Kickass Torrents update
by Cito on Jun.13, 2013, under News
The common url for Kickass Torrents website http://kat.ph seems to be down. There is an article on Torrentfreak discussing the situation.
A few moments ago KickassTorrents disappeared from the Internet prompting the usual flurry of worried emails. While these instances of downtime are usually down to minor technical issues that tend to sort themselves out, there are signs that something a little more serious might be underway. Details are sketchy but at the moment it appears that the site’s KAT.ph domain is being replaced with a new one, KickAss.to.
Source: http://torrentfreak.com/kat-ph-goes-down-following-domain-issues-switches-to-kickass-to-130613/
You can still get to Kickass Torrents by going to their backup domain name: http://kickass.to/
So fret not, just point your web browser to their backup domain name kickass.to for now, and keep an eye on up to date Torrent news over on TorrentFreak
Sternnation forums closing temporarily
by Cito on May.28, 2013, under Blog, News
Mike from sternnation.com forums announced that due to personal issues he would be closing the sternnation forums for now. Between possible moving and taking care of his own stuff he didn’t have the time to keep eye on the forum and of course didn’t need all the aggravation that comes with that for the moment. So his decision to keep the domain and such but close the forum was a good idea so he could focus on what he needed to do.
For regulars of the sternnation.com forums you can find most everyone over on http://forum.dude-suit.net I have registrations set for manual approval so once you register I have to approve it. And the forum is set to members only, so it’s just a hangout for the sternnation members until Mike gets things taken care of and returns. Since I will be manually approving new accounts on http://forum.dude-suit.net you can leave a comment to this post with what nickname you signed up with if you don’t get approved right away.
Big thanks to Mike for running the forums and wish him well with the personal issues he has to take care of and hope to see him soon.
The Left Rights – Genesis 16:12
by Cito on May.17, 2013, under Music, Youtube
Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis!
Music video for The Left Rights’ “Genesis 16:12″.
Created by M dot Strange.
http://www.youtube.com/user/mdotstrange
SternNation forum temporary outage info – Updated 5/18
by Cito on May.16, 2013, under Blog, News
Update May 18, 2013
http://sternnation.com forums are back online, Mike got everything back up today after the Godaddy screwup. I’ve closed the backup forum for now. See you on the SternNation Forums!
”What happened?”
Regarding the outage of the SternNation forums May 15, 16…
Spoke to Mike, there has been a wave of people who have had hosting through GoDaddy have had their sites go down recently. There are posts on the godaddy forums as well as wordpress forums and various others. The reason Godaddy have been telling everyone including Mike of SternNation is “excessive DNS” issues.
Now to take hundreds of sites offline for this particular reason is a bit like chopping your toe completely off just because you had an ingrown toe nail. I spoke to Mike via emails and reading everyone’s complaints on other forums what I’ve been able to piece together is the common factor is a runaway sql server. Now those sites that host with Godaddy use Godaddy’s sql servers, and it’s probably a safe bet that the sql servers aren’t all shared. It’s probably all seperate virtual hosts, it’s very possible that the sql servers vhosts are on it’s own machine while the web hosting accounts are on it’s own machine. Anyhow it doesn’t matter how it’s really setup, but from I can piece together the majority of people with issues all ran forums or wordpress/drupal/joomla type sites.
In the case of a forum it could have been set to not disable hostname lookups, which if there were tons of abandoned accounts or lots of incoming traffic that would cause a whole lot of reverse ip dns requests you then combine this with hundreds of other Godaddy hosted forums also set to do hostname lookups, each time those logs or specific sections were accessed it would send a huge spike in dns traffic to Godaddy’s dns servers creating a type of “internal DDOS” in a sense. Blog sites like WordPress and such also have options to turn on hostname lookups or not.
This is my conclusion going on the posts on godaddy forums and wordpress.org forums at least. The annoying part is Godaddy never informed it’s customers of this issue and dropped the sites offline to deal with the problem without telling the customers creating a huge hornet’s nest of angry customers.
Anyhow with that said, Mike will have the sternnation forums back up and running shortly. But until then I tossed up a temporary forum for those looking for news can swing by and check it out until sternnation is back up. I do have registrations tightened down a bit, so when you register it may take a little bit as I have to approve it manually. But don’t fret, it’ll be taken care of as soon as I see it 
Update 5/18: Stern Nation Forums are back online! See ya on the forums.
Pirates Spend 300% More On Content
by Cito on May.12, 2013, under News
Interesting story today on Torrentfreak:
Telecoms regulator Ofcom has just published a study into the state of online copyright infringement in the UK, with some very interesting conclusions. The researchers found that 10% of the country’s most prolific infringers are responsible for almost 80% of all infringements carried out online, but with a bonus. These plus an additional 10% of infringers spend 300% more than ‘honest’ consumers who don’t infringe copyright at all.
Read the Full Story Here: http://torrentfreak.com/0-more-on-content-than-honest-consumers-130510/
This continues to prove that big media just don’t know what they are talking about when it comes to file sharing. A lot of folks in their 30′s and up like me may remember this same argument and occasional lawsuits making the news when big media were going after blank cassette tapes, dual cassette recorders, blank VHS tapes and VCR’s with record functions and even some fancier VCR’s with programmable record timers you could set to record your favorite show at a specific time. Of course history shows that big media lost their fight against cassette tape sharing, blank cassette and VHS tape mediums.
Bit nostalgic though thinking back on my highschool days sharing mix tapes with friends, or making that cheese “romantic” mix tape for a crush