All .COM domains now subject to US Law

[Nephew Twiddleton]

If we went to .de, would that mean we'd have to lose this emote?



because that would be terrible

We're not going to .de (unless you mean the server, in which case, be more clear).

Yes, that would be terrible.

But I think we would not get in trouble by applying the "easier to ask forgiveness later" maxim, if some German official wants to be anal about it (and they have been/can be) they ask and we remove it, but not before.

If we went to .de, would that mean we'd have to lose this emote?



because that would be terrible

I honestly don't know the meaning behind that emote.

It means "look Germany that thing you did 3/4th century ago that you still suffer national conscience over, killed millions, that horrible thing that created the Wall slashed your country apart that terrible thing that you all said NEVER again, that thing? we trivialized it by giving Hitler a banjo, don't you think that's funny?".

It means about the same thing as a really funny black-face animated GIF.

Hmm...

Ok.

Twid,
Still has no reason to ever use it.

[Faust]

If we went to .de, would that mean we'd have to lose this emote?



because that would be terrible

I honestly don't know the meaning behind that emote.

Once the move is complete and though I dislike the us deciding it owns the internet I will have multiple domains resolve here, .com and org already do and I'm not willing to just switch them off, not when they give us such good traffic.

[Cain]

I think making fun of Hitler is considered fairly legit under German law.

Our emoticons are safe.

[Richter]

Let's get a Kickstarter to put our server on the Moon.

No good. Dok Howl is gonna blow it up, remember?

Who cares?  Kickstarter is for leeching money off of suckers.

Or so I am told.

PT Barnum reinvents every time he has a new outlet.

[Cain]

Question: what about Sweden?  I notice TPB is running on a .se domain name, and they host loads of Nazi material.  If German freedom of speech laws are an issue, then it would seem they do not apply north of the border.

[Triple Zero]

Sure, why not Sweden I haven't had time to familiarize myself with all the differences in legislation everywhere. I'm somewhat familiar with the rules in the US due to media exposure, pretty familiar with the ones in NL due to living there, and just read up a bit on the laws in DE because I came across a sweet deal for renting a dedicated server.

Just reiterating that it's two separate things, where we rent a server (which is a computer in a server park with an IP address) and what domain we use (which is the URL that points to that IP). The first one is a pretty sure thing as Faust's made up his mind about moving away from Dreamhost, and the Hetzner deal so far is the best one we've seen. The second one, buying yet another domain in order to get away from US-controlled .com and .org is an idea that only came up when the news in this topic came to light. Before that, it seemed like it would be enough to have the server not physically located in the US.

Also moving to a different domain is not as pressing as getting a new server. The forum was offline again for some hours today and it would be really nice if we could activate the search feature again. A dedicated server will do that for us, because those problems come from the fact that the Dreamhost server we're renting now is a computer in a US-based server park that we share with a bunch of other people.


this is where I digress and talk about VPSs for a bit
I'm not sure how many customers we're sharing this machine with, but that's the reason why Faust can tweak the amount of CPU and memory resources available to PD: the machine is in fact much more powerful than what we get to use, because it "serves several Dreamhost customers (guests) and they can use the control panel to select how big a slice of the resource pie they want (for a price). This is why it's called a Virtual Private Server (VPS) because to the guest it (virtually) looks like we're renting our own private computer, while in reality it is a slice of a really big fat machine.

The "super" process that manages all these slices and allocates resources for them is called a HYPERVISOR (I'm looking at the wiki page for VPS now and just learned this--didn't want to withhold a cool word like HYPERVISOR from you guys). While it's technically possible for the HYPERVISOR to create a fully virtual environment for each guest so that it's completely indistinguishable from a standalone machine, this comes with a lot of overhead, meaning a smaller pie for everyone to share.

Here comes the part which is speculation, because I'm not entirely familiar with how this works and what our set up is. But I guess Dreamhost wouldn't do full virtualization because of the mentioned performance gains. This is fine but it might also mean that you can "hear" your neighbours if they're noisy. I dunno if that's part of what's taking the forum offline now and then, but if we really had our own dedicated server we could get to the bottom of it. Another possibility is that we are the noisy neighbours, and the landlord (HYPERVISOR) notices we're using our resources really intensively and maybe cuts us off for a while. I dunno.


Anyway, yeah, we could probably also rent a dedicated server in Sweden, or anywhere else. The thing is, while I've not been actively looking much, I've kept my ears and eyes wide open for any decent non-US-based hosting deals over the past year or so and Hetzner is the first that really popped out. Also the people on HackerNews were quite positive about it. Still, we're always open to new suggestions of course. Ask your geeky IT friends. Hit Google for dedicated hosting in Sweden, France, Belgium, Bulgaria, Switzerland, wherever, and see what deals are out there.

As for a .se domain name, I looked around on the webpage of the .se domain registry https://www.iis.se/en/ and it seems that you can basically  register any free domain even if you're not Swedish. This is not always the case for every country, for instance you need to be a resident of the Bahamas if you'd want to register http://himeo.bs

[Faust]

Actually we were the noisy neighbors. We we're knocking the whole vps offline every time we had large query.
For the last three months, ever since I set the server to take a larger share of the pie and restricted search and such we've been  a lot more stable.
However dreamhost have not, at least once a month they have had huge outages. It used to be that they would refund people for their down time. They stopped doing that a long while ago and it really makes the downtime insufferable.

[Bebek Sincap Ratatosk]

Cloud servers, boys... cloud servers

[LMNO]

Cloud servers, boys... cloud servers

Why does this sound like "frying pan, meet fire"?

[Cain]

Cloud servers are great....if you own one.

[Bebek Sincap Ratatosk]

Cloud servers, boys... cloud servers

Why does this sound like "frying pan, meet fire"?

Actually, I've been working with the technology for awhile and its tends to be more stable than the older hypervisor/virtual server design.  One of the really cool things about it is that you can build a server image, and set it up so if that server gets hammered, it will create a copy of the image, bring it up, drop a load balancing server in front of it and double your capacity until the server traffic returns to normal. At that point, it shuts down the extra servers and returns normal mode. Those hosts are paid based on usage only... and they have some nice configurations so that you don't start duplicating servers to deal with a DDOS etc.

I admit it might be a bit of an overkill for PD.com, but the pricing is pretty competitive.

[Faust]

Cloud servers, boys... cloud servers

Why does this sound like "frying pan, meet fire"?

Actually, I've been working with the technology for awhile and its tends to be more stable than the older hypervisor/virtual server design.  One of the really cool things about it is that you can build a server image, and set it up so if that server gets hammered, it will create a copy of the image, bring it up, drop a load balancing server in front of it and double your capacity until the server traffic returns to normal. At that point, it shuts down the extra servers and returns normal mode. Those hosts are paid based on usage only... and they have some nice configurations so that you don't start duplicating servers to deal with a DDOS etc.

I admit it might be a bit of an overkill for PD.com, but the pricing is pretty competitive.

That does sound like a pretty cool way of doing things, I asked about the same for our server: Dynamically increasing our resources when a big hit comes its way, but dreamhost wouldn't make any money off the higher rate if that was the case because we would lower it down afterwards.
A disadvantage of going cloud is that it doesn't provide full root access, I want a machine I can freely install whatever I want on it (provided it's legal).

[East Coast Hustle]

Sure, why not Sweden I haven't had time to familiarize myself with all the differences in legislation everywhere. I'm somewhat familiar with the rules in the US due to media exposure, pretty familiar with the ones in NL due to living there, and just read up a bit on the laws in DE because I came across a sweet deal for renting a dedicated server.

Just reiterating that it's two separate things, where we rent a server (which is a computer in a server park with an IP address) and what domain we use (which is the URL that points to that IP). The first one is a pretty sure thing as Faust's made up his mind about moving away from Dreamhost, and the Hetzner deal so far is the best one we've seen. The second one, buying yet another domain in order to get away from US-controlled .com and .org is an idea that only came up when the news in this topic came to light. Before that, it seemed like it would be enough to have the server not physically located in the US.

Also moving to a different domain is not as pressing as getting a new server. The forum was offline again for some hours today and it would be really nice if we could activate the search feature again. A dedicated server will do that for us, because those problems come from the fact that the Dreamhost server we're renting now is a computer in a US-based server park that we share with a bunch of other people.


this is where I digress and talk about VPSs for a bit
I'm not sure how many customers we're sharing this machine with, but that's the reason why Faust can tweak the amount of CPU and memory resources available to PD: the machine is in fact much more powerful than what we get to use, because it "serves several Dreamhost customers (guests) and they can use the control panel to select how big a slice of the resource pie they want (for a price). This is why it's called a Virtual Private Server (VPS) because to the guest it (virtually) looks like we're renting our own private computer, while in reality it is a slice of a really big fat machine.

The "super" process that manages all these slices and allocates resources for them is called a HYPERVISOR (I'm looking at the wiki page for VPS now and just learned this--didn't want to withhold a cool word like HYPERVISOR from you guys). While it's technically possible for the HYPERVISOR to create a fully virtual environment for each guest so that it's completely indistinguishable from a standalone machine, this comes with a lot of overhead, meaning a smaller pie for everyone to share.

Here comes the part which is speculation, because I'm not entirely familiar with how this works and what our set up is. But I guess Dreamhost wouldn't do full virtualization because of the mentioned performance gains. This is fine but it might also mean that you can "hear" your neighbours if they're noisy. I dunno if that's part of what's taking the forum offline now and then, but if we really had our own dedicated server we could get to the bottom of it. Another possibility is that we are the noisy neighbours, and the landlord (HYPERVISOR) notices we're using our resources really intensively and maybe cuts us off for a while. I dunno.


Anyway, yeah, we could probably also rent a dedicated server in Sweden, or anywhere else. The thing is, while I've not been actively looking much, I've kept my ears and eyes wide open for any decent non-US-based hosting deals over the past year or so and Hetzner is the first that really popped out. Also the people on HackerNews were quite positive about it. Still, we're always open to new suggestions of course. Ask your geeky IT friends. Hit Google for dedicated hosting in Sweden, France, Belgium, Bulgaria, Switzerland, wherever, and see what deals are out there.

As for a .se domain name, I looked around on the webpage of the .se domain registry https://www.iis.se/en/ and it seems that you can basically  register any free domain even if you're not Swedish. This is not always the case for every country, for instance you need to be a resident of the Bahamas if you'd want to register http://himeo.bs

As a complete aside to the point of the thread, if we DO want to register himeo.bs I can possibly find someone who would do that for us.

[Bebek Sincap Ratatosk]

Cloud servers, boys... cloud servers

Why does this sound like "frying pan, meet fire"?

Actually, I've been working with the technology for awhile and its tends to be more stable than the older hypervisor/virtual server design.  One of the really cool things about it is that you can build a server image, and set it up so if that server gets hammered, it will create a copy of the image, bring it up, drop a load balancing server in front of it and double your capacity until the server traffic returns to normal. At that point, it shuts down the extra servers and returns normal mode. Those hosts are paid based on usage only... and they have some nice configurations so that you don't start duplicating servers to deal with a DDOS etc.

I admit it might be a bit of an overkill for PD.com, but the pricing is pretty competitive.

That does sound like a pretty cool way of doing things, I asked about the same for our server: Dynamically increasing our resources when a big hit comes its way, but dreamhost wouldn't make any money off the higher rate if that was the case because we would lower it down afterwards.
A disadvantage of going cloud is that it doesn't provide full root access, I want a machine I can freely install whatever I want on it (provided it's legal).

"Cloud Sites" don't give you root access. Cloud servers are basically disk/memory/processor and you can build your own server from the OS up... full CLI etc.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Sure, why not Sweden I haven't had time to familiarize myself with all the differences in legislation everywhere. I'm somewhat familiar with the rules in the US due to media exposure, pretty familiar with the ones in NL due to living there, and just read up a bit on the laws in DE because I came across a sweet deal for renting a dedicated server.

Just reiterating that it's two separate things, where we rent a server (which is a computer in a server park with an IP address) and what domain we use (which is the URL that points to that IP). The first one is a pretty sure thing as Faust's made up his mind about moving away from Dreamhost, and the Hetzner deal so far is the best one we've seen. The second one, buying yet another domain in order to get away from US-controlled .com and .org is an idea that only came up when the news in this topic came to light. Before that, it seemed like it would be enough to have the server not physically located in the US.

Also moving to a different domain is not as pressing as getting a new server. The forum was offline again for some hours today and it would be really nice if we could activate the search feature again. A dedicated server will do that for us, because those problems come from the fact that the Dreamhost server we're renting now is a computer in a US-based server park that we share with a bunch of other people.


this is where I digress and talk about VPSs for a bit
I'm not sure how many customers we're sharing this machine with, but that's the reason why Faust can tweak the amount of CPU and memory resources available to PD: the machine is in fact much more powerful than what we get to use, because it "serves several Dreamhost customers (guests) and they can use the control panel to select how big a slice of the resource pie they want (for a price). This is why it's called a Virtual Private Server (VPS) because to the guest it (virtually) looks like we're renting our own private computer, while in reality it is a slice of a really big fat machine.

The "super" process that manages all these slices and allocates resources for them is called a HYPERVISOR (I'm looking at the wiki page for VPS now and just learned this--didn't want to withhold a cool word like HYPERVISOR from you guys). While it's technically possible for the HYPERVISOR to create a fully virtual environment for each guest so that it's completely indistinguishable from a standalone machine, this comes with a lot of overhead, meaning a smaller pie for everyone to share.

Here comes the part which is speculation, because I'm not entirely familiar with how this works and what our set up is. But I guess Dreamhost wouldn't do full virtualization because of the mentioned performance gains. This is fine but it might also mean that you can "hear" your neighbours if they're noisy. I dunno if that's part of what's taking the forum offline now and then, but if we really had our own dedicated server we could get to the bottom of it. Another possibility is that we are the noisy neighbours, and the landlord (HYPERVISOR) notices we're using our resources really intensively and maybe cuts us off for a while. I dunno.


Anyway, yeah, we could probably also rent a dedicated server in Sweden, or anywhere else. The thing is, while I've not been actively looking much, I've kept my ears and eyes wide open for any decent non-US-based hosting deals over the past year or so and Hetzner is the first that really popped out. Also the people on HackerNews were quite positive about it. Still, we're always open to new suggestions of course. Ask your geeky IT friends. Hit Google for dedicated hosting in Sweden, France, Belgium, Bulgaria, Switzerland, wherever, and see what deals are out there.

As for a .se domain name, I looked around on the webpage of the .se domain registry https://www.iis.se/en/ and it seems that you can basically  register any free domain even if you're not Swedish. This is not always the case for every country, for instance you need to be a resident of the Bahamas if you'd want to register http://himeo.bs

As a complete aside to the point of the thread, if we DO want to register himeo.bs I can possibly find someone who would do that for us.

I think that would be totally awesome, personally!