According to our good buddies at the WHIR, Los Angeles county has halted plans to build a $68 million dollar data center facility because of the animals that have already claimed that spot as their home. Now these are not bears, monkeys or sea lions oh no, they are much more dangerous than all three of those put together. They are 150 wild cats with a bad attitude.
Finding new homes for these cats have put a strain on the local government. The new data center was suppose to start construction back in 2007, but those cats, those wild homeless felines have another idea. Here are some facts about the data center that could have been according to the article:
The new high-tech data center, which was supposed to begin construction in 2007, will be the county’s first energy-saving “green” facility – with a vegetated roof and built partially underground – and is to be constructed in the derelict buildings just south of the Rancho Los Amigos National Rehabilitation Center in Downey.
According to reports by Data Center Knowledge, the county is planning to build a 46,000 square foot data center that will be used to process employee payrolls, welfare payments, court documents and other county department records. Planners are also designing the facility to meet the criteria for a Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design certification.
Now I tried to do my best to get a quote from the cats in question, and they at first had no comment but then told me all the talking they had to do would be done so through their lawyers, because they are cats and “normal” people usually can not make heads or tails out of what they are saying. They also wanted me to tell the public they really don’t like the LOL cats all over the Web.
I am happy to see ICANN has decided to stand up and do something about this money grubbing nonsense. Under current ICANN rules, anyone who registers a new domain name has a five-day grace period to back out and receive a total refund. The problem is people use this period to test how well the domain name does in the real world and also slap ads all over it to make a buck.
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Now I know not many people like the blogs or podcast on the blogs or podcasts. Talking about yourself talking about yourself can get a little confusing for some and a little boring for others. I just have a little ‘bit of news to share.
It has been a while since we covered the latest happenings from around the wild and wacky world of web hosting so I figured I’d take a break from the how to and help to let you know what exactly has been going on out there.
Fighting Terrorist via Web Hosting
I am probably not the first person to have this idea, but it seems like day after day you hear about these terrorist web sites that are spreading propaganda and talking about nefarious things. Anything on the Web is hosted somewhere right? So why not talk with the web hosts who hosts the material about brining it down.
According to a report from theWHIR.com this might be starting to happen. As the story goes, a local Tampa, Florida reporter told local web host Noc4Hosts about an al-Qaida related site they were hosting. This is not the only case of this happening though.
Over in Arizona, CrystalTech Web Hosting also took down an al-Qaida related site after being tipped off by the Arizona Republic newspaper. This site in question was sharing information about how to recruit car bombers, promote war on the West and provide a forum for Islamic militants.
So as you can see, US based web hosts are not except from being used for these low down and dirty reasons. No mater which political side of the fence you are on I think any web host out there that finds content like this one their servers should shut it down as soon as they can.
Why is it Happening and How Do We Stop It?
Now why are web hosts of any location such a good place to target? Well many web hosts out there host so many web sites it is hard to keep track of every single domain. You could check them out on sign up – but if you are signing up a new hosting plan and new domain name there is no way to check out the history of the person.
So should web hosts keep relying on customer complaints and reporters tipping them off to such sites or could web hosts start creating a “watch list” of their own for suspicious new signups and transfered domains? There are a lot of “maybe” and “could be” answers but what we need to do in a whole is bring the topic into the public web hosting discussion.