Elliott C. Back: Internet & Technology

The new server is up, and running. Load is something ridiculously low, say 1%. I also have 100GB of disk space, SQL running on server, the whole works. DNS is also transferred from Dreamhost, although I’m waiting on them to fix my subdomains. I removed them from the hosting, and added a CNAME * -> elliottback.com, but their individual A records still live on. I really do like my new Plesk environment, though. It’s so gorgeous, if a little clunky:

I really do enjoy it so far. Having some trouble getting BIND going, but I don’t need that anyway yet. I totally recommend Cari.net so far!

Update

I’m getting all the subdomains back up now, since dreamhost’s fixed our DNS config and dropped all the old A records.

I guess I’ve got a major problem with outsourcing and globalization now. An Indian blogger is ripping off my content. As other countries and cultures enter the primarily western blogosphere, they may bring a different attitude towards intellectual property. However, I believe, in this case, that there is an absolute standard. For educational purposes, here’s what he’s copied so far:

• His Legal Info matches my Legal Notice to a T
• His Digg Defender post copies content from mine without attribution, and hotlinks the code.
• He’s listed himself on BlogTopSites

This guy has the audacity to copy content at will, blog straight from digg, and then label it all “Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.” Uh huh, yeah right. Here’s what I can find out about you, my spammer friend:

• Is named “xxx yyy zzz”
• Uses the screen name xxx123
• Use the email xxx123@gmail.com
• Is from Mangalore, Karnataka, India
• Is 16 years old

Here’s what I’m sending him, his host, and his host’s host. The infamous DMCA:

Sender Information:
Elliott Back
1108 Cascadilla Hall
Ithaca, NY 14853, USA
1-607-229-0623

To whom it may concern,

I act on behalf of myself, and am the exclusive owner of the copyright works in question, that is, all of the content of my website and blog network, found on elliottback.com and its subdomains. Browsing a server on your network, xxx and the URL xxx, I find unauthorized copies of the ElliottBack network material which infringes on my rights as copyright holder:

1) -redacted-
2) -redacted-

Please immediately remove or disable all access to the infringing material. This infringing material is not authorized by myself, and this Notice of Copyright is accurate. Under penalty of perjury, I swear that I am authorized to act on behalf of the Owner, which is myself.

Should you require further information, please contact me via email or telephone.

Signed,
Elliott C. Bäck
04-24-2006

ecb29@cornell.edu
607-229-0623

Why do people do this? Do they just not understand fair use?

Update: XXX has removed the infringing material. I’d like to think of this as a case of an amateur blogger getting his ropes, rather than anything else.

Update 2: In the spirit of hospitality, I have redacted all of the identifying information.

Since 1and1 threw me off their servers for using too much CPU, and Dreamhost is beginning to complain that I’m using about 5 to 6 times their daily limit of 1 cpu-hour, I purchased a dedicated server hosting package from Cari.net, which seemed to have the best prices around–their $200 setup fee notwithstanding. For $79 / month I’m getting the following specs:

• P4 32bit 3 GZ w/ 2MB L1 and w/o HT
• 1 GB DDR400 RAM
• 160 GB SATA
• 1.2 TB Bandwidth
• 4 MB/s sustained on 100Mbs Ethernet
• Fedora Core 4 Linux and Plesk

The specs are pretty sweet–I’m particularily happy about the 1 GB of RAM. If I were buying a server, I’d go for dual Xeons or Opterons, but for my little website this should be more than enough. I’m also going to be rolling out a new mega-site in the next month or so, as well as a total upgrade to this old, tired theme. Both of these will be lightning fast. And, since I’ll be consuming only my server’s CPU, I can probably turn off caching and enjoya more responsive Wordpress installation.

Now, this isn’t anything against Dreamhost, which rocks for small websites. Currently they’re out of dedicated servers, so I have to look somewhere else. MediaTemple was too expensive for a real rack, and their virtual server offerings were too vague for my taste about how many users per dual-xeon system there were.