From www.washingtonpost.com

www.elitetorrents.org was shutdown on Wednesday by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Department of Homeland Security. Visitors to the site are welcomed by a bright red screen declaring the site permanently shutdown as well as warning of prosecution and punishment for online illegal activities.

The site also warns that organizers and users of the elitetorrents network are under investigation, but officials stated that it is particularly the individuals who maintained the network who are being targeted.

The takedown comes after the recent release of the newest Star Wars installment release, Revenge of the Sith. Elitetorrents provided it’s users with access to an online version of the movie before it was released in theaters.

Not mentioned in the article is the presence of a small amount of text hidden at the bottom of the page that now occupies www.elitetorrents.org. Selecting all the text, one can see, all the way down at the bottom of the page the letters “RTJKJAS”. Is this a secured-eyes only code, or a secret shout out from an anonymous hacker, or a last will and testament of the creators of elitetorrents? No one may ever know, but it’s fun to guess.

“Return of The Jedi Kicks Jabba’s A** Sucka’s!” ??

Well, I’m currently working on developing my first open-source API. It’s for the www.boxedthoughts.com API. I just finished updating the XML class. It controls the user metadata which anyone could use for their own website.

I plan on using it for my site as soon as it’s implemented. I developed something similar for BT, but not for the API. I want to be able to display my last thought here on my website, and it’s easiest to do that with XML. The only problem I ran into was the code generated by my old script wasn’t xhtml… and we can’t have that here on the new site can we?

More announcements to come. If you’re interested in learning more about the project, head over to these places:

www.boxedthoughts.com
The boxedthoughts forums
The boxedthoughts API site

Anyone else notice that www.kevinrose.com has been down lately?

I’m assuming that it has something to do with the release of Systm. Users probably overloaded kevin’s server looking for information about the release. He says he’s on a new server right now, so hopefully everything will be restored shortly.

P.S. The premier episode of Systm rocked. If you haven’t seen it, get the torrent and download it because it’s worth the watch.

Well, I’ve been working on debugging this blog for a few days now, and I think I finally got everything resolved. The biggest problem was with trackbacks and pingbacks. For some reason my site wasn’t sending trackbacks or pingbacks but was able to recieve them.

After much deliberation and a clean upgrade of WordPress, I finally got it working. (**I think**). Let’s hope everything is in order now. I actually reinstalled WordPress, so there may be a few bugs that I don’t know about for a little while.

In the meantime, I found some nifty websites that helped me figure out this backtrack/pingback stuff. If you’re having trouble with your blog in these areas, check out these websites:

http://redalt.com/External/pingomation.php
( A site for testing incoming/outgoing trackbacks and pingbacks. This one is nice because it shows you the debugging XML. )

http://www.tamba2.org.uk/wordpress/TestTrack/
( A test blog, where you can make your own posts and see how your trackbacks work on another blog. )

http://kalsey.com/tools/trackback/
( A nice site for sending trackbacks manually. You can use this to send a trackback to another site if your trackbacks aren’t working. )

http://www.aylwardfamily.com/content/tbping.asp
( Similar to the site listed above. Shows you the debug XML afterwards. )

Well, anyone who frequents online blogs may have come across one called TachyonXero. In an article posted on February 2nd, he talked about how the demise of TechTV might actually be a good thing. That in reality, the fall of a poorly managed company may just be “god’s” way of saying, “Hey, you can have better!”

Then along comes Systm. The “better.” Turns out… he was right.

Read the article on TachyonXero.com : http://www.tachyonxero.com/

Today, Monday, May 23 2005, the series premier episode of Systm was released onto the internet. Available via bittorrent, servers all over the globe were flooded with requests to get the files.

Even the www.systm.org website was so overloaded with requests for the newsletter that Systm officials decided to change from a limited hour-early release to a public one. And the live house party camera feed was overloaded with requests. 3 separate mirrors were added to defuse the load, and all 4 servers still went down.

To get the latest episode of Systm, go towww.systm.org or use the following bittorrent file.

High Quality