Anyone interested in contributing should go to http://www.opequip.org/forums/ and create threads for your area (if not already there) under organizing, volunteering, donating. Say what you can do and promote locally. Also if you have ideas about broadening the goals of the project, go to http://www.opequip.org/forums/ideas/ !!
Because they're in the middle of BFE. A beautiful wine country town far, far from everything.
[Note, I can't say for sure that's why the above person doesn't work there anymore, but it's likely. I interviewed several times and was astounded that they wanted me to relocate to the middle of nowhere for a 3 month contract.]
That's an opinion. Stating opinion as fact is a worthless contribution, in fact a detriment, to healthy discussion.
I wouldn't argue that there's moral high ground here, I'd simply put it this way:
Anyone who thinks there is a better way to keep people from pirating music than to make the legal means of acquisition simple, affordable, and to not play games with release dates, is a fucking idiot.
Right, that works really well for YouTube. The great problem that is created when one tries to apply rules in this way is that, look, big companies won't suffer, and small ones will unduly.
The internet is full of user-generated-content sites and the core objection to SOPA is that we cannot police every posting. We do not currently have a legal obligation to do anything other than respond to complaints.
Further, as a veteran of the hosting industry, I'm really disappointed in BlueHost for taking action against a paying customer's domain name. Be sure to read the SLA and TOS when you sign up for services.
I am against SOPA just like everyone else; however that does not mean we don't have a duty to police our own sites. In this case, someone misusing a service caused the whole service to suffer - including paying customers. This has nothing to do with SOPA but with making sure your business runs properly, and won't affect or cast a bad light on your service.
As for the disappointment at BlueHost - they should have probably let the customer know before taking action - but other than that I think they did the right thing. As a veteran of the hosting industry, if one of your customers wordpress blog was hacked and hosting a phishing site, would you not disable the site and let the customer know right away that they need to clear things up? That's just a random example, but any sane company will protect their servers via a TOS - if they didn't I would be quite concerned about the service they are offering. Just my $0.02 on this..
I'm sorry, DNS/Registration is NOT the same as an exploited website.
There is nothing intrinsically bad about DNS that it needs to be turned off; the OP has already said they were using different hosting.
BlueHost was in no way vulnerable, and in no way needed to protect itself, as the only traffic was DNS requests. GoDaddy tries to pull the same thing with disabling DNS[1].
I feel like we need a Chris Crocker video about DNS systems this month.
I remember being "Top Graded" as an "A Player" when I was at Rackspace. In addition to everyone quickly beginning to hate me, I caught an article on Top Grading in the next few days which said that A players have an average tenure of 3 months, mostly due to the fact that we shake things up and are unafraid to challenge anyone, which eventually gets tiring. B players are loyal and anyone who has actually read on how all this is supposed to work realizes that C players are just in the wrong job, possibly even at the right company. They're unhappy and they stop trying, unless you can redeploy them.
A lot of this is great, but it's clear that the author has not actually followed the process of launching AWS. Bezos did not wake up one day and decide to start selling his datacenter space. AWS was developed, clearly after this person left Amazon, for Amazon developers. The engineer (CTO?) responsible for this woke up one day and realized, well, fuck, we could sell this. Pairing some of the stories here with that basic knowledge actually explains a lot of the SOA startups popping up in EC2. Companies are beginning to form in the shape of departments at Amazon, which is interesting, I'm not sure it's awesome.
That said, let's not fool ourselves. There is nothing more wrong with The Internet right now than EC2. It is poorly executed and Amazon's position as a market leader has made them incredibly lazy about improving it or contributing to the core technologies (Xen!) which are responsible for the most complex bits of it.
