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Four men linked to Mugshots.com have been charged with extortion
Four men allegedly behind the website Mugshots.com have been arrested and California Attorney General Xavier Becerra announced charges of extortion, money laundering and identity theft. The website mines information from police department websites, pulling names, mugshots and charges of those who have been arrested, and then publishes them online. To get the content taken down, individuals have to pay a "de-publishing" fee -- a practice that has been illegal in California since 2015. Becerra's office says that over the course of three years, the site collected more than $64,000 from California residents and over $2.4 million nationwide.
Judge limits government warrant for info on anti-Trump protest site
We've been following a case for a few months now between the Department of Justice and web hosting company Dreamhost surrounding anti-Trump protests on Inauguration Day. Originally, the DoJ demanded that Dreamhost hand over all the information they had on everyone who'd visited the domain. Now, the judge has stripped the DoJ's warrant to basically nothing: Dreamhost has been ordered to redact all personally identifying information from "non-subscribers" of the website, or in other words, users who have nothing to do with this investigation and merely visited the site.
Judge orders DreamHost to hand over data from anti-Trump site
Earlier this week, after DreamHost challenged its warrant in court, the Department of Justice narrowed what sorts of information it would seek from the website host in regards to activity on the site disruptj20.org. The website was used to help organize protests against Donald Trump on Inauguration Day and the government claims visitors to the site used it to plan violence. Today, a judge ordered DreamHost to comply with the newly refocused warrant.
DOJ gives up on getting all 1.3M IPs from anti-Trump website
The Department of Justice has given up on getting the IPs of 1.3 million visitors to disruptj20.org, a website that helped organize protests of the president's inauguration. It originally asked the website's host, Dreamhost, for all visitors' personal info, including contact information, email and photos if available. The host refused to give in and pointed out the extreme scope of the request. Now, in its reply brief addressed to DC's court, the agency responded that it had no idea that its warrant would be so broad, since it didn't know how much data DreamHost has.
DOJ demands info on 1.3M visitors to protest-organizing website
A month ago, the Department of Justice served a warrant (PDF) to Dreamhost regarding one of its clients. This is routine for law enforcement to make such requests, the website hosting service said in a blog post -- except the page in question, disruptj20.org, had helped organize protests of Trump's inauguration. And the DOJ is demanding personal info and 1.3 million IP addresses of visitors to the site.
DreamHost offers free year of Bandwagon iTunes backup and sync service
It sure has been getting easier lately to use an account with web hosting behemoth DreamHost to back up your Mac. We found some good ideas for this back in April, but now DreamHost has gone one step further and partnered up with Bandwagon, a web-based iTunes backup service we found in March. In one of their annoyingly lengthy blog posts (scroll to the end of it), DreamHost unveiled that they are now offering a free one-year membership to Bandwagon's DIY services to all DreamHost customers, available through the end of July. This is a great deal, especially if you have both an expanding iTunes library and a massive chunk of storage at DreamHost just waiting for something to do.To access the offer, current DreamHost customers need only to go to the new Partners Page in the DreamHost control panel, then click on the Bandwagon logo to be taken to the Bandwagon signup page with the coupon code already inserted. The rest of the setup is pretty straight-forward, though I think I should share the solution I developed for a slight snag I ran into: For whatever reason, Bandwagon's FTP client couldn't log into my DreamHost account to begin uploading my iTunes library until I created a brand new FTP user. I don't know if this will hold true for everyone, but it's probably a good idea from a security standpoint anyway, take that advise how you will.So far, after finally signing up for Bandwagon and getting everything going, I'm pretty happy with the service. Bandwagon's account manager can display statistics of what kinds of data and how many you have stored online. I'll have to see how the rest of the upload process on my 6396 item iTunes library fares before I say much more, but until then this sounds like a great deal that DreamHost customers shouldn't pass up.
Widget Watch: DreamHost status
I'm a pretty happy DreamHost customer, though I've been with enough basic hosting plans to realize that many hosts (at least the ones in my price range) might experience some hiccups from time to time. It just seems to be the way hosting is, at least in my tax bracket. Fortunately, DreamHost offers a status website and RSS feed to help customers check in on the network, but a fellow DreamHost customer by the name of Geoff has created a Dashboard widget just to give us one more option for staying on top of things. The widget simply loads the same status text one can read via the website or RSS, but it offers a compact, quick-access window into the world of DreamHost's status without having to refresh a website or add yet another feed to your exponentially increasing RSS list.
Backup your Mac to DreamHost
Michael Lee at the Addison Road blog has put together a nice tutorial for doing an online backup to a DreamHost account. DreamHost is a well known shared hosting provider that offers a reasonably good deal on website hosting, with about 170GB of storage for about $8 a month. Michael is basically suggesting that if you have a site with DreamHost, but don't use anywhere near your allotment of storage and bandwidth, you can use some of that space for online backup instead of one of dedicated online backup services like JungleDisk with S3, Omnidrive or Joyent BingoDisk. Michael's solution involves using OS X's built-in command line tool rsync to do the heavy lifting (the actual backing up), scheduled using iCal alarms calling an AppleScript.In fact, I have been a DreamHost customer for quite some time, and I use my hosting account like this as well. Instead of using rsync like Michael, however, some time ago I set up an Automator workflow that calls the Transmit FTP client to upload backups to a WebDAV folder as suggested on the Strongspace blog. One advantage of doing it this way is that I can mount that WebDAV folder in the Finder to grab files off of it (or even access it through a web browser). However you do it, taking advantage of online storage space you might already be paying for is a good idea.[Via Digg]
