Sites – Page 10 – Paintball Headlines

PbPixel Delivers The Lulz

So, the owner of the site PbPixel decided to contact me about my comical post about his site. Apparently, he didn’t like it. So he asked me to remove it. I kindly didn’t remove it but tried to help him by telling him his mail server or client was sending incorrect date headers, but he wouldn’t have any of it. Anyways, here’s the whole conversation:

Screenshots 1 and 2 (apparently the second shot didn’t work the first time) of the email in Gmail. Or you can read on. And sadly, yes, I’m still using Windows. This damn wireless card just won’t work under linux and I can’t figure out why.

Hey, I am the owner of the website of PbPixel.com, and I please ask you to delete the post of PbPixel, if you don’t like it, just don’t visit it. there is no need to flame my website. I don’t flame your website even if is not the best paintball “blog”, so please don’t do mine,

Regards.

PbPixel Owner.

In Gmail, it says 12/28/07. It actually looks pretty weird.

Date: Fri, 28 Dec 2007 16:31:30 -0800

Wow, you sent this in December? I’m impressed, you managed to predict a post 17 days away. I wish I had to psychic abilities like that. I mean, I can easily predict things a week away, but anything past 2 weeks starts to get pretty fuzzy.

Sent Jan 24.

Woah. You sent this December 30th?

No man, your mail server’s or your computer’s or whatever you’re using to send this from’s date is foobar. It’s sending out of date date headers. And the time seems to be off by about 2 hours.

Who cares when I sent it, please delete that post. I have sent it 2 hours ago.

This one is hilarious. 2 hour ago since when? From now? I highly doubt that. When I read it? And to be technically correct, it was actually 1 hour and 19 minutes between the 2 sent times

It’s not a matter of when you sent it; the whole you sent it this date was a joke. It’s about the date headers being off. If I was using some other mail client, your post could’ve gone back with all the other emails from late December, and I probably would’ve never seen it.

And he never sent me anything else. I guess he got annoyed. If he said it was the mail server, and it was out of his control, it would’ve been cool and understandable.

I might have an actual good post tomorrow.

Failure Friday: Worr.com

Warning: Complicated computer speak following

I guess Worr released a new site. Don’t remember their old one, but I’ll just follow along and say it’s new. I hope for their sake that it is brand new.

They dislike proof reading as much as I do, though the Synergy is totally “Lorem ipsum” like. (they now have at least fixed it)

Though they really need to bone up on their coding practices. We can get a nice little XSS on their form pages, like here, here, or here. Just enter something like:
"/><script>alert("I did it for the lulz")</script>
And you get this:

Way to sanitize your input there guys. Here’s a hint, convert ",<,> to their HTML equivalents. Another hint, jsut ask me and I’ll tell you exactly what to do.

So we can break their site and maybe cause some of their users some trouble, but what if we want to do more.

According to their headers, they’re running Windows using IIS as their httpd and running both ASP.NET and a very out of date PHP (over 2 years old).

But, wait, what are they really running? According to this error, PHP. At least with ASP, you have some slight non-valid input protection.

So they’re running of Windows and ASP.NET really just seems pointless. According to nmap, only port 80 is open, so they don’t have a mail server or anything of that nature (that’s at least accepts connections) running. Why not a LAMP server? I’m sure it would be cheaper and better, but whatever.

I think I’ve found enough fail to call it a failure. Plus this is boring me.

Turn-key Websites Now Infesting The World Paintball Of Paintball

This post is because of the horrible, and I repeat, horrible site, PbPixel.com (I’m not linking to their trash, and I would suggest that no one go to it, here’s a screenshot so you don’t have to go)

Anyways, here’s the deal. It’s a pixel selling website, you know, like that shiteous million dollar homepage crap, that makes absolutely no sense, but managed to get enough people to spam it so it got traffic (he’s also trying to do it again, but it’s a complete and utter failure). It has no use or adds any value to anything. It just exists, and it even does that poorly.

Want to make your own? Easy. Just download one of the many million dollar homepage clone scripts, add some crappy looking logo, and maybe a catch phrase, hopefully a more sensible one than ‘pixel your website’, and your done. Really, it takes at most 10 minutes. I would do a screencast of it, but I’m too lazy.

Another popularity, those thankfully it has died down now, was MySpace clones that focused on paintball, like Paintball Alliance, Mobzor, and tons of others. Pointless. But since I’m not seeing more of these, I’m not going to continue.

But another issue coming to fruition are splogs. Most are jsut taking either an RSS feed of Google News or Blog Search nad making those out to be posts. Some are actually taking content from providers (even some are using some of my posts). 68Caliber complained about people taking their content before, though they were going after members of forums doing it. Want to set one up? Just get a modified version of WordPress with an RSS catcher in it, add a couple of feeds, and you’re done. Oh, and don’t forget to put ads everywhere, that’s a must, or else it seems like you aren’t doing it for the money, but of course you are.

I really don’t care too much if people are using my content, since I’m all for free and open information sharing, which is why all these posts are licensed under a Creative Commons license. It allows you to copy and paste the whole article as long as you cite that you got it from here and don’t use it for commercial purposes, as in, don’t sell it.

Anyways, this post was just everywhere. I wrote parts of it at different places and times, so my mind was always somewhere else. I’ll try give you a better one tomorrow.

68Caliber.com Still Crazy

68Caliber.com has gone on another crazy tangent about copyright law. I guess people didn’t listen last time. Big surprise there.

Basically, their whole article is making fun of people who might have happened to copy and paste their story, and threatening them with lawsuits and probably bodily harm. Nothing like threatening people with a lawsuit to scare them straight. Just look at how well it works for the music and movie industry.

First, even after he clearly states it’s fine to link to them, they still state you still need permission to link to them.

If you want to link to one of our stories-go ahead after receiving permission (just like much of the paintball media already does).

Sorry, I’m not going to ask for permission to link to your articles. I just won’t. Easy enough.

They also have a whole list of the people that support them. It’s a total of 4 people, one of them being related to 68Caliber and another associated with some magazine I’ve never heard of.

Then they go into the whole stealing an actual item is the same as “stealing” some content. Wrong. If someone steals your Angel, you can’t use it anymore unless it comes back to you. If someone “steals” your content, you can still use it and do waht you want with it. No one took away your content. It’s still sitting there pretty on your server, which if someone stole, then the content wouldn’t be there.

Let’s just be entertained by some quotes from their article (Fair Use)

A juicy, interesting, exciting story breaks on www.68caliber.com (that’s almost always the case, we get the stories before anyone else almost ALL the time).

Kinda cocky there. I get the emails from the mailing lists at probably about the same time you guys do.

In fact, under the “fair use” doctrine, you could even quote some of my sentences in your own article.

If we want to give someone limited rights (let someone borrow it or license it), such as reprinting the lead paragraph, we can.

What?

So, TOOL, how does it feel?

Ouch. Calling the people who read your site tools seems a little harsh.

The enablers have even gone so far as to claim, publicly, that the DMCA-Digital Millennium Communications Act-shields them from being taken to task because ‘they’re just the provider and can’t be held responsible for the actions of their individual members’.

Basically. The DMCA provides a safe harbor for content providers. You send a takedown notice to the provider, usually the person running the site, and ask them to take it down.

If anyone is wondering, I don’t really get any stories from 68Caliber. They usually cover something that has been covered by someone else before or just isn’t that good or interesting. I get informed mostly from RSS feeds and mailings.

As for this site, the posts are most likely going to be placed under a Creative Commons license, most likely Attribution-ShareAlike or Attribution-Non-Commercial-ShareAlike, which would mean you could use the content of this site as long as you cite the source and put it under the same license.

Also, please stop using dashes when commas should be there. It’s really quite annoying. And doing a tad bit of SEO work will probably help a lot with the search engine traffic. And a framed link out is possibly one of the most annoying things ever.

Here’s the link to the story, without actually linking to them.
http://www.68caliber.com/story042529.php

SD Feature, PbNation Sponsored

I couldn’t make this up if I wanted to.

PbNation, the site that was so against the NPPL and their Fox Sports deal, is now sponsoring a TV show called SD Feature. It’ll be aired on Colours TV on Dish Network and some cable companies in, count them, 4 states. It means that I, and no one I know, will be watching this on TV.

Also, it’s not really a paintball show. It’s a sports show that features paintball in maybe one or two episodes.

Each episode will feature one sport – Paintball, Martial Arts, or Surfing, with an emphasis on Paintball and the Martial Arts, along with segments that focus on music and fashion in todayâ€™s pop culture.

Yup, paintball, right next to martial arts and fashion on a barely available channel. This is going to be a hit!

But the interesting part of this is PbNation. I’m really tired of them making any sort of “news,” if you call this site that, but it’s too ironic to pass up.

They banned the NPPL becuse of it’s Fox Sports deal is now promoting it’s own (well, not it’s own, but they’re sponsoring it) TV show.

Kinda weird, don’t cha think? But they want to make sure everything is clear.

Guys lets keep the NPPL drama out of this thread.

PbN – Guys, no talking about the NPPL thing
Me – But, isn’t it kinda related?
PbN – No, now shut up
Me – But…
PbN – STFU!

Seriously, either this is the worst timed press release ever or the whole PbNation NPPL thing just got a bit fishier. It’s starting to feel like a soap opera. I’m kinda having fun watching PbNation digging itself into a deeper hole.