Category Archives: Technical

Technical

Wikileaks

Julian Assange

This week has seen continued drama surrounding the website WikiLeaks and it’s head Julian Assange. Behind the scenes, a cyber war is being fought by opponents and defenders of the site.

Various providers of services to WikiLeaks, including hosting companies, dns providers, payment gateways and others have withdrawn service over the last 2 weeks. This action prompted a furious backlash against their websites by angry supporters of WikiLeaks.

Most providers who withdrew services cited breaches of their terms and conditions in one way or another – some technical, some not. Paypal said “…our payment service cannot be used for any activities that encourage, promote, facilitate or instruct others to engage in illegal activity. We’ve notified the account holder of this action.” Others were subject to denial of service attacks. Few, if any, have stated their action was as a response to US governement pressure.

As quickly as providers have halted services, website mirrors and new domain names have sprung up around the world. Meanwhile supporters of the site have set up retaliatory attacks on providers who withdrew services. Mastercard and Visa have both seen outages on their website in the last few days. One such group , Operation Payback, even advocates a mass faxing campaign to tie up communications at companies such as Amazon, MasterCard, Moneybookers, PayPal, Visa and Tableau Software.

For web hosts, it’s time to take a good look at the terms and conditions of service. French host OVH is all over the news this week because of its decision to request a judicial review of its responsibility associated with removing WikiLeaks from its servers, and to continue hosting the site until that review is complete. A survey by WHIR of hosters makes interesting reading – hosts were split 50/50 on whether they would host WikiLeaks at all.

Monitoring website Netcraft has real-time performance graphs for all the main players at http://uptime.netcraft.com/perf/reports/performance/wikileaks

Opinion, Technical

Vint Cerf addresses 6::UK event

Vint Cerf at 6::UK

Vint Cerf, founding father of the internet, spoke yesterday at the first 6::UK conference to promote adoption of the next generation IPv6 IP addressing system.

2020Media was at the event and was pleased to find our preperations and progress are already well ahead of most of UK business.

2020Media published its plans for IPv6 last year here. It’s anticpated that all IPv4 addresses will be allocated from the central pool by summer 2011, so the 6::UK group aim to encourage all UK stakeholders to act now to be ready for the new addressing system.

Any broadband customer who’d like to start using IPv6 on their connection can do so right now, for free, using our free tunnelling service. Please contact us to request a tunnel.

Opinion, Technical

2020Media supports ISOC IPv6 project

1 Comment

The IPv6 Matrix project, proudly supported and hosted by 2020Media, was featured in a presentation at London INET this week. The ISOC project looks at the entire internet for take up of next generation IPv6 addresses. IPv4 addresses are due to run out in under a year so adoption of IPv6 addresses is crucial to the future growth of the internet.

INET London

INET is a worldwide set of conferences looking at the future of the internet. Opportunities, threats and challenges to business were examined and discussed by the participants.  Matthew Ford, technology program manager from the Internet Society spoke about the current state of internet penetration and how ISPs are constantly increasing capacity to keep up with demand. The big 6 ISPs who account for 94% of UK broadband services now use an arsenal of technological techniques to manage, control, and limit their users internet use. These include traffic shaping, deep packet inspection, acceptable use policies (AUP) and limits hidden deep in their terms and conditions.

2020Media’s broadband has clear up-front quotas on bandwidth use, no deep packet inspection or traffic shaping, and a clear indication of the line speed you can expect. View our broadband site for more information.

Other comments of interest included one likening the internet to the large banks – “too big to fail”. The internet is now such a essential part of the way services are delivered to the public that it is now considered essential infrastructure. ISOC warned that in the future the freedoms and accessability of the entire internet we have now, may not exist. Their Future Scenarios videos demonstrate some of the problems we are internet users and providers may face.

Technical, Tips and Tricks

Joomla User Group

Another meeting of the Joomla London User Group took place yesterday in London. The user group is now 2 years old and is attended by about 10 people each monthly meeting.

A useful tip mentioned this meeting was about extending Joomla through the many add-ons available. The central place for find Joomla add-ons is the JED (Joomla Extensions Directory). This directory lists both commercial and free extensions. There are often several extenstions that tackle the same need so it can be hard to know which would be best. We advise that you check the views and reviews show in JED very carefully – if there only a few this can mean that the extension is not particularly popular and may lead to the developer abandoning it.  It’s also worth looking at the ‘last updated’ date next to ‘Views’. Not all extensions need updates of course, but if an add-on has a recent update it’s a sign of an active project.

Joomla Extensions Directory

Some of the user group had been experimenting with Joomla 1.6, the tenth beta of which had just been released. They said there is still a way to go, and there a certain issues that remain unresolved. Clearly the final release isn’t going to appear just yet.

The user group meets on the 3rd Tuesday of each month and you can find out more on their website.

Finally, Joomla!Day 2010 is taking place in Ipswitch, Suffolk from Saturday, 30th October to Sunday, 31st October 2010 inclusive.

Joomla hosting requires a certain environment on the server and 2020Media’s Joomla hosting is designed to deliver exactly the right specification for all Joomla websites.