Dutch Pirate Bay Blocking Case Gets a Do-Over
The Pirate Bay is arguably the most widely blocked website on the Internet. ISPs from all over the world have been ordered by courts to prevent users from accessing the torrent site. In most countries courts have decided relatively quickly, but not in the Netherlands, where there’s still no final decision after eight years. A Dutch court first issued an order to block The Pirate Bay in 2012, but this decision was overturned two...
Piracy: If the Internet Isn’t Broken, Should We Fix it Until it is?
Back in the 80s, I fancied myself as a half-decent 8-bit coder but of course, there was always someone who did it outrageously better. Like my idols in the C64 demo scene, for example, whom I eventually rubbed shoulders with. They made computers do things they weren’t supposed to, like displaying graphics in places the machine didn’t natively allow or playing music on the heads of disc drives. The aim, at least in part,...
‘Well Respected’ People Send DMCA Notices to Hide Their Mishaps
Most of us like well-respected people. They’ve usually worked hard to get where they are and have found some way to give back to society. Unfortunately, even these people might have made a mistake or two in the past. And if those end up on the Internet, they’re hard to erase. That doesn’t mean that you can’t try of course… Recently, we stumbled upon a series of DMCA takedown requests which kindly request...
5 open source alternatives to Skype
If you’ve been a working adult for more than a decade, you probably remember the high cost and complexity of doing audio- and video conferences. Conference calls were arranged through third-party vendors, and video conferences required dedicated rooms with expensive equipment at every endpoint. read...
My first sysadmin mistake
If you work in IT, you know that things never go completely as you think they will. At some point, you’ll hit an error or something will go wrong, and you’ll end up having to fix things. That’s the job of a systems administrator. As humans, we all make mistakes. Sometimes, we are the error in the process, or we are what went wrong. As a result, we end up having to fix our own mistakes. That happens. We all make...
