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I was downloading a series of free add-ons for a particular piece of software, when I was forced into downloading it from one of those “file hosting” services. This got me thinking, because it was mildly annoying to have to use such a service for a file that was only 1.8 megabytes in size, after a sixty-second wait due to my not being a “Premium” member.

Of course, hosts like RapidHost and their kind derive a large amount of their traffic from, shall we say, less than fully legal data. But to see something that was 100% legal, and 100% free, being offered on such a service….well, suffice it to say I spent the 60 seconds thinking, I hope, somewhat productively.

Because this is a market that “old-school” traditional web hosts can handle, as well. The people putting files like these on download services do not need privacy; in my specific case, they actually had it linked from their online profile. And they probably have an account on that service, which means they’re willing to pay for the service. Continue reading…

Oddly enough, this actually is a feature and not a bug. It hinges on the Single Sign-on feature linking Plesk Billing and Plesk itself. Plesk is trying to redirect to the Billing side to take login credentials.

Just open ports 11443/11444 on your firewall, and you’re good to go.

More info here.

Rupert Murdoch claims that he’s opposing Google because it’s getting rich on his dime, despite the fact that his own websites go out of their way to point Google to the juiciest, most advertiser-friendly content.

Murdoch went so far as to claim that he intends to use this fact to attack Fair Use doctrine:

He also challenged the idea that Google and others could take just the headlines and opening lines from his papers’ stories, indicating that he would not tolerate even that.

“[They use] a doctrine called fair use, which we believe can be challenged in the courts and will bar it altogether,” he said.

And thus, that’s where the real strategy starts to emerge. Continue reading…

I simply can’t do better than this, so I won’t even try. Discussing Goldman Sachs’ inexplicable decision to send PR flacks into churches suggesting that Jesus Christ was actually promoting a Gospel of Greed, Gonzo Superstar Matt Taibbi uncorks the single best political rant I have ever seen on the intertubes.

Among the rhetorical molotov cocktails was this soon-to-be-classic riff:

Nothing else explains people like Alan Greenspan and Megan McArdle and all those other idiotic Ayn Rand devotees, big and small, who continually go out there in public and flog pseudo-religious beliefs about the self-correcting free-market as a cure-all for anything and everything, even as evidence to the contrary rains down from the sky like volcanic ash. These people actually believe this shit and they believe it with the imbecilic ferocity of teenagers, even the ones who are 190 years old like Greenspan (who incidentally finally conceded a “flaw” in his thinking, but only after the entire world exploded and even all the reality-proof friendly data sources he had relied upon for his whole life told him his ideas were fucked), and it’s nearly impossible to get them to let so much as a sliver of their belief systems go.

God bless you, Taibbi. My hat is OFF.

On Drudge yesterday, and still there as of this writing, there’s a blurb making big hay of the fact that FoxNews had a significantly larger share of the total audience for election coverage than any other station. In fact, it claims that Fox, with 4,043,000 viewers had a larger share than MSNBC (974K), Headline News (842K), and CNN (826K) combined.

We’ll overlook for a moment that Drudge’s link actually goes to a story he’d previously linked on a proposed law to make employers give employees up to five paid sick days.

Let’s look, instead, at the breakdowns for the “25-54″ demographic that Drudge also breathlessly trumpets as evidence of Fox’s news supremacy. Continue reading…

I’ve seen a couple articles today where the Republicans are trying to politicize the concept of network neutrality, comparing it in one case to “a Fairness Doctrine for the Internet“.

Well, it’s not that. And I could spend several paragraphs excoriating Republicans for yet-another weak attempt to convince uninformed voters that Obama’s going to [fill-in-the-blank], but I won’t. Instead, I will simply present you with What Net Neutrality Is, and What Net Neutrality Isn’t. Continue reading…

After his Ayn Rand-worshiping, bankster-babying, free-love-for-free-markets ass spent the entire 1990’s shooing the government out of regulating the financial services and banking industries to the greatest extent possible, it appears that Alan Greenspan has had a change of heart, and is now advocating the breakup of so-called “too-large-to-fail” banks.

Gee, Al, ya think?

I mean, after all, we gave ‘em everything they wanted in the 90’s, and they just treated us like a shotgun bride, getting drunk on their own excess and holding the gun of economic meltdown against our heads until we ponied up their bail. What does the banking industry say to a body politic with two black eyes? Nothin’ it ain’t already told it twice.

Apparently Iowa Dems have been playing coy, implying that they had a strong contender to run against the 28-year Senate veteran Chuck Grassley.

Grassley’s poll numbers, once borderline-Olympian, have been brought closer to earth by his hyper-partisan and deceptive participation in the health-care debate, as mentioned here previously.

It seems the mystery contender is none other than the spouse of former Iowa governor Tom Vilsack, Christie Vilsack, setting up a Democratic primary prior to the 2010 election, as Bob Krause is also running, among other potential candidates. There is also persistent speculation that Grassley will face a primary challenge on his own side of the aisle as well, fueled by far-right conservatives who feel Grassley has drifted too far to the left. (Which just goes to show the state of the Republican Party at present; Grassley is pretty far from truly being “liberal”.

I’ll be keenly interested to see if Chuck can triangulate his way out of this one; I’d especially like to see him get pinned down on his attempts to follow Sarah Palin’s lead on distorting the health-care debate with talks of “death panels”. After all, in all my life, I’ve never seen an issue get so deeply poisoned by dishonest rhetoric as the health-care debate has, and I’d very much like to see all such politicians punished unequivocally for doing so.

General McChrystal, our top military leader in Afghanistan, has asked for more troops to stave off ultimate failure.

And there’s a growing chorus of voices, mostly on the left, but some on the right as well, who look at history and see Afghanistan as the place where empires go to die. And rightfully so.

But, I would remind the naysayers of some simple differences between our situation and all the conquerors throughout history who met their match in that barren terrain.

We can’t change how we got there, nor what we’ve done and not done since we’ve gotten there. But there’s three key factors at play in Afghanistan today that will mark the difference between our victory and our defeat, as evidenced by an ongoing threat to American citizens, soil, and interests abroad by the very terrorism that led us to the Hindu Kush to begin with.

Each of these factors can only be harnessed if we follow through with enough troops to see the mission through.
Continue reading…

I think you can officially lump the Washington Post into the “biased corporate media” category, with this inane anti-fluff piece by Dana Milbank.

Let’s say you’re preparing dinner and you realize with dismay that you don’t have any certified organic Tuscan kale. What to do?

Here’s how Michelle Obama handled this very predicament Thursday afternoon:

The Secret Service and the D.C. police brought in three dozen vehicles and shut down H Street, Vermont Avenue, two lanes of I Street and an entrance to the McPherson Square Metro station. They swept the area, in front of the Department of Veterans Affairs, with bomb-sniffing dogs and installed magnetometers in the middle of the street, put up barricades to keep pedestrians out, and took positions with binoculars atop trucks. Though the produce stand was only a block or so from the White House, the first lady hopped into her armored limousine and pulled into the market amid the wail of sirens.

Then, and only then, could Obama purchase her leafy greens. “Now it’s time to buy some food,” she told several hundred people who came to watch. “Let’s shop!”

The piece, which made it to Drudge about five seconds later, makes a big show of pointing out the higher costs one can often find at a farmer’s market: Continue reading…