Here comes the flood.

I have suddenly ended up on some sort of spam list, because the heavens just opened and my email inbox just filled up with a vengeance.

Gmail’s pretty good at identifying and categorising spam so that I never generally see it. But when you receive 2200+ pieces of spam in less than 10 minutes, some of it’s going to end up in the inbox.

Also, the site keeps going offline.

Ah, what fun. Does this just happen to be a bad day on the internet for me, or have I made a friend that’s playing a funny joke?

Keep up the great writing and don’t give in to bullies.

I actually emailed Des when I saw your account was down, in the hopes that he might know what was going on, and he was nice enough to email me back to let me know you’re up and running again.

Obviously it is faster than the music industry can understand as well, though I suspect part of the problem is that the lawyers have a lot to gain by creating dissention and the executives have no leadership skills when it comes to navigating these new and dangerous seas. In fact it is probably through discussions on commentaries like yours where the anwers will begin to evolve.

I am quite puzzled about solutions to the copywrite protection that creative people have depended on for so long. How is this going to work in the future? Should copyrights last forever as they are beginning to do? I don’t know, but these are a couple of the issues to be resolved in a new era, and obviously the industry has only enough imagination to use the hammer approach, and as I recently heard a great bard say (Tommy Chong, perhaps): “to a hammer, everything is a nail…”.

I am very concerned when someone who is only reporting the news is threatened for doing so. It seems that that is your position. Similar trends have allowed the Iraq war to be started under very disadvantageous conditions and the “Patriot Act” to be passed without dissent in our country. Fear is a great motivator, unfortunately. Fortunately, more people MAY be starting to be more fearful of heavyhanded tactics. The experience of your blogg becomming much more read due to the industry approach is both ironic and instructive.

The webserver I occasionally write applications for at work sometimes has a similar problem sending mail from PHP – in fact it seems that when it gets in this state PHP is unable to open any new files or run external processes at all, although it still serves pages and talks to the MySQL database perfectly happily. We haven’t got to the bottom of what’s actually going on, but the solution is to get the sysadmins to restart the web server. This implies some kind of resource starvation is going on, but I haven’t tried to find out any more details. The web server software is not Apache though, which is why this may be of no use to you – it’s a SunOne server running on a Solaris/SPARC machine with PHP version 4.x.