a-cubed.info

I’ve not been posting as much on here lately as I’d have liked, because I’ve been having trouble with the blog. I’m hoping it’s now sorted out. One of the admin pages still looks awful, but it’s not one I actually need to go to and if I need to I can work with it. I was having trouble posting some entries and editing a lot of them. After hunting and hunting and hunting for the solution, I finally found something on the WordPress troubleshooting site about turning off Apache’s “security filtering module” in the .htaccess by adding this:

<IfModule mod_security.c>
SecFilterScanPOST off
</IfModule>
As ifby magic, suddenly I can post and edit again. The original thread discussed certain words triggering this module. Dangerous words like “biopsy” and “autopsy”. I’m not sure what words in my Museums review post it didn’t like, but this shows how bad security can be in getting in the way of the purpose of software. The biggest problem is that I wasn’t getting an error. No, I was just getting booted back out to my home page.

Wired’s blog is reporting that the insecure.org website’s DNS registration was suspended recently by GoDaddy following a complaint by MySpace that one of the mailing list archives on the site contained a file of passwords from a cracking attack on MySpace. Reports differ as to how long GoDaddy tried to contact the site’s maintainer Fyodor (they claimed they gave him an hour to respond, but his email logs suggest it was one minute). Leaving aside the question of how long they should have waited, the big question here is whether any registrar should be getting involved in such censorship. Removing DNS registration is a horrendously blunt instrument to be allowed to be employed in responding to complaints of inappropriate material hosted on a site. In particular, a complaint regarding a single file held on a site containing in excess of 250,000 pages, should not be subject to complete blackout.

There are procedures that have gradually developed for dealing with complaints about the content of a site and they involve contacting the abuse team of the ISP providing the connection (and possibly the hosting) of the site. If the material is indeed something that either violates the T&C of the ISP, or is illegal, then they should be able to selectively block the material rather than to take down an entire site. The only thing a DNS registrar can do is remove the entire site from domain name visibility. (more…)