Chad's News

PayPal—it’s not just for eBay anymore.

Link: http://money.cnn.com/…

Just enter the domain name, and this site will tell you who is hosting it. Not sure it works perfectly, especially when dealing with resellers.

Link: http://whoishostingthis.com/
(via digg)

Are you a legitimate mass emailer who has problems getting your messages past spam filters? Well there is a solution. Five major ISPs will guarantee delivery for a fee of $0.0025 per message.

Link: http://arstechnica.com/…

I’ve read about people losing jobs or job offers because of stuff they posted on the internet, sometimes years earlier when they were in college. There are also the criminals who got caught after uploading videos of their crimes. But this one takes the cake. The man in question lost an expensive lawsuit because of his online blogging. As a general measure, always be careful what you say online—it can come back to haunt you.

Link: http://www.boston.com/…
(via Kim Komando)

Last week Comcast demonstrated a working cable internet system with 150Mbps download speeds. Dubbed DOCSIS 3.0 (current cable systems use DOCSIS 1.1), it’s about 25 time faster than existing cable technology. Large-scale deployment may begin as early as next year. One downside, however is that the 150Mbps is shared amongst households connected to a node, so it’s possible to get much slower speeds.

Link #1: http://www.rockymountainnews.com/…
(via Slashdot)

Link #2: http://arstechnica.com/…

The linked article is a technical discussion on IPv6, the next-generation internet protocol. For those Chad’s News readers who are not technical, I suggest just reading the first page and a half to two pages, which explain the history of IPv4 (the current internet protocol), why we need IPv6, and the IPv6 addressing scheme. Adoption of IPv6 has been very slow, due in large part to the popularity of network address translation (NAT). The switch to IPv6 can be quite expensive in both time and money, and for many companies there really isn’t a compelling reason to make the transition. The US Government, however, is helping the process by mandating a switch. In addition, Asian countries have an interest in IPv6 and are implementing networks that use the new protocol.

Link: http://arstechnica.com/…

This guy wanted to determine if dynamic web content (such as that generated by javascript) would show up in Google search results. He created a web site with two nonsense words in static HTML, two in dynamic javascript, and two in another form of javascript. Only the static words were indexed by Google. So if you have a web site that relies on dynamic content, don’t expect it to show up in search engines. This does not apply to PHP-generated content, because PHP runs on the server—unlike javascript which runs on the client.

The Googlebot ignores both javascript and cookies, which has been known to cause problems with poorly designed web sites.

Link: http://www.brainhandles.com/…
(via Slashdot)

I usually ignore Robert X. Cringely’s rants, but this time he’s hit upon an interesting problem. Earthlink is dropping a huge percentage of its users’ emails, with no warning and no recourse. They only admit the issue when contacted about it—so there are many users with no idea they’re losing emails. And even though they admit to it, Earthlink is not fixing the problem. I find this mind-boggling and outrageous.

Link: http://www.pbs.org/…
(via Slashdot)

Fresh on the heels of The Million Dollar Homepage, Alex Tew has come up with a new idea: Pixelotto. The pixels cost twice as much ($2 apiece), but he’s going to give away the extra $1 million to a random user who clicks one of the advertisements. Nice idea. The prize fund is already up to $135,000.

Link: http://pixelotto.com/
(via Nothing To Do With Arbroath)

In 2005, the US Air Force added cyberspace to its list of operational areas (i.e., air, space). Now it is planning to create a cyberspace command.

http://today.reuters.com/…
(via engadget)

There is an interesting legal case going on in a US District Court, with ramifications for the entire internet. Spamhaus is an organization that publishes a spam blacklist, and it was sued by a blacklisted company earlier this year. Spamhaus initially participated in the proceedings but then withdrew, stating that a US court had no authority over a company based in the UK. A summary judgement was ordered, which Spamhaus ignored. Now the plaintiff is trying to get the Spamhaus domain name shut down, via a proposed court order (PDF) to both the US-based ICANN and the Canadian domain registrar Tucows. ICANN has stated that it cannot comply with the proposed order and that only Tucows can do so. Since Tucows is based in Canada, it does not have to comply with a US court order. So we have a US court possibly trying to shut down a UK organization by issuing a court order to a Canadian company. This is a true test of who really controls the internet. Note that the court order has only been proposed, and has not yet been signed by the judge.

Spamhaus’ blacklist is responsible for blocking about 50 billion spam messages each day. This is an estimated 75 to 90 percent of the total email traffic, so shutting down Spamhaus would cause a four- to ten-fold increase in the amount of email worldwide. Spamhaus is predicting doom and gloom if that were to occur.

http://arstechnica.com/…

http://arstechnica.com/…

http://www.itworld.com/…

UPDATE: The judge has denied the proposed order.

The Reuters news agency is opening a virtual news bureau in the online world of Second Life. The bureau will provide real-world news.

http://www.infoworld.com/…

http://today.reuters.com/…