I don’t agree.

Here’s my response to the plan:

Let’s assume that the total income of the nation is $1,000,000.
So, currently the 60% of people making less than $97.5k contribute $37,200 to the pot. Let us generously assume that the greedy buggers over $97.5k don’t pay any money into the pot (which we know is not the case, but we can not derive the right percentage).

Under your plan, all 100% of the income is taxed at 3.2% (which we know is not true, because people below the poverty line would not contribute). 3.2% of $1,000,000 is $32,000. Which is less than the $37,200 above. $32k is actually going to be less, and $37.2k is actually going to be more. So, you have made the problem worse.

Now, being one of the greedy buggers making over $97.5k, I will actually see my overall FICA contribution drop by about 1/3. not bad. Now, another approach is to leave FICA at 6.2% and drop the ceiling. The problem then becomes that I, and all of my money grubbing, elitist cohorts will demand equity for the increased contribution. So, the amount of money required to fund my retirement is going to be substantially higher if I pay more in. Again, this doesn’t fix SS.

The system is fundamentally flawed. It is a pyramid scheme and it is suffering the fate of all pyramid schemes once you pass a critical mass. In this case, the rate of growth of the work force is not sufficient to keep the program solvent. So, we are forced to drop it, introduce gross inequities, or fund it through some new tax scheme de jure.

The major problem with reforming social security is inequity.  The plan presented above seems to make a lot of sense.  Those that can least afford it will not be burdened, while those that can most afford it will contribute the most to the pot.  The two fundamental problems are:

1. people making less than the lower limit will have their retirement subsidized, potentially without ever contributing any money.
2. in order for the plan to work at all, there would need to be a fairly dramatic cap on benefit payments, meaning that someone who contributed $10,000,000 to the social security fund is only eligible to collect his or her $3000 per month

Both of these problems will are foundational issues that will prevent a reform including these ideas from being passed.  Like it or not, in the US it is not the poor that make laws.  It is the wealthy - be it democrat, republican, independent, green party, etc.
I am certainly not on the side of leaving things as they are.  I am proposing that we look for solutions that have a chance in hell of being enacted.

I got to thinking about the risks of someone sniffing my logins to the sites. That reminded me of a post I wrote recently about an idea to conserve IP addresses. Most of my sites are hosted on a shared IP address on my server. I simply don’t have enough IP addresses to cover all of my sites. Without dedicating an IP address for each, using SSL is simply not possible.

The vast majority of web sites do not have SSL capabilities, in the same way that mine do not.  At the same time, the instances of hacking, snooping and data theft are spiraling out of control.  As well, the “Starbucks” culture of camping out in a restaurant to surf the web on a laptop is growing, leading to many more opportunities for the trivial capture of passwords and other sensitive data.

Certainly, financial data such as credit cards and logins to financial institutions are generally well protected by SSL.  The types of information that can be lost at the local coffee shop is more likely to be a facebook username and password, or the username and password to a webmail account.  Useful to the hacker, and damaging to the victim, but not at the same level of severity as a credit card number.

So, in a nutshell, modifying the SSL protocol to allow for the negotiation of the requested domain *before* the SSL tunnel is established has another advantage - allowing sites on shared IP’s to use SSL to protect the private information of the users of a site.

It seems to me that the certificate authorities would jump at supporting this idea - it opens a substantially large new market.

There are now tens of billions of web pages on the Internet. Driving traffic to your site can be very difficult. This post is meant to serve as a basic primer to increasing the amount of traffic on a site.

Sources of Traffic

There are a few ways that web surfers can end up on your site:

• Traditional advertising
  • This can be Television commercials, bumper stickers, T shirts, etc.
• Online Advertising
  • Target relevant key words for your site in an ad campaign using a service such as Google Adwords.
• Search Engine Results
  • Visitors are directed to your site after searching for a term.
• Link From Another Site
  • Visitors find your site by way of a link from another site.

Not all of these methods will be appropriate for all types of sites, or all budgets.

Traditional advertising

Posting yard signs with a short teaser phrase and a web site around town has become a very common practice in advertising.

Order some T shirts and other items from Cafe Press with your site address and logo. A very effective idea is to order some tight T shirts for female friends & family to wear.

Bumper stickers, trinkets, etc can be ordered with logos and web addresses to use as give away advertising. Cafe Press also provides these.

Television and radio advertisements can get quite involved. A company called Spot Runner has emerged that allows the for the easy & cheap purchase of advertising time.

Online Advertising

There are many options for advertising online. The basic concept is that you “buy” keywords from ad networks, who will display your add on search results pages when that key word is searched for, or when a page related to your keyword is displayed.

The two most popular online ad programs are:

Google Adwords

Yahoo Sponsored Search

There are many, many others that have different programs and different features.

Search Engine Results

Ranking well in search engine results for a popular key word can drive high volumes of traffic to a site. The best part of search engine referred traffic is that it’s free!

That’s the good news.  The bad news is that ranking highly on search engine results pages can be extremely difficult.

There are a few general factors that impact the placement of a site in search engine results:

• Quality of the content on the site
• Links from other sites, where more authoritative sites count more.
• Rate of change of the content
• Age of the domain being used

Link From Another Site

Having a link to a site placed on the front page of Digg, Reddit, Slashdot, Fark, and others, will generate a large volume of traffic for a short time.  Done well, posts on the front pages of these sites will generate discussion or controversy on other sites that will, in turn, link to the promoted site having the additional benefit of improving search engine placement.

While the traffic generated from these sites can be great, it is important to understand a few things:

• Unless you are using a technique that is “cheating your way to the top”, a promoted site must have content and a look & feel worthy of being on the front page of these sites.
• If you are “cheating your way to the top”, the success will be short lived, and you will have to deal with being banned and any future submissions from the promoted site will have a much harder time rising to the top.
• The traffic volume is good, but will quickly decay, due to the nature of these sites wanting to get new and interesting content to the front pages.
• Know your audience and plan accordingly.  The readers of these sites tend to be very technology savvy, and are sick of looking at ads.  Most readers of these sites use ad blocking software, potentially rendering the effort to promote a site worthless.  These types of visits should be viewed as “getting the word out”, not a source of income.

1. Find a place to host the image, such as photobucket
2. Place a link to the photo on a web site using the <img> tag.

Alternatively, images can be uploaded to a blogspot or wordpress blog when writing a page or a post by using the “add an image”.

Additional suggestions to allow GIS to properly categorize your images:

• Label the picture with a caption.
• Use the “alt” phrase in the <img> tag
• Name image file to relate to it’s contents.  i.e., pictures-of-lilies.jpg vs. DSC001.jpg

Getting Google to crawl your site is another trick.

• Back link
  • A link placed on a different site that links back to the target page or site.
• Dofollow Link
  • By default, back links are considered ‘do follow’, if the link code does not contain the tag “rel=nofollow”. Do follow links are processed by search engines and used in the calculation of site relevance.

• Link Baiting
  • Generic term for a way to lure visitors on other sites into visiting your site. This is generally done with a controversial teaser.
• MFA (Made For Adsense)
  • This is a term used to describe web sites whose clear goal is to host advertisements.  They are often lacking content and poorly organized.
• Nofollow Link
  • A type of back link that contains the tag “rel=nofollow”. Most search engines essentially ignore these links in the determination of site relevance, as the owner of the site with a ‘nofollow’ tag is indicating that the appearance of the link is not a vote for the relevance of target site. These are commonly used on forums and blogs where the general public can post links without the approval of a site owner. Some SEM’s believe that using ‘nofollow’ on a site will prevent that site containing the links from being negatively impacted ranked by the quality and/or quantity of links on that site.
• Off Page Optimization
  • A general term that refers most commonly to link building to a site.
• On Page Optimization
  • Structuring the content of a page to maximize the value that search engines perceive as they crawl a site. This is generally done via meta tags, titles, H1 tags, and the repeated use of a specific word or phrase that the optimizer wishes to have a high SERP for.
• PR (Page Rank)
  • A 0 to 10 ranking issued to all web sites by Google that indicates the level of authority that Google has interpreted. Page rank can be viewed when using the Google Toolbar and visiting a given site. Page rank is allegedly one of roughly 200 variables that Google uses to determine the SERP of a particular site for a particular search term.
• SEM (Search Engine Marketing or Search Engine Marketer)
  • The business of, or someone who works to increase the SERP ratings for a particular web site or web page, generally for the purposes of making money.
    
• SEO (Search Engine Optimization or Search Engine Optimizer)
  • Same as SEM.
    
• SERP (Search Engine Results Position)
  • The position of a web page in the result set from a search engine when a particular key word or phrase is searched.
• Splog (Spam Blog)
  • This term describes blogs that are the web page equivalent to spam email.  They serve little purpose other than to promote a site or product.

URLs

First, is the URL structure. Search engines value the descriptiveness of a URL. By default, SMF uses URL’s that are worthless for SEO. An SMF mod, called Pretty URLs, will rewrite your URLs to be far more useful for a search engine. Pretty URLs is very simple to install, but a common problem is to ensure that .htaccess is writable, and that the root directory is writable.

Notice the difference (these links all go to the same post):

• Default SMF URLs: http://www.cyvin.com/index.php?topic=2969.0
• Search Engine Friendly URLs: http://www.cyvin.com/index.php/topic,2969.0.html
• Pretty URLs: http://www.cyvin.com/offtopic/unleaded-gas/

Pretty URLs use the title of the post topic as part of the URL.  This will help search engines to properly classify the page and build a stronger connection between the the page and the title of the post in search results.

Robots.txt

Next is duplicate content. Search engines will generally penalize the appearance of the same content multiple times. The interpretation is that the site is trying to “stuff” in content to make the site more favorable for certain keywords. This is a problem because each message is individually accessible, as well as the thread, and then there is a separate view of the same content in a printer friendly format. What we want the search engines to do is simply index whole threads only, thus avoiding content duplication. All of this is easy to fix with a robots.txt file in the root html directory that looks like this:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /*?action*
Disallow: /*sort=*
Disallow: /*msg*

H1 Tags

Next is the H1 tag. Like the URL, H1 tags are used heavily by search engines to classify the content on a page. I have not found any SMF themes that take advantage of this fact, though I have not looked at more than 10 or 20. Unfortunately, there is no easy way to do this with a mod. It requires some modification of the theme you are using. Most themes have a navigation section that indicates where you are currently at in the forum. The objective is to modify the theme so that the end node (the current page) is wrapped in the <h1> </h1> tag. This will also require a change to the css stylesheet.

Google Tagged

Google Tagged is mod that tracks search engine referrals to various threads, along with what search term lead to the visit, and displays those tags in a tag cloud style box (Example). When visiting a thread, it will also show what search terms have lead to that thread in the past at the bottom of the page (Example). It is not pure SEO, but it does reinforce keywords with the search engines.

Meta Tags

Meta tags are another tool that search engines use to classify sites. Edit the “meta description” in the index.template.php file to describe the site. Users of SMF version 2 can use the vBulletin Style Meta Tags mod to update the tags based on the thread that is being displayed.

Header and Footer

For an easy easy way to add content to the header and footer of an SMF forum, use the Global Headers and Footers mod. Descriptive text can be an essential element in search engines properly classifying the contents of your forum.

I’ve used the blackberry as a wireless connection on many occasions, and it generally works pretty well, though often seems pretty slow.  One thing I had never been able to get working was the VPN client to my employer.  I hadn’t spent a lot of time thinking about it, but one day I really needed to connect and had no other options.

Now, the VPN connection would establish, but I could not reach any systems on the company network.  I had spent a good amount of time as a network engineer in a former life, so I’m fairly adept at troubleshooting such things, despite my management lobotomy.

I opened up a DOS shell, and tried pinging the intranet web server  Sure enough, the pings were getting through.  But, I still could not get get a web browser to connect to the site.  After pondering it for a minute, I knew the answer.  I tried the ping again, but this time I set the packet size to 1500 bytes, the normal TCP maximum size.  Viola!  The pings did not get through.  I retried the ping, decreasing by 100 bytes each time, until I got to 1100 bytes.  At 1100, the pings worked again.

Next, I went out and found this document on resetting MTU size in Windows.  I followed the instructions in the section labelled “Change the MTU Settings for VPN Connections”.  I followed the directions to reset the VPN MTU to 1100 bytes.  A requisite reboot, and I was connected.

I have since observed that web browsing in general is much faster as well.  Originally, I had thought that the overhead of the VPN client was causing an overrun in the size of the packets, forcing them to be fragmented, which is generally not handled elegantly.

Hopefully someone is able to find this tidbit useful.

I have a long drive, so my mind tends to wander. I started to ponder the question: “why don’t musical groups continue to maintain an ongoing brand, even after the original artists fade away?”, like Pantera and the Beatles. It seems that successful groups spend many years, and millions of dollars in building their brands, and that the brand essentially dies once the group disbands.

Allowing popular bands to dissolve is akin to the management of a successful company saying ‘well, that was quite a ride, time to go our separate ways’, and the company dies then and there. There is one clear problem with this example - musical artists continue to make money after the group disbands, because their works continue to sell without additional effort by the former group.

I suspect that the major problem with the continuity of musical groups is the pervasive use drugs, and general bad behavior and even worse business decisions.

I understand the logic behind those comments. Drilling for oil now means that we may have more supply in 10 years, because of the time to actually find where it is, and the infrastructure build duration. But, that assumes the price of oil is simply a matter of supply and demand. We have more demand than we have supply.As much as many people don’t want to hear it, we DO have enough supply, on a daily basis at least. It’s true that we are burning through a resource that will one day be completely gone, but we’re not there yet.

I strongly believe that the price of oil has been driven up far higher by speculation than any true supply constraints. An astute person should be able to intuitively see this happening. There is a relatively fixed amount of money in the world that is invested. Much of that money is held by relatively few investors, like hedge funds, mutual funds, and retirement funds. Those investors don’t like to have their money on the side lines. So, they will go from dumping money into poorly run tech companies, to financial companies, to real estate, and now to commodities like gold and oil.

It is certainly true that some amount of price increase is the result of inflation and low fed funds rates. But, we can’t carry that blame too far. Prices have tripled recently, and we have seen well less than a 50% move in the dollar in the same period.

The investors are speculating that we are running out of oil! We have China growing, along with the rest of Asia. They’ve got CARS in China, for Pete’s sake! There’s going to be a billion new cars on the roads soon!

But, it’s not to be. Just like the irrational exuberance, to steal a phrase, of the dot com and housing bubbles, a bubble is setting up in the commodities. Good news makes oil go up, bad news makes oil go up and there is always some news somewhere.

I strongly suspect that we are approaching a cliff in commodity prices. Each time a new oil reserve is found, we get pushed closer to the edge. It doesn’t matter that it won’t be producing for 10 years. It doesn’t matter that some day we will run out of oil. What matters is that the money managers begin to lose confidence that oil will continue to rise in price. Once that happens, we will see a large unwinding of crude prices quickly, as the big investors search for some new darling to invest in.

On the surface, falling energy prices sound like a great thing for the economy and inflation. There are two problems I see with dramatically falling energy prices:

1. A swift reduction in energy prices will almost certainly cause some amount of deflation in the dollar, and a disorderly repricing of the dollar will likely harm some part of the economy, primarily exporters and multi-national companies who have retooled to deal with the current economic situation.
2. The swiftly rising energy prices have created a boon in the energy sector, from the obvious oil and natural gas companies, down to the vast array of startups that are developing new forms of energy, many of which could not survive such a dramatic fall in oil prices.
3. The “burning platform” for the creation of energy alternatives is gone, at least for a while. If anything good has come out of the current energy situation, it’s the focus on conservation and cleaner & sustainable new options.

The longer we go without a correction in oil prices, the more dramatic the impact that the above issues will have on the economy.

I’ve spent a lot of the past decade in various networking, programming and technology management roles, and dabbled a bit in web hosting work. One thing that is obvious to me is that we are not going to be moving wholesale to IPv6 any time soon.

I was surprised to see an article the other day bringing up the dreaded doomsday of the Internet, predicting that we have 3 years until the end.

SSL Sites

In the early days of my experience with hosting, I was troubled to find that EVERY web server that serves HTTPS traffic with a unique digital certificate requires a separate IP address. What a waste, it seemed to me. There, of course, is a logical explanation:

When a browser opens a connection to a web server, a handshake to establish the SSL tunnel is performed based on the hostname used in the browser. From the perspective of the server, it is simply an incoming connection that needs to establish an SSL session. The server does not have context of what host the browser is trying to reach, and so relies on a one-to-one mapping of IP addresses to SSL certificates.

Modifying the SSL protocol to include the context of the domain that is being requested at the time of handshake should provide an additional number of years before which we must convert to IPv6. The change could well be fairly easy to accomplish, assuming there is a mechanism for backwards compatibility. Of course, web server software writers and browser authors would have to implement the protocol enhancement, then push those updates out to the world.

The number of certificates issued each year is not a published number, so it is difficult to tell just much the growth rate of IP’s could be slowed with such a solution.

Portable Net Blocks

At several points in my career, I had the responsibility of procuring IP addresses for several fast growing companies. In all cases, the companies were using non-routable addresses that were address translated by a firewall, which essentially only used one “real” IP address for the hundreds systems on the company’s network. Each company was implementing redundancy with it’s ISPs - essentially connecting to two or three ISPs in case something bad happened to one or two of the other ISPs. In order to facilitate this, we wanted to obtain our own IP addresses. Each of our ISPs was willing and able to assign IP addresses that could be used across multiple ISPs. However, those IP addresses remained the “property” of those ISPs. So, if we decided that ATT stunk and we were using ATT, we would need to re-address our enterprise.

We did not actually need that many addresses - less than a class C (or /24) of 255 addresses. At the time, at least, the minimum size allocation that ARIN would make was a /21 net block, consisting of 32 class C net blocks, or 8,160 addresses. In each case, I had to justify the use of that many IP addresses. The companies were large enough that it was pretty easy to justify that many IPs, assuming we assigned each host on the network a “real” IP address, in addition to showing the contracts that we had with the various ISPs, indicating our intent to “multi-home” our networks. And re-IP we did. I did this 4 times, wasting somewhere around 30,000 IP addresses. Yay for me.

ARIN has since updated it’s allocation policies, now providing minimum net blocks of 4 class C’s. Based on my experience, I cannot fathom how many IP addresses are allocated and sit unused or used poorly because of situations like mine. Unlike the SSL issue, there doesn’t appear to be a good solution to this. There is a practical limitation to the number of individual networks that can be announced on the Internet. Continuing to make the minimum allocation smaller and smaller will create a different kind of problem on the Internet - routing may become unstable without major upgrades to the Internet’s network equipment.