Title.

Okay I may be switching to calibri in this blog soon.. It seems clearerand easier on my eyes. You may have noticed an ad on the side of my page… it is to test out AdBrite’s ad system as I may be implementing it on some sites soon to raise a little bit of money. I would like to express my opinion on charging people to gain access to some websites. I find this unacceptable behaviour as the internet started out as a medium of free speech and I would like it to stay this way, unconstrained by how rich or poor you are.

The internet was also based on anonymity, which means that you should be able to stay anonymous… however this is becoming increasingly untrue, due to IP trackers being able to find out your location. If you have to pay for access to a site then that site now has access to all your details, and phishing is becoming an evermore ugly aspect in web usage.

Scammers online are the lowest of the low, preying on the weak and stupid, trying to gain their login details… knowing full well that these people who willingly hand over their details think that they know everything about the internet and will not check the address bar to check if the site is legitimate or even think about whether it is a scam.

I will now turn to the topic of a site called “OiNK” being shut down lately… apparently this site was used to distribute pirated goods online. One of the arguments used by the defence is that they are the same as google in being able to find pirated goods. For those of you who don’t know how this works, google has a filetype searching system, where you can type “filetype:” and then the file you want, and google will find exactly that - your search term in that filetype. So if a user was to type in “filetype:torrent” they would be able to find a torrent file which is commonly used to pirate electronic media. I advise against this as google DOES keep a record of what you do online and goverments may have access to this data soon, leading criminal activities to put you in gaol. 

So I put an argument forward to the owner of “OiNK” - your site is not similiar to google, as google automatically indexes everything it finds online discriminately… they do not advertise this filetype feature openly and also the owner of “OiNK” - he knew exactly what people were using his site to do so I don’t beleive any ignorance plea he puts forward. 

Back to the subject at hand - I may be giving this site a complete makeover soon so watch this space.