Gossamer Web Design Lake Tahoe

In the better late then never category; while investigating unusual server behavior I ran across picscout.com. I fail to actually link this website; it is no oversight.

While consulting google foo I ran across a number of interesting posts. It seems that for several years picscout.com has teamed up with various players intent on enforcing Image Copyright Infringement legal proceedings, in a David vs. Goliath environment against unsuspecting small businesses and their web designers.

At issue is whether the use of hundreds of pixels of a an image available on the web constitutes copyright infringement sufficient to deny the copyright holder but a single meal at the dinner table.

Lets be clear, for anyone to deny a meal to the originator of any image found on the web, you would need a copy of the copyright  image consisting of millions of pixels. Unless an image is published that would allow for the commercial production of the image, then these images certainly fall into the category of the exclusions defined in sections 107 through 118 of the copyright law (Title 17, U. S. Code).

The Fair Use Doctrine.

Oh yeah, google foo. Seems some folks believe they can make a buck by intimating thousands of businesses with thousands of dollars consisting of inflated claims of damages; actual economic losses. The letters these folks send out presume guilt, demand thousands of dollars per image, and violate the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

You can review most of the ancient history here. Then and now, a webmaster has to evaluate legitimate claims. And we expect anyone indexing our websites to provide clear and present identification of their crawlers in our logs.

While google foo revealed some old data on the IP addresses of picscout activity, for the most part it seems that these sources have lost track of those that wish to extort rather than build win/win business relationships.

We have identified the following sources of questionable behavior for your convenience.

• bzq-114-71-13.static.bezeqint.net
• bzq-179-82-199.static.bezeqint.net
• bzq-79-176-31-143.red.bezeqint.net
• bzq-79-177-113-122.red.bezeqint.net
• bzq-79-178-106-205.red.bezeqint.net
• bzq-79-178-88-235.red.bezeqint.net
• bzq-79-181-112-244.red.bezeqint.net
• bzq-79-181-45-20.red.bezeqint.net
• bzq-79-182-47-213.red.bezeqint.net
• bzq-79-183-115-218.red.bezeqint.net
• bzq-80-16-231.red.bezeqint.net
• bzq-80-17-3.red.bezeqint.net
• bzq-82-81-150-209.red.bezeqint.net
• bzq-82-81-35-175.red.bezeqint.net
• bzq-84-109-41-133.red.bezeqint.net
• bzq-219-119-15.static.bezeqint.net

The last entry appeared in my log files minutes after posting this article.

Of course, I leave it up to the user to fill in the IP addresses, all of which have been banned from my server. While some may suggest that you can merely add a robots exclusion for ‘picscout’, since they do not identify themselves this will not work. You really have to wonder why picscout goes to such great lengths to hide their activity, masquerading as a web browser.

A tool to help identify copyright infringement would be very helpful to the majority of webmasters, but when this tool is used to harass and demand extortion like payments, it represents the worst on the web.

Mountain Magic Catering, one of Lake Tahoe’s premier catering companies and Gossamer Web Design combined talents to give The Wizard’s website a makeover. Gossamer designed the original website a decade ago and while the website proved extremely popular, the technology used was showing signs of wear and tear.

The first step in upgrading any website is to come up with an appropriate theme. Dozens of themes were reviewed before the selection was narrowed to two themes, then one. We wanted a theme that was simple, yet elegant, and that included a splash of flash to spice things up.

One of the larger challenges faced when redesigning a website is predicting what effect the redesign will have on the search engine rankings. Quite often new designs are not received well by the search engines for a variety of reasons, so a great deal of effort was devoted to the new structure of the website. Current page rankings were analyzed along with how to organize the new website with the keywords we wanted to target prior to upgrading each page of the new website.

Each page was then carefully crafted in order to optimize the page along with our keyword selection goals. While I fully expected a temporary drop in rankings since we were both changing the IP address of the website and completely redesigning the website; Gossamer and Mountain Magic Catering were pleased when we found out that rather than see a drop in our rankings, we actually saw an increase in the number of and rankings for the majority of our targeted keywords.

The biggest surprise came when Peter revealed that he had been saving up new photos for the last two years and submitted some 700 new photos for the website. The Wizard’s new website now has over a dozen new photo galleries. These galleries are an ideal way to let future customers see what a magically designed catering event looks like.

During the several month process redesigning the website, I bombarded Peter with a ton of technical details. Peter took them all in stride, indictative of his uncanny ability to take in and organize the thousands of details each and every catering event demands.

Your work to date with my content is cutting edge… – Peter

Along with the transfer of Peter’s website to our server was a transfer of Peter’s email service. Peter had been complaining of excessive amounts of SPAM with his previous ISP and as I had boasted, Peter’s SPAM was dramatically reduced.

My Spam is way down/very nice.. – Peter

Gossamer has been designing ‘Websites that Work‘ in the Lake Tahoe area since 1996 and this year is celebrating fifteen years of service; which makes us one of the oldest web design companies in the Tahoe Basin.

The following perl modules have been updated:

• p5-Bit-Vector-7.0
• p5-Catalyst-Runtime-5.80011
• p5-Class-Accessor-Grouped-0.09000
• p5-DateTime-Locale-0.43_1
• p5-IO-Socket-SSL-1.30
• p5-JSON-XS-2.25
• p5-Module-Build-0.35
• p5-MooseX-Types-0.19
• p5-subversion-1.6.5

This morning we received  several vulnerability security warnings for Apache. While the initial read of the warnings seem to preclude our current configuration, it is better safe than sorry. The main threat appears to be Denial of Service (DOS) related.

The following packages have been updated:

• libtool-2.2.6a
• apache-2.2.13
• curl-7.19.6_1

Webmasters running WordPress on a UNIX flavor server running Apache2 may have noticed that when you attempt to use the automatic upgrade option on your plugins page of the Dashboard, that you are prompted for a FTP login.

Rather than conjour up a FTP account you can patch one of your WordPress administration files to get the upgrade option to work. The patch suggested by rootninja modifies the function get_filesystem_method() found in wp-admin/includes/file.php by replacing the call to mygetuid() with a call to posix_getuid().

if( ! $method && function_exists(‘getmyuid’) && function_exists(‘fileowner’) ){

…

if ( getmyuid() == fileowner($temp_file_name) )

becomes

if( ! $method && function_exists(‘posix_getuid’) && function_exists(‘fileowner’) ){

…

if ( posix_getuid() == fileowner($temp_file_name) )

Of course, your webserver will need rw permissions to your plugin directory.

Thank you rootninja, I was getting a bit tired of manual installations and I agree, FTP blah.

The following WordPress plugins were upgraded today:

• Google XML Sitemaps – Version 3.1.5
• Multi-level Navigation Plugin – Version 2.1.12
• Private Files – Version 0.37
• Simple Sidebar Navigation – Version 2.1.1
• YAK for WordPress – Version 1.7.5
• Yet Another PhotoBlog – Version 1.9.22

The following perl modules have been updated:

• p5-Catalyst-Action-RenderView-0.11
• p5-File-ChangeNotify-0.07
• p5-MooseX-SemiAffordanceAccessor-0.05
• p5-MooseX-Params-Validate-0.12
• p5-Devel-Caller-2.03
• p5-Catalyst-Devel-1.20
• p5-Catalyst-Manual-5.8000,1
• p5-Catalyst-Plugin-ConfigLoader-0.27
• p5-Catalyst-Plugin-Session-0.25
• p5-Catalyst-Plugin-Session-State-Cookie-0.12
• p5-Catalyst-Plugin-Session-State-URI-0.11
• p5-Catalyst-Plugin-Session-Store-FastMmap-0.11
• p5-Class-MOP-0.92
• p5-DBIx-Class-0.08109
• p5-Data-Dump-1.15
• p5-Date-Calc-5.6
• p5-DateTime-Format-Strptime-1.10.00,1
• p5-DateTime-TimeZone-0.96
• p5-HTTP-Server-Simple-0.39
• p5-Locale-Maketext-Simple-0.21
• p5-MIME-Lite-3.02.5
• p5-Moose-0.89
• p5-MooseX-Emulate-Class-Accessor-Fast-0.00902
• p5-MooseX-MethodAttributes-0.15
• p5-MooseX-Types-0.17
• p5-NEXT-0.64
• p5-PAR-Dist-0.46
• p5-PPI-1.206
• p5-Pod-Simple-3.08
• p5-Test-Base-0.59
• p5-Test-Deep-0.106
• p5-Text-SimpleTable-2.0
• p5-URI-1.40
• p5-WWW-Mechanize-1.60

The following modules have been updated:

• freetds-msdblib-0.64_4,1
• gnutls-2.8.3
• libevent-1.4.12
• nss-3.11.9_3
• samba-libsmbclient-3.0.36
• wget-1.11.4_1

Over the past year, Gossamer has deployed additional filtering for SPAM offenders which automatically traverse our log files and updates our tcp.smtp file to block any IP address that is guilty of sending 5 or more  SPAM messages in a 2-3 week period.

This program was initiated when we noted that the vast majority of SPAM we received were addressed to email accounts that did not exist. While we would prefer that Qmail and its associated filters would automatically reject email addressed to a non-existent user, this is not the case.

While this program meet with some success, the log files we traversed can grow to be quite large (GB) which created enough disk I/O to slow things down. More importantly, the program did not include those IPs responsible for sending thousands of viruses our way.

As users of CLAMAV know, each time a virus is detected an email is sent to the system administrator to notify of the event.  In the past it was sufficient to configure a rule in Outlook to automatically delete these messages. But as of late, thousands of the email messages have been generated each day which cause Outlook to run out of resources and fail to delete the notifications. This was tying up Outlook for an hour each morning processing literally thousands of messages.

So Gossamer has modified this program to parse a log file that contains both notifications of SPAM and VIRUSES and runs in seconds rather than minutes. Our tcp.smtp file is now automatically updated via the magic of cron every ten minutes to blacklist any IP address that sends 3 or more SPAM or VIRUS files our way during the last 3 day period.

Gossamer expects this new program to improve the performance of our server and we will be closely monitoring the effectiveness of the program to provide further refinements if neccessary.

The following WordPress plugins have been upgraded:

• All in One SEO Pack – Version 1.6.4.1
• Multi-level Navigation Plugin – Version 2.1.11
• Page Tree – Version 1.4
• WP-EasyArchives – Version 1.5.1
• YAK for WordPress – Version 1.7.4
• Yet Another PhotoBlog – Version 1.9.21