Domain Name Wire reports that the WebLock program will be opt-in rather than opt-out. The report also notes that the email was sent to 49 customers.

Phone Call

I got a phone call from Network Solutions, where they acknowledged that the wording of the email wasn’t good. They’ve had meetings about the wording of that email, the caller said.

I said that I didn’t want the feature. So the person who called me had a quick script to go through where I had to acknowledge that I understood what I was declining. The phone call took about two minutes in all.

My Next Step

I’ll be transferring my domain names. Probably to Hover.

Over the past 24 hours I’ve had lots of registrars recommended to me. The upshot seems to be this: they’re all good except for GoDaddy. People recommend Namecheap, PairNIC, Gandi.net, Dreamhost, and Dynadot.

Which doesn’t give me a clear answer — until I take into account Hover’s long-time support of the podcast community. (I’m a listener and a podcaster. No, they haven’t advertised with me, and I haven’t asked them to.)

Questions

People have asked me a few questions (or had misconceptions):

Do I host my sites at Network Solutions?

No. They’re at DreamHost. (I’ve been there for about 10 years and they’ve been great. This site is fast. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that it’s a statically-rendered site.)

The name servers are also at DreamHost.

Which domains were involved?

ranchero.com and inessential.com (this blog). The email didn’t specify which domain would be getting the WebLock program. It could be both. I don’t know.

What kind of traffic do I have that would get me noticed by Network Solutions?

Domain Name Wire reported yesterday that this service was going to “approximately 1 percent of Web.com’s customers.”

I have no idea how Network Solutions would know how much traffic I get.

My stats app Analog tells me that inessential.com had 2,270,357 requests for pages in December 2013, which was a typical month. I don’t know if this counts RSS feed requests. Presumably it doesn’t count images and style sheets and similar.

(I’m sure I sound terribly old-school by now: Network Solutions, DreamHost, and Analog. But that’s just because I haven’t felt a need to make changes. Until now.)

Was I unaware that Network Solutions indulged in less-than-stellar practices?

I was not unaware. I stopped registering new domains there in 1999. But I hadn’t felt it necessary to transfer my domains. (Not least because my time is best-spent writing code.)

The Internet Machine

So what happens when something so obviously inflammatory is posted?

My initial tweet was retweeted 293 times and favorited 47 times.

My blog post had the top spot on Hacker News for hours yesterday. It also appeared on Slashdot and on Reddit’s Technology page.

This blog got 2.8 times its normal traffic. (I don’t have ads. And I’d way rather people came here to read about something cool or something I made.)

I spent some time reading comments. My favorite — because I’m a software developer — was this one: “I was really pleased with the instantaneous load of this blog.”

mpicpp sends this report from Ars Technica: "Protests against tech giants and their impact on the San Francisco Bay Area economy just got personal. According to an anonymous submission on local news site Indybay, an unknown group of protesters targeted a Google engineer best known for helping to develop the company's self-driving car. ... The protest against Levandowski came the same day that the San Francisco Municipal Transit Authority (SFMTA) voted for the first time to take action regulating Google, Facebook, Apple, and a number of other large tech companies that shuttle workers in private, Wi-Fi-enabled buses from the Bay Area to points south in Silicon Valley."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Printing company blacks out photos of pigs in International New York Times because "this is a Muslim country".

Greps under uppdrag att skydda norsk kvinna.

Sockatume writes "Remember the fun of spurious substring matches, AKA the Scunthorpe problem? The UK's advanced 'intelligent' internet filters do. Supposedly the country's great new filtering regime has been blocking a patch for League of Legends because some of the filenames within it include the substring 'sex.' Add one to the list of embarrassing failures for the nation's new mosaic of opt-out censorship systems, which have proven themselves incapable of distinguishing between abusive sites and sites for abuse victims, or sites for pornography versus sites for sexual and gender minorities."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Phone-tapping allegations from the former NSA analyst have soured relations between Australia and Indonesia.

Polisen larmades i kväll om väpnat rån mot en livsmedelsbutik i Sundsvall.

Slashdot visited the Formlabs CES display in 2013. Tim looked at their Stereolithgraphy 3-D printer again this year. The company is now boasting about their PreForm 1.0 software, and not as much about their hardware, which was their main focus last year. Another important difference was that at CES 2013 they couldn't talk about sales because they hadn't sold any units yet, but now they claim they've sold over 1000. And the last major problem they faced was a patent infringement suit, which seems to be settled (or nearly so). According to this Oct. 2013 article, it's doubtful that Formlabs would have been able to raise $2.95 through Kickstarter, followed by another $19 million from traditional venture capitalists, if the lawsuit wasn't close to settlement -- which may not matter much in the long run, since many key patents in the field have either expired or are due to expire between now and 2015.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.