The latest from TechCrunch
- WikiLeaks Reports It Is Under A Denial Of Service Attack
- Sites With Government Seized Domains Are Moving On, On Twitter
- Gmail Lite: If You Build It Google, We Will Come
| WikiLeaks Reports It Is Under A Denial Of Service Attack | Top |
| @wikileaks WikiLeaks We are currently under a mass distributed denial of service attack. about 9 hours ago via web Retweet A lot of people, including many governments, have problems with WikiLeaks , the site dedicated to publishing sensitive and often classified documents. (Read more background on the controversial organization). The site is currently under a distributed denial of service attack, according to a Tweet from the WikiLeaks account. The site seems to be withstanding the attack so far. It is up right now . The DDOS attack comes just as WikiLeaks is preparing to release another set of U.S. government documents—this time diplomatic cables which may prove so embarrassing that the State Department decided to warn foreign governments ahead of their release. But WikiLeaks reports via Twitter that even if the site goes down, newspapers around the world will publish excerpts from the cables: @wikileaks WikiLeaks El Pais, Le Monde, Speigel, Guardian & NYT will publish many US embassy cables tonight, even if WikiLeaks goes down about 9 hours ago via web Retweet So who is behind the DDOS attack—government spy agencies, the Russians, 4chan? It is obviously a conspiracy. Different people will have different theories, including that WikiLeaks itself is behind the “attack” to draw attention (and sympathy) on the eve of its latest big leak. But let’s give them the benefit of the doubt for now, until proven otherwise. Update : The New York Times published its first series of articles on the leaked documents along with selected cables . CrunchBase Information WikiLeaks Twitter Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Sites With Government Seized Domains Are Moving On, On Twitter | Top |
| Last week while everyone was waiting for the COICA bill to move through Congress, the US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agency one upped the Attorney General and seized domain names from a group of over 70 copyright infringing websites . A visit to the blacklisted domains now results in the ominous looking message from Homeland Security below. While the graphic is pretty scary, Market Ticker’s Karl Denninger points out the websites themselves and the servers they run on have not actually been seized , just the domains. “That’s a lot of staff attorney time and trouble to get a big fat nothing out of it, which is exactly what they get going down this road. Why? Because all they can do is redirect the domain pointers which will do exactly nothing when the sites re-register under a top-level domain not under the US Government’s jurisdiction – and there are lots of them.” Domains under US jurisdiction currently include anything controlled by Verisign which puts .com site owners in a legal relationship with the United States. According to Denninger, all afflicted site owners need to do is move to a non-US controlled top level domain in order to dodge further ICE seizures. Some have already started to migrate to other domains, though it’s likely choices like .net won’t be any safer. Torrent-Finder owner Waleed Gad El Kareem said he switched his site over to Torrent-Finder.info the moment he saw the ICE message on Torrent-Finder.com, posting the new site’s address on Twitter. @gadelkareem Waleed GadElKareem Torrent Finder is now http://www.torrent-finder.info November 25, 2010 11:49 pm via Digsby Retweet Hip hop site RapGodfathers has aggressively followed suit with its own .info address, using Twitter to get the word out about the move and asking people to retweet as well as @replying fans with its new domain. @RapGodFathers RapGodFathers.info Everyone please retweet our new link, lots of people still don't know about it. http://www.RapGodFathers.info #RGF November 27, 2010 3:58 pm via web Retweet Onsmash seems to have not made the move over, but is soliciting emails from fans on Twitter who oppose the domain name seizure as well as tweeting out stuff like “THEY CAN NEVER STOP US!!!” I’ve emailed them and sister site dajaz1.com about possible plans to move to a different domain and am waiting to hear back. @HofOnSMASH Hof // OnSMASH ARTISTS: If you oppose the seizure of @ OnSMASH pls send an email to gmail .com”>freeonsmash@ gmail .com & express why. Your participation is appreciated! November 27, 2010 4:08 pm via web Retweet Even the counterfeit sites have caught on, an email I sent to www.2009Jerseys.com was met with the following auto response, “Notice: The original Domain Name has been suspended, please visit the new domain name www.2009Jerseys.net, We apologize for the inconvenience. If there is new information, we will first time inform you.” The people behind Dvdcollects.com have decided to focus all their energy on the yet unfettered Bestcollects.com according to their Facebook page. If it really is that easy to pick up and move on its hard to believe that the other 70 or so sites won’t find friendlier domains on which to land, rendering ICE’s efforts ultimately futile. If anything, the seizures serve as lesson to all possibly infringing sites — Steer clear of the .com top level domain. | |
| Gmail Lite: If You Build It Google, We Will Come | Top |
| I’ve seen the future of messaging — it looks a lot like Facebook Messages. More specifically, it looks like the new version of Facebook Messages that the company began rolling out two weeks ago. But I’m not sure that the future is Facebook Messages. At least not for me. Because that’s simply not how I have used Facebook and it’s too hard to switch my patterns now. And that’s why Gmail has a huge opportunity. We need a Gmail Lite. At first, I was underwhelmed by the new Facebook Messages. But that’s just because I really hadn’t been using Facebook Messages before. I would get a message every now and then, but mostly I would ignore the area. But in the past couple of weeks, probably as the feature gets turned on for more users, I’ve started to get more messages coming to me this way. And as that has happened, I’m seeing the absolute beauty of the system. Namely, I’m seeing the beauty in its speed. I’m not even talking about loading times or anything necessarily related to the technology behind Facebook Messages. What I’m talking about is the feature that allows you to respond to a message simply by typing in the tiny box below it and hitting return to send. Some people hate this idea because they want the return button to insert a carriage return like the old days — and that’s fine, that’s still an option right next to the box you’re typing in — but I love this quick-send ability. Love. Love. Love it. The famous cliche is that every second counts. But it’s a cliche because it’s true. Every second does count. At first, you might think it’s ridiculous that I’m jumping for joy because Facebook Messages is saving me one or two seconds by not having to use the send button. But those seconds really do add up. I wonder how many times over the years I’ve hit that send button? Tens of thousands? Hundreds of thousands? 100,000 seconds is almost 28 hours. In other words, I’ve probably wasted a day of my life hitting that stupid button. And yes, I know there are keyboard shortcuts. But the percentage of people who use those is likely pretty small. Plus, on Gmail, the keyboard shortcut to send something involves hitting two keys: tab then enter. If you could cut out the tab part, you’d still be saving about a half second. Again, per message. It adds up. But that’s just one part of it. Let’s talk more specifically about Gmail. The product I’m envisioning would be an opt-in version of the service which would replace the standard Gmail that we all know and love (when it’s not unbearably slow these days ) with a modified version. This new version would work much like Facebook Messages in that when you load a message thread, you’d have a small box under it: the reply area. To reply, you’d simply type a message and hit return, and off it would go. There would be no options to change the fonts of the email. No subject line. No CC field, no BCC field. No left-align, right-align, quotes, bullet lists, etc. None of the crap that you don’t use 99 percent of the time. It would just be a tiny input box that you could type a message into, or paste a URL into. Ideally, you’d be able to drag a photo or document in this box too, to attach it to the message (like you now can with regular Gmail). And then you send it. Again, just like Facebook Messages. If for some reason you needed to add any of the above mentioned clutter to your message, there would be a button to make that stuff appear. But by default, it would all be off. It would just be a small input box. But the real key to this Gmail Lite that I envision would be a restriction. Message length. Currently, a huge amount of time with email is wasted trying to fit it into some lame formal style. Dear so and so, Thank you so much for the such and such. It was great to so and so. Hopefully we can such and such again. Oh and blah blah blah. Wasn’t that blah? Sincerely, The person whose time was just wasted P.S. Writing this sentence just wasted another 20 seconds of my time. If you want to be formal with someone, send them a letter. 99 percent of messages online should be brief. Message: Drinks tonight? Response: Yes That’s it. If anyone wonders why SMS has been exploding in usage over the past decade (in spite of rip-off costs), this is it. There’s no reason email shouldn’t work like that as well. And while email may be getting less formal with time, I would bet that the length of the emails actually isn’t going down. That’s why we need a new restriction in place in this Gmail Lite to enforce that. Back in September, my colleague Jon wrote about the awesome movement to send three sentence emails . It’s a wonderful idea, but it’s just not catching on in the way that it needs to in order to fix the problem. We need a built-in solution. Gmail Lite should borrow the character restriction from Twitter and enforce it. 140 characters. But maybe bump it up to 160 characters, the actual SMS limit, as usernames wouldn’t be needed with this system. This way, messages could also be sent via SMS (again, like Facebook Messages). More importantly, messages would have to be brief. Even more brief than three sentences. It would be so beautiful. Part of the problem with email coming in is that when one comes in, you know in the back of your mind that you’ll have to type a bunch of words and hit send to respond to it. It will take time. So you put it off. If there was just this input box that forced you to be as brief as possible, I bet that a lot of people would respond more immediately. And the response rate in general would be higher. How do I know? I see it in my new Facebook Messages inbox and my Twitter Direct Message area. Obviously, this idea will have some people screaming bloddy murder. But remember, Gmail Lite would just be an opt-in option for users. And if you needed to send a long email, you could hop back into regular Gmail Classic with the click of a button. But I would bet that a huge percentage of Gmail users would opt-in to using Gmail Lite as their primary email solution. And it would come with some sort of built-in notifier in the mail itself (either at the bottom or in the metadata) to let people know that you were responding with Gmail Lite, and that’s why your response was so shot (like what three.sentenc.es does). It might be weird at first, but eventually, everyone would get used to it. So what’s stopping a startup from doing this? Why does it have to be Facebook or Google? Because, sadly, this is probably only going to work with a messaging system that has hundreds of millions of people already using it. (And of those, Gmail is in my mind still definitely the best.) Twitter has come the closest to doing this from the outside, but that service is used differently — it’s public messaging versus private messaging. And private Direct Messages are severely limited by the follow factor (someone has to be following you for you to DM them). Gmail’s Priority Inbox is great . But it really just dances around the true inbox problem. It helps you determine what email to ignore. It doesn’t solve the fundamental issue that we’re all seeing more and more as inboxes grow: the lame legacy formalities of the system. And the outdated ideas such as the subject line and even the send button. We need to kill all that stuff off. And we need a current email system to help do it, so it will actually catch on. Facebook Message may well be the future of this type of online communication for the younger generations, but Gmail has a chance to mimic the idea and get the rest of us involved right now. Gmail Lite. If you build it Google, we will come. Update : Chris Messina (who happens to work for Google) had some similar thoughts that he shared on his blog last week . Check out his mock up for the simplified Gmail message, looks good. [image: Universal Pictures] CrunchBase Information Gmail Facebook Information provided by CrunchBase | |
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