Elliott C. Back: Internet & Technology

Wikipedia Statistics From WikiCharts

Posted in Computers & Technology, SEO, Web 2.0 by Elliott Back on August 30th, 2006.

If you wanted to know what’s hot on Wikipedia, check out WikiCharts. The newtool shows the articles from the English Wikipedia that are viewed most, but is still in testing and may report wrong results. Here’s what it claims are this month’s top 20 posts:

1831000  3% 	4.2065% 	1. Main Page
62250  14% 	0.1430% 	2. Wikipedia
52500  15% 	0.1206% 	3. United States
49750  16% 	0.1143% 	4. JonBenet Ramsey
39500  17% 	0.0907% 	5. List of big-bust models and performers
36500  18% 	0.0839% 	6. Hurricane Katrina
36250  19% 	0.0833% 	7. Irukandji jellyfish
35250  18% 	0.0810% 	8. Pluto
33250  19% 	0.0764% 	9. Wiki
30750  20% 	0.0706% 	10. Jeff Hardy
30500  20% 	0.0701% 	11. List of sex positions
30000  19% 	0.0689% 	12. World Wrestling Entertainment roster
29750  20% 	0.0683% 	13. List of female porn stars
28750  20% 	0.0660% 	14. Wii
27000  21% 	0.0620% 	15. Pokemon
25750  21% 	0.0592% 	16. Pornography
24500  22% 	0.0563% 	17. Neighbours
24250  22% 	0.0557% 	18. Celebrity sex tape
22500  24% 	0.0517% 	19. Volkswagen Type 2
22500  24% 	0.0517% 	20. Priyanka Chopra

My only question–what are “Irukandji jellyfish” and why are they so popular? Can you EAT them?!

Jerry Chang Does Pachelbel’s Canon in D

Posted in Music, YouTube by Elliott Back on August 30th, 2006.

The New York Times has an article about the internet-famous guitar player JerryC who published a YouTube video of himself playing an electric rock version of Pachelbel’s Canon. The movie was an instant hit, and spawned a huge number of imitations, almost none as good as Jerry C’s original, which you can view below:

JerryC Canon Rock – JerryC
5 min 24 sec – Jan 1, 2004

Then, a guy only identified as Funtwo published his own version of the song, which was even better performed than the original:

Canon by Funtwo –

Naturally, the Times reporter did his best to track this newcomer down:

By following a series of clues on JerryC’s message board and various Canon Rock videos, I was able to trace funtwo’s video to Jeong-Hyun Lim, a 23-year-old Korean who taught himself guitar over the course of the last six years. Now living in Seoul, he listens avidly to Bach and Vivaldi, and in 2000 he took a month of guitar lessons. He plays an ESP, an Alfee Custon SEC-28OTC with gold-colored detailing. A close analysis of his playing style and a comparison of his appearance in person with that of the figure in the video, left little doubt that Mr. Lim is the elusive funtwo.

Is Clubhostcity.com Spammer’s Paradise?

Posted in My Blog, Spam by Elliott Back on August 28th, 2006.

I sent an email to Layeredtech, because DNS claimed that they owned the IP which operated Accelzone, a splog ripping off my content, but then I got the following email from Club Host City, who claim they actually operate the site:

We have received your complaint regarding copyright issues with Accelzone.com forwarded to us via the 3rd party that you erroneously contacted, Layered Technologies, who incidentally has absolutely nothing to do with Accelzone.com whatsoever and is **NOT** the hosting provider for that domain.

Did you ever think about looking at the WHOIS information on the domain instead of trying to do an IP lookup?

We share the same data center as Layered Technologies and our IP addresses come out of the same IP pool as them in the Saavis data center, Dallas, TX but we have no affiliation with that company other than the common location.

For future reference, the hosting provider is the domain shown on the DNS servers and also listed as the contact
address in the DNS record header.

If you just took a look at the header record of the DNS or the DNS servers listed in the WHOIS, you would already know who the hosting provider was.

The hosting provider for Accelzone.com is Cybertoad Networks located on the web at www.cybertoad.net which is a reseller under our company, Clubhost City.

We would have been happy to handle your complaint! However, we have absolutely no tolerance for dead light bulbs like yourself so we are instead going to ban you from our entire network and all web sites that we control (more than 3 million) and instruct the reseller to give the customer Accelzone.com a free upgrade to the next account plan at our expense.

Next time you should be more careful!

Abuse / Policy Enforcement
Clubhost City

Here’s what DNS says for accelzone.com:

Domain Name: ACCELZONE.COM

Registrant:
accelzone
accelz *******@gmail.com)
4th street
NY
,90210
US
Tel. +76.12121455

Creation Date: 10-Nov-2005
Expiration Date: 10-Nov-2006

Domain servers in listed order:
ns2.clubhostcity.com
ns.clubhostcity.com

That doesn’t tell me anything substantive, so I looked up the IP address (72.36.230.170) and then WHOISed it:

OrgName: Layered Technologies, Inc.
OrgID: LAYER-3
Address: 18816 Preston Road
Address: Suite #100
City: Dallas
StateProv: TX
PostalCode: 75252
Country: US

ReferralServer: rwhois.layeredtech.com:4321

NetRange: 72.36.128.0 – 72.36.255.255
CIDR: 72.36.128.0/17
NetName: LAYERED-TECH-
NetHandle: NET-72-36-128-0-1
Parent: NET-72-0-0-0-0
NetType: Direct Allocation
NameServer: NS1.LAYEREDTECH.COM
NameServer: NS2.LAYEREDTECH.COM
Comment: Please send all abuse complaints to
Comment: *****@layeredtech.com
Comment: Please send all network queries to ***@layeredtech.com
RegDate: 2005-02-22
Updated: 2005-09-07

Since everything pointed to the site being hosted by Layeredtech, I don’t think I was wrong in initially emailing, and cannot believe the response I got from Clubhostcity. I replied to them:

The WHOIS information does not actually list clubhostcity as being anything but the nameserver, which is not an indicator of hosting status or not. I use dreamhost as a nameserver for many of my domains, while they’re hosted elsewhere on a dedicated server. Instead, I looked up the IP address to determine who was hosting accelzone, and it returned that the IP came from within Layered Tech’s address space. Naturally, I contacted their abuse department first, who insisted that I file a DMCA complaint. I’m not sure how I could have determined that you were actually the host.

Since I seem to have erroneously sent them that email, I’ll file it instead with you. Please expect to receive a DMCA notice by email shortly.

It seems that the infringing page is now down, but at what cost? Here’s a screenshot:

clubhostcity.jpg

This is perhaps worse than dealing with yesterday’s incident with Robert Scoble, because the relationship between him and I involved correction and communication across a larger mistake. Here we have no mistake on my part (as far as I can tell) and incredible arrogance on the part of the host. Sorry Clubhostcity; in your email you confess that you’re going to give a spammer and splogger a bonus for evading the legal system. That means bloggers won’t like you.

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