Archive for April, 2009
Geocities is closing!
Say goodbye to free hosting that once was. Yahoo announced it is now closing down its popular free hosting service geocities.yahoo.com. As stated on its website:
“Current GeoCities customers:
After careful consideration, we have decided to close GeoCities later this year. We’ll share more details this summer. For now, please sign in or visit the help center for more information.”
The site is no longer accepting new customer signups and will eventually close the service completely. That sounds like a big 2.8 billion dollar mistake in my books.
For all of you Geocities members who are now going to be looking for a new home. I highly recommend you NOT sign up for Yahoo hosting and pay $11.95/month. There are much cheaper alternatives available out there including http://www.bluehost.com for just $3.95 per month and they have more features than Yahoo.
Time Warner Meter Cap Stopped
It looks like a major victory for fans of unmetered bandwidth. Time Warner announced today that they are going to discontinue plans to start issuing tiered pricing to customers. The new plans were to cap bandwidth for users of their high-speed internet plans. There was heavy pressure coming from the customers as well as government officials and due to the amount of complaints they received they have abandoned the plan. At least for now.
German site wikileaks.de suspended – Censorship!
On April 9th 2009, the domain registration for the website Wikileaks.de was suspended by DENIC, Germany’s registration authority, without prior notice.
On March 25th of 2009 the German government introduced a nation-wide internet censorship system. This gave them the ability to shut down internet sites that they did not agree with or thought needed to be removed from view. Australia and Germany are the only Western democracies publicly considering such a mandatory censorship. The system is much like the censorship that takes place in mainland China and is ridiculed by free countries around the world. Will the loss of freedom ever end?
Free 2GB of backup space
Now you can get 2GB of backup space for your important files completely free! Just click on the link to visit MOZY and see what its all about. If you need more space than that, they have plans starting at $4.95 per month.
Mozy Backup Services
Facebook blocks Piratebay
Facebook recently started blocking links from http://www.thepiratebay.org stating it was due to the pending legal proceedings that took place recently in Sweden. The Pirate Bay added a “Share on Facebook” button to their torrent file links a few weeks ago and users could share torrent links with friends via their Facebook profiles. While the Pirate Bay does not actually host or contain any copyrighted software, they provide a torrent service in which users can upload a link to share files with each other. Data is broken up into small chunks and comes from multiple torrent “seed” computers and users who are downloading the files are also sharing the parts they download with others thus making it difficult to track where the files are coming from. While piracy has always been an issue that content providers have struggled with, the issue of file sharing showed up around the late nineties. Newsgroups, file sharing services, AOL chat rooms, and now torrent trackers have all participated in allowing internet users to connect with each other and share their information. Whether it be for legal or non-legal purposes. The main story here is that file-sharing and piracy are not going away anytime soon. The big question is how to make it work in favor rather than against you?
Read more at: http://www.itworld.com/legal/66173/expected-facebook-halts-pirate-bay-links
ICANN to offer custom TLD’s
ICANN has proposed a new method for TLD’s on the web. The new proposal is to allow custom TLD’s opening up the world from .com, .net etc. to things such as .sweet .movies .games etc. You would essentially be able to name your website whatever you wanted. Maybe if the do that we will buy the domain name www.hostslide.news or something to that effect. This could be a major change in the way people purchase domains – and offer a whole new world of internet real estate.
Read more at: http://www.icann.org/en/topics/new-gtld-program.htm