Monday, February 22, 2010

Fire Suppression Mishap

My webhost shows the following message:

On Saturday, February 20 2010, at approximately 2:20 p.m. MST during an annual fire system inspection of our data center the fire suppression system was inadvertently triggered and discharged into the data center environment. The discharge of the fire system has affected the hardware and operations of our servers. Not all servers have been affected by the discharge. We are working to restore servers and services as quickly as possible. Due to the nature of this interruption we will be experiencing extended outages.

The Community Color web sites were sparodic during the weekend and went completely dead Sunday night. Hopefully, they will come back to life soon.

Friday, February 12, 2010

IRS Fraud Site

Hmmm, this is odd. While updating my list of tax related web sites, I stumbled on a site called "irs-fraud.com" which invites people to blow the whistle on tax cheats.

Domain Tools tells me that the site is located in the Antigua Tower in Panama, Panama.

That a tax-fraud reporting site is located in an internaional tax haven is itself quite telling.

You can report tax fraud simply by filling out an IRS form. The IRS site says you need to ship the form to Fresno, Ca.

Hmmm, Fresno is about as bad as any third world nation when it comes to online fraud. I decided not to list this site.

I've actually come across quite a few tax related sites with no address and that use a proxy server to protect the site's owners. I would never give my identity to such a site.