.

Here's the key data

Process               CPU seconds      user   machine   count  average

mt-comments.cgi         1492.7900   43.880%    6.220%    2115    0.706

mt-tb.cgi               1180.9000   34.712%    4.920%    2007    0.588

mt.cgi                   525.5200   15.447%    2.190%     574    0.916

The script that is causing the problem is mt-comments.cgi. Which is odd as there were no comments to speak of yesterday, and it was a light spam day too.

So far I have gotten away with a very cheap hosting plan for what I think of as my hobby. Moving to a dedicated server would push the cost waay up. Not high enough for me to take ads, but high enough for me to half-wish I did.

But unless this is a blip, that's where I'm headed.

Discourse.net Greatest Hits

Several people have suggested that I should somehow identify some past blog posts for new readers, a sort of 'greatest hits'. Perhaps I should just point people the 'Torture' category and leave it at that, but here (in alphabetical order) is a first cut at a representative list of posts I think I'd be happy to have a new reader look at, ranging from funny to grim.

• America Needs You, Harry Truman
• Apologia Pro Tormento: Analyzing the First 56 Pages of the Walker Working Group Report (aka the Torture Memo)
• A Constitutional Law Scavenger Hunt With A Serious Purpose
• Guantanamo: Our Collective Shame
• There is Hope for Us All
• Of Pigs and the Ballot Box
• OLC's Aug. 1, 2002 Torture Memo ("the Bybee Memo")
• Rose Burawoy, Political Scientist
• Ten Reasons Why You Should Teach Here -- And Three Why You Shouldn't
• The Walt Disney Company Standards of Business Conduct Illustrated
• What Belongs on the Faculty Desktop?
• When Bad Taste Is Acceptable
• Who Will Run Against Ros-Lehtinen? (All Politics Is Local)
• Why I Write 'Legal Scholarship'
• Yoo Unrepentant

Odd that so many cluster at the end of the alphabet.

In the event anyone cares, I welcome nominations for additions to the list.

Packet Whirl

For an approximation of what a packet from this blog does before launching out onto the Internet and finding its way to you, see the Dreamhost video. (Not suitable for those who get carsick on roller coasters.)

Nice Work if You Can Get It

...at least according to Business Opportunities Weblog, which explains the calculation as follows,

Inspired by Tristan Louis’s research into the value of each link to Weblogs Inc, I’ve created this little applet which computes and displays your blog’s worth using the same link to dollar ratio as the AOL-Weblogs Inc deal.

This Blog Breaks the (Design) Rules -- Should I Reform?

Jakob Nielsen is an authority on web design. When he writes Weblog Usability: The Top Ten Design Mistakes, one should at least pay attention.

By my count, this blog only clearly adheres to two three of the ten rules, and totally fails at least three, arguably five -- and doesn't do too well on the last two either.

1. No Author Biographies [arguably FAIL] (I do link to my homepage...)
2. No Author Photo [arguably FAIL] (ditto)
3. Nondescript Posting Titles [FAIL sometimes]
4. Links Don't Say Where They Go [FAIL sometimes] (I do try to be conscious of this one, but I get sloppy sometimes).
5. Classic Hits are Buried [FAIL]
6. The Calendar is the Only Navigation [PASS]
7. Irregular Publishing Frequency [PASS]
8. Mixing Topics [FAIL MISERABLY]
9. Forgetting That You Write for Your Future Boss [FAIL] (Tenure is nice)
10. Having a Domain Name Owned by a Weblog Service [PASS]

Should I change my ways?

PS. Please treat this as an open invitation to make any other blog-related comments/suggestions.

Incidentally, it's clear that I'm also very bad at publicity: last night at dinner, one of my colleagues asked rhetorically if I had a blog, and seemed taken aback a bit when I said that well, yes, I did.

Comment Spam is Getting Weird

Today I deleted some comment spam. A daily task. But this spam, although it carried the traditional link to a commercial web site, was a bit odd. This is what it said:

No way. No comments. No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.
No way. No comments. No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.
No way. No comments. No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.
No way. No comments. No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.
No way. No comments. No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.
No way. No comments. No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.
No way. No comments. No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.
No way. No comments. No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.
No way. No comments. No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.
No way. No comments. No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.
No way. No comments. No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.
No way. No comments. No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.
No way. No comments. No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.
No way. No comments. No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.

- Sara Corner

I got about half a dozen of them.

More generally, my spam is less of a pain since I turned off trackbacks for everything but the most recent items.

LA Power Outage Dims Discourse

The LA blackout seems to have taken the site down with it. Supposedly Dreamhost has an emergency backup system, but it seems to have failed completely. Probably FEMA-approved hardware...

Update: Details if you care...

What Goes Down Should Come Up

The site is up and down like a yo-yo today. Sorry about that. I've initiated inquiries as to why.

The "CBL" Has Blacklisted U.Miami?

Several students have told me that they've tried to email me at U.M. but the mail has bounced. At first I was skeptical, since I'm getting email, but one student was kind enough to send me headers, which led me to this CBL Lookup Utility. The CBL is a self-styled "composite blocking list". They do provide a form for removal, but as I'm not the owner of the machine that has the blocked IP number -- it's upstream from me -- I'm not about to try to fill it out.

I reported this to the help desk and they're "working on it".

Meanwhile, if mail to me bounces, there is a rarely-used backup: myforename.mysurname@gmail.com (be sure to replace myforename with michael and mysurname with froomkin). I'll try to check there occasionally.

Attention Fellow Dreamhost Customers

I know that several readers of this blogs are fellow customers of Dreamhost. I'd like to ask you a favor. Dreamhost.com has a nice system by which users can vote on the service improvements they would most like to see implemented. As they put it, "Votes (strongly) influence what gets implemented, but do not 100% determine it!"

I've just contributed a suggestion for something I need, and I'd like to ask fellow customers to vote for it please: 'Offer a "high cpu usage" plan.' If they'd do this, I could rebuild the whole blog without timeouts, and I could also fight spam more effectively.

You get to the voting booth by going to your web control panel, logging in, click on "home" in the top of the left column, then "Suggestions".

That takes you to a page asking you to vote on a large number of suggestions, with the newest at the top. Currently 'Offer a "high cpu usage" plan' is third from the top. Every customer gets 40 credits worth of votes, and suggestions 'cost' 2-5 credits based on difficulty. Mine will cost you 4; you get the credits back if they decide to do it, or if they decide not to do it. Meanwhile, you can always take the credits back and repurpose them for a different suggestion later if you have something else you want more. So if you are not currently using your voting credits this will cost you nothing more than the time it takes to make a few clicks. Thank you.

Dreamhost.com Gets Cocky

This blog is hosted at dreamhost.com. On the whole I’ve been happy with its low prices, although as this blog grows I chafe more an more at the limits on processing times imposed by the virtual host controller on my shared machine. I am no longer able, for example, to kill off more than a few spams at a time via mt-blacklist; I can’t rebuild the site without having a crash except on the dead of night on federal holidays. It can get frustrating. But it is cheap. And the real problem is that movable type and some of my favorite plugins are rather resource-intensive.

Nevertheless, I do find it a little worrying to see the management at DreamHost crowing about how easy it is to make money off folks like me. So much money that they are going to hire a bookkeeper.

PS. If you are looking for very cheap and on the whole reliable blog hosting, tell them “froomkin” sent you and I get a kickback.

Safari/Mac Rendering Woes

Something is messing up this page on Safari, and (not having a Mac to test with) I can’t figure out what on earth it could be.

The problem pre-dates the addition of the clustermap in the right margin (which will start functioning tomorrow, if all goes well). As far as I can tell, it also seems to be unrelated to the previous change, the addition of the Google page rank graphic in the right margin. I’ve seen a screenshoot and both of the outside columns are overlapping the center one, leaving a wide swath of blank stuff where the two outside columns should be.

I know that my HTML isn’t completely standards compliant; some day I’ll move to wordpress and do a better job. In the meanwhile, if anyone has a suggestion as to what might be the cause of this problem, I would be grateful for advice.

I Have No Idea What Any of This Means

According to Blogstreet, this blog has a "rank" of 437 out of the 103,159 blogs on its list and a BIQ, or "blog influence quotient," of 164 (something to do with how many "top ranking" blogs link to you). [I saw "BIQ" and thought it was something about brains, another manifestation of a common American fallacy, that of equating intelligence with popularity. Some crowds are wise, but are all?]

I don't know what any of this Blogstreet stuff means, and I suspect that I'm not going to try to figure it out: one could spend far too much time navel gazing about what is, for me, part hobby and part soapbox, and surprisingly little connected to my academic pursuits. (If we had drinks, it perhaps it could be the virtual pub.)

Naturally, not everyone approaches the medium in the same way. I went to a conference a few months ago and met a guy who introduced himself to people there as a blogger, even though he had a real job at a nice university, which struck me as a more salient fact. (Then again, his blog is indeed highly ranked. But so is his university.) I thought that was a little odd. Later, I did him a very tiny favor and he said "just for that, I'll link to you" as if it were a big deal; that seemed a bit odd too. And then, of course, he didn't...

Discourse.net Googlified

No doubt some horrible trademark violation if used seriously. Googlification via Logogle.com (Hmmm. Trademark…) via boingboing (who call the process “Google-fying” and the end result a “Googloid” logo).

Say Hello to Guest Blogger Jon Weinberg

Another thing I’ve done to prepare for my trip is to line up a superb guest blogger. I’m only going to have limited Internet at best while abroad, so Jonathan Weinberg will be minding the store. Jon and I have several things in common. Among them are some intellectual sympathies: we’re both part of the tiny number of Administrative Law teachers who write about ICANN and the Internet. (They’re not that many of us around, which may explain why ICANN is run so badly.) We are co-editors at ICANNWatch. And — although this is now a larger group than it used to be — we’re both part of law-professor faculty couples.

In addition to being one of the nicest people in law teaching, Jon knows a whole lot more about the FCC than I do. He’s an expert on RFID. And he’s clerked for two people who sat on the Supreme Court. Jon writes interesting and very readable articles, the most recent of which are listed after his official bio.

Jon will start Thursday (or earlier if he likes). I’m sure readers will enjoy his company as much as I do.

Is it Time to Kill Trackbacks?

The amount of comment spam that gets past my blocks and filters is much less today than it was six months ago. But the trackback spam is fully making up for it. In the last week I have deleted hundreds of spam trackbacks — and received only a handful of real ones. (Do trackbacks TO me that I record here really give other sites any meaningful Google points? They shouldn’t.)

It’s very interesting to see who links to this stuff and what they make of it. But the trackback ecosystem must surely be on the brink of collapse.

If only technorati were a little better…

David Starkoff Encounters a Name Collision

David Starkoff, who blogs as “Inchoate”, encountered an Australian confusion of sorts between discourse.net and an Other Discourse. So far, though, no great spike in Australian traffic.

This Week's Events

I’m going to be leaving Tuesday evening for the GDR TICS - Workshop Governance, Regulations, Powers on the Internet being held in Paris on Friday and Saturday. I’m going to queue up a few things that have been lying around, but I don’t expect to blog much while away.

Fortunately, I’ve secured the services of my very favorite UM colleague to serve as a guest blogger in my absence.

Update: And a good thing too, or I might have had to switch to Autoblogger (spotted via Joi Ito).

Server Woes

The server is acting up today. If you get a ‘500’ error when trying to post a comment, hold that thought! Hold on to the comment and try back a little later.

I’ve reported the problem, but I’m on the budget plan here so it takes a while for support to get back to me.

PS. Posting is almost impossible too at present.

But Enough About Me

I was recently interviewed by someone doing an academic project on academic bloggers. He asked a number of questions I found hard to answer (“Why do you do this?”), and one I found nearly impossible to answer with confidence: “Who are your readers?”

So this is my invitation to you, the reader, to please enter a comment telling me something about who you are. If you don’t want to use your name out of modesty or fear of guilt by association, that’s fine — tell me where you live, and a little something something about your circumstances.

How to Scare a Blogger

Spotted at The American Street:

Weirdness

It looks like http://www.discourse.net has been hijacked. I wonder if Michael knows.

Now, I doubt that Kevin is playing a prank here, so presumably he’s really seen something. But I have no idea what it is, my site looks normal from here, and thus I have no idea what the problem might be (cache poisoning somewhere? a 302 exploit? )