Josh Wieder

Until the site went off line some 35 hours ago, torrent distribution site Kickass Torrents was wide ly be lieved to be the most popu lar torrent site on the internet, having surpassed the  long-troub led Pirate Bay in traffic years ago.  Kickass Torrents  was taken off line after the arrest of Ukrainian  Artem Vaulin  in Po land , who  law enforcement are accusing of using the site to  profit from copyright infringement. Copies of a US Federa l  crimina l comp laint brought against Vau lin in the Northern District of I l linois revea l an interesting connection with another incredib ly controversia l  investigation: the case brought against Ross U lbricht for the now-famous Si lk Road website. The connection between the  Kickass Torrents  investigation and the Si lk Road investigation comes in the form of a sing le individua l: Home land Security Investigator  Jared Der-Yeghiayan. The Kickass Torrents crimina l comp laint is  entire ly based on a sworn affidavit provided by  Der-Yeg

    Recent versions of WHMCS introduce a feature called " Product Bundles ". The idea is simple - a single link combines a number of products, possibly with a specific set of Configurable Options . These combinations can then be assigned discounts unique to that Bundle.     This comes in handy for a variety of different scenarios, for example in WHMCS instances where multiple brands are in play and you want to run a sale on a single brand that is still sold on other sites.     I recently encountered a situation that involved integrating a pre-existing pricing form within a CMS platform (think Joomla/Wordpress/Drupal/etc) with an order form and series of products with WHMCS. Not only did the signup buttons on the CMS page for each product need to connect to the corresponding WHMCS order form page, but pricing and product details on the CMS page needed to be generated dynamically from information stored in WHMCS, because updating two platforms to make simple price changes suck

Comcast is my current home ISP. Over the last year, I've had a ton of problems with them filtering all sorts of legitimate (outbound) traffic . The latest fun times I've had is the random dropping of SSH connections on both standard (22) and non-standard TCP ports. This occurred while I was running a `yum update` on one of my servers and I hadn't used ` nohup ` or ` disown ` to allow the processes I had spawned to continue to run. By the time I had got a VPN connection up and running, the yum process had been terminated, which in turn caused yum's database to become corrupt. How can you tell that your server's yum database is corrupt? Running yum will generate this vaguely-terrifying error: # yum update error: rpmdb: BDB0113 Thread/process 4498/140039588845376 failed: BDB1507 Thread died in Berkeley DB library error: db5 error(-30973) from dbenv->failchk: BDB0087 DB_RUNRECOVERY: Fatal error, run database recovery error: cannot open Packages index using db5

Its come to my attention that blog has way too much helpful technical information and not nearly enough bitching & complaining. With today's post, I hope to tip the scales a bit. During the course of the day, I use a variety of operating systems. Most of my desktop computers use Windows, most of my servers use some version of either linux or bsd, and a large number of my customers use Macs (which I know underneath the branding is also linux, but we are talking about UI stuff in this post, and in that department OS X qualifies as its own thing). Over the last 20 or so years I've alternated between which operating system I use most frequently, based on what kind of work I'm doing as well as what is inexpensive, secure and effective at the time. Lately I've had a series of Windows laptops that I've spent a fair amount of time working with. It is what it is, I don't want to get off topic. This isn't some mouth-breather-y attempt to measure the manhood be

    Several days ago I noticed that several Comcast / Xfinity residential internet connections throughout the Southeastern US were unable to download or upload torrents. I have a hunch that Comcast implemented a new manner of filtering for customers in my area with the intent of stamping out P2P traffic, however I am not certain if this is the case yet, so I am holding off on a tirade about the friendly neighborhood corporatist internet monopoly for now. I'm interested to know if any other P2P users have encountered similar issues - if so, I hope this post can help.      The torrent client used for file sharing on these connections was qbittorrent, and listened for incoming connections using a random TCP port assignment that changed each time the client was restarted. Outbound connections used something in the high range on the local side (e.g. TCP port 59999) while on the remote side the port would also be random. It was possible to establish a connection to remote hosts using

When used correctly, encryption works really well. It works so well that most people can't wrap their brain around how powerful it is. The biggest gains we can make in improving online security and privacy won't be the result of making encryption better. Most of our problems are the result of how encryption is used. At the moment, using encryption is complicated. Its not complicated to the point where you need special training to use it, but its complicated enough that its a pain in the ass for non-technical people to adopt. So non-technical people don't adopt encryption. That's a real problem - because most people are non-technical. Actually, its worse than that, because it means only communications between technical people can be secured with any regularity. Even technical people can't communicate securely with non-technical people. Encryption can only be truly successful with massive levels of adoption. Even with all of its problem, HTTP-based SS

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