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Thursday, November 20, 2008
On the Internet, all business is personal
 Webmaster Access is a regular convention of adult webmasters which regularly convenes in Los Angeles. Like many conventions in any hotel or convention center in the country, the morning is filled with seminars, breakout sessions, and blazer-and-dockers networking events, and the evening is filed with drinking.At a morning roundtable on hosting (and I mean this literally: there were about 12 people chatting informally over Sheraton mints around a circular table), I met Brad Mitchell of MojoHost, a Michigan and Florida-based web hosting company. Mitchell's company hosts about 30,000 adult sites in a Tier-4 facility in Miami, perched above the city on 30-foot stilts and sharing space with Google, Yahoo, and the United States Department of Defense. "When we give a tour," he said, "guests need to be on a list beforehand, have passports and driver's licenses, and be accompanied by one security official for every four guests," he said. "There are parts of the facility I have never seen." So the DoD and Google have no objection to sharing space with a Known Pornographer? "Every datacenter in the world is mostly porn," he said. "The Internet runs on porn." He was asked about Denial of Service (DOS) attacks, in which servers are bombarded with information requests that are designed to overwhelm them. A web surfer experiences a DOS-attacked site often enough by not being able to access it. A Denial of Service Attack is not the same as a Cleopatra of the Nile of Service Attack. "DOS attacks are infrequent," he said, "but we sometimes have to rely on our upstream carriers that we have relationships with to help us out and, less often, I'll have to drop a client because he is a magnet for DOS attacks." Why would a client be a magnet for DOS attacks? "Because he has pissed somebody off," answered Ycaza Thrush of Los Angeles' RightHosting. And not only that... "Somebody hacks you and all of a sudden you've got Mexican Donkey Child Porn on your site. And there's a guy from the FBI, a guy from the Secret Service, and a representative of local law enforcement at your door." As a hosting provider, what do you do when confronted by this? "Hand over the hard drives as quickly as possible," Thrush said. Mitchell said that he had a client who was traveling through Thailand and posting his sexcapades with the locals on his blog. "And I guess he angered some of the nationals," Mitchell said, "because whatever hosting company he uses, DOS attacks follow." And what is the busines model of hackers? "What is their business model?" Thrush asked. "Basically to get as much informaion by doing as little work as possible." By holding sites for ransom or by selling customer credit cards to third parties? "Whatever involves the least effort," Thrush repeated, noting that "Russia and Asia-Pacific net is full of hackers with no compunction about fucking you up." And what legal resources do you have when you get hacked? "The Feds will not lift a finger," Thrush said. "Unless they're guys you've helped before." It was interesting that the only red flag these web hosts identified was child porn, but that all other adult content seemed to transcend the moral and ethical objections that would traditionally skeeve out mainstream business partners. I thought about how the mainstream panelists at this week's FSC seminar were antsy about being seen with the adult crowd but, at the terabyte level of datacenters, it just didn't matter. Data was data (unless you piss someone off). Previously on Porn Valley Observed: GP posts tagged "Business" See also: Webmaster Access West, MojoHost, RightHosting Labels: business, events, interviews, seminar, technology, websites ¶ Thursday, November 20, 2008 
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