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Jan192012
Richard Stallman speaks tonight in Boston about SOPA, PIPA and Internet Freedom
There is still some space available to hear the founder of the Free Software movement and President of The Free Software Foundation, Richard Stallman speak about the proposed SOPA and PIPA laws and what we need to do to secure the freedom and power of the Internet.
Full details about this great event, including how to register for free, can be found on our events page.
See you all tonight!
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Jan182012
Free hosting for sites participating in the SOPA & PIPA blackout
Positive Internet is pleased to offer free hosting for sites participating in the SOPA & PIPA blackout today, January 18, 2012
The Positive Internet Company, a specialist GNU/Linux hosting, cloud services provider and Free and Open Source software advocate, supports its clients who are shutting down their websites on January 18, 2012 in opposition to the pending US SOPA and PIPA legislation by providing a them with free hosting and managed services for the duration their site is blacked out.
"Our clients, whether big or small businesses, are making a great sacrifice by shutting their sites down for an entire day to educate their users about, and protest against, these potential laws that seek to restrict Internet usage and we want to do all we can to support them in this important stand for Internet freedom," says Scott Molski, Vice President with Positive Internet. He continues, "it's a small sacrifice that all hosting providers who care about their customers and and the future of the Internet should make. We ask all of our hosting colleagues to join us in providing this aid to these sites and applications who are turning off their businesses to stand up for what's right."
Nick Mailer, founder of The Positive Internet Company and veteran Free and Open Source software evangelist adds that "SOPA and PIPA represent the latest in a decade-long string of attacks against the core principles of network self-determination and liberty. These principles have been the bedrock of the Internet's success, and are not simply ethical niceties but at the basis of its use in a properly free market. As with previous threats, we will not allow our species' communicative freedom to be held hostage by a handful of old-media oligarchies."
The Positive Internet Company is a leading managed services and hosting provider specializing in open source and Free software. Positive partners with startups, small businesses and some of the world's largest organizations including popular media sites like Rocks Paper Shotgun and Stephen Fry, major broadcasters like the BBC, banks, financial services firms, NGOs, political parties and entertainment groups, including the ever-popular 'Angry Birds' franchise. Positive has become the preferred choice for Free and open source managed hosting and cloud services, standards compliance, security and disaster-recovery.Positive is also hosting a number of free educational events to discuss SOPA & PIPA, "cloud computing", and how to get the most out of and avoid the pitfalls of "the cloud". Speakers include Richard Stallman, President of the Free Software Foundation, Nick Mailer, co-founder of The Positive Internet Company, and Yuriy Rusko, co-founder of Forumatic and contributor to PHPBB, the leading Free and Open forum and community software. Register today at http://www.positive-internet.com/events. Events from January 19-25 in Boston, Washington DC, Philadelphia, New York and New Jersey.
For more information, questions, etc. contact:
Scott Molski
+1 646 660 3252
scott.molski@positive-internet.com@posipeople
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Jan172012
Dr. Richard Stallman to speak in Boston about Freedom in "the cloud", SOPA and PIPA
On Thursday, January 19, 2012 at 6:30pm in Boston, MA, Dr. Richard Stallman, President of the Free Software Foundation will give a talk "What the ideas of Free Software imply for network services" as part of the Freedom in "the cloud": is it possible? event hosted Positive Internet.
This event is not technical in nature so anyone who uses the Internet should attend to learn about many of the freedoms in place and how we can preserve them in light of technical change and legal movements such as SOPA and PIPA.
Registration is free for this great and timely talk by the leader of the Free software movement. Register now.
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Jan172012
What's SOPA and why is Wikipedia down?
The Wikipedia community made a bold move in joining the January 18th protest against SOPA. They "blocked" their English-language site for the day. This gave users a taste of the void that might occur were the SOPA or PIPA bills to pass, with the subsequent draconian powers executed.
However much one might be frustrated by the loss of factoid-validation for a day, the temporary loss of Wikipedia is a price worth paying to bring the problems with these Bills to a wide attention. One day's symbolic blackout is a worthy investment in the continuing free and open Internet.
To learn more about the educational efforts by Wikipedia concerning SOPA and PIPA, visit Wikipedia's SOPA announcement.SOPA and PIPA would not achieve what they claim to wish to achieve. Furthermore, there is already plenty of legal recourse for those who believe their copyrights have been breached; indeed, laws like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act are already considered by most technically-savvy observers to be overly draconian. SOPA and PIPA take the kangaroo-court problems of the DMCA and make them astronomically worse. They take the approach of shoot first, ask questions later. And when they shoot, they use cluster weapons.
The US Government and its agents could command search engines, Internet Service Providers and hosting companies arbitrarily to block and change websites - sometimes completely - after little more than a complaint about one posting on one forum of the site. The host would be ordered to keep the block running automatically ad infinitum, at the very fundament of the Internet. As you can imagine, this would raise the costs of Internet services, as the industry would need to implement tools and procedures to comply with these new laws: tools that serve nobody's interests except those of the censors and their agents.
It will also dramatically shift the balance of power on the Internet. Even now, the DMCA has been used to chill free speech. SOPA and PIPA take that to the final extreme, where media oligarchs and worse will be able to flag sites as violators of SOPA and PIPA, and destroy their online presence totally and radically beyond the purview of any judge.
The peculiarly wide-ranging and ambiguous scope of the proposed legislation can be seen in its bizarre title: "To promote prosperity, creativity, entrepreneurship, and innovation by combating the theft of U.S. property, and for other purposes. —H.R. 3261". "Other purposes"? What "other purposes"? This is left to the imagination (quartering soldiers? Who knows?) . And it is astonishing that a Bill should wilfully confuse property with copyright licenses, which remain two distinct legal entities, however successful the propaganda phrase "intellectual property".
We join with and applaud sites, especially those with such broad audiences as Wikipedia, in bringing awareness to this proposed legislation, which is so inimical to liberty and free markets.
If you'd like to learn more, and are in New York, Boston, Philadelphia or Washington DC on January 19-25, please register for one of our free educational events about Cloud Computing and SOPA or a discussion with Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation about SOPA and freedom in "the cloud". -
Dec272011
Happy PosiDays!
Excuses, excuses! We have been rather busy this last year establishing our new PosiCloud and CloudCare Managed Cloud services, gliding more and more clients over the PCI compliance mountain and, as ever, helping some of the most popular sites and services on the web tick along merrily. We'll also have some big anouncments for you January!
Almost inevitably, updating the PosiBlog took rather a backseat to this, but our New Year's resolution is to remedy the paucity of posts here! We hope to provide tidbits on this blog more frequently, and look forward to hearing from everyone about topics you think we should cover. Feel free to mail us at good@positive-internet.com with feedback and ideas, or throw us a tweet on our new Twitter accout - we're @posipeople
In the meantime, we wish all our clients, customers, suppliers and staff all the best. Naturally, we remain on duty throughout the festive period, so should you need help at midnight on Christmas Eve, or a quick chat at 3am on New Year's day, we'll be around, bushy-eyed and bright-tailed. Our five global data centers will remain staffed by security as well as our professional Linux engineers at all times. With perhaps just a little more tinsel than usual.
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Dec232011
Daddy, What Did You Do?
From our colleagues at Positve UK:
The only thing more amazing than the Internet is how we take it for granted. In fact, we can actually slip into holding it in slight contempt. It remains the butt of many a radio panel-show's tedious jokes ("haha, Wikipedia is not always reliable. haha, the Internet contains pornography" and so forth). You'd have thought that nearly 20 years of the Internet's absorption into public consciousness would have dampened such fatuous punchlines. But no, the audience titters still, as if in eternal sympathetic vibration with the 90s collective memory of "it's just a geeky CB radio fad".
Recently, the director Steven Soderbergh discussed his latest film on a radio review programme. The movie makes fun of blogging, which he terms as no better than "graffiti on a bathroom wall". His leading man even wore prosthetic buck-teeth so he could be the "typical blogger". Quelle dérision! Soderbergh mused, happily, that in his test-screenings, the audience gained almost orgasmic pleasure every time the Internet was attacked. They couldn't get enough of Net bashing, which they enjoyed more than the rest of the film put together. The film-reviewers interviewers chuckled along, in amiable agreement. That they then immediately promoted the Internet podcast in which this interview was being promulgated didn't seem to phase them.
Such cognitive dissonance abounds. Even while they giggle nervously, most of the technophobic titterers would rather have a limb extricated than their smartphone. They would sooner cancel the whole postal service than one Email account. However they sneer at wikipedia, they would whimper if ordered to visit the public library every time they needed to look up a footling fact or all-encompassing concept instead of using this astonishing online resource.
In this season of Goodwill to all Men, we should pause to consider what an astonishingly lucky species we are to have managed to coalesce about us something as miraculous as the Internet. A miracle can be defined in a number of ways. One definition that captures its essence without having to rely on playing supernatural games is to term a miracle any happenstance that was somewhat unlikely, and did not necessarily follow the predicted contextual logic of the times. SUch a miracle emerges as a delicate butterfly from a cocoon of capricious chaos. Such a miracle might be seen as something delicate, something as fragile as a growing crystal, however ubiquitous and sturdy its eventual shape. Its formation was mercurial and unlikely and, were we to reverse time and reset the experiment, so to speak, would likely not follow the same path again.
And when you start taking such a miracle for granted, you can put it on a neglectful path to destruction. You forget how lucky you are to enjoy its benefits. You forget how delicately inchoate was its formation. You assume that its features are part of a solidly inevitable march of historical progress. And your hubris bloats to the level where you even enjoy a little contempt for its stale ubiquity. Haha, that wikipedia. Hoho, those blogs. And you forget that the whole complex collection of services and social conventions that make up the Internet is predicated on a fundamental notion of liberty. And you forget that all liberty comes at the price of an eternal vigilance. And you allow the desperate, malign or merely opportunistic to take advantage of this amnesia and eviscerate the miracle. And then you walk despondently amidst the shards of the shattered crystal, wondered what went wrong. But no cyber-equivalent of humming "Where Have all the Flowers Gone" will bring it back.
Early in the New Year, the American government aims to help Big Media to eviscerate the Internet, to destroy the miracle and shatter its crystalline delicacy. As ever, Big Media is blaming "piracy" as its excuse to stamp its jackboot repeatedly on the face of our online lives, and is bundling this repression into a horrible proposal entitled SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act). That there are plenty of more engaging and fruitful ways to fund creative endeavours is ignored. It seems we must all be coerced into accepting that a failing business-model from the last millennium deserves no less than full might of the State to bolster its clumsy missteps. Suffice to say, it is sadly not hyperbole to claim that the provisions of this act would help to destroy the Internet. It is technically inevitable. And it would give to the American government the same arbitrary rights of censorship now enjoyed by such places as North Korea and Saudi Arabia.
Fortunately, a large constituency of the online world refuses to join Soderbergh's titterers. It is taking action, writing to Congress and fighting against the dying of the enlightened Internet. Happily, this panoply against the disembowling of the Internet includes a wide range of organisations and individuals, many of whom can be found bickering in other circumstances, including Google and Microsoft. You might assume that the fightback would also include the Internet hosting providers of the world. And you would be correct. With one glaring and shameful exception: GoDaddy. We do not make a habit of dissing or even merely discussing our competitors. It is unprofessional and usually seems peevish at best; however, in this case, when the whole industry is standing up against the forces of darkness, we wish to join our ethically-sound competitors in drawing to attention such obnoxious behaviour. This is not the first time that GoDaddy has courted controversy. But this time, it doesn't seem merely happy to exterminate the odd pachyderm: it is eager to help to destroy the Internet that gives it profit. Such behaviour brings the whole hosting industry into disrepute, and we join our honourable competitors in countering this crawlingly tawdry display.
A large campaign has formed to urge people move their domains from GoDaddy in protest at their behaviour. It might be self-serving of us to support such a campaign. After all, capitalism enjoys nothing more than the opportunity to kick a competitor when it is down. This really does go beyond that for us, though. We have always revelled in the miracle of the open Internet, and feel an existential shudder in our core whenever someone attacks it. Thus, if you have domains with GoDaddy, our hostmistress will be happy to advise how to transfer them to someone more ethical. Whilst we would, of course, be delighted to take the domains under our own wing, we will also be happy to advise on how to transfer your domains to any competitor of ours more ethically sound than GoDaddy. This means so much to us that we would prefer to take the hit in time and effort to give business to a reputable competitor than to see GoDaddy remain unscathed by their wilful defilement of the miracle that sustains us all.
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Dec152011
Are online merchants ready for IRS 6050W?
Are online merchants prepared to meet the new IRS requirements now that we are a mere five months away from the date personal returns, and usually that means small business returns as well, are due? Most commonly known as IRS 6050W, the new tax law that requires payment processors such as PayPal and other merchant account providers like FirstData to collect identifying information and then report that information to the IRS takes effect in 2011.
To many small and home based business this law is likely going to come as a shock at tax time (or now as the providers scramble to get the identifying information). We would expect that many smaller merchants might have the "cash business" mentality and are wrongly omitting income from online businesses from their tax returns as they knew it wasn't reported by third parties.
The key items to tax away from this new law is that you are going to have to provide tax identifying information to your payment processor (EIN or SSN). Then, if you exceed $20,000 in transaction value AND 200 transactions, the processor will send all of your revenue information to the IRS.
PayPal has a pretty good information page that goes into more detail and for those who are really interested you can sit by the fire and dig into the US Code.
All in all, yet another sign that the wild west era of the Internet is coming to an end. So this year and years forward, make sure you are accounting for your tax liability in all your online business and properly reporting the income to the IRS as for the first time in history, someone else will be reporting it too.While we at Positive don't get involved with the Internal Revenue Code, we host many Level 1 PCI DSS apps and sites and are PCI hosting and PCI compliance experts and can happily help you with any payment need or refer you to experts who have specialized expertise such as with 6050W.
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Dec072011
Total Cost of Ownership of Open Source Systems
Today, Glyn Moody of Computer World to another look at the classic enterprise debate of open source vs proprietary systems total cost of ownership. While these "reports" are often a dime a dozen and usually corrupted with bias, we think this one highlights some good thinking points for systems design that we generally discuss when our clients come to us for advice.
The report behind the post is "Total Cost of Ownership of Open Source Software" released by the UK government under the Open Government License. Here are our favorite points:
1 - "Open source software is different from proprietary software as they each place different demands on, and offer different benefits to, the host organization and it is embedded in somewhat different software ecosystems and is served by different supply chains."
This issue goes back to a line like "with great freedom comes great responsibility". With proprietary software, the vendor gives you want they want to give you, they service and support it and they update it (hopefully on all those points! still have to do your due diligence there). Customers then get the one stop shop for working software to accomplish a goal. On the open source side, the software is there to do what you want, or close to it, but if you want support or service you'll need to find another vendor or self serve. This creates fear.
Luckily, finding a one stop shop for free and open software has become easier over the years as Positive Internet, and companies who have followed us, offer VIP Managed Hosting and CloudCare VIP for all open source software giving you the freedom but taking over most of the responsibility.
2 - "One of the things that emerges from the report is an appreciation amongst users of free software that the benefits go well beyond simple savings: early adopters of open source applications in the public sector quote benefits such as reduced vendor lock-in as one of their key arguments alongside lower costs."
The vendor lockin should cause far more concern than any other issue for selecting a mission critical piece of software. How many times have we seen software companies go out of business, discontinue features and products, fundamentally make changes, raise prices, a project champion leaves, etc. You lose all control over your business when you choose proprietary software to run it.
If you have free and open software, say Magento to run your ecommerce sites. You can upgrade or not upgrade, hire a developer to customize just for your business and then any other developer can take over later, etc. So before selecting any proprietary software, make sure to think long term and realize that you ARE locked in so the benefits must out-way this severe detriment.
3 - "A facet that is seen as beneficial but rather unexpected is how a culture of innovation and more risk taking behavior can be promoted as open source is used. Open source adoption has, for example, forced local authorities to become more accepting of "mistakes" that can be identified and rectified quickly by hands-on access to code and configurations. Experience of such agility and empowerment can spur the change in favor of open source."
Essentially, moving the agile mind set out of startups and into all parts of the enterprise. Computers will always work for you. You can change things, fix mistakes, learn how things work to make improvements, and then actually make those improvements, right now, not waiting for upgrades, and if they don't work just quickly roll back.
To learn more about how our Open Source Software Managed Services can help you more easily and confidently realize the benefits of free and open software, just give us a call and we're happy to share all of our experiences.
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Nov282011
US Government Seizes the most domains ever in Black Friday "In Our Sites" raid
It is widely reported that the US Federal Government once again seized a large number of domains of websites that they believed sold counterfeit goods. In this round, the authorities timed the seizure to coincide with Cyber Monday, though according domain registrar records, sites were seized on Black Friday. Now, all the seized domains, more than 150, redirect to seizedservers.com.
In this particular sting, Federal Agents purchased goods through the sites as a normal customer would. After confirming that the goods were counterfeit, investigators obtained domain name seizure orders from a federal judge.
While businesses selling counterfeit and other protected goods are operating illegally and should be subject to the criminal and civil code as appropriate, the concern here is the further eroding freedom of the internet.
Domain redirects and seizures will have little effect on the ultimate problem, as these business often operate outside of countries with strong intellectual property laws. So, all the need to do is simply register a new domain, pop up the same old site, they still have their inventory, and all in all they are back in business only with only a minor disruption.
On the other hand, the innocent need to be protected. There have been cases of governments seizing entire shared servers, bringing down 100s of innocent websites to shut done one suspect, not guilty but just suspect, one. Here, if an innocent site makes it onto this list, an agent doesn't properly identify something as not counterfeit, someone filed a false report, etc. and legitimate business just had its website seized during the busiest shopping weekend of the year. Not only did they lose the actual sales, but lost the goodwill of customers once they see the seizure notice when trying to do their shopping.
Such tactics that do such little long term good and have such potential to do severe harm to innocent businesses must be resisted to ensure that the internet remains free, both in commerce and in politics. -
Nov232011
Be Thankful For Free Software
Yet another year has passed and the great American holiday of Thanksgiving is upon us. A long weekend to enjoy some time off with great food and friends and family.
In addition to everything else in life, we all need to be thankful to the great community of free and open software developers. Perhaps this community can be called the great potluck dinner that created the internet as we know it today! People with different backgrounds, different skill sets, and more come together with the goal of creating software that is freely available for education, recreation and commerce.
To learn more about this great movement, you can always visit it's founder and Positive client Richard Stallman's personal page or the great Free Software Foundation.
Happy Thanksgiving and Happy Coding!
Looking for something older? Visit the archives.