On Jan 18th, sites will go dark to protest the internet censorship bills.

MemeStreams will be joining the strike on January 18th.

STRIKE AGAINST SOPA

From Decius:

As many of you know, about two months ago TI sent me an email referencing the DMCA and demanding that I take down one of my blog posts. I complied at the time, but I also sent TI a response, requesting that they reconsider their position. They did not respond.

Two weeks ago Jennifer Granick at the Electronic Frontier Foundation sent TI an email on behalf of myself, and several other bloggers who received similar notices from TI. In that email Jennifer told TI that we would repost our censored blog posts today if TI did not respond and clarify their position. TI has not responded.

Therefore, the original blog post has been restored, and if you didn't read it before, you can read it now. Its hardly the best post I've ever written. It was jotted down at 9:30 in the morning while I was getting ready for work. I tend to shoot first on this blog and ask questions later, and that certainly leads to posts which are poorly articulated and easily misinterpreted. In a later post I did a much better job explaining the technical concept which drew my interest to this calculator key cracking effort in the first place.

I'd like to thank the EFF and particularly Jennifer Granick for working with me as well as the other bloggers in this case. My blog post is not important, but it is important that people have a right to blog without worrying about receiving legal threats when they haven't done anything wrong. Its important that people stand up for that right, and we're fortunate that there are people out there who are willing to do it. Thank you EFF.

The post TI censored has been reposted.

TI’s response has been to target programmers and bloggers with cease and desist letters telling them that the anti-circumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act require them to take down the keys, remove links to forum discussions, and delete blog posts.

The law, however, is not on TI's side.

EFF on the DMCA takedown MemeStreams received.

Hey, TI, Leave Those Kids Alone | Electronic Frontier Foundation

You can now preview your posts before submitting them. Please let us know if you run into any problems with this.

Preview added to MemeStreams!

More on the recent search update from the man who implemented it..

Tom posted some quick enhancements I made to Memestreams today. If you are running IE 7 or Firefox 2+ you you might notice your search bar is glowing while browsing Memestreams. You can install MemeStreams as a search provider with one click now in both those browsers as shown below:
Firefox

Internet Explorer

Of course, those of you who regularly search MemeStreams may have a complaint or two about the performance. We're fixing that soon. Its entirely a disk I/O problem and we'll be buying a new server with better storage performance when the new machine comes online in February.

Memestreams supports Firefox/IE's Search bar

I've posted two updates to the site tonight that Acidus wrote a few weeks ago. I'm sorry they didn't make it out sooner but I've been busy with the Christmas holidays and the like.

The first is an updated set of MemeStreams Bookmarklets. You do not have to upgrade to these if you don't want to, but good testers who report problems are always valuable to us. They should work a bit better than the old ones, particularly when selecting text on a page with a bunch of iframes, and we're now back to one peice of cross browser javascript code, which is nice.

The second is that if you're running IE or Safari you might notice your search bar is glowing. You can install MemeStreams as a search provider with one click now in both those browsers.

Of course, those of you who regularly search MemeStreams may have a complaint or two about the performance. We're fixing that soon. Its entirely a disk I/O problem and we'll be buying a new server with better storage performance in a few weeks. Unfortunately I am going out of the country for two weeks so I won't be able to get that done until I return, but the new machine should be online sometime in February.

Thanks Acidus for the nice bits of code!

Yeah! Thanks Billy!

MemeStreams Update: Acidus Badassness

We posted a significant update to MemeStreams today. There are two primary aspects. The first is that posting is now much more free reigned. You can reply to your own posts. You can reply multiple times. You can post the same url to your blog multiple times. If you do the later, it will not result in the repeated promotion of that url on the main page.

The other aspect is anti-spam. New user registration is now open again. New users will not show up on the main page or in the "recent posters" section of the weblogs page. They are relegated to the "new users" section of the weblogs page until one of the admins blesses them, or someone who already has a good reputation recommends a link from them. So, those of you who can, please watch the new users for interesting people who you might want to bring into the fold.

This is a big update so please, as always, let us know if anything is not working properly.

Tom worked very hard to get this update done in time for Blogworld. Over the course of the next two days, we are all heading out to Vegas. It should be an interesting week.

MemeStreams Update

The first and only industry-wide tradeshow, conference, and media event dedicated to promoting the dynamic industry of blogging and new media.

Industrial Memetics will have a booth at BlogWorldExpo next week in Las Vegas. If you are near the area come by and pay us a visit!

Blog World Expo

MemeStreams is an early social networking website, online community, and blog host that was established in 2001 by Industrial Memetics,[1] and particularly prominent among computer professionals.[2][3] It was cowritten by Tom Cross and Nick Levay.[3][4] The site employs a reputation system.[5]

Someone finally made a Wikipedia article about MemeStreams. If you're bored, give it an edit...

MemeStreams - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

If you attempted to use the system most of today, you saw a message from Decius explaining that the system was broke...

Immediately after my earlier post explaining the situation with the OIDs Rattle and I leapt into action with a major overhaul of the database schema and software. Oh how this brought back memories of being an admin. Totally unexpected computer work when you're supposed to have the day off and you have to get it done before you can do anything else. Waiting on development systems to reload while sitting on a speaker phone.... that disconnected manner of teleconferences that span hours while work is getting done.... Random breaks to grab coffee, or dinner, without hanging up the phone... Your eyes getting heavy as you strain your ears to make out the details of the television news which the party on the other end of the line is using for background noise...

We got it done. About 200 lines of new code written and 650 modified. Rattle even managed to work a fix in for the redirection on login and some problems with creating a new account, and I cleaned up some annoyances with the circle interface.

MemeStreams is back. Thank you for your patience, and please let us know if you notice anything strange about the way the site works (or doesn't work) over the next few days.

Things should be back to working normally, and in some places a little better than normal.

Everyone will need to log into the system again. If there are any problems with login, let us know. Since we were trying to push this fix out as soon as possible, it's entirely possible bugs have been missed.

MemeStreams is OK again