Archive for the 'internet' Category

Repairing Amazon S3 downloads for IE

Published on July 14, 2011 in internet. Closed Tags: , , .

I use Amazon S3 for cloud storage of big digital-cinema files (up to 3GB) for distribution. It works fine most of the time, but I kept getting the odd complaint: “I can’t download on my PC, I get an error”. Everytime I asked what browser they were using, it was Internet Explorer. I am a Google Chrome man, and I almost never do anything with IE, but still, customer is king, let’s see what could be wrong. So I tested it myself with IE and yes, most files can be downloaded, but some couldn’t. Sometimes one would get an empty page, sometimes the following: “XML 5619: Incorrect document syntax”

So I fire up  Fiddler2 – an invaluable tool to see what’s going on under the hood of the communication between your web browser and the web server. I look at the client and server HTTP headers and see something interesting:

1) Download via Chrome

CLIENT:

User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.0) AppleWebKit/534.30 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/12.0.742.122 Safari/534.30
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate,sdch

SERVER:

Content-Type: binary/octet-stream
Content-Length: 26176425
Server: AmazonS3

2) Download via IE for a file that can be downloaded:

CLIENT:

User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 9.0; Windows NT 6.0; Trident/5.0)
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate

SERVER:

Content-Type: binary/octet-stream
Content-Length: 26176425
Server: AmazonS3

3) Download via IE for a file that can NOT be downloaded:

CLIENT:

User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 9.0; Windows NT 6.0; Trident/5.0)
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate

SERVER:

Content-Type: application/x-zip-compressed
Content-Length: 687411306
Server: AmazonS3

It was a consistent pattern: every time the Content-Type of a file was x-zip-compressed, I couldn’t download . It might have something to do with MS KB 841120: the server that recompresses .zip files with gzip, and the browser mis-interpreting.

Anyway, I used CloudBerry S3 Explorer to go and explicitly change  every file’s HTTP headers and now I can download all files with IE. If I ever forget about this IE quirk, now I’ve written down the solution!

DROA: now with a Belgian lawyer

Published on November 13, 2010 in internet. 2 Comments Tags: , , , .

It seems my contacts with the people from Domain Registry of America (DROA) have gone one legal step up. Last week I have received an official letter from a Brussels law office, representing the Domain Registry of America - DROA (Buffalo, NY, USA), Domain Registry of Canada - DROC (Markham, Ontario, Canada), Domain Renewal Group (London UK) and Mr Alan Benlolo. Apparently my claims about the “domain renewal scam”, as most legit domain registrars and thousands of fooled users call it, are “completely unfunded” and constitute “defamation and libel” (Article 443 – translated from Dutch by me).

Furthermore they claim that

  • I supposedly have published the home address of Mr Benlolo on my blog. I have checked and in none of my blog posts about the DROA (DROA scam, Govern yourselves accordingly and DROA: the saga continues) have I published any address belonging to a person: all addresses are PO Boxes – so not physical addresses – belonging to companies, not persons. These addresses I have found either on the letters what were sent by the DROA or on their web site.
    The letter I received actually shows Mr Benlolo’s address, and I can confirm it is nowhere on my blog. Other unhappy customers might have done that on other blogs/forums, but not me.
  • I am supposed to remove the three blog posts mentioned above ASAP. I have reread all three and in each I just cite known convictions of persons and companies involved, as well as reactions from institutions like the  FTC and Better Business Bureaus who all disapprove of the type of business that the DROA is active in.
  • Interestingly I’m also supposed to remove a fourth blog post “Amy Cross is spamming Technorati” which I did not know was related. Maybe it’s just because there’s a link to the DROA article.

I have gotten seven days to comply, and that period has just expired. I have tried to contact the lawyers but no one has bothered to call me back. I don’t agree with their claims, and I still stand by the blog posts I have written.

DROA: the saga continues

Published on September 22, 2010 in internet. 4 Comments Tags: , , .

This post is about my dealing with the company DROA / Domain Registry of America.
I first wrote about them in Dec 2004: “Domain Registry of America scam“: they had sent me letters to urgently advise me to renew my domain names. When I researched a bit who they were, it became clear it was an shady initiative of some Canadian ‘businessmen’. They write scary letters in the hope that a non-tech-savvy person in the accounting department gets scared and quickly pays, thus transferring their domain management to DROA, who charge more than the average.

Then in March 2007, they contacted me to demand the removal of the blog posts, if not they would sue me for an Ontario court. “Govern yourself accordingly” showed that I was not impressed with that threat.

Now the saga continues: I have been contacted by a Gilbert Duchanan in an effort to make me remove my blog posts. It started on last Aug 19, with a short email. “I represent a company that is currently in talks to acquire the company Domain Registry of America. Upon searching on Google we discovered links to negative articles on your blog regarding the company. What would it take to have you remove the article(s) found at (…) Gilbert“. Just a first name, not a “Legal representative”, “Customer relations” or anything. That’s kind of weird for a legal person.

I replied: “Dear Mr Duchanan, I find it hard to believe that a company with honest and bona-fide practices would be interested in taking over the heritage of the DRoA. So unless you could convince me of the opposite, I will just assume that the scam will continue, and I will not take away the articles. Please be aware that this conversation could end up on my blog too.    Peter” Who knows, it might develop into a good story. I of course expected to have legal threats at some point.
Continue reading ‘DROA: the saga continues’

Fax 2.0: because fax won’t die in the internet age

Published on January 2, 2010 in hardware, internet and Web2.0. 3 Comments

In one corner of my apartment: my fixed telephone line. In another my printer/scanner/fax device. Challenge: run a wire from one to the other, every time you rearrange the furniture.

Recently I investigated web fax services like eFax, WebFax, RingCentral but for a low volume user like me they’re too expensive. You pay a lot of money for having a dedicated phone number for you, regardless of the number of faxes you send/receive. But I already have a dedicated telephone number, only it is completely disconnected from my ‘normal’ workflow: email, web, news reader. I would like to receive my faxes in my Gmail, because I never delete mails. With 7GB+ email storage, I don’t need to.

So what I would like to have, and what I don’t think exists yet: a Fax 2.0 device at home, let’s call it the FaxaPorta. It needs power and a phone connection, and … that’s all. So let’s make it look like this (not uninfluenced by the Apple Airport Express):

Faxaporta mockup

Here’s how it works:

  • You plug the Faxaporta in a power outlet and connect to the phone plug.
  • The device has built-in wifi and will connect to the internet in that way.
  • You associate the device with your account on the Faxaporta website.
  • Now you can configure how it is supposed to work:
    • Incoming fax: send it to an email address as a PDF file, print it (you can connect a printer to the USB port)
    • Incoming voice call: take a voice mail and send it to an email address as a MP3 file, forward the call via Skype
    • Outgoing fax: behave like a network printer, or you upload a PDF file to the Faxaporta web site (it is then downloaded by your own Faxaporta device and sent over your own phone line).
  • But because your fax is now part of your web-connected world you can do cool stuff like:
  • When you get a fax/voice call, the Caller ID (phone number of the sender) is being matched with your Google contacts to add name, company and email of the sender.
  • The faxes your receive pass through Faxaportas service and are OCR’ed so that you can copy/paste the text on it (cf. the ScanR service).
  • The voicemails are run through a speech recognition service so that you get a text transcript together with the MP3 file. (Google Voice has this)
  • The whole configuring of the fax/voice service is no longer done on a silly small screen on the fax machine with 15 cryptic buttons, but online, from anywhere you want. New response message? Upload the MP3 file! New front sheet for outgoing faxes? Create it in a WYSIWYG editor!
  • You have an RSS feed for your incoming fax messages, one for your incoming voicemails.
  • You could even make a ‘better’ (more expensive) service for companies:
    • try to route a fax to the right person (depending on who sent it, on names that were OCR’ed in the document)
    • set up a Interactive Voice Response system through the browser (“For Sales, press 1”).
    • create a searchable fax archive
    • How about a fax ‘out-of-office’ service?

    Does the Faxaporta exist already?