Category Archives: Internet

Two Videos That Belong Together

Posted on February 13, 2007 by Michael Froomkin

These two videos belong together: Web 2.0… The Machine is Us/ing Us


and Introducing the book:

I did have some trouble deciding which one should come first.

Posted in Internet | Comments Off on Two Videos That Belong Together

The War Against TOR

Posted on February 9, 2007 by Michael Froomkin

Via the Chronicle of Higher Education, Caught in the Network — how campus cops tried to pressure Prof. Paul Cesarini to stop using TOR, an anonymizing proxy.

(I tried TOR a while back and found it a bit clunky.)

Prof. Cesarini did not give in to their suggestion that he avoid teaching about TOR in his classroom, although he expressed some sympathy for the campus IT folks' worry about what it might do to their network.

Posted in Internet | Comments Off on The War Against TOR

Unfortunate Domain Names

Posted on January 29, 2007 by Michael Froomkin

Picking a domain name is an art. Some people are bad artists.

Posted in Internet | 3 Comments

Registrar Deletes Domain Name Based on 3rd Party Complaint

Posted on January 26, 2007 by Michael Froomkin

Declan McCullagh has a story about a stealth practice that apparently has been going on for some time, but blew up spectacularly the other day. GoDaddy pulls security site after MySpace complaints. (I'm quoted in the story.)

It seems a registrar has been deleting domain names in response to abuse complaints — mostly spam and child porn — for a long time. But this week their policy took down a legitimate internet security site on the theory it was a hacker haven — and did it with a minute's warning (or maybe an hour's warning, accounts differ).

If GoDaddy is your registrar, you might want to consider how you feel about that.

Posted in Internet | 3 Comments

Pandora’s Peculiarities

Posted on January 14, 2007 by Michael Froomkin

I love Pandora, but it has done two strange things recently.

I recently took the Secunia Software Inspector out for a spin, and it in addition to finding all sorts of obscure software that it thought needed updating, and I thought needed deleting, it also found multiple outdated copies of Java and the flash player. So I deleted them all except the newest. Alas, now that I had only the newest version of the Flash player, Pandora stopped working — it was convinced I was blocking the flash player from storing its data locally, even when I wasn’t. I laboriously followed the directions in Pandora’s FAQ and went through the flash privacy panel (I hate that obscure thing) and gave Pandora the rights to everything short of my first-born, but no dice. I eventually had to uninstall version 9.x of the flash player and downgrade to 7.x to make Pandora work again. This is odd.

And then there’s the station I created with Right Said Fred’s “I’m Too Sexy”. That’s one weird station.

Posted in Internet, Software | Comments Off on Pandora’s Peculiarities

Pirate Bay Wants to Buy Sealand

Posted on January 12, 2007 by Michael Froomkin

Pirate Bay launches bid to buy country

NEFARIOUS file-sharing site The Pirate Bay says it is planning to buy its own country and turn it into a copyright-free piracy paradise.

The torrent outfit launched a “Buy Sealand” campaign this week, with the aim of acquiring the former World War 2 gun platform now known as the Principality of Sealand, located just six miles from the UK coast.

The cut-throat file sharers claim the platform is up for sale having been badly damaged by fire in the summer of 2006.

The Pirate Bay hopes to fund the £100 million sale through donations from users who will automatically become citizens of the principality.

£100 million ???

Posted in Internet, Law: Copyright and DMCA | 1 Comment