Vannevar Bush said in 1945, “The summation of human experience is being expanded at a prodigious rate, and the means we use for threading through the consequent maze to the momentarily important item is the same as was used in the days of square-rigged ships.”
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Pitfalls of Shared Web Hosting
We are on a new web host. They are better than the last bunch. However I have some observations about shared hosting companies in general.
- All such companies make promises they don’t keep. If a web host says they will move your site — it won’t happen or they will mess it up. You will have to do it yourself or hire a professional to complete the move.
- Email will be a headache. Nobody tells you how to access your email unless you use Outlook or Thunderbird. They say you are incompetent if you don’t use one of these two email clients.
- Small problems turn into big problems because of the interaction between ISP, web host, and client software.
- Web hosting companies, ISP’s, etc., etc., all think they are alone in the world and rarely make any effort to understand how to interact in a productive way. If they do make the effort, they seem unable to communicate to their customers how to make thing work together.
- Extensive investigation to find the causes of problems is your job, even if the web host caused the problem.
- Answering a support request in an unhelpful manner is worse than not answering.
- Web host operations think they are selling technology to geeks, when in reality, they are selling a service to ordinary people with some technical knowledge. They don’t understand that a service is something that takes away the customer’s pain rather than adding to it.
If you are looking for a new web host, then go to HostJury.com and look at what their customers say about them.
We are moving to another Web Host. The Confidential Resource may disappear for a short while as we move over to the new server and there won’t be any new articles posted until next week.
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In September, an enterprising bandit robbed an armored car aided by unwitting accomplices hired through a Craigslist ad, and then escaped by floating down a nearby creek in an inner tube.
On Monday, a suspect was nabbed by police officers and FBI agents outside a Target store in Monroe, Washington, and charged with the hold-up.
Boy, 14, ‘posed as female spy to arrange his own murder’
Saturday, 29 May 2004
A schoolboy posed as a female British secret service spy in an internet chatroom to persuade a friend to try to murder him, a court heard yesterday.
The boy, John, now 15, groomed a 16-year-old boy, Mark (both pseudonyms to protect the children), with an “elaborate matrix of deceit” involving six fictional characters in the MSN chatroom and correspondence totalling 56,000 lines of text.
The fictions created by John, then 14, convinced Mark that he was murdering someone who had a terminal brain tumour.
He was told that his reward would be money, a job as a British secret service agent and sex with the spy, whom he believed was a middle-aged woman.
In fact, John was determined to get himself killed…
Now I know that Craigslist is good for a lot of things but this is novel:
Armored truck robber uses Craigslist to make getaway
“I came across the ad that was for a prevailing wage job for $28.50 an hour,” said Mike, who saw a Craigslist ad last week looking for workers for a road maintenance project in Monroe.
He said he inquired and was e-mailed back with instructions to meet near the Bank of America in Monroe at 11 a.m. Tuesday. He also was told to wear certain work clothing.
“Yellow vest, safety goggles, a respirator mask…and, if possible, a blue shirt,” he said.
Mike showed up along with about a dozen other men dressed like him, but there was no contractor and no road work to be done. He thought they had been stood up until he heard about the bank robbery and the suspect who wore the same attire.
Civil.ge, the Georgian news site, is under cyber attack by the Russians. Their news output was moved to Google’s Blogspot at http://civilgeorgia.blogspot.com/ to keep the information flowing about what’s going on in Georgia. Google has the infrastructure and resources to defend against these attacks.
It seems that Georgia is cyber-locked just like a land-locked country has no access to the sea. Cyber-locked countries rely too heavily on a handful of connections through hostile countries like Russia for their network access to the outside world.
Today marks the beginning of the third year of The Confidential Resource blog.
Today’s work has been downright strange.
First I was asked to research the online antics of one of those annoying individuals often found on blogs and forums. I found some very immodest pictures of her on a lesbian dating service. That led to a treasure trove of artfully composed pictures of her doing some unusual sexual gymnastics. I don’t know if any of this was relevant to the original research mandate, but it was interesting.
Right on the heels of that, I was asked to find a field telephone for use during an extended rural surveillance. It seems the subject was a Ham radio operator and scanner fanatic. I found a field telephone that was voice powered. I hope they have fun lugging around a mile and a half of wire.
Strong Canadian dollar said hurting pot exports
VANCOUVER, British Columbia (Reuters) - The strong Canadian dollar has hit the illegal marijuana sector just as it has other industries that export to the United States…
When most people hear the word Investigator, they immediately think of Police Detectives or Private Investigators. However, any act of inquiry is investigation. The word research derives from Middle French; its literal meaning is to investigate.
Some of the best Investigators I know have nothing to do with policing or the private investigation business. One of best Investigators I know is a fund manager. He manages a fund that invests in companies that may strike it rich and become take-over targets. He travels the world looking for these investment opportunities.
He must collect data from diverse sources in many languages. He interviews people who are often hostile, dishonest, and dangerous. He reviews economic data and forecasts, accounting data, government documents, court records, and corporate filings. Through all this he must sift, to discover companies that represent worthwhile investment opportunities.
Doing all this, when he is the only guy without a gun, in frequently hostile and volatile environments, is not for the feint-hearted or the simple-minded. He is a true Investigator.
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No, you may not ask how I found this.
Jared Benedict held 56,000 USGS maps for ransom. Benedict purchased the 56,000 public domain maps on CD-ROM from USGS. He then asked Internet denizens for donations to recoup his cost of $1600. This was met in 24 hours. All the maps are now freely accessable at the Internet Archive!
Does this strategy bring anything to mind?