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SOPA and PIPA Threaten A Free internet

Tanya — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 08:28:15 +0000

There has been a lot of coverage recently about two new anti-piracy bills in the United States, which many feel would end the relative freedom of the Internet as it currently is. SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect IP Act) are broadly designed to help stop sites online sell or distribute copyrighted materials like films, music and even goods, which sounds like a good thing…right?
Whilst few would argue about the intentions of bills, in actual fact they would change the internet as we know it. Here are some of the salient points from each:

SOPA
- It would allow the US Attorney General to order a particular site or host to be removed or blocked at source. This may have been done by cutting the DNS, but soon after this was proposed the Obama administration said that “Any effort to combat online piracy must guard against the risk of online censorship of lawful activity and must not inhibit innovation by our dynamic businesses large and small.”

PIPA
- This would force US internet providers to block access to all websites deemed to have infringed copyright
- The infringed party would then be able to seek legal action against the search engines to have to the offending sites removed.
- This will also apply to all advertisers on the offending sites, as well as any new ones that start up.

This will effectively mean that all site owners, be they blogs, wikis or anything else will take on the responsibility for keeping their sites clean of infringements, so the internet will become one big hunt for violations. If someone uses a copyrighted logo or picture, even in the most harmless way, as a teaching aid or simply as a background filler for example, they are then liable and could be sued by the owner. This could end up affecting nearly every site online.

In an unprecedented show of solidarity, hundreds of the most popular websites online shut their doors for the day in a ‘blackout’ protest. This is an amazing concerted show of strength from a normally quite disparate group, and shows the severity of the bills. It succeeded in getting them shelved for the moment, but it’s certainly not the end of this. Find out more and get on board with the fight at americancensorship.org

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Megaupload Could See All Data Erased This Week

Tanya — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 16:22:10 +0000

If you’ve been following the news recently then you’ve no doubt heard about the arrest of Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom (otherwise known as Kim Schmitz), on multiple charges of copyright infringement.

What might surprise some of you however (particularly those who have uploaded data or media to the website), is that all the data located on the site could be erased as early as Thursday this week, according to the Associated Press.

The potential removal of all the data stems from the fact that all Megaupload assets have been frozen, meaning they can’t pay their hosting companies (Cogent Communications Group and Carpathia Hosting, who supply all of Megaupload’s storage). As a result, the hosting providers may begin deleting all data this week, which is bad news for all Megaupload’s users (particularly those who are hosting data legally).

Despite the potential of losing all their user’s data, Ira Rothken (Megaupload’s lawyer) remains confident that an agreement can be put in place to keep the data safe.

Megaupload was shut down in early January by the United States Department of Justice, with the Megaupload founders being charged with making $175million on the back of the distribution of copyright protected materials (most notably films and television programs). If Kim Dotcom and his accomplices are found guilty of the charges levied against them, they could face a maximum penalty of 20 years in US prison.

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Mozilla Continues With Google Search Partnership

Doug — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 13:51:27 +0000

Anyone who’s familiar with the Mozilla Firefox browser will have seen that Google has been the browser’s default search engine for some time, allowing users to make Google searches directly from the taskbar. This relationship has been hugely positive for both Google (helping to ensure their market dominance by featuring so prominently on one of the most popular western browsers) and Mozilla (adding user functionality, improving brand awareness and making them a considerable sum of money), so news of the pair continuing their relationship at first doesn’t seem too surprising.

However, with the current deal between the two major brands expiring in November, plus Mozilla’s recently released ‘Firefox with Bing’, many people had begun to speculate that the deal between Mozilla and Google could be coming to an end (with many suggesting an imminent switch to Bing as the primary search provider). Considering the growing rivalry between Firefox and Google’s own Chrome web browser, this didn’t sound completely outside the realms of possibility.

According to an announcement from Mozilla, the new deal between the company and Google will run for a minimum of three more years, with Google continuing as the Firefox default browser.

Although the monetary elements of the new deal weren’t disclosed, one can expect it to be extremely lucrative for Mozilla, with their relationship with Google accounting for more than 80% of their revenue in 2010.

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Best Retro Inspired Fonts of 2011

Doug — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 12:25:19 +0000

As designers we all love fonts, and some more so than others. They can easily be the making or breaking of great graphics, and matter a lot more than you might think. From legibility, display and compatibility on various devices to the style of the font, there is a lot to consider. With the huge proliferation of designers and material available on the internet today, there is a more baffling choice today then ever before. We’ve picked through and tested a lot of fonts this year, and here are just some of our favourites:

- Weston
From the excellent ‘League Of Movable Type’ collective (who have some other great offerings like Chunk 5 and Ostrich Sans) comes Weston. It’s retro, yet futuristic somehow, which is the perfect combination for me at the moment. A really lovely font.

- Pompadour
Although these are only numbers, I really love this set. The beautiful slab serifs are inspired by retro imagery from the 1950s, but look fantastic in all kinds of modern layouts. They’re really stylish and very versatile as well.

- Ranger
From the stunning collection of the Lost Type co-op comes Ranger, a beautiful bold italic font with subtle little points. It’s apparently inspired by old Colorado sign writing, and designed by Colorado native Evan Huwa.

- Highlands
Again from the Lost Type co-op, Highlands is another font inspired by retro posters; this time from National parks in America. The bold slab serif is very versatile and works really for headlines and posters.

- Bebas Neue
The fantastic Dharma Type are the creators of the final entry here, and again have lots of other really great retro fonts, many inspired by advertising and posters of the 40s and 50s. Bebas is a very simple narrow slab serif that echoes woodcut type of the past, and works in a huge range of situations.

- Duke
Finally, something quite similar to Bebas above, but with some lovely subtle shading to give it a 3D effect. It works just as well in the same situations, and makes really great looking titles and bold headers.

Facebook Upgrades To Keep In Line With Google+

Doug — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 10:15:18 +0000

Social networks are big business today, as we all know from the well documented story of Facebook co-creator and 14^th richest person in the world, Mark Zuckerberg. With the launch of Facebook’s main competitor, Google+, in July this year, some updates to ‘keep up with the Joneses’ were surely close behind.

So low and behold, people were greeted with a revised and updated Facebook layout last week, but with such sweeping changes will people be put off? Some of the main differences and new introductions were:

Changes to the news feed mean that you now see ‘top stories’ above the most recent ones, with a button on the top right of the feed to change to most recent instead.
Facebook now features a ‘subscribe’ button in addition to the ‘friend’ option. It’s very similar to the way Twitter works, and ‘circles’ within Google+. It allows you to follow someone and see their public posts without them returning the favour.
Currently in testing is a ‘smart list’ feature, that groups your friends into categories, much like the ‘circles’ in Google+. It’s not clear how they are going to make this work, but it will enable you to see all posts within a certain category like ‘work’ or ‘school friends’.
A separate feed in the top right of the homepage has been added that lists all comments, pics, status updates and other information from all of your friends, and constantly ticks over with new information, much like the stream on Twitter.

We have also been given a glimpse of future layout changes by Digg founder Kevin Rose, who seems to have pre-release access to the new profile. He was kind enough to post a picture of it on his page, so this is what the future profile will look like:

With all updates like this there is a certain backlash, but it usually dies down after a week or two as people settle in to the changes. However, with the privacy issues they faced earlier in the year where your details were displayed to others automatically, combined with other problems and these new changes, could it signal a move away from Facebook?

When the last round of changes was made several years back, there was little alternative for users who didn’t like them. Myspace was on the way out and other networks had so few members as not to be worth it, but Google+ certainly represents a good alternative. Despite the best efforts of the Facebook team to compete with Google+, you have to ask, will the changes ultimately end up pushing more people towards it?

DigiNotar Certificate Authority Banned For Life From Chrome And Firefox

Tanya — Sun, 25 Sep 2011 20:54:36 +0000

Internet security is something that a lot of us worry about, but how much do we know about what goes on behind the scenes? In very many cases we know almost nothing, and rely on internet security programs and certificates to tell us that our data is safe.

However, online fraud, phishing and identity theft have been on the rise for the past decade, and now constitute the largest form of online criminal activity. It is estimated that losses from this are well into the billions of pounds each year, and with the constant increase and diversity of the ways people access the internet it is a problem that is set to continue.

An example of this has been uncovered recently with the Dutch company DigiNotar. They were a company called a ‘certificate authority’, which issues digital security certificates based on public key encryptions. These give the base for the security of everyday users, who see an SSL certificate and assume they are safe.

The problem began when lax security policies at DigiNotar ended up in a network breach. The hackers that broke in then managed to forge and distribute many different certificates including Google, Mozilla and over 200 others. This in turn put millions of people at risk, not to mention that the same company was responsible for security certificates relating to sensitive government information. Worse than their inability to account for security certificates was the six week period it took them to own up to it, angering many people around the world.

This breach has now been brought under control, with Google and Mozilla adding the offending certificates to their blacklists, but not without consequence for DigiNotar. Since the debacle they have officially been banned for life by both of these internet giants, and the bad publicity has caused the company to go into administration with the loss of several hundred jobs.

Although the results of this whole episode haven’t been as disastrous as many thought it could be, it is a stark warning of the dangers of the internet. It only takes sloppy security in one part of the chain for it to potentially collapse altogether. At Pixel Internet we take our security very seriously and do our best to stay on top of all latest news stories like this, in turn keeping our customers as secure as possible.

Apple Launches Beta Version Of iCloud

Doug — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 08:33:35 +0000

Apple’s iCloud has been much anticipated for some time now, with speculative reports surrounding its’ official release date growing in frequency over the last few weeks. Good news for all those eager to try out the new cloud-based service then, as Apple have finally released the Beta version of iCloud – available to all customers with an official Apple ID.

The Beta version features online versions of the iWork suite (Numbers, Pages and Keynote), as well as the ‘Find My iPhone’ app, Mail, Contacts and Calender. To take advantage of iCloud Beta, you’ll need to visit iCloud.com from iOS 5, which is currently only available to those registered as an Apple developer. Apple has suggested that you can also access the service via Mac OS X Lion, although reports are already surfacing of people having trouble accessing iCloud via the Lion OS X.

As you would probably expect, the service is already drawing comparisons with Amazon’s Cloud Drive, particularly as Apple have released their official pricing structure for the online service.

Whereas Amazon’s cloud service offers unlimited music storage completely free of charge, as well as an additional 20GB of space for $20 (around £12), Apple’s iCloud will not include their cloud music services and will offer 5GB of space for free. Additional space on the iCloud service is available in increments of 10, 20 and 40GB, costing $20, $40 and $100 respectively.

Whether or not the iCloud suite will be as popular as the Apple’s other recent offerings remains to be seen, as as yet the Beta version of iCloud appears to be little more than a tweaked version of the MobileMe suite, which has been available to users for some time.

There’s no doubt that a big element of the future of the way we use computers and access our data lies in cloud computing, but which company will become the dominant providers of such services remains a mystery. Whatever happens, it will certainly be interesting to follow the cloud-based developments over the next few months.

Hosted Exchange now with 10GB mailboxes!

Steve — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 14:28:23 +0000

We are happy to announce we’ve upgraded all our Hosted Exchange mailboxes to a whopping 10GB! This upgrade is for both new and existing customers, what’s more we’ve upgrade the mailboxes for all our existing customers already!

For just £7.49 per month every Pixel Internet Exchange email hosting includes:

• 10GB storage space (was previously 4GB)
• Free Licenced copy of Microsoft Outlook 2010 (2011 for Mac users)
• Microsoft Outlook email Boxes
• Enterprise spam & virus protection
• Mobile phone access

Enjoy the freedom to securely access all of your email from virtually any browser, web platform or device, be from your PC, iPhone, iPad, Blackberry or web browser. Exchange Server 2010 gets your email fully accessible and synchronised. Further more if you are already using Exchange 2003 or 2007 elsewhere, you can easily transfer in your existing data without loss of up time or data.

Why not take advantage of this fantastic package and order Hosted Exchange from Pixel Internet.

50% Summer Sale Now On!!

Tanya — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 15:51:23 +0000

We’re offering a massive 50% off selected hosting plans this summer, starting from just £14.99 per year! We have slashed the prices of our Home, Business and Pro hosting plans on both our Linux and Windows platforms.

You can order a 1 or 2 year hosting plan and save yourself a packet and still enjoy all the fantastic features and customer services provided by Pixel Internet.

Check out our amazing web hosting offers and save your self a packet!

WordPress Finally Drops Support For Internet Explorer 6

Steve — Mon, 30 May 2011 18:25:15 +0000

As Microsoft continues encouraging people to stop using Internet Explorer 6, yet another high profile web service – the hugely popular WordPress – has now officially dropped support for the outdated internet browser.

IE6 has caused a huge amount of compatibility issues for numerous developers, designers and online services (not to mention security issues for users), but despite this nearly 12% of people round the World were still using the browser in April of 2011.

WordPress.com announced an end to IE6 support earlier last week, with a spokesman telling the press that it was down to “increasingly complicated coding to make the WP dashboard work with IE6″.

WordPress users running IE6 will still be able to log into their WordPress dashboard, although they’ll now be greeted with a message warning them to update their browser:

The dropping of IE6 compatibility will be included in the next WordPress update (WordPress 3.2), which is expected to be fully rolled out sometime next month.

On top of the end to IE6 support, the new WordPress update will feature an improved, redesigned dashboard as well as a new ‘distraction-free’ writing mode. You can find out more about the 3.2 update via the WordPress.com website, or by downloading the 3.2 beta version now.