Positive Internet

Blog

• Nov

  25

  2018

  Positive turns 20!

  The Positive Internet Company is 20 years old

  By: tom

  20 years ago today, The Positive Internet Company Limited was founded to champion Free Software and provide the very best in GNU/Linux hosting and network services. What began in a modest bedroom in north-west London today runs from offices in "both" of the Soho/SoHos (London and NYC), our own flagship green-energy datacentre in Cambridge, UK, and myriad points of presence across the globe. Our founding motto, 'we're good', continues to run through everything we do where other similar-vintage companies' claims of virtue are unconvincing. (Google was founded a few weeks before us, for example!)

  In our 20 years, we have been privileged to work with wonderful customers, fantastic suppliers, and a phenomenal team who have shared in our success. We are particularly proud of how many of our staff have been with us for more than half of our 20 years: testament to the mutual loyalty and bonds which underpin our everyday work.

  We are excited for the next phase of the company's development. Here's to the next 20 years and thank you, all!

• Oct

  31

  2016

  Linux sysadmin vacancies

  By: tom

  Sysadmins / Senior Sysadmin roles at The Positive Internet Company
  
  The company
  
  Positive focuses on GNU/Linux and Free Software like very few other organisations do. From the company’s desktop machines through to complex computing clusters, as well as in significant parts of our networking stacks, our deep commitment to free and open source software shines through. Can we interest you in a rare opportunity to work for a company with that dedication?
  
  Positive Internet has been providing managed services and hosting based on Free/Open Software for nearly 20 years. We have positions available in our lively and friendly team providing support for a range of GNU/Linux systems running secure networked services for a diverse range of clients including some of the globe’s biggest brands.
  
  The roles
  
  We have several positions open at this time and welcome applications from candidates ranging from enthusiastic amateurs to seasoned sysadmins.
  
  Initial salaries range from c.£22000 for trainees to c.£65000 p/a for more experienced candidates. The starting salary will depend on experience and location as we have positions available in London and Cambridgeshire; Positive offers excellent prospects for career development.
  
  All applicants should have experience in some aspects of GNU/Linux sysadmin, tuning the LAMP stack - including configuring and maintaining MySQL and/or MariaDB, shell scripting, DevOps methodologies, configuring HA hardware, software and storage clusters. Experience with Debian is especially welcome.
  
  Candidates for senior positions should have significant experience of high-availability platforms in heterogeneous environments, including configuring and maintaining private cloud stacks based on Xen and KVM virtualisation technologies and, ideally, hybrid AWS platforms, deploying with tools like Ansible and Puppet, configuring caching technologies like Varnish, and some experience in deep-configuration and securing of popular open application stacks, including Magento, WordPress and so forth. Ideally, senior candidates will also have experience of attaining and maintaining secure systems up to PCI Level 1 and ISO27001 standards.
  
  Reporting to the Technical Team Manager and benefitting from the support of a small, lively, and talented team, we nonetheless expect you to work autonomously on a number of projects for the company and its clients, ranging from providing support and troubleshooting through configuring and tuning new private clouds to coordinating technical relationships with our key clients.
  
  
  Details
  
  We can offer these positions in one of two locations: either working from our offices in Soho, the very heart of London’s West End (5 minutes’ walk from Oxford Circus and Piccadilly Circus tube stations) or in the NOC of our wholly-owned data centre in Cambridgeshire (by train, 14 minutes from Peterborough, 30 minutes from Cambridge).
  
  Whilst you will generally work either in the London offices or Cambridgeshire data centre, we do offer some home-working opportunities. You will join the Technical Team on-call rota which involves occasional weekend working remunerated separately.
  
  Positive gives a good holiday allowance (25 days + bank holidays + goodwill days around Christmas/New Year), lots of training opportunities, funding to attend free software conferences such as FOSDEM and other technical training/conferences, company mobile phone, and the chance to work with some of the best free software experts in the business.
  
  Apply
  
  This position should interest anyone with a passion for working in a Linux-only environment with a team that shares your commitment to Free and Open software and technical solutions.
  
  If you would like to work in a completely Windows-free zone, please send an email and CV (PDF only, please) to jobs@positive-internet.com.
  
  Please ensure the subject line of your email includes *either* the job title “Junior Sysadmin application” or “Senior Sysadmin application”.

• Dec

  31

  2015

  A Tribute to Ian Murdock

  RIP, Ian Murdock, the father of Debian

  By: nickm

  Ian Murdock has died. You may not have heard of him, and the circumstances of his death are not yet clear. Whatever the context of this specific tragedy turn out to reveal, the general legacy of Murdock's pioneering work is unambiguous.

  As founder of the Debian project, Murdock helped to create something that prefigured the very notion of Open Source; that offered a distributed "app store" decades before it was the twinkle in any proprietary eye; and, most importantly, helped to found the world's first properly universal, free, open, operating-system distribution upon which we at Positive base everything we do. His legacy lives on in the very name of the project he began, a portmanteau of his and his then partner's names: Debian. Positive has relied on Debian almost since our birth, and we have put our money where our mouth is to support it, as the founding sponsor of its "Long Term Support" project.

  It is sometimes easy for those outside of technical communities to belittle such technological developments and progress as merely technocratic: at best, perhaps, they're seen as a layer of new soil into which those perceived as more "creative" might plant their more "worthy" crop. The technocrats themselves are not given the benefit of any inherent cultural or progressive doubt. People like Ian show how shallow is this conception. The notion of the geek merely concerned with the alignment of their train-set does a disservice to the philosophically and politically engaged men and women whose visions, again and again, shape the societies in which we live.

  Until Debian, operating systems and collections of software (whether proprietary or Free) were packaged, distributed and maintained by separate individuals or companies. The organisation in question would select the software it decided should be a part of its offering and they would then take on the responsibility of patching, securing and updating that collection of software. The traditional Unix distributions did this. Microsoft did this from DOS onwards. So did Apple. But in each case, the disadvantages of relying on a single organisation to take on such a burden became obvious. Not only did the schedule and scope of any fixes, updates and enhancements rely on the haphazard commercial priorities of the organisation, but the scope of the distribution was necessarily limited to the small collection of applications and services to which that organisation had a right.

  Whilst an upgrade to a newer version of Windows might bring you some new services, what about the whole collection of software "islands" that you'd installed previously on top of the older version of the operating system? Many of these islands would now be rendered inaccessible by newer libraries, newer security requirements and so forth. Your only option in this case would be to abandon those "islands" or to seek individual updates, which may or may not be available, for each separate app under the aegis of each separate software fiefdom. To an extent, the proprietary realm made this all but inevitable. Each app relied on a different proprietary licence, based upon a different business model and the specific commercial needs of its creator. To upgrade and update everything as a seamless whole was not therefore merely technically improbable, it was commercially impossible and legally forbidden! Even today, with all the app stores in the world, each app remains a grudging passenger on your system rather than a coherent participant in its "society".

  Of course, the world of Free Software, with its liberal licences and its encouragement to share and agglomerate software, removes the legal impediment to a more coherent organisation of collections of such software; but early efforts in the GNU/Linux world to distribute such software generally aped the traditional proprietary schemes. It took someone with the forethought of Ian Murdock to realise that the legal and political opportunities opened up by Free Software could extend beyond the individual apps that enjoyed these freedoms.

  Crucially, Murdock envisioned freedom as not merely a property of an individual app, but as a fundamental character of a wider ecosystem. And this vision is where he leapfrogged the walled-garden "App Store" even before any such thing existed. As such, Murdock's realisation was not some mere technological suggestion. It was, indeed, a cultural vision lucidly set out in the Debian Manifesto.

  The Manifesto was no mere technocrat's white paper. It was a moral proclamation. It rightly railed against "unacceptable behaviour being rewarded" and instead hoped for a distribution "based on the needs and wants of the users rather than the needs and wants of the constructor". To service this vision, a whole collection of technical innovations gushed out: the ".deb" packages, the Debian Package Manager, the Debian Policy guide, the eventual emergence of the "apt-get" systematic update program and all the social and political tools necessary to allow discrete, individual package managers nevertheless to be able to servce the collective coherently.

  The exhortation to collectivisation is, of course, both exquisitely political and historically fraught. Ian was thus one of the very rare individuals whose visions of collective endeavour did not end in tragedy or worse. He had a nuanced understanding of how to balance the rights and expectations of the users, the developers and the maintainers. His modest "separation of powers" remains the bulwark against any aspect of the Debian project toppling any other. He envisioned an accommodation subtle enough to ensure that individual interests did not poison the stability of the collective, however much heat might be released by the inevitable creative friction. The historical rareness of crafting such collective stability, again, cannot be overstated (hence jokes about anarcho-syndicalist communes and so forth). But Ian did it.

  Today, the Debian Project is a byword for reliability and stability, of interoperable components and flexibility that has taken it to watches, banks and the Space Station. And it has provided the base for derivatives like Ubuntu. Certainly, Debian has had its arguments and its flame wars, its controversies and its eternal grumblers, but it remains one of the few top-flight GNU/Linux distributions in the world. It is, indeed, a testament to the vitality of the GNU/Linux universe that it has allowed two economically and philosophically distinct distributions to thrive: Red Hat, a multi-billion dollar traditional commercial venture, on the one hand, and Debian, a non-centralised radical collective on the other. Both are considered the essential targets for any software produced for the GNU/Linux platform.

  In paying tribute to Ian's life and his most important work, it's essential that we move beyond seeing Debian as a "mere" technological endeavour; the project deserves recognition from journalists, scholars, and other "opinion-makers" for the full, astonishing scope of that endeavour. Certainly, Debian marks at least as radical a social experiment as Wikipedia (and, indeed, Wikipedia runs upon it), but you won't find an NPR or BBC Radio Four documentary about it any day soon. But Ian Murdock's astonishing creation will live on: a small glimmer in our present of the post-scarcity "Star Trek" economy of our future. And for that, the future will remember Ian fondly indeed.

• Sep

  02

  2015

  Client Spotlight: The Poke

  Positive and the Poke: The Serious Service of Hosting Hilarity

  By: nickm

  "Positive Internet have done a great job for us - 
  smoothly handling frequent and unplanned surges of viral traffic 
  and also helping us plan for solid hosting strategies for the future"
  - James - Co Founder of The Poke

  
  

  A nice treat those of us who work in managed-hosting enjoy is the glorious range of eclectic organisations we encounter. One minute, we’re attending a meeting to discuss an exciting arts project with the world’s largest broadcaster; the next minute, we’re helping a charity launch their world-changing campaign; and before teatime, we’ve secured an innovative new banking platform upon which millions of credit-card users will rely. For nearly two decades, our team has taken this rich variety in its stride; we thought it might be interesting to share some of the varied clients with whom we work.

  Let’s introduce you to one of them today. The UK has a rich tradition of satirical publications, sometimes ribald, sometimes wry, sometimes scurrilous but always richly woven into the tapestry of irony that exemplifies so much of Britain’s humour: from the scandalous political cartoons of the 18th century, through Punch, to Private Eye and even Viz. So it comes as no surprise that this venerable tradition has wended its wily way online.

  One of the most popular and successful examples of British online humour is The Poke. It is the biggest humour site in the UK, with over 5 Million unique users viewing up to 10 Million videos, stories and pictures per month. It happily infects social media with daily comedy viruses, and its features are every bit as deeply silly and yet profoundly revealing as anything Gillray penned. We’re tickled to have hosted their site and managed their platform for many years.

  The Poke are a good example of how we go beyond being “A Web Host” in that most banal of 1990s senses. A site as popular as theirs, where a meme can expand from a few lunchtime titters into a tweetstorm in less than a minute, requires special attention. The classic, plodding way to respond to such spiky, voluminous traffic is just to throw ever more metal at it, or to have a panoply of cloud instances waiting in the wings, to buoy the site on the cresting wave of traffic.

  At Positive, the pride in eking every last bit of capability from a platform demands something a little less plodding! We work very closely with The Poke’s developers to make sure that the site can cache itself as well as possible. We install the most sophisticated systems to lessen the burden of a deluge of hits on the platform, so that it can cope with a sudden twitter frenzy without meltdown, and without having to scale histrionically into the stratosphere. This requires tinkering, tuning and detailed honing that even most in-house teams would find onerous. And yet our team meld their ways into understanding the business, the logic, the platform and the technology of each client, individually. Professions like the law demand simultaneously broad but deep mental “context switching”, as the professional moves from one client to the next. Whole universes of knowledge, culture and context have to be assimilated quickly into the workflow without a hiccup; it’s interesting to note that companies like ours now demand this of our technical team just as stringently.

  Our detailed, painstaking work, allows a relatively lean, trim platform to slurp through staggering quantities of traffic. Indeed, people who see what we can achieve with such a platform are frequently astonished, wondering where they might find the “man behind the curtain” who actually makes something this popular tick. There is no man behind the curtain. Instead, there’s a team who thrive on not simply chucking a few more VMs into the fire, but in tuning the platform so “alchemically” well that it performs to degrees that begin to look supernatural. Many technical commentators wistfully assume this level of “clever hacking” disappeared in the days of 8 and 16-bit computing, with the careful marshalling of resources that was required in those environments. Our team carries the torch today for such well-honed craftsmanship.

  So next time you click on a tweet from The Poke that makes you guffaw, titter or even tut, you might ponder that getting comedy to scale the heights of modern media is a surprisingly serious business.

  
  

   

   

   

   

• Aug

  27

  2015

  Ashley Madison's Lessons: Security as Culture

  The Ashley Madison hack: lessons beyond moralising or hysteria

  By: nickm

  The Ashley Madison hack has inflamed media attention to a frenzy. And of course it would. The site offered aspiring philanderers the opportunity to encounter like-minded people. The cheaters’ paradise turned out to be less of a niche-proposition than one might imagine, with an estimated 37 million users. A group of crackers took it upon themselves to break in and reveal the names and details of the privacy-coveting members of the service.

   The fallout of the leak has been, of course, costly and embarrassing. The tale’s clash of ancient-morality-tale and 21st-century digital-paranoia makes it a tsunami of a story. On the one hand, it’s a veritable Elizabethan plot of conniving philanderers and cuckolds, and the devious but peculiarly puritanical blackmailers who would unmask them. Its themes could have flown from Christopher Marlowe’s quill. On the other hand, the story encapsulates a shiny Gibson-esque dystopian nightmare. It paints a picture of a world where no secret nor confidence can finally be protected from the marauding swarm of digital predators.

  Much media attention has focussed on the dark depths of the human condition the story plumbs. Plenty of smart pieces have been written about Ashley Madison, but there have been disappointingly few attempts to shine some rational light on what systematic steps we can take to prevent such tragedies from happening. Whatever else the story reveals, it confirms that “tragedy” is not too strong a word to use. Online security has now become a matter of life-and-death. We always knew that about military secrets and the like. Now we are forced to acknowledge that there are no “trivial” exceptions. As in the aerospace industry, though, we need respond to disasters not with hand-wringing emotionalism, but with calm reflection on what we can put into place to limit the severity of such attacks, if not prevent them. So let us see what lessons might actually be learned from the Ashley Madison furore.

   The primary lesson involves no specific techniques nor one-stop-solutions to thwart Black Hats. Instead, it involves ethos. One might think this a little namby-pamby compared with getting the latest shiny IDS (Intrusion Detection System) installed, or in trundling through a PCI Compliance (the credit-card industry’s gold-standard of audited security policy) document; however, rooting the culture of your project deeply in security’s soil makes a difference between digital Security Theatre, and actually having some chance of thwarting the bad guys. The distinction between performative “showbiz” security and the actual culture one needs to have in place to keep everyone safe is one that we at Positive have felt keenly from our very beginning. Security is not a “layer”. It’s not some protective faerie dust you sprinkle on your system. It’s not an amulet you hang at the doorway of your data-centre. Crucially, security cannot be treated as that annoying dweeb who’s there to buzzkill your startup’s launch party. If you have “prioritized public relations over robust security” then it should be no surprise when such priorities eventually destroy your business.

  Sadly, treating security as an annoying adjunct to the fun is the biggest mistake entrepreneurs have always made, and continue to make. They beguile themselves with the spit and polish of a well-marketed lobby, and pay little time or money to securing the foundations that hold up the building. Splurging on logos, PR campaigns, apps and even SEO is sexy. It’s new media. It’s Silicon Valley glitz. Apportioning funds from the start to a pallid team of geeks who give a damn that you’ve used Pass1234 as the password that gives full access to all your servers, is not sexy. But it’s annoyingly vital. Getting an in-house security team, or a managed service like we provide at Positive, or engaging serious consultants who wag their fingers at you when you try to ignore that one little thing that’ll end up destroying your venture, is not an optional extra. It’s the sine qua non of establishing a service on the public Internet.

  Another lesson involves continuity. It’s at this stage that one would usually engage cliches about eternally repainting the Forth Bridge in Scotland. Consider them duly engaged! Even those who’ve paid a modicum of attention and money for the initial security of a site-build then distressingly often chuck the thing onto some cheap slag-heap of an unmanaged hosting package, or perhaps float it up upon a lazily-drifting public cloud, pop open the champagne and then never bother themselves with the underpinnings of their venture again. Of course, just because the ship’s crew never peek under the hull doesn’t mean that the black-hatted buccaneers don’t. As every week passes, new holes pop open. With nobody there perspicaciously to patch them, your stout ship becomes quietly keelhauled. Eventually, it sinks.

  But before it actually takes on water, why spend ongoing money on a bunch of stalwart geeks to maintain the vessel when it’s so much more fun to splash out on parties in its ball-room? A lesson from the Ashley Madison attack is not that the hull-breach was “very sophisticated”, as some have claimed. Quite the contrary, as the attackers made clear, the vessel was trivially open to plunder and, unforgivably, “nobody was watching”. Make sure you always have someone to watch over you, as the song goes, and keep that crow’s nest staffed.

  This focus on systemic continuity is why we at Positive make such a distinction between a managed service and mere “hosting”. A team of conscientious geeks who darn and patch security holes as they inevitably pop open provide no guarantee of incorrigible security. Such attention does, however, shut “water-tight doors” against the severity of any attack that might succeed. If you discover a hole in your web application, make sure you have engaged a team empowered to patch that application without breaking it. Where any hole remains, limit those who have administrative access to the bowels of the application to the minimum trusted pool.

  If that hole nevertheless does allow nefarious external access, make sure that the server’s operating system is sufficiently buttressed so that no “root” compromise can be achieved. If a root compromise somehow still succeeds, make sure that sensitive data is properly encrypted and that logs have already been shunted elsewhere, secure from tampering. Again, effective security is not installing a branded VPN in front of a leaky hulk and partying on, but is instead a systemic imagining of best and worst case scenarios, and putting a panoply in place against them.

  A final lesson to be learned is that verifiable trust is crucial. You need a team whose provenance is proven, using software, systems and even procedures which allow full and transparent auditing. This is one of the reasons why we give tours to prospective clients of our datacentres, where the prospective client can go through full due-diligence prodding of every aspect of our operation. It’s why we encourage face-to-face meetings with our team. It’s why we not only take the time to learn how the applications entrusted into our care work, but also why we make a priority of getting to know the people and business behind the application. This is why we at Positive Internet are trusted by many of the world’s largest banks and insurance companies to look after some of their most precious data assets.

  Crucially, verifiable trust is why we have focussed, for nearly two decades, on Free and Open Source software. As with peer-reviewed science or democracy, the transparency that Open Source promises is no panacea for security. But whilst Linus’s Law is not infallible, it throws into relief the least-worst method of software production we have. And, unlike security-through-obscurity proprietary systems, Free and Open Source platforms at least guarantee that the winner of a “game” between the black-hats and the white-hats should depend on skill and wisdom rather than a hopelessly skewed playing field. Whilst Ashley Madison used these technologies, it is notable that they used them in conjunction with proprietary plugins and services that seem to have been the gateway to the crack.

  To suggest any magic-bullet response to the Ashley Madison hack would be dangerous hubris. No single piece of technology, no individual vulnerability scan, and no wizard with a compliance manual will guarantee against such break-ins. However, we should take very seriously the mortal differences that a project’s culture, ethos and priorities can make to its eventual vulnerability to such calamities. We should neither fall victim to a counsel of despair, nor to any silicon snake-oil vendor who assures us blithely that their special tonic will let you party on without a care. That might sound portentious, but it can be heeded simply by making the best use of open, transparent solutions and deep, trusted relationships with your technology providers. It is perhaps ironic that in its exhortation of blithe affairs, this is the one trusted relationship which Ashley Madison should have taken care to nurture.

   

• Aug

  17

  2012

  Happy Birthday Debian!

  The Debian Project: how freedom works

  By: nickm

  Yesterday, the Debian Project turned 19 years old. Positive Internet raises a glass to this miracle of human cooperation. More than an unassuming technical project, it has profound implications on what humans can achieve with unencumbered networks.

  Operating systems don't lead to much heated enthusiasm in the saloons and hostelries of the nation; less so the different ways of distributing and putting together those operating systems. Talking about operating-system distributions seem a very definition of arcane. But bear with me: by examining one operating system's distribution in particular, we can find fascinating sociological, economical and philosophical insights.

  The distribution I'm talking about is 'Debian'. But let's first backtrack a bit: what is a 'distribution'? When you buy Windows, or MacOS, in its shiny box or from a glinting app-store, you understand that you're getting something that makes your computer run, provides the windows and menus, and includes some basic software, like notepads and wordprocessors. In a sense, then, you could call those proprietary operating systems "distributions", I suppose. But because what gets put on the DVD or in the download is strictly regulated by the company who produces the operating system, there is usually just one distribution of such operating systems. Well, to be precise, there are some small variations: Microsoft, for example, allows you to purchase cheaper, more restricted versions of Windows for low-powered netbooks, and throws in an extra bucket or two of bells and whistles for their enterprise versions. But, because of their tight, proscriptive control of what goes into these sub-versions, it seems more appropriate to call them "editions" than completely different distributions.

  Operating systems based on the Linux kernel tend to have less onerous licencing restrictions; however, the organisations that put together the distributions of the free software packages that run on top of the Linux kernel - the web servers, the databases, the desktop clients and so on - are often competent but otherwise uninspiring. RedHat, for example, for all the good work it does, is "just another" company, that employs technicians to put together and test these packages under its corporate roof, and sells support and management services. Certainly, it receives help from its community via the Fedora project, but it still acts as the central, commercial clearinghouse that is well understood and oft-immitated.

  Debian is different: it has no centre, no hub, no commercial core, no large team of employees. Debian is an agreement, a coherent social structure, an arrangement between free agents - but it is not a corporation in the traditional understanding of that term. It is a group of individuals and organisations who, for manifold reasons, tend their own particular corner of a garden that matters to them. The interesting bit happens through an alchemy of the network effect, free software and combined, intermeshing self-interest. So long as the individual maintainer follows certain rules and conventions, their specific package, documentation or meta-infrastructure is included into the project as a whole. The benefit to the maintainer is that their work is given a supported place within a larger, useful infrastructure. And the benefit to the project is that it gains an additional useful component. The networked world, and the universe of Free and Open Source software, allows startlingly novel structures of production that nevertheless somehow speak right to the interest-matrices of our hunter-gatherer roots. Debian is the prime, working example of such novelty based on ancient cooperative instincts. No centre, no core, and yet somehow out of the chaos emerges a stable distribution of thousands of individual software packages produced by hundreds of different individuals in dozens of countries. And it all works meticulously. In a sense, Debian has had a universal, networked, liberated "app store" for more than a decade before the proprietary people caught on.

  More recently, producers of proprietary operating systems have include "app stores", where people can distribute their software, and the operating-system owner, as gatekeeper to the walled garden, takes a cut for each application sold. People are treating the coherent, easily-updated app store as a novel development; in fact, projects like Debian have provided huge repositories of coherently distributed and updated applications from the beginning, but with one key difference. Debian provides these applications not as part of a "walled garden", but though a cooperative agreement on how applications should be installed and updated in its environment. Because the great majority of Debian's applications are under Free Software licences, the coherence and scope of the "app store" goes well beyond those offered in the proprietary realm.

  Because Debian focuses itself profoundly on Free and Open software, the social contract of those who produce its thousands of packages reflects the contract's principles both in philosophy and engineering. There are guidelines for creating and maintaining individual software components, but no compulsion, no specific carrots and no hefty sticks. One would assume, then, that this peculiarly libertarian but cooperative environment would lead to chaos and instability. In fact, Debian is renowned as one of the most stable - perhaps even conservatively so - distributions available, and has been so for longer than companies like Google, Facebook and even Apple (in its revitalised form) have existed.

  We at Positive Internet have used Debian almost since our inception, and have systems with many years of uptime on it. We take for granted the abilities it gives us to keep systems secure and reliable, and yet replete with a rich collection of important applications for running the latest web-services for our clients. The huge variety of tasks we have demanded from the distribution is testament to its flexibility: from small firewalls to massive bank-grade clusters, we don't give a second thought that Debian will be up to the job. And where it needs tweaking, or some special package demands particular tending, we know that a universe of maintainers and developers will be there with us in that task.

  So, for 19 years, the Debian project has modestly, unassumingly, engineered  myriad human minds, with myriad separate requirements and motivations, to deliver, e pluribus, unum. This project of massively heterogeneous conception, emerges as one unified, elegant body of work. It is a pity that so many political theorists, economists and philosophers are technophobes: would that they weren't, they would have a case-study of of two decades of cooperative productivity in the networked age that is uniquely captures our species' capabilities in a liberated networked world.

  Debian has spent nearly 20 years proving conclusively that a well-tended garden needn't be walled. And for that, they deserve a toast or two.

• Apr

  11

  2012

  Records - not eggs - broken!

  Positive involved in another World Record event

  By: nickm

  

  Anyone visiting London in the last few months will probably have noticed that large eggs have appeared throughout the city. These intricately decorated pieces of public art played their part in promoting an auction - both online and at Sotheby's - in aid of the magnificent charities Action for Children and The Elephant Family.

  We at Positive Internet were asked to supply the hosting infrastructure for the live online auction, for which we provisioned a special managed failover cluster in our flagship Positive Park datacentre. We took the responsibility seriously: the thought of the final moments of such an important live event's ruination by a server crash or network glitch is the stuff of bitter nightmares. We prefer sweet dreams - so we put our best team on it, who kept a close eye on these systems throughout the Easter Monday bidding.

  In the end, the hard work paid off, because the online and Sotheby's auctions netted over a million pounds for the worthy causes, with Positive's managed cluster never missing a beat. Alan Newman of Sensible Development coordinated the whole project between Positive, the charity and creative agencies. Alan was kind enough to offer the following comment:

  "We have worked with Positive Internet for many years: they understood exactly what was required for this high-profile project, and tailored the cluster so it'd cope with bursts of extremely popularity.
  As part of the VIP managed service, Positive engineers offered live support throughout the auctions. They made sure everything went without a hitch. Positive is a partner rather than a simply a 'provider': everyone from the directors through to the oncall engineers is a pleasure to work with. It's clear they care about our projects as much as we do".

  Such kind validation of our team really helps our egg-os. Of course, we work egg-stremely hard to ensure our managed service always entails this level of attention to detail; however, when we muse on the work that Action for Children egg-sel at, it's egg-straordinarily gratifying to know that our service has played a part in allowing them continue doing it so egg-selently. This evening, we're egg-suberant to find out that this is the second project in which we've been involved that's won a Guinness World Record! Indeed, it's won two. Frankly, we're oeuf-er the moon. (sorry - we'll egg-ress now)

• Apr

  07

  2012

  Podcasting: now remarkably unremarkable

  Podcasting is fast becoming the default way people broadcast and listen

  By: nickm

  Positive Internet and our Jellycast venture are veterans at podcast hosting and distribution. Indeed, since we won the Guinness World Record with Ricky Gervais for his podcast, we have hosted a gratifying number of top-rated global media extravaganzas for people like Stephen Fry, and for organisations like the British Council. The most recent in our stable to gain the coveted iTunes top podcast status is Iain Lee's Pocket Radio Show. From an idea Iain and we discussed to a global sensation in mere weeks, this is just another of those unremarkably remarkable success stories that hosted services like we provide have made possible.

  Iain, a well-known television and radio personality, has decided to devote his proven talents to podcasting. This is podcasting 2.0: professional, interactive, with the sophistication of a radio programme but with the immediacy of new media. All the finesse one would expect from a professionally produced programme is there: phone-ins, interviews, jingles - the signifiers of "proper" speech broadcasting that just a few years ago would have demanded the backing of a huge established media-organisation to marshal, but today require little more than a microphone, a laptop and an affordable mediacasting account with Positive Internet or Jellycast.

  Iain's podcast represents an increasing trend in online audio. In the early days, podcasting was considered either an amateur's game, or a gimmicky adjunct to a "proper" broadcaster's output. As the medium has evolved, an increasing number of professional people are focusing on podcasting as their primary or even sole means of communicating with the public. The freedom that podcasting gives creative people has been an obvious lure from the start; as audiences have proven themselves loyal downloaders, an increasing number of popular podcasters are finding that they are able to sustain themselves financially through cultivating this audience, by obtaining sponsors and through democratic patronage from their followers. Podcasters control their own media destiny in ways unimaginable under the old broadcasting hierarchies. This freedom is intoxicating. Listeners enjoy the closer relationship they have with the broadcaster, without the alienation of intrusive middle-men.

  In a sense, then, what is remarkable about podcasting is how unremarkable it has become. We take for granted the ability to select and download audio programmes at will. Commutes, flights, jogs and even hospital-stays now seem unimaginable without our favourite stash of comforting audio-accompaniment. And popular podcasts, like Iain's, are garnering tens of thousands of loyal listeners. Just a decade or two ago, the notion of getting radio-sized audiences by recording something in one's front-room and uploading it to a service like Positive Internet's would have seemed absurd science fiction. Now becoming a radio star is simply another in the range of services we offer. We work hard to ensure that our mediacasting bandwidth, reliability, support and speed is second to none, so that we can fade into the background and allow our hundreds of media champions to shine, and some to propel themselves all the way to the top of the charts. Just like Iain has done over the last few weeks.

  We're such dab-handed veterans at this now that it's sometimes easy to forget how subtly revolutionary the services we provide can be. It's no longer grandiose theory to proclaim that anyone with an idea and with the talent to communicate it can do so without hindrance - to the whole planet. And that's surely something worth remarking on.

• Dec

  24

  2011

  Happy Holidays

  Rest easy: we have it covered

  By: nickm

  

  Excuses, excuses! We have been rather busy this last year establishing our new PosiCloud product, gliding more and more clients over the PCI compliance mountain and, as ever, helping some of the most popular sites and services on the web tick along merrily.

  Almost inevitably, updating the PosiBlog took rather a backseat to this, but our New Year's resolution is to remedy the paucity of posts here! We hope to provide interesting tidbits on this blog more frequently, and look forward to hearing from everyone about topics you think we should cover. Feel free to mail us at good@positive-internet.com with feedback and ideas, or throw us a tweet on Twitter - we're @posipeople

  In the meantime, we wish all our clients, customers, suppliers and staff a very restful Christmas and a wonderfully fruitful New Year. Naturally, we remain on duty throughout the festive period, so should any of our managed clients need help at midnight on Christmas Eve, or a quick chat at 3am on New Year's day, we'll be around, bushy-eyed and bright-tailed. Our flagship Positive Park datacentre will remain securely staffed at all times. With perhaps just a little more tinsel than usual.

• Dec

  23

  2011

  Daddy, What Did You Do?

  How GoDaddy lets our whole industry down

  By: nickm

  The only thing more amazing than the Internet is how we take it for granted. In fact, we can actually slip into holding it in slight contempt. It remains the butt of many a radio panel-show's tedious jokes ("haha, Wikipedia is not always reliable. haha, the Internet contains pornography" and so forth). You'd have thought that nearly 20 years of the Internet's absorption into public consciousness would have dampened such fatuous punchlines. But no, the audience titters still, as if in eternal sympathetic vibration with the 90s collective memory of "it's just a geeky CB radio fad".

  Recently, the director Steven Soderbergh discussed his latest film on a radio review programme. The movie makes fun of blogging, which he terms as no better than "graffiti on a bathroom wall". His leading man even wore prosthetic buck-teeth so he could be the "typical blogger". Quelle dérision! Soderbergh mused, happily, that in his test-screenings, the audience gained almost orgasmic pleasure every time the Internet was attacked. They couldn't get enough of Net bashing, which they enjoyed more than the rest of the film put together. The film-reviewers interviewers chuckled along, in amiable agreement. That they then immediately promoted the Internet podcast in which this interview was being promulgated didn't seem to phase them.

  Such cognitive dissonance abounds. Even while they giggle nervously, most of the technophobic titterers would rather have a limb extricated than their smartphone. They would sooner cancel the whole postal service than one Email account. However they sneer at wikipedia, they would whimper if ordered to visit the public library every time they needed to look up a footling fact or all-encompassing concept instead of using this astonishing online resource.

  In this season of Goodwill to all Men, we should pause to consider what an astonishingly lucky species we are to have managed to coalesce about us something as miraculous as the Internet. A miracle can be defined in a number of ways. One definition that captures its essence without having to rely on playing supernatural games is to term a miracle any happenstance that was somewhat unlikely, and did not necessarily follow the predicted contextual logic of the times. Such a miracle emerges as a delicate butterfly from a cocoon of capricious chaos. Such a miracle might be seen as something delicate, something as fragile as a growing crystal, however ubiquitous and sturdy its eventual shape. Its formation was mercurial and unlikely and, were we to reverse time and reset the experiment, so to speak, would likely not follow the same path again.

  And when you start taking such a miracle for granted, you can put it on a neglectful path to destruction. You forget how lucky you are to enjoy its benefits. You forget how delicately inchoate was its formation. You assume that its features are part of a solidly inevitable march of historical progress. And your hubris bloats to the level where you even enjoy a little contempt for its stale ubiquity. Haha, that wikipedia. Hoho, those blogs. And you forget that the whole complex collection of services and social conventions that make up the Internet is predicated on a fundamental notion of liberty. And you forget that all liberty comes at the price of an eternal vigilance. And you allow the desperate, malign or merely opportunistic to take advantage of this amnesia and eviscerate the miracle. And then you walk despondently amidst the shards of the shattered crystal, wondered what went wrong. But no cyber-equivalent of humming "Where Have all the Flowers Gone" will bring it back.

  Early in the New Year, the American government aims to help Big Media to eviscerate the Internet, to destroy the miracle and shatter its crystalline delicacy. As ever, Big Media is blaming "piracy" as its excuse to stamp its jackboot repeatedly on the face of our online lives, and is bundling this repression into a horrible proposal entitled SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act). That there are plenty of more engaging and fruitful ways to fund creative endeavours is ignored. It seems we must all be coerced into accepting that a failing business-model from the last millennium deserves no less than full might of the State to bolster its clumsy missteps. Suffice to say, it is sadly not hyperbole to claim that the  provisions of this act would help to destroy the Internet. It is technically inevitable. And it would give to the American government the same arbitrary rights of censorship now enjoyed by such places as North Korea and Saudi Arabia.

  Fortunately, a large constituency of the online world refuses to join Soderbergh's titterers. It is taking action, writing to Congress and fighting against the dying of the enlightened Internet. Happily, this panoply against the disembowling of the Internet includes a wide range of organisations and individuals, many of whom can be found bickering in other circumstances, including Google and Microsoft. You might assume that the fightback would also include the Internet hosting providers of the world. And you would be correct. With one glaring and shameful exception: GoDaddy. We do not make a habit of dissing or even merely discussing our competitors. It is unprofessional and usually seems peevish at best; however, in this case, when the whole industry is standing up against the forces of darkness, we wish to join our ethically-sound competitors in drawing to attention such obnoxious behaviour. This is not the first time that GoDaddy has courted controversy. But this time, it doesn't seem merely happy to exterminate the odd pachyderm: it is eager to help to destroy the Internet that gives it profit. Such behaviour brings the whole hosting industry into disrepute, and we join our honourable competitors in countering this crawlingly tawdry display.

  A large campaign has formed to urge people move their domains from GoDaddy in protest at their behaviour. It might be self-serving of us to support such a campaign. After all, capitalism enjoys nothing more than the opportunity to kick a competitor when it is down. This really does go beyond that for us, though. We have always revelled in the miracle of the open Internet, and feel an existential shudder in our core whenever someone attacks it. Thus, if you have domains with GoDaddy, our hostmistress will be happy to advise how to transfer them to someone more ethical. Whilst we would, of course, be delighted to take the domains under our own wing, we will also be happy to advise on how to transfer your domains to any competitor of ours more ethically sound than GoDaddy. This means so much to us that we would prefer to take the hit in time and effort to give business to a reputable competitor than to see GoDaddy remain unscathed by their wilful defilement of the miracle that sustains us all.

  Update: After a flurry of bad publicity, GoDaddy have just announced that they will no longer support SOPA after all, although apparently they still support its principles.