Yes, probably old news 😉 but I thought I’d mention it here for completeness, as I blogged about the downtime. They’re up again , from the Netherlands, hosted at Leaseweb (home of Mininova as well) 😉 With a nice touch to the logo of their pirate ship bombing Hollywood 😉

As already reported a few minutes after the fact and on a few hundred newssites and weblogs, The Pirate Bay is currently offline. As most of you probably know, TPB was one of the biggest BitTorrent trackers and search engines around. They were based in Sweden, where what they did is legal (not seeding the actual files). They had a pretty impressive serverrack as well, I might add.

Now, they’ve had a few complaints and cases but every time it was ruled that they were doing nothing that was against Swedish law. That’s why it’s so strange now that all servers in the rack were confiscated (even ones not powering TPB) and that probably a few crew members are currently in custody. The raid was ordered by Swedish police after complaints from the Swedish anti piracy movement. I wonder how long it will take for them to come back online (not if, because I’m sure this was a desperate measure and everything will be let go once it’s once again proven that they were abiding Swedish laws)…

Although I actually never used it, it looked like a pretty good site – especially since the google-esque internationalized redesign they did, and the letters/emails they sent back to copyright complaints from lawyers were pretty hilarious.

… when you’re a scammer. See >here< for why you really shouldn’t try to rip people off.

Found this >hilarious piece of research< on IRC, thanks ytti.

Oh, and if you’re wondering why I’m ><‘ing my links: I’ve had complaints that they weren’t very clear in the rest of the text, which I agree with. I just couldn’t seem to fix it in the CSS in a jiffy without fucking up other links; I’ll try again later.

Seems the comment/guestbook spammers have rediscovered my blog since I upgraded to WordPress (they thought I was interesting enough to create a custom formfiller when this blog was still running self-written software, but now, they can use their standard wordpress bombers, yippie). Fortunately, I was never bothered even with a request to moderate, thanks to Akismet. Recommended!

It seems DNS.be has made a bit of a booboo… They have billed all agents for march (instead of april), resulting in negative credit balances (somehow march is a month with way more registrations than april) for many agents. Affected are at least Openminds , Priorweb and Stone IS – probably more. If your .be registrations don’t work today and/or tomorrow, this is why.

 Of course, today being a public holiday doesn’t help things, as there will probably be noone there to fix the mistake before tomorrow. Unfortunately, business on the internet goes on, 24/7, and people will expect domain names to be registered…

Cool thing, which I missed when flying to Mexico last time… Internet on the plane. Using pretty funky networking techniques, and it’s fun to see how the data available on the internet (I could check it from my own BGP routers as well) can be used to see where planes are (not very accurate but still). Just a pity they had to waste a whole /24 per plane, and then not even use the IP addresses but NAT everyone… The registered block is a /16, so that’s enough for 256 planes; there may be more blocks, I didn’t check.

Since a little over a week our hobby network Phyxia got connected to the FreeBIX Internet Exchange . We seem to have some software issues which appear to be hardware issues sometimes, but overall everything is working nicely. We even got peering up with EDPnet ! Toys for the boys ! 😉

Yes, yes, it’s GNU/Linux 😉

 Stumbled upon this page with a very clear look on why Linux is actually better (than Windows) for you, and your computer. It doesn’t hammer again and again on the freedom (as in speech or as in beer) but more on the actual advantages which can help you persuade others to try this wonderful OS out 😉

I was wondering why every time I did a search on ipkg.be the search counter incremented by 2. I checked through my code but nowhere was that statement being executed twice. After a while, thinking about something else related to AdSense, it dawned on me… I recalled seeing Google AdSense hits in my access_log for the site, requesting the exact same page as the user (to adjust to the content on the page). On a “search engine” ofcourse, this means that Google does the exact same search as the other user, effectively doubling the number of searches logged… I have adapted my code to check the user agent, will be fixing up the database later so that Google’s hits aren’t included anymore…