To the Cloud! (with the blog)

Some of you may have noticed that my blog looks a bit different.  

I moved it from my own server and put it up on Google's Blogger hosting service.  I had it up on Blogger about a year ago, and in retrospect can't think of why I took it and put it on my own server.  Experimenting I guess.

In the meantime there are going to be a lot of 404 links for really long url's and url's that have strange characters in them.  They'll 404 themselves out of the search engines and be reindexed soon I hope, so I'm not too terribly concerned.  

If you came to my blog on a search query (which about 50% of you do), and your search resulted in a 404, then take a look at the archives, or use the search box.

 

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Please leave comments below.

Suspicious Domains related to Japan Disaster

With every disaster that takes place, one of things that I do is start to watch the domain names being registered on the internet in relation to the event.

For instance, "earthquake", "Tsunami", Haiti, Chile, and now, Japan.

We mourn for all of those that lost loves ones in each of the disasters, and I feel very sorry for those that have lost everything.  Homes, cars, valuable pictures of your loved ones, family history, and the families themselves.  I am quite sure there are examples where entire families may have been lost to this most recent tragedy.

It's despicable that a malicious person would register a domain, and set up a webpage to receive donations, only to keep the money themselves, or fund $bad_thing.  Absolutely disgusting.

I was taking a look through my list for this morning (I get a list every day), and looking at some of the examples.  A lot of the names you wouldn't even think, just by looking it, that it would be bad.  Examples like "redcrossjapan.com" and .org.  One might think that was a legitimate site.  A few more interesting ones, I'll leave the extension off of these:

• "earthquakeandtsunamis"


• "tsunamidanger"


• "tsunamireliefforjapan"


• "savejapanesepeople"


• "rebuildjapan"


• "japanemergency"


• "japanliferescue"


• "earthquakeeastjapan"

Now, I'm not implying that any of the above are bad or linked to the evil-doers. I'm saying that you need to use caution when donating and visiting these sites.  Not all humans are decent, wholesome, and good.  In fact, there are a large amount of people that aren't.  I know, surprise, surprise.

How many domains have I see like this?  Hundreds.  Several.  Hundred.

Donate

I don't want to dissuade you from donating funds to the people of Japan.  They need your help.  They need it bad.  I've donated, and will donate more.  But ensure, when you are donating, you are donating to a reputible organization.  People flocked to help Haiti, I'm asking that we flock to help Japan too.  Just because they are not a 3rd world country, doesn't make them any less important.  Japan came to our rescue when Hurricane Katrina hit, donating millions and millions of man hours and dollars towards the tragedy.  Let's do the same for them.

http://www.redcross.org/