Our Smog Shall Blot Out The Sun

Then we shall surf in the shade!

Apparently the Hollywood Hills caught on fire this afternoon!

We also just got a notice from our building… coincidence?

To All Garland Tenants,

At or about 1:33 PM, 1:45 PM & 1:55 PM today, 3-30-07, the Garland Building experienced 3 spikes from DWP. The building infrastructure is currently running normally with no issues to report and is not on generators. We will continual to update you with more information as it becomes available.

If you should have any questions or concerns please contact the Office of the Building.

“Continual”, eh?

Their grammar may need work, but at least our power’s okay!

Public Relations, or “How I Learned To Love Josh”

The other day I sat with my wife in Denver International Airport, bored out of my skull. We had a couple of hours to kill before our flight back to LAX and I needed something to read both then and in-flight. So, being the tech geek that I am, I grabbed a copy each of Wired and Fast Company.

After shaking out the two dozen or so subscription card things (because, you know, lots of newsstand readers want to subscribe to the same magazine two dozen times - what’s up with that, anyhow?), I dug into Wired first.

(Wired: I love the cover, BTW)

The thing that caught my attention was this issue’s focus on “Radical Transparency”. Apparently, there are companies out there that are turning their inside operations out into the open, allowing customers and clients to both to read up on things that would otherwise never have been put out there in the old days. The reasoning behind policy and product changes, internal company debates and decision making, that sort of thing.

It seems that there are even companies out there that allow their employees to post all sorts of stupid crap on their official company weblog - and allow customers to respond in turn with (sometimes) well-founded complaints and witty scathing remarks. Madness!

Okay, so this is a bit tongue in cheek on my part. DreamHost has always been a bit more, err, out in the open than its competitors. While other guys have traditionally filtered everything through a bunch of Public Relations mavens (or limited their unfiltered discussion to a small list of “safe” topics), we’ve long been ones to put it all out there and deal with the consequences.

I’ll leave it up to you, our loving customers and weblog devotees, as to whether this is a conscious decision on our part or simply a side-effect of not being able to keep our big fat mouths shut when we probably should.

DreamHost? Public Relations?

Of course, that doesn’t mean that there haven’t been forces within the company that felt uncomfortable with this sort of thing - and by that, I mostly refer to myself. Way back when, before my full-time Abuse days, I was actually the designated Public Relations guy here at DreamHost (I’ve done a little of everything, it seems). Not sure how that happened - I lack the fake perma-smile, fashionable wardrobe and earnest pretty-boy good looks that seem to go hand in hand with PR - but happen it did.

I took to the role with some degree of gusto, and among my tasks I somehow convinced Josh (one of our four Head Honchos and DreamHost Newsletter writer) to forward his Newsletters to our main internal list before sending them out. We had some, well, perhaps ill-chosen Newsletter incidents in the recent past and received more than a few complaints about them. So, I figured, as I was going to be the main guy who would be responding to them, I should probably do my best to keep Josh under some control and limit the damage before it happened.

Of course, Fearless Leader™ 1 of 4 is a bit too wise for that, and I think by the end of things he was sending blatantly offensive Newsletters my way with the expectation that I would complain (after which he would ‘meet me halfway’ and chop off only the most egregious stuff, leaving the still-funny but still slightly ‘off’ stuff). Say what you will, Josh is pretty wily like that.

What Next? Suits and Ties? Mandatory Anal Bleaching?

One other thing we did at some point was actually hire one of those slick, real (well, in a manner of speaking), honest-to-god Public Relations firms. We figured, it was a lot cheaper than advertising and possibly more effective. I was to be the main liaison between DreamHost and our PR people.

I was a bit apprehensive as to whether they would ‘get’ DreamHost - especially after seeing the blown-up 72 DPI logos of their other clients’ logos in their lobby, undoubtedly pulled from a hopelessly dithered JPEG somewhere - but figured that we had enough tech knowledge in-house to keep them from making any major mistakes. We had high hopes, as we were paying them many thousands of dollars every month and hoped for results.

One thing I recall is how surreal and orchestrated the whole PR thing could be at times.

Our company had set us up with a conference call interview with one of the most respected telecom industry journalists around, and we were pretty psyched about it. We were really excited about certain aspects of how we designed our web panel and hosting back-end and how they gave (and still give, really) us a leg-up on our competition. Our PR people scheduled a conference call shortly before-hand to give us the scoop on the journalist we would be talking to. It was crazy! It was as-if they had kept a detailed dossier on the guy, providing us with a fully detailed run-down of his personality and personal interests. I wouldn’t be surprised if they kept an in-house psychoanalyst around, keeping watch on all of the major tech journalists.

After the call, they gave us a full de-briefing, letting us know how we did (which I guess was pretty well, as a decent article on us came out shortly thereafter).

They say that PR is one of those things that only really works if you use it for a long time, and that it can be hard to quantify results. In hindsight, I really don’t think that the company we used made any mistakes - such companies probably work fine if you’re selling, say, toothpaste or munitions or something - but over time it became apparent that they weren’t a good match for us and we eventually decided to let them go.

Progression To… This

Even so, it did leave a funny taste in my mouth, and I was pretty sure I didn’t like it. What should have been an enjoyable blab session with a journalist became an unnecessarily orchestrated thing. While we certainly didn’t lie or do anything unethical, it did shine a light on how incredibly false and superficial most Public Relations work (and by extension, the media business built around it) is. If you read an article, it’s quite likely that it’s a regurgitated press release. If you see a glowing review of some product or another, you can almost bet that there was some wining and dining going on behind the scenes. For every Om Malik, there would be ten lazy reporters who would publish anything to fill their quota. While our PR people hadn’t yet gotten us that far, by the end I knew it was coming.

Flash forward a bit. I stopped doing PR work, eventually meandering full-time into the often painfully reality-grounded world of Abuse. I would have a chance to stretch my tech geek and coder muscles again while taking on something new - law.

Out of habit I still read Josh’s Newsletters, but had become a lot less concerned about it all. At some point, Josh proposed (and implemented immediately thereafter, as I recall) this weblog. Anyone within the company would have a chance to put their thoughts out in the open without any sort of formalized review process. Everyone working at DreamHost would have a voice, if they wanted it, even if it would piss the occasional customer (or potential customer) off.

Back In The Airport

This brings me back to the airport, circa two days ago. Radical transparency. Over the span of a few years, I went from being DreamHost’s biggest PR worry-wart to one of the biggest proponents of transparency. Yeah, sometimes Josh’s frankness still gives me the heebie-jeebies (”ninja with a boner“, Josh?), but I know what the alternative is and given a choice I can’t help but feel that we’re on the right track.

Opaque Transparency?

As an aside, the article that interested me most in that issue of Wired was one by Fred Vogelstein, a case study in transparency at Microsoft. He detailed how one lone employee at the Redmond giant braved the PR and marketing people there to set up Channel 9, Microsoft’s “unfiltered” site for blogging and evangelism.

Imagine his amusement (and mine) when someone at Microsoft accidentally forwarded to him his own dossier! I guess PR people really do keep track of this stuff.

A couple of choice excerpts for your edification and amusement (you can read the whole thing in PDF format, here):

Awesome.

The Dream Machine

We don’t just break servers you know!

Once a week a dozen or so of us take a break from the physically and mentally demanding task of causing the most downtime and nfs slowness possible to cause the most dunktime and nba showness possible…

We joined the LA City Department of Parks and Recreation men’s basketball league!

More specifically, we joined the “C League”… defined as:

Recreational: No ex-college or High School Varsity players under the age of 30 years old. Players who love to play, but have limited experience; Limited/no ability to play above the rim; no more than one player with the ability to consistently score more than 20 points per game. Play is sometimes “playground” style and recreational. “Score Out rule in effect (20 points).”

If ever there were a team to fit that description, you’re reading the blog about them!

I played in college (Div III, JV!) but I just turned 30 three weeks ago! I have limited/no ability to play above the rim, and I’m the one and only player with the ability to consistently score more than 20 points a game! Me, me, me!

Score Out Rule?

Little did I know that the “C League” does not even allow any one player to score more than 20 points in a game! Once you do, you’re out! That rule made me nervous… all the way up until about one minute into the game, when I realized I had nothing to worry about.

We started the season undefeated!

Of course, then we had our first game last Tuesday.. our perfect win percentage (undef) was at stake!

It was a wild roller-coaster of a game!

We jumped to an early 2-1 lead! Which we held for the first six minutes!

With five minutes left in the first half, we were still crushing our opponents (”Delancy St.”), 6-5!

Which is when we really exploded .. ending up leading 20-7 at halftime!

Let the celebrations begin!

As long as we didn’t let them score twice as much in the second half as we did in the first, we had the game!

Flash forward.. with only seconds left in the game, we were down 22-20! They had the ball!

Fortunately, just then I intercepted an ill-advised pass and streaked down the court. As I went up I was hit hard…

Count the basket!

And the foul!

No time left!

And now, one free throw to win the game! Fortunately.. we caught it on video for you below… please move to the edge of your seat, double click below, and watch…

????????????????????????????!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Epilogue

On our team we consider it a triple-double if you get just *2* in three different stats.

Nobody recorded one this game.

Afterwards, Dallas and I celebrated the upcoming holidays some at Target!

After that, we played “Drink Uno” until 4am. I didn’t have a proper wine opener.

Epi-Epilogue

This wasn’t exactly how the game went down.. but it’s more entertaining this way.

I Just Noticed Something…

vs.

Either Sony (who made both) is trying to siphon some of Peter Parker’s bad-assed-ness over to the PS3, or somebody paid too much for that font and is trying to get their money’s worth!

Register Flight

I don’t know if you’ve heard about the problems over at RegisterFly?

They’re an ICANN-accredited registrar with like 900,000 domains, and because of some combination of escorts and liposuction they’ve been missing registry payments, not allowing people to move domains, and perpetrating countless other SHENANIGANS!

Anyway, ICANN finally said enough is enough, and announced they will be de-accredited on March 31st!

And now, the vultures are circling!

On a completely unrelated note…

If you’ve got a domain registered with RegisterFly now, you can transfer it to us, and get a year of our CDI hosting plan absolutely free!

Just use the promo code FLYAWAY when signing up!

(Be sure to enter your RegisterFly-registered domain on the form too!)

Dealing With A DMCA Crook

Along with dealing with the various spammers and fraudsters who manage to find their way onto our servers, one of the issues we deal with pretty regularly is copyright infringement. People storing, distributing or downloading cracked computer games, purloined CD/DVD rips, etc. using their DreamHost accounts. These are usually pretty blatant, and our typical response is to just disable the associated accounts.

Yeah, we’re hardcore like that - kind of like Mounties.

Sometimes, though, there are ‘gray’ area cases where it’s not very clear whether or not copyright infringement is taking place - perhaps there’s a distribution license we don’t know about or it falls under Fair Use doctrine. Just because someone says that illegal copyright infringement is taking place does not make it so.

For that reason, we require what is known as a DMCA Notification. This is a legal document (submitted under penalty of perjury!) wherein the alleged copyright holder basically says “my stuff is being distributed without permission and I want it taken down!”, after which we take it down. A similar process exists for getting the content placed back online. It’s all a bit more complicated than this - and possible fodder for a future DreamHost weblog entry.

While the DMCA does offer some major benefits to both copyright holders and web hosts like DreamHost - legal immunity, woo-hoo! - it’s not always used as a force for good. Occasionally, unscrupulous types (and I’m looking at you, Church of Scientology!) will attempt to use the DMCA as a cudgel to take down sites that they don’t like, even when they are clearly in the legal right under copyright law. When that occurs - and it does from time to time - we tell them (in flowery legal language, of course) to go away and leave us alone.

Liability issues aside, we’re not about to knowingly help someone silence valid criticism by going along with false or overly broad DMCA Notifications.

Which brings us to the aptly-named Michael Crook…

Copyright © 2005, Fox News Network (not Michael Crook)

For those of you who are unaware, Michael Crook has become a bit of an Internet phenomenon - sort of like a twisted, distorted version of the Star Wars Kid. Instead of feeling pity because he once made a poor choice of getting in front of a camera, you can’t help but watch the slow motion trainwreck that ensues as he digs himself into a deeper and deeper hole.

It all started in 2005 when he was invited onto a Fox News Channel show due to his controversial “Forsake The Troops” web site. In a moment of spirited bipartisanship among the far-right and not-quite-as-far-right, the show’s hosts railed against him and his site, which was “dedicated to the notion that our nation’s military is grossly overcompensated, at the expense of the American taxpayers.” While also controversial, his holocaust denial site wasn’t featured.

You can view the segment in its entirety on Youtube.

Flash forward to September of last year: Crook decided to copy another “griefer” by posting fake ads promising sexual activity on Craig’s List, baiting men into writing and then posting those responses to his site. Popular weblog 10 Zen Monkeys found out about this and wrote an entry about it, including the (rather unfortunate, to put it mildly) screen capture from the Fox News appearance shown above. Crook responded by filing a DMCA Notification against the site’s web host, who quickly took it down.

The problem is that the copyright for the image - indeed, the whole video of the appearance - doesn’t belong to Michael Crook. It belongs to Fox News, who has stated they don’t care if it’s reposted. Somehow, Crook misinterpreted his being on the show as somehow making him a partial owner of the content.

The web and Crook’s reputation being what it is, the image spread like wildfire - eventually landing on a number of DreamHost-hosted sites. Humorous variations appeared all over the place (even in a FARK Photoshop contest), and Crook sent out fraudulent DMCA Notifications for each of them. We received several, though after the first was reinstated - and we learned the story behind Crook and the images - we stopped acquiescing to his goofy demands.

Once it became clear that we were done listening to him, Crook became quite agitated in his communication with us. He called us names, threatened legal action, filed Notification for yearbook photos he doesn’t own the rights to, filed Notifications for sites that we don’t even host, and even sent us these little gems:

While you’re duly noting, please note also that you will get a DMCA notice every day Until you comply.

You are now a party to interference with a business relationship as I have not received Royalties for these photographs, for which I paid a fee.

Also..just out of curiosity….how would your vendors and customers like an “anonymous” Tip that your company was founded and is run by child molestors?

Just wondering is all.

One other thing for your legal beagles to consider:

Those photographs were from a yearbook for which I paid. I am therefore the
copyright holder. You are fraudists, liars, and you probably all molest your children.

Umm. Yeah.

Mind you, DreamHost Abuse actually does incur a fair bit of this sort of thing. We’ve received death threats, bomb threats, you name it. Libel and defamation? Yeah, we get that sometimes too. Baseless legal threats, though, are a stupidly common occurrence (”I have a right to send spam under the First Amendment - I sue you!”). If we received a penny every time we heard this sort of bluster, we would… well… have a whole bunch of pennies. We don’t scare easy, though, so we mostly just laughed Crook’s Internet kookery off.

We couldn’t help but feel some glee, though, when Crook was sued by the Electronic Frontier Foundation for his abuse of the DMCA. Finally - a landmark case that we could point to showing the penalty for abusing the DMCA! Crook’s misuse of the law was so absuredly blatant that the EFF would almost certainly win!

Unfortunately, on Wednesday it was announced that the case was settled out of court. No legal precedent would be set. D’oh!

Almost as good, though, were the terms of the settlement. Crook would have to formally withdraw all DMCA complaints, apologize for his interference with the free speech rights of his targets, and - perhaps best of all - take a course in copyright law.

Here is Crook’s apology (nice touch with the mustache, huh?):

Click To Play

Of course, this is probably not all that sincere (Crook has since posted attacks against the EFF and 10 Zen Monkeys’ Jeff Diehl elsewhere), but at least it was an admission that he was - legally speaking - completely full of it.

There are a few things to learn from all this:

• If you don’t know the first thing about law, don’t file legal documents. You’d be surprised at how many invalid and incomplete DMCA Notifications we receive, even from people who probably do have a legitimate complaint. For your own sake, heed the advice of a qualified intellectual law attorney!
• If you don’t have a legitimate complaint, don’t make a point of harassing and annoying others. What begins as a minor deal that nobody will remember a week later can quickly become a bit of a tempest. Crook will live with his decisions for the rest of his life, and if (as he has said) he really has/had an interest in going into law he’s almost certainly ruined any chance for that.
• While it has its virtues, the DMCA is flawed. Formal penalties - ones involving more than just video-taped apologies - need to be codified in the law for those who file malicious or false Notifications.
• Simply appearing in a photo or on video does not give you copyright ownership over that appearance.

So, folks, for those keeping score at home: Do yourself a favor. Don’t be a Crook.

Buy or Build?

There comes a time in every young man’s life (and I’m sure it happens to you too, young women), where you’ve asked yourself the age-old question, “Josh, should I buy myself a new Gulfstream G550… or just build it?“

Now that may seem like a ridiculous question to some of you… but it’s not.

It’s a very undiculous question.

Clearly, a Gulfstream G550 is too expensive to buy. So, that kind of narrows it down!

Of course it’d be cheaper for you to build your own, right? I mean, I assume these guys aren’t just making private jets as a way to burn through their trust funds. They must be charging more than it costs them to make… so let’s save some money and build one ourselves! I’m so sure we could build one measly jet for less than $60,000,000!

Now, where do we start?

I guess, we call up a, um, wing store? And maybe a propellor factory? Some kind of fuselage shop? A hot tub manufacturer?

Then, we hire some cheap Chinese/Indian/Mexican/Canadian labor to piece it all together, and whammo, we should have our very own ultra-lux jet for quarters on the dollar!

But quarters on the dollar is not enough! Somebody, somewhere, is clearly still making profit off of us!

Couldn’t we be even cheaper, and build our own wings, too? And our own fuselage? Our own hot tub?

I bet we could! And that’d be even cheaper!

And we could mine our own iron too! And drill for our own oil! And, er, sand our own silicon! And desalinate our own water! And, and, and…

Okay, enough of that. Everybody knows you gotta buy some stuff, sometime… division of labor, specialization, economies of scale, and all that. If it always made sense to build things yourself, why does my wife go shopping so much?

In fact, when you’re just a measly consumer, it pretty much never makes sense to build your own of anything! There’s a reason we’re not called producers.

The average consumer has no capital to spend, no expertise to use, and probably only needs one or two of the item in the first place… which all adds up to a pretty heavy bias towards “buy”.

For a company though, the decision is a little harder. Clearly, there are tons of things you need to produce your product or service that just don’t make sense to build. They’re just too difficult to build, or require too big an investment of money/time for how much of them you need.

For example, we don’t build our own servers, we don’t write our own operating system, we don’t run our own international fiber-optic network, we don’t run our own domain registry, we don’t own our own data center, we don’t run our own office building, we don’t handle our own medical insurance, we don’t bake our own pizzas, and we don’t even clean our own toilets.

In fact, even for companies, most of the time you aren’t going to build things yourself. Generally, your whole business is based around providing just one added value. And generally, it works best if you just focus on making that one added value the most efficient, highest quality, and I guess valuable… you can.

If you get distracted by how crappy your vendors are and start thinking “we could do what stupid Xmlyz Corp does, only soooo much better”, you might just find your company turning into a jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none. And nobody goes with the company that does lots of things poorly.. they use the company that does just what they need… the best!

When you buy something, you can always get it cheaper, faster, and better than building it yourself. So, it always makes a lot more sense to buy.

Except not always!

There are insidious hidden downsides to buying, ones that will now no longer be so as I illuminate them!

For one, the more you buy, the less you control. If it’s a core part of your business, you probably need to be building it!

You don’t want to be lying asleep at night dreaming, “Hmm, that Ventimaxilator 3000 we bought doesn’t quite work as well as I was expecting. I sure hope I can convince Acme Ventimaxilator, LLC to fix it in the 4000!”

And sure, that software license might be cheap today, but once you’re running your whole business on it, who’s to say the price won’t go up, up, and away next year? NOT YOU.

For two, if you can buy it, your competitors can buy it too, brainiac! What’s your advantage then? Having more money? Spending more on advertising?

Well, your competitors can get loans and spend more on advertising too, baby-genius!

I’m pretty sure these downsides to buying are one of the big reasons open-source software is getting ever more popular, especiallyOSS has the cheaper, faster, and better advantages of buying along with the control and differentiation advantages of building!

But wait, how does it have the differentiation advantage? Can’t your competitors use the same open-source software you use?

Yah, yah, yah. True dat.

But at least with open-source you can make your own changes to it. Not to mention, if you have any sort of software expertise, you have a big advantage over other companies trying to use OSS since, unlike much commercial software, OSS is hard to use and has little professional support available!

That’s right. Open-source software’s biggest failings for the consumer market may just be the reason it’s succeeding in business!

I know I at least consider the fact that we use all open-source software, plus our own custom billing, provisioning, and management software one of our greatest advantages through the years.

Oh yeah, and this awesome blog.

Oh yeah…

Have you checked out https://panel.dreamhost.com/ in oh, say, the last five minutes?!

After more than six years of the current panel, we thought it was maybe time for a little update..

Really, all that’s changed is:

1. it’s got a hawt new “web 2.0″ look.
2. we’ve css-ified everything.
3. we’ve added a TINY bit of Ajax.

Functionality-wise for you, the Happy DreamHost Customer, not all that much has really changed.

YET!

But, getting all our various panels standardized and modernized was a huge first step in being able to make lots more little improvements across our panel.

More features? Faster load times? More AJAX?

…who knows!

ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE NOW!

And it’s all thanks to Brett!

P.S. Feel free to post comments/critiques/bugs in the comments here, or over at this thread in our forum!