Paxfire stole Google.com

POSTED BY joe on Aug 7 under Security

Seriously. Stolen… or at least, that’s certainly what it looks like if you’re unfortunate enough to be stuck using a Paxfire DNS appliance like the two I found a few weeks ago.

I just finished my first Google Knol: DNS Squatting

In a nutshell, Paxfire DNS appliances pretend to be ‘www.google.com’. They aren’t pretending to be other search engines from what I can tell - just Google. Fun times when the marketing wonks decide to sniff your search habits…

2 Comments

What every web site and host needs to know about the DMCA

POSTED BY joe on Jun 13 under Hosting

Daniel over at DailyBlogTips is getting ripped off. Web sites are stealing his content and trying to pass it off as their own and worse, the clueless host involved (EliteHost.net, which I will not dignify with a link) doesn’t seem to realize that not only is the webmaster thief liable but the host is as well if they fail to respond appropriately to a valid DMCA takedown request.

The DMCA^(pdf) has been vilified by a lot of frothing-at-the-mouth loons that run about screaming that it’s the death of internet “freedom” yadda yadda. If you pin one down on the topic it usually turns out that they haven’t even read it or if they claim they have they certainly don’t understand it. Yes, the DMCA is a big club that can be used by multi-billion dollar corporations to smack down the “little guy” but that club has a handle at both ends. If you’re a U.S. web publisher (blogger, conventional site etc) or a web host then you must make yourself familiar with the provisions of the DMCA and know how it affects you… and how you can use it.
Read more

1 Comment

Need a PHP Template Engine - Use SMARTY

POSTED BY joe on Jun 12 under PHP

If you need a PHP Template Engine then please, use SMARTY. FastTemplate was good when I first wrote it (not great though, since there are at least two places in the code where I’m wasting huge numbers of cycles) but Smarty is a lot… smarter. More importantly it’s updated fairly often.

Due to the dreaded “Work” tag I haven’t been able to update FastTemplate since 1.1, and I’m not going to. The problem isn’t that I don’t have free time to write code, I do. The problem is I’m a professional developer (among my many hats). When I first started tossing my PHP code out for everyone to use I got into huge amounts of trouble with my employer at the time, as technically they could have laid claim to my work despite the fact that I didn’t write any of it on company time or equipment. I was publishing and writing as “CDI” at the time so they didn’t find out right away (took almost a year in fact) and by then the code was already out. So instead of getting into a big knock-down drag-out over the issue we all just agreed that I wouldn’t make any more code for public consumption. I could write for my own personal projects of course, but nothing open source.

That was years ago and I’ve changed employers since then but my job description is pretty much the same so rather than tempt fate with the new employer, the status quo will be maintained. Besides, the code hasn’t been updated in -so- long and there are so many better alternatives now that it’d be silly for me to even try. Use Smarty to handle your template needs or, if you really like TONS of bloat you can use PEAR instead.

2 Comments