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Dave on Web Monitoring with Uptime Robot
I have just discovered uptime robot, it monitors the availability and responsiveness of my web sites. It’s simple and free and I am quite excited. Read More
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Dave on Local Government Web Sites
As part of my research into Lewisham’s Democracy Review I needed to look at web site design, UX/UI and usability because theirs is very poor. Here’s what I found about being good. Read More
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Dave on Der Spiegel and the internet blocking of the CCC
Der Spiegel reports on Three & Vodafone’s blocking of the Chaos Computer Club, with the headline, “British Porn Filter blocks the CCC web site.” This page is a Google Translate version in English as I cannot find their English language report. It refers to the open rights group’s http://blocked.org.uk site which documents the blocks. Read More
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Dave on .uk names and nominet
Nominet UK is the top level registrar of internet domain names in the UK. This is its home page. Here’s its wikipedia page. It also has a whois query page.
There is an alternative at easywhois. and at who.is.
Outlaw explain their view of the legal position in the case of name disputes. Nominet explain their dispute procedure here.
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Dave on Ruggedising the Internet
Mike Masnick writes a little article forecasting the engineers re-writing the single points of failure out of the internet. He entitles his article, Building A More Decentralized Internet: It’s Happening Faster Than People Realize. He cross references to two articles written by himself back in 2010, Operation Payback And Wikileaks Show The Battle Lines Are About Distributed & Open vs. Centralized & Closed and The Revolution Will Be Distributed: Wikileaks, Anonymous And How Little The Old Guard Realizes What’s Going On in which he, more accurately, recognises the current and future power of distributed and private networks. It should be remembered that these predictions all occurred before the Arab spring and the recent protests in Turkey and the state responses to the use of networks. This article was written in 2014, and I inserted the excerpt line five years later. Fore more, see below or overleaf. … Read More
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Dave on P2P DNS
Looking at DNS and the attempt to P2P it.
Peter Sunde launched a project, reported at Computer World in an article called “P2P DNS to take on ICANN after US domain seizures”
It seems to have got stuck. This article dated 18 Oct 2011 and called Continuing the Distributed DNS System on Slashdot has some pointers. See also P2P-DNS taking control of the Internet at memeburn.com.
The nearest successor seems to be namecoin, see http://namecoin.info/ , https://bit.namecoin.org & its wikipedia page
While researching this in 2013 I came across a page on alternate roots at Wikipedia.
In 2020, I had another look, and came across https://www.namecoin.org/, here’s a query on Bruce Schneier’s site. Other’s imply that the only answer is to move to broadcast protocols, why not? It’s what ethernet is/was.
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Dave on Twitter API V1.1 (Deprecated)
This post was written in 2013 and I discovered in May 2018 that most of the links failed. It’s been a while, and it surprises me that my little wiki has lasted longer than the resources I point to, but not here. I could have deleted this post, but chose not to; I have heavily edited it so it’s as much a diary as the technical note it once was.
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Dave on Life after Google reader
So it’s finally going, should have left it when they swapped RSS publication for Google Plus only. Here’s the then alternatives …
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Dave on Linksys WAG 54GS & Power Offs
Household Power Test
I tested the household power yesterday and turned the Gateway off for 2 hours.
Resetting Factory Defaults
When it came up the wireless wouldn’t work. So I rang Linksys and they talked me through resetting factory defaults.
For those of you following me, you must document your encapsulation and consequent parameters, your wireless settings and encryption passwords and any firewall ports that are open.
It seems that the reliability of a system boot after a sustained power down is not 100%.
Powering Down
I was recommended to power down the gateway by removing the power lead from the appliance. I assume using the switch on the wall plug is equally effective. Don’t use the power switch on the front of the box. This is a deeply flawed piece of UI design 🙁
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Dave on Add This
I created this page to test scripts published by http://addthis.com. It was originally created on the Qube. See below for early experiments for what I wrote at the time, all probably useless now. I have installed their wordpress widget and so even lower down on this page, after the article , are add this’s sharing buttons. I suppressed the plugin on my blogs some time ago, but Addthis exposed itself again when I implemented the Cronus theme in 2021. …. Read More