ShortFormBlogdns Archives

So Obama has thrown in his lot with Silicon Valley paymasters who threaten all software creators with piracy, plain thievery.
Rupert Murdoch • Posting on Twitter yesterday afternoon about the Obama administration’s stance on SOPA, which discouraged the bill in its current form. CNET’s Greg Sandoval says that Murdoch’s reaction is a strong sign that the entertainment industry is starting to lose the battle, with a key provision of PIPA and SOPA — which involved the DNS system — getting removed from both acts. Murdoch, meanwhile, was quick to rip Google for what he perceived as their strong influence on the White House statement: “Piracy leader is Google who streams movies free, sells advts around them. No wonder pouring millions into lobbying,” he said on Twitter. On the plus side, at least Rupe isn’t making gambling jokes that could be misinterpreted. source

Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

We’d like to fess up to something. Earlier today, we wrote a blog post about the latest bit of the Wikileaks saga. In the post, we mentioned a site called EasyDNS as being responsible. When we wrote the entry, we weren’t intending to blame them, but just to note that it happened. If Amazon of all sites can’t handle Wikileaks, we’d expect their beleaguered DNS provider to have even more of a claim than Amazon did. (And others weren’t quite so kind.) Here’s the problem, though. It wasn’t EasyDNS. It was EveryDNS. Without intending a pun, it was an easy mistake to make. EasyDNS soon after wrote a blog post about how everyone was making the same mistake as us, including Gawker, and called us out for it. (Deservedly, mind you. Let’s own up to the fact that we’re not perfect.) We’d like to offer up some thoughts on this whole mess:

How we work We’re a small staff, and whenever me (Ernie Smith) or fellow blogger Seth Millstein blog about stuff, we’re usually working alone, with the goal of trying to cover a lot of stuff quickly. We’re looking up interesting links but offering up commentary or interesting quotes, numbers or blurbs in the process.
Our weaknesses Unlike a larger site, like, say, Gawker (who made the same mistake and isn’t owning up to it), we don’t have an army of editors and are often working around other jobs, so sometimes we’re forced to write our posts in a limited amount of time while self-editing. Some days it doesn’t work out for us, but we try.
Owning up to it Look, our friends at EasyDNS have had a rough day, and we made it a little bit rougher on them. There are some weaknesses in how we work, and instead of chalking it up to a two-second mistake, we’re going to work on our self-editing processes to ensure diligence. To EasyDNS, we’re sorry. source

» One other thought: We’d like to think that when we screw up, there’s opportunity to be found in it. Maybe the problem is collective workload. So, let’s try to make some lemonade out of this: We’re always interested in having more voices on ShortFormBlog, so let us know if you might be interested at trying your hand at the short-form storytelling we do.

Posted by Ernie Smith • 1 Comment • Permalink

crazy Days after Amazon shut down its access to Wikileaks, they came under an attack so strong that their domain name distributor, EveryDNS, had to rescind their ownership of Wikileaks.org. WTF?
crazier As of right now, the very controversial site remains up at wikileaks.ch, but it only forwards to an IP address. Wonder who wants to force them offline? The U.S.? Nah, that simply couldn’t be. source

» Correction: To our friends at EasyDNS, Sorry. We feel bad. It was EveryDNS, kids. (It’s what we get for posting a little fast. In our defense, the much-larger GigaOM also made the same mistake. Read here for a full, heartfelt correction.)

Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

15 Jan 2012 10:05