Many Orlando Florida and Tampa Florida businesses contact Justice Solutions for Web Development and Web Design to create their next vision.  Many of these businesses see social and viral media as the next generation for their ideas and new and current websites and ask us to build and design them exactly that.  iPhone App Creation is another key part of our business and is another venue for the social and viral media outparcels…but not if SOPA and PIPA have their way.

Basically in a nutshell….if there’s copyrighted material on a website and it’s your website…you are responsible for policing it and removing that material or be fined or sued or maybe even both.  The other two big bombshells of the bills is the ability for ISP’s (your internet providers such as Century Link, Time Warner, etc.) to block at their level, any websites accused of having copyrighted material, and the ability for any private owner of copyrighted material to bring a lawsuit against a site (currently only the Justice Department can do so).

These provisions place a huge burden on the owners of the smaller sites trying to get to the levels of YouTube, Google, Facebook, etc. who could easily afford the defense costs if targeted in such a suit.  In an economy which desperately wants and needs to create new opportunities for the American people, it seems as though this legislation really could impact the already barely recovering economy.  Not to mention the fact that the whole censorship of sites “accused” of having copyrighted material on their site at the ISP level just gives me a really bad feeling about these bills.

Now do I feel something needs to be done about online piracy and protection of copyrighted materials….absolutely.  However not at the expense of causing a bigger problem than what currently exists.  Napster combated it by saying….let’s work a deal to make this legal and get you (the music owners) some money since if things continue you’ll have none.  Apple recently combated it by saying to its new iCloud subscribers…hey give us $39 a year and we’ll allow you to “legalize” your music and even give you a better sounding one while we’re at it.  The world of the world wide web is always changing and evolving, so we as a country must continue to evolve as well and not just throw up censorship as the only way to solve a problem.  We need to rethink SOPA and PIPA since otherwise we’ll all be SOL.

Windows Server 2003

At some point in your web development or web programming career, you will find yourself faced with the task of having to go on to a web server, perhaps Linux Apache or Microsoft IIS, and need to do some system tasks such as adjust some security settings, etc.

But what if you’ve never read or taken any education in regards to a web server?  You could find yourself in a situation where you can cause more harm than good.

Here’s an example.  A client of mine had a stack of servers co-hosted at a location.   The servers were delivered pretty much as-is with some basic virus software on it and Windows Server 2003.  I took over one of the three servers and the other developer took on the other.   We discovered tonight after a hack attempt, that the other developer had never disabled the local Admin account…big whoops.

So for those of you who would like to pass Networking/Server Support 101…here’s what you do.  Go to Computer Management under the Administrative Tasks location on the Start menu.  Next, click on users, and then you’ll see in the right hand pane a list of users.  Now this is very important, make certain you have created a new user or updated an existing one…let’s say johnsmith, and added her/him to the Administrators Group.  If you don’t do this you could find yourself in a heap of trouble.  Ok, now that you’ve done/verified that, right click on the Administrator user and click Properties.  In the dialogue, check the “User is Disabled” checkbox.  This will essentially disable this user and you may avoid a low level attack on your web server as a result.

Be careful though, there’s a lot to networking and support in these systems, so be very sure to double check everything you do not only with a site like this one, but others as well…there’s always new information coming out every day about hack attempts and you’ll want to make sure that you are up to date with the information that will keep your information safe and secure as possible.

Until next time…happy coding.

Doug.