From the same band that brought us “Fight for Your Right” comes many great themes for opposing SOPA.
In a post-SOPA world images and music with questionable copyrights will be tickets for take downs, financial seizure, and other under handed attacks on popular websites.
You think the legal ho-ha over patents is extremely petty and wasteful? Picture how bad the internet will be when user posted content can get your entire organization shut down instantly?
Here’s an example, say I decide to post something on our blog that’s not SOPA-safe. The competition takes note of it, and the instant I say something the competition doesn’t like, they complain about the post, our DNS is yanked, our accounts are frozen, and THEN we get the complaint to remove the content.
Yeah that’s not going to work, look at Germany if you want to see an example of what a SOPA-like environment is like.
Here’s a SOPA-like example:
Retired, Computerless Woman, forced by courts to pay fine for pirating hooligan movie
Even little things, like a picture of an awesome band, and a ~10 sec clip of their music would become ‘frightening’ if SOPA passed. Such uses are fine right now as we’d find out right away if a rights holder cares, and we’d take it down without a fuss. Post SOPA would be completely different, and fear of take-downs would absolutely kill user-submissions because each post would need to be checked for violations.
Tom’s Hardware also posted today with similar concerns to what we have in regards to immoral and unwarranted take-downs of sites over user-generated content. I really do like the fact that they had no qualms explaining exactly how pirates will work around SOPA DNS blocks, how SOPA won’t be effective at it’s main purpose, and is only going to be abused.
The names of companies opposed to SOPA is huge and growing, with supporters like GoDaddy changing it’s stance as the public backlash forces them to step back from a supporting role. In fact today GoDaddy even took the time to share a copy of the remaining supports of the bill, with it’s name missing from the list.
This has even more people freaking out about GoDaddy because:
Soaking your neighbours in kerosene has never been the wisest way to try and douse your own fire…
It’s no wonder GoDaddy reacted to the anti-SOPA movement; One report had pegged the losses for GoDaddy at over 70,000 domains in a single day last week, and today (Dec 29th) is the official ‘boycott GoDaddy’ day over on Reddit.
Imgur also stepped up and announced that they are working on leaving GoDaddy as well, but there’s speculation over how people would react if GoDaddy was to ‘make good’ on it’s position by actually supporting the anti-SOPA movement instead of merely dropping it’s support for the bill.
Only time will tell but I really am starting to worry about all the folks saying that SOPA is ‘likely’ to pass!? That just seems so absurd to me, but experts are hard to ignore, and I’m no political watch dog.
UPDATE: Okay I knew I was breaking the cardinal rule of auto-play and I knew it was for a good cause, but I couldn’t let it stick for more than a day. The clip’s still there you just have to hit play. 
SEO news blog post by Ryan Morben @ 3:51 pm
This is the day folks, the bill is in Congress as I type and here’s some good spots to follow the proceedings closely:
EFF Twitter Feed
Video Webcast
Justin.tv re-broadcast of the live feed
Wondering what all the fuss is about?
Here’s a great read:
Wikipedia -> Stop Online Piracy Act
Who supports SOPA?
Domino Project’s SOPA Supporter List
What sort of organizations are opposed to SOPA?. It was such a bad move that Wikipedia was publicly contemplating a blackout of the service just to make it clear how bad the bill is!
There’s also a few very active/current discussions over on Reddit in the r/technology section that give a good ‘nerds eye view’ of the bill reading.
Wonder why Google was opposed to the bill? Here’s a humorous take on the essence of their fears:
If I had to personally sum everything up into a TL;DR I would have to go with:
“Artist and labour groups who don’t have a nerdy understanding of how the internet works and how to approach piracy are joining with other anti-piracy groups to fast-track an ill-considered and potentially dangerous bill.
While most folks don’t understand the internet enough to argue the bill as experts the general reaction today has been “we are rushing something we don’t understand and we can’t proceed”.
With any luck that’ exactly how bill H.R.3261 will end, some potential, but not ready. *fingers crossed*
SEO news blog post by Ryan Morben @ 10:42 am
For some time now the “free hosting” Korean company Co.cc has been a target of malware, phishing, and large volumes of spam content.
Over at Google I can picture a hand full of their best ‘whack-a-mole’ admins looming over activity from .co.cc sites.
It’s anyone’s guess what kind of resources this one company has tied up over at Google (and other search engines) but I’m going with “too much” as my guess. When you consider that most of the results are spam, and the rest are mainly malware and phishing attacks, it shouldn’t be a shock that Google has done us all a favour and just blocked the whole *.co.cc stream from showing in the search results.
Sadly, spammers will be spammers and already I can see http://jzp.cc/ is acting as a portal to .co.cc sites and Google is currently showing these sites in their search results.
Wait, I see the problem! Going to need a bigger hammer!
The very unpleasant problem with this tactic is that the spam tends to just squish around, like a full diaper. The .cc TLD belongs to the Cocos Islands in Australia and while there are legit sites on that domain, the figures from the Anti-Phishing Working Group in 2010 are quite amazing. In the latter half of 2010 .cc domains accounted for almost five thousand phishing attacks in that time period!
While the percentage of good sites in the .cc realm might be questionable Google is effectively removing over 11 million registered domains run by almost 6 million users! My personal guess is that the block will stay up for some time, and once the spam has shifted elsewhere, we’ll silently see .co.cc domains back in the search results.
Google has stated they aren’t above blocking an entire bulk sub-domain in the past, they have clearly proven they will follow through, and I expect them to continue to do this as companies lose control of the content from their users.
The best way to fight spam is at the user level. Do you purchase anything that was ‘spammed’ at you? Are you rewarding people who put things on-line for your review, or are you spending money on things that are forcefully presented to you without solicitation? If the only way to make a sale is to respect the customer, retailers wouldn’t spam us because they would shoot themselves in the foot. As the consumers in this ecosystem of commerce, the matter is entirely in our hands if we so choose.
SEO news blog post by Ryan Morben @ 6:14 pm
Bitcoin had a serious case of the Mondays yesterday as the EFF dropped the currency for donations, and MtGox, a major international exchange, managed to spill over $5 million worth of BTC in a public ‘free for all’ moment. One lucky fellow snatched up over $5 million worth of BTC with a mere $2,613 by wisely setting an unlimited buy order at $0.0101 (everyone else was bidding $0.01).
The EFFs move wasn’t so bad when you pick it apart. Accepting any donation might seem harmless, but if the charity needs to convert that donation to a currency then it becomes an issue. The EFF cannot responsibly spend BTC, or exchange it, without exposing themselves to legal entanglement in doing so. Until the currency is ‘trouble free’ the best option for a huge non-profit is to avoid that donation.
In a post from Cindy Cohn on the EFF blog the issue is broken down three ways:
- Lack of understanding with regard to legality of BTC
- Misleading donors with regard to value and use of donations
- Giving a false endorsement of Bitcoin technology
Going forward the EFFs plan is to simply dump the donated BTC into the public faucet where they will be given away in small chunks to fresh Bitcoin users (or existing users who have never drank from the faucet). Don’t hurt yourself rushing on over for your handout, the current give-aways are only around 55 cents US when there’s more than 50 BTC in the faucet.
Speaking of give-aways, the $5 million I mentioned at the start of the article is apparently pending the decision of the folks running the exchange. The story is the very essence of TL;DR, so let me try to put it into point form:
- MtGox setup a BTC exchange in Japan
- MtGox’s auditors were hacked and an encrypted file was stolen
- Alerts went out to change passwords and secure accounts
- At some point on the 19th an MtGox user put a gigantic sell order up
- As the sell was taking place Kevin Day took note, offering $0.0101 per BTC
- By the end of the trading Kevin had purchased ~260k BTC for $2,613
- Kevin took out 643.27BTC (~$8,000 US) and placed it into a personal wallet
- MtGox claims that the day of trading broke exchange rules and must be reversed
- Initially MtGox was considering a review by the FBI but at the moment it seems they are focused on a roll-back
- MtGox has not mentioned an ability to reverse coins that left the exchange which creates a large problem
At this point the MtGox sites are having a hard time staying up and as of 11:40AM GMT they are struggling to allow users access to ‘reclaim’ accounts. I gave up on the site personally and have just been looking in Google’s cached results (a great solution for overloaded websites any time something like this happens).
There is also mention of the exchange going back on-line when the accounts are sorted out, and the claim that once the site is back on-line, trades 218869~222470 will be reverted and the exchange price will be going back to ~$17.50/BTC. Given everything that has happened this seems really optimistic to me.
Can’t wait to see what happens tomorrow.
SEO news blog post by Ryan Morben @ 8:48 pm
Don’t forget, June 8th is the official IPv6 test day!
We should have a full blog post later today but I wanted to remind everyone to take a look and see who’s passing the test.
This is a link the test site to see if you have an IPv6 compatible connection: http://test-ipv6.com/
Have a great day and don’t forget the game tonight (Go Canucks!).
SEO news blog post by Ryan Morben @ 6:37 pm
Blacklists sound like a racial slur, but they are simply a list of known bad offenders. Email spam is effectively kept in check to some degree by maintaining blacklists of known bad offenders. If your mail server isn’t accepting mail from a domain because the security is notably ‘not acceptable’ and ‘likely compromised’ why would you let that same domain access your login systems?
I’ll keep my rant short and to the point, but the details of the attack are a bit like a drunken man explaining how his cat ‘escaped’ after he left the door open and his music playing really loud for hours.
Today there was news of another major hack on the Canadian Federal government in top level systems. Part of the news revealed that “Defence Research and Development Canada”, a civilian agency of the DND, was compromised. I personally read that as “hackers will be enjoying the fruits of our federal research money/time before we are”.
This hack also took major segments of the federal government offline, likely as a necessity to facilitate cleanup and containment of the situation. So this wasn’t a ‘scare’ or an ‘annoyance’, it’s clearly costing us money, tax payer money.
The source of the attacks came from China, as they always seem to be. Admittedly, if one wanted to hide their identity, the best place to start would be an insecure network in China, and then work out from there. If this is a no-brainer for myself, a tech-savvy SEO, what’s going on with the professional security services we’re paying for?
Do we really have a lot of Canadian federal employees in China making it far too difficult to block logins to sensitive networks from that entire country save a few exceptions?
SEO news blog post by Ryan Morben @ 7:50 pm
It’s pretty much a given, what Microsoft strives to be in the OS arena Google strives to be on the ‘Net … everything.
From a recent discovery by ZDNet’s Garett Rogers posted on their Google blog Garett reveals his discovery that hidden in the GMail code is the following line:
function vJ(){if(uy){;return”+”Manage this domain”+” | “}else{return”"}}
The key piece in here that gives us a glimpse of what’s to come is the “Manage this domain”. What this indicates, according to Garett and certainly a reasonable assumption, is that Google is in the process of developing their own mail servers allowing people to set mail.google.com as thei mail server and have the main for their domain (beanstalk-inc.com for example) routed through the Google mail servers.
Taking this one step further and based in part on the launch of Google Web Page Creator last week and building on the launch of Google Analytics (for free) it appears that the fine folks at Google are preparing to not just index the Internet, they want to control it by monitoring how people use your site (Google Analytics), control how you design and host your site (Google Web Page Creator) and now, control how you communicate over the Internet with others.
So what’s next for Google? If it’s up to Sergey it would be an elevator to the moon (seriously) but more likely … a full scale hosting service, probably free provided that you show these little ads on your pages. And then? Well, all that’s left after total domination of the Internet would be that elevator plan. 
For more reading on what Google’s up to the ZDnet Google Blog is definitely one for your “Favorites”.
SEO news blog post by Dave Davies, CEO @ 5:20 pm
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