MaxCDN as well as its parent company NetDNA are active community contributors to many Open Source software projects, and lets face it, Linux does dominate our office desktop and laptop installs, mostly used by our networking and operations teams.  Our other teams aren’t there yet with Sales on Windows machines and our creative genius on Macbooks and modified Mac minis (SSDs are your friend)

If you have any Content Delivery Network (CDN) questions feel free to find us and ask.  You can also tweet @maxcdn #scale10x and our event coordinator can hook you up with one of our employees in attendance.

This is one in a series of upgrades throughout the next few weeks. Please schedule downtime on your internal monitoring systems accordingly, and stay posted as we continue to provide updates.

Regards,

Operations Team

This is one in a series of upgrades throughout the next few weeks. Please schedule downtime on your internal monitoring systems accordingly, and stay posted as we continue to provide updates.

Regards,

Operations Team

Save the Internet: Stop SOPA

We here at MaxCDN try to leave political commentary to experts.  However, when such an impactful piece of legislation, such as the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) gains as much momentum and notoriety that it has, we feel it necessary to comment on the proposed legislation and help provide some clarity on the very real dangers that passing this bill will present to Internet based business, including our business and the businesses of our customers.

Background on SOPA:

The Stop Online Piracy Act, also known as H.R. 3261 is a bill that was introduced to Congress in Oct. 2011 for the purpose of fighting online trafficking of copyrighted intellectual property. The SOPA legislation provides relief for content creators through broad means of preventing access (blacklisting) to the website that contains alleged infringing content. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Online_Piracy_Act

Existing legislation for the same purpose: 

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is the current means of enforcing the rights of Copyright holders against infringers who use the Internet as a means of trafficking or distributing infringing content (knowingly or unknowingly).  There has been substantial precedence created by the case law generated after the initial DMCA legislation was adopted.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_Act

Problems with the Bill:

• Not capable of effectively performing its intended purpose.  The bill has the justifiable intent of preventing the illegal distribution of protected intellectual property.  The problem is not with the intent of the legislation, it is with the execution of how the bill attempts to execute this goal.
• Authors of the bill, and experts that were asked to testify for Congress, admittedly do not understand how DNS actually works, nor were they able to explain to Congress the impact this legislation would have on such critical Internet functions.
• Case law will need to be developed to understand exactly how the legislation will be enforced.
• The bill will blacklist a websites hostname on US based DNS servers, but not block the associated IP address.
• The legislation can be circumvented in a number of very simple ways.
• This blacklisting of DNS entries will likely create a fragmented global DNS system, encouraging websites to use off-shore DNS servers, or to potentially move operations overseas as well.

Why this should matter to you: 

The broad sweeping language in the SOPA Bill, would grant significant power to Copyright owners to immediately shut down allegedly infringing websites.  Such sites include staple Internet companies such as Twitter, Facebook and Google.

Current Supporters of SOPA:

SOPA is supported primarily by the entertainment industry.  You can view a current list of these companies, here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_organizations_that_support_the_Stop_Online_Piracy_Act

It is also important to note, that all of these businesses that support the SOPA legislation do not have significant online businesses, in fact many have been on the incumbent's receiving end of deflationary economics (explained well in Mark Suster's article here: http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2011/12/22/the-amazing-power-of-deflationary-economics-for-startups/) simply meaning that these large dinosaur industries have seen their large margins diminish as disruptive companies and technologies continue to be introduced.  Think iTunes for the music industry, and Netflix for the entertainment industry.

The legislation appears more like a veiled attempt to curb the growth a competing industry, than it does a means of protecting Intellectual Property (which the Bill won't actually be effective at actually doing).

Opponents of SOPA: 

SOPA is pretty much universally opposed by Internet based businesses.  Businesses that operate primarily on the Internet, such companies include: Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter, AOL, eBay, and Wikimedia and of course MaxCDN .

On Dec. 22nd GoDaddy published a press release that discussed their support of SOPA.  This resulted in the story being picked up by Reddit and quickly circulated the web based community.  The founder of Wikipedia even publicly voiced his opposition and that he was moving his domains from GoDaddy.  The following day, GoDaddy responded by changing their position on SOPA, now opposing the Bill.

What You Can Do?

Take action and sign this anti-SOPA petition: https://wfc2.wiredforchange.com/o/9042/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=8173

Browser Plugins: 

We have created a browser plug-in that alerts you if a site uses GoDaddy as a registrar or if the site that you are currently on is one of the companies that is supporting SOPA. Since GoDaddy is now opposing the bill now we have disabled the GoDaddy registrar alert.

We where not the only ones with this idea so there are a few plugins out there that are doing the same thing. Now it is your turn install one of the plugins and boycott, email, tweet or write a nasty letter so these companies wake up as well. It worked great on GoDaddy

Chrome Extension by Andy Baird (@ajbaird) and Tony Webster (@webster)

Firefox Add-on by Lautaro Orazi (@tarolandia) one of our developers @maxcdn

Please let us know your thoughts on SOPA and if you have ideas how we can improve the plugin or if you are a developer, fork it on github.

As I’m sure most of you know, MaxCDN is owned by NetDNA, and NetDNA has recently released a major price change.

“How does this affect me?” you ask? Well, with the new price changes at NetDNA, MaxCDN prices will drop too!

You can read the full press release here:
http://blog.netdna.com/news/netdna-slashes-prices/

Feel free to check out the new pricing page
http://www.maxcdn.com/pricing/

SocialEngine has been out there for quite some time now, and since its initial release in 2007, it has now emerged into a powerful social networking service with tons of features. And now, in SocialEngine's latest release that they deemed 4.1.8, the developers over at Webligo added six new and brilliant features! They added all kinds of features from performances updates to integration with several external services:

• New Pages in the Layout Editor - Over 35 pages now available for editing with the layout editor - enhancing the full content management system experience. Read More...
• Google Analytics ID Integration - Track your traffic. Easily integrate Google Analytics tracking code by just inputing your ID.
• Affiliate branding option - Earn back your SocialEngine product fees and more! Join our SocialEngine affiliate program and input your affiliate ID into a field.
• MaxCDN pull or rsync-based implementation of a custom CDN - Speed up your site! We've added StaticBaseUrl configuration parameters to allow static resources to be served and hosted by MaxCDN's pull zone or other CDN/file-hosting services. Read More...
• Viglink - Add an additional revenue source! To help increase our monetization offerings, we've partnered with Viglink - where if one of your users clicks through to a product or service and buys something, you earn a commission. Read More...
• Minor performance improvements (more to come!)

The one feature we are very excited about is of course the MaxCDN pull zone support! We worked directly with their team to make sure MaxCDN's pull zone will work with ease. With full CDN integration with both MaxCDN and all rsync-based CDNs, the SocialEngine script will now be able to perform much faster offloading its content off to a CDN.

We can't wait to hear on how fast these SocialEngine sites will be able to run with CDN support. If you use SocialEngine, we would love to hear if you plan on integrating your social website with a CDN.

If you would like to view SocialEngine's post announcing MaxCDN support, feel free to click on the link below:

IMPROVEMENTS

• Custom Domains Added FAQ for custom domains: We don´t allow full sites as custom domains, which means www or a url like http://example.com are not valid as custom domain
• Improved Custom Domain error message

BUG FIXES

• API Fixed an API issue that occurs when NULL values exist in return array: The PHP XML-RPC client does not allow NULL values. Our API does, as with this release, not return NULL values anymore.
• listZones Fixed beginning 0 value & removed array wrapper for listZones functions: listZones function returns zones now in a proper array
• Cache Inspector Fixed Cache Inspector validation error: A input validation error was fixed.

In this launch, our development team fixed a bug with VOD password changes that occurred with our first generation media servers. They have also worked on, and rolled out a new beta feature available to a few select Enterprise CDN clients only, that gives them access to an Asset Manager for their Push Zones. If after the beta testing clears QA, this feature will be rolled out to all Push Zones in a future release.

On the horizon, we expect to have our Asia PoP integrated into all of our systems, as well as the introduction of Full Zones. More information about these new features will come.

If you have a feature you would like to see included in a future release, email us at requests@netdna.com, or if you have a bug to report, email bug@netdna.com

One practical example Google listed on their blog is that a PDF file and a HTML file containing the same content and by adding “Link: <http://www.example.com/white-paper.html>; rel=”canonical”" to the HTTP headers of the PDF file, Google will fully understand that the PDF file is a duplicate of “white-paper.html”. Many PDF documents and HTML files contain the same content, it happens too much, and now that Google supports canonical links in the HTTP headers, webmasters can finally say that a PDF file is a duplicate of another similar file.

The example HTTP header Google mentioned is below for reference:

GET /white-paper.pdf HTTP/1.1

Host: www.example.com

(...rest of HTTP request headers...)

HTTP/1.1 200 OK

Content-Type: application/pdf

Link: <http://www.example.com/white-paper.html>; rel="canonical"

Content-Length: 785710

(… rest of HTTP response headers…)

Google is always trying to help webmasters use their search engine in the most efficient way possible. Even though canonical links have been around for quite a while now, it’s somewhat surprising Google decided to add the canonical attribute to HTTP headers at this point in time.

There’s one amazing use for the canonical link in the HTTP headers, which Google did not give an example on. As CDNs rely on taking your content and duplicating it, the content from any CDN could show up on Google along with duplicate content of the main image. One example is having an image at “http://cdn.maxcdn.com/image.png” and “http://maxcdn.com/image.png”. Now with the canonical attribute, this opens a whole new door to CDN providers by making sure Google knows the content on your CDN is in fact duplicate content.

Either way, we hope every webmaster will take advantage of this new feature being provided by Google. It may not be a large feature, but canonical links are very important in terms of SEO rankings.

MaxCDN also has full robots.txt support on all pull zones!

There’s most likely no purpose of letting search engines index your CDN, as all content is already on your main server, especially on a pull zone. MaxCDN came up with a brilliant way to prevent search engines from crawling your CDN pull zone. Under the advanced settings of every MaxCDN pull zone, you will now see a “Custom robots.txt” section presenting you with full ability to modify the robots.txt file.

Not only can you enable the robots.txt file to deny all user agents by default, you can also create a custom robots.txt file and only deny them to your scripts folder or anything that search engines do not need to index. When search engines are indexing your CDN, it can potentially drain your bandwidth as well; enabling the robots.txt file of your pull zone is something you should consider.