A Dysfunctional Playground

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.

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

Months of constant Megaupload controversy, video of the raids leaked, Megaupload owner Kim Dotcom released and most all of the charges dropped, and many many more other news surround the controversial file storage site.

The new “Mega” is now officially online!

Users will get 50 Gig of free data storage! So far that tops any “cloud” service to date. You’d have to pay quite a bit to get that much storage with services like Dropbox, Rapidshare, Amazon, etc. Plus no one in their right mind would use rapidshare anyhow, there is nothing “rapid” about rapidshare.

So head on over to Mega today and give it a try, I personally haven’t tested it yet but will see how the speed is and how sharing fairs for the new reincarnated Megaupload

https://mega.co.nz/

In her final days as Commander of the International Space Station, Sunita Williams of NASA recorded an extensive tour of the orbital laboratory and downlinked the video on Nov. 18, just hours before she, cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko and Flight Engineer Aki Hoshide of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency departed in their Soyuz TMA-05M spacecraft for a landing on the steppe of Kazakhstan. The tour includes scenes of each of the station’s modules and research facilities with a running narrative by Williams of the work that has taken place and which is ongoing aboard the orbital outpost.

Video of the raid on Megaupload’s founder Kim Dotcom’s mansion.

For more than six months there have been claims and counterclaims about what happened in January when New Zealand police raided the mansion of Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom. Now video of the event has been released to the public and it includes helicopters, armed officers, dog units and multiple police vehicles – Hollywood style.

Source: http://torrentfreak.com/video-police-raid-on-the-mansion-of-megauploads-kim-dotcom-120808/