On ‘Kodi Fully Loaded’ and Beautiful Interface to Piracy

English / Writing

That’s some odd title, i know, but i’m talking about the case of some android tv box sellers on Ebay that sells them with HTPC software Kodi, fully loaded with addons that facilitates watching pirated movies and tv series. There’s now a case of them being arrested in the UK.

From torrentfreak:

Police have arrested five people on suspicion of selling ‘pirate’ set-top boxes configured to receive pay TV. The Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit teamed up with FACT, Sky, Virgin, BT, and The Premier League to arrest the sellers, who allegedly supplied Kodi with unlicensed addons.

To me, Kodi Fully Loaded is just another symptoms of the growingly easy to use and beautiful interface to piracy. My dad, a 60 year old man, for example, seem to watch movie everyday, without realizing that the site where he’s watching them from is actually an illegitimate pirate site. But it’s designed in such a way that barrier to the content is so low that average people who’s not aware of technology will not realized that he or she is doing something illegal.

In fact, some of those movie streaming sites tend to have names that end in “flix”, or “theater”, that makes people think that this is legit movie streaming site. And if it’s not legit, how wrong could watching a movie by just clicking a single buton really be?

From my experience with Kodi, the availability of addons for streaming movies, tv series, sports streams and other media content fetch from the internet is pretty impressive. By just buying a $35 box and loading it up with Kodi, it feels like you’re paying $100+ to your cable company. But with kodi, you’ll only need to pay once.

I can see why the copyright holders are becoming increasingly worried about this issue, but i’m afraid this is just a sign of what piracy will turned into in the coming years. The days of messing with torrent clients, finding legit torrents that are not bundled with virus, getting letters from your ISP, etc. In the future it will be a simple click. The answer is not to arrest everybody, but to lower the barrier to content even more.

If copyright holders still act greedy and kept trying to get more money from content by means of geoblocking, pulling content from Netflix and putting them in another paid service, etc, this will only get worse.

There’s a Demand for a Good Shared Hosting Panel & Billing Software but There’s So Little Choice

English / Writing

There’s simply too small of choices for web hosting providers on off-the-shelf panel and billing platform to use.

I really don’t understand why that is. There’s so many choice in the market for open source CMS, or other 3rd party software for sysadmin. But for off-the-shelf hosting panel and billing platform, cPanel seem to have a tight grasp on the market.

Open source website control panel like Webmin, Vesta or Ajenti V are available, but simply not good enough for commercial adoption or even average people with a VPS to use. They’re just too hard to use. For billing platform, WHMCS, especially after they got acquired by cPanel, now seem destined to be the number one choice for years to come.

Boxbilling, the one viable open source competitor to WHMCS, seem to be somewhat abandoned. Github issues are not being looked at, and my last experience using them for GOODHost just ends in weird bug that seem to have no resolution. So we decided to migrate back to WHMCS.

The funny part is they seem to have abandoned support for the pro version as well.

I wonder if this is because the only ones who use off-the-self software, especially free ones, are kiddie host with a reseller hosting plan. And yet even though that might be true, having only one truly viable product for hosting providers that don’t have the resource to develop their own panel, is not a good look for this industry.

Competition is always good, and i’m afraid if cPanel and WHMCS became the industry standard, there will be no true innovation in the shared hosting space because we’re inherently tied to cPanel’s development cycles and their closed-source codebase.

I don’t know, maybe this post is just 10 years too late and there’s simply no need for innovation in the shared hosting space. Unlimited everything is the last innovation this industry will ever made for years to come. Maybe containerized hosting is truly the future.

Looking at the amount of people that don’t know how to administer a linux server though, i’m not sure if that’s true.

5 Easy Steps to Having The Quickest Loading WordPress Site Ever

English / Writing

Here it is:
1. Find a VPS provider. At GOODHost we offer 512mb OpenVZ VPS for $37/year
2. Open easyengine.io, follow their steps to install a wordpress site
3. Or use my step. Type this on the command line:

sudo ee site create yoursite.com --wpredis --   php7


4. Migrate the contents from the old wordpress site to the new one, or starts anew.
5. Enjoy

Proof? Here’s the result of sucuri performance benchmark of this site, hosted on our LA VPS:


You can test your own wordpress site performance on Sucuri Performance Benchmark

And here’s a result of pingdom speed test from New York (the server is in LA):


You can test your own wordpress site performance on Pingdom Speed Test

Note that i didn’t use a CDN, nor i use any kinds of caching plugins.

Also, as a bonus: If you need an SSL certificate to give your site an enhanced security & a boost in google rankings, you can use this command with easyengine:

sudo ee site update yoursite.com --letsencrypt

This setup is so much faster than the typical wordpress installation on a shared hosting environment, even without static caching.

The installation steps that i use above basically told easyengine to create a wordpress site using PHP 7 (huge performance boost compared to PHP 5), and use Redis as object memory caching.

Of course, with a VPS you’d need to know how to properly secure your server. But that’s a guide for another day, and i’m sure your VPS provider would be more than willing to give a hint or two.

Why Is There So Many Fake Web Hosting Reviews Online

English / Writing

At GOODHost, we’ve recently started focusing on marketing ourselves better. To do this, I’ve tried looking into how people purchase their web hosting plans online.

One of the biggest surprise i found is that there’s so many people who seem to get tricked by a bunch of review sites for hosting that’s neither objective, nor credible.

Most of these review sites embed an affiliate link on every outgoing link to the web hosting provider they recommend.

And guess what happens? All of the providers they recommend just incidentally turns out to be providers who pay their affiliates the most.

As i considered myself quite active and ‘in the know’ about most web hosting companies they mentioned, it almost seem like a joke that they still recommend Blue Host, Hostgator, Site 5 and the likes. These are mostly companies who used to be good but then got acquired by the giant hosting company crusher and ruiner called EIG.

I thought at first, well, these review sites look quite fake, i mean, just taking a gander at it for five seconds will show you their true motivation, which is for you to signed up and stay for at least 60 days so they can get their payday.

But it turns out people actually fall for this. It’s pretty often i have people visiting the site, hit up the live chat and said, “Hostgator offers unlimited hosting, why don’t you?

Then people who came to web hosting forum, mostly trying to get a recommendation on what hosting company is actually good, and then mentioned that they’re considering Hostgator. Or GoDaddy. Or Bluehost.

It’s not in my nature to take a shit on providers, since i know there’s good people working there, and providing quality support is actually really hard, especially if you have that amount of customers.

But these companies are just simply not good. At least after their acquisition. And they treat their employees badly. And they don’t care about the customers at all.

So why do they still get the same amount of attention?

Maybe the hosting industry, especially the shared hosting part of it, is just too oversaturated and the noise just push customers into picking providers that they heard the most often, but these review sites truly is another beast entirely. They illustrate and contribute to the scummiest part of this industry that i hate the most, which is marketing lies.

There’s no unlimited hosting. There’s no unlimited bandwidth. There’s resource limits hidden in page 73 of their TOS, and if you go past the limit, your site will either be slowed down to hell, or they’ll tell you to upgrade. They’ll not help you optimize your site, they’ll just kick you to the curb.

I don’t know the answer to solving this issue, but i know that people need to speak up more often and post reviews on providers they actually liked. I’ve seen some review sites try different methods and not use affiliate link at all, and i hope in the future they got more attention because this is just bad.

Why Is it So Hard for People to Update Their WordPress???

English / Writing

From Sucuri:

WordPress 4.7.2 was released two weeks ago, including a fix for a severe vulnerability in the WordPress REST API. We have been monitoring our WAF network and honeypots closely to see how and when the attackers would try to exploit this issue the wild.

In less than 48 hours after the vulnerability was disclosed, we saw multiple public exploits being shared and posted online. With that information easily available, the internet-wide probing and exploit attempts began.

I really don’t get it. The fact that modern CMS these days are so easy to attack has been known for so long, and yet i’m still seeing so many old wordpress, Joomla or Drupal in the wild. I can understand that updating also came with a risk of its own (mainly your site getting broken), but the headache of trying to fix a broken site is much much less than your data getting stolen or your blog becoming a terrorist organizations advertising banner overnight.

Lowendbox seem to be one of the site affected by this exploit too.

Cloud.net Dallas VPS Review (Softlayer)

English / Writing

Developers and customers who wants their own servers these days tend to get confused by so many choice in the marketplace. Linode, Digital Ocean, and Vultr have become such household names, it made offers from smaller, or larger outfits that don’t want to spend a bunch of money to develop a platform and market themselves, get lost in the noise.

One solution seem to come from Onapp’s Cloud.net, which offers a marketplace that acts as the beautiful “cloud” front-end for big datacenters that might not want to focus or develop platform for the VPS/cloud instance market like Digital Ocean does. From cloud.net, customer can choose to get their server from multiple providers in different locations.

I first found Cloud.net from my journey looking for VPS providers that resell from Softlayer. The reason why i want a VPS in Softlayer datacenter is a nostalgic one. My first blog (setengahmateng.com, now dead) is hosted on a shared hosting account which apparently is hosted on a server located in Softlayer Dallas location.

Unfortunately, i found that Softlayer no longer focus on small providers, and that’s why VPS resold from a Softlayer bare metal server will be overpriced. But as it turns out, Cloud.net has a partnership with Softlayer that enables them to sell a piece of Softlayer on their platform.

So i create an account, and add $10 (you must deposit a minimum of $10 to your Cloud.net Wallet to buy a server) to my wallet. I then choose the lowest end server i could get, which has 512mb of RAM, 1 cpu core and 2TB bandwidth running KVM. As an added surprise, they seem to be running a promotion so the server only costs me $3.47/month (which got further discounted to $1.90 thanks to a 50% off coupon).

My experience with their panel starts horribly. I first installed Debian on the server, but decides to switch to Ubuntu just for the sake of it (i ended up using Debian after all). Unfortunately, the panel seems bugged so it doesn’t respond to my command. It only says, “the server is scheduled to be updated” but it doesn’t do anything. Yes.

Confused, i decided to wait, since the phrasing seem to suggest that it’s not an instant rebuild process. But after 10 minutes, i decided to hit up the live chat. Since i hit their chat on off-hours, i didn’t get a respond, and decided to submit a ticket. Their reps responded to me in 2 minutes (literally).

About 10 minutes later, i’ve got a response on the live chat, and the issue is solved within 30 minutes. They admit the issue is on their panel, but it’s now fixed. Pretty impressive support, i should say.

So now that i got my server off and runing, i decided to run some benchmark. Here’s a result of a simple vps benchmark script that’s pretty popular online:

System Info
-----------
Processor : QEMU Virtual CPU version (cpu64-rhel6)
CPU Cores : 1
Frequency : 2099.998 MHz
Memory : 491 MB
Swap : 1023 MB
Uptime : 8:48,</code>

OS : Debian GNU/Linux 8
Arch : x86_64 (64 Bit)
Kernel : 3.16.0-4-amd64
Hostname : dallas

Speedtest (IPv4 only)
---------------------
Your public IPv4 is 69.x.x.x

Location Provider Speed
CDN Cachefly 104MB/s

Atlanta, GA, US Coloat 54.4MB/s
Dallas, TX, US Softlayer 108MB/s
Seattle, WA, US Softlayer 29.2MB/s
San Jose, CA, US Softlayer 32.0MB/s
Washington, DC, US Softlayer 27.4MB/s

Tokyo, Japan Linode 11.4MB/s
Singapore Softlayer 5.10MB/s

Rotterdam, Netherlands id3.net 6.96MB/s
Haarlem, Netherlands Leaseweb 23.2MB/s

Disk Speed
----------
I/O (1st run) : 643 MB/s
I/O (2nd run) : 656 MB/s
I/O (3rd run) : 552 MB/s
Average I/O : 617 MB/s

 

That’s some impressive I/O, huh? The connectivity to areas across the world is not bad, either. Remember, it costs me $1.90/month. Other than that, i also run a geekbench 4 test which uncover the fact that the CPU seems to be quite weak, at least compared to another VPS of mine from Vultr Singapore location.

You can view the full benchmark result here

I’ve been using the VPS for 7 days today and have no problem with it. The crazy (and i mean, literally crazy) price i got for it more than made up for the initial problems that’s quickly solved by their speedy support. If you want affordable VPS from premium data centers worldwide, i wholeheartedly recommend trying out Cloud.net

By the way if you’re wondering if this review is sponsored in any ways, well, they didn’t have any affiliate programs set up so as much i want to make a buck or two, i can’t. 😀

Apple (Software) Is Just Not Interesting Anymore

English / Uncategorized / Writing

I know, the title is pure clickbait. But what do you expect, i’m a click whore.

Anyway, to the topic at hand. Next week, Apple will announce their Q1 2017 earnings, and as expected many people who are really into Apple are up in arms about it. What will it said? Would Apple make more, or less money? Would Tim Cook said something, or not, about the thing that other people was saying about that other thing?

Who cares. I don’t anymore. But i do have a bit in mind about Apple, and the current state they’re in. Maybe it’s worth something, but nobody reads this blog anyway so why not, right? Well, anyway. Read More

Why i Decided to Buy Into The Xiaomi Lifestyle

English / Uncategorized / Writing

Ben Thompson got a very well-written, well-researched article up at Stratechery, talking about the ambition of Chinese phone maker Xiaomi and its challenges, as well as explaining the misconception and some amount of culture shock surrounding the company’s behavior when viewed by its western brethren.

I figure this is an interesting enough article to just put up here as a link, but i decided i have some points to add, considering that i sold my iPhone 5 3 months ago and bought a Xiaomi Redmi 1S (and made a tidy profit as well by doing so).

It’s well worth remembering that i’m far from a qualified pundit like Thompson, but more like an Apple fanboy who decided to dump the iPhone for Xiaomi’s low to mid-end product offering. Also, considering that i’m from the 3rd target country of Xiaomi (Indonesia) Thompson mentioned, and my age group belongs to the 25-34 range that from the data in that article are the majority of Xiaomi’s userbase, my opinion to the product’s value and attractiveness might be somewhat helpful to western reader.

My Reason for Selling the iPhone and Buying the Redmi 1s

It is a somewhat odd beginning, but my journey to buying the Redmi begins when my friend, who for some years have been an android fanboy come knocking on my door. He’s holding a phone that i thought seem familiar. I think i’ve read about the Redmi 1s on some android blog somewhere, and so i asked him. He said it’s the Redmi 1s. He sold his Nexus 4, a phone that is made by LG, a more popular and relatively more trustworthy brand than an obviously Chinese name like Xiaomi (i have no grudge against chinese brand, but common belief dictates that a chinese name doesn’t associates with great quality hardware). I hold the phone, and although it’s obvious that it’s a low to mid range product, with full plastic case, it’s truly well made. It has no flex, and the operating system runs smoothly. Seems fine, i thought. But what intrigues me is the fact that the phone at that point sold for 150 (in us dollars).

I bought the iPhone in full price without subsidy. Easily 4 to 5 times that price. The display is obviously larger than the iPhone 5 i’m using at that point, and it has a weaker camera, but seeing as i used my phone most often for reading, my consideration for a good phone is always the display, full stop. I just need a phone that i can use for reading and watching youtube and texting, so the proposition of plastic body doesn’t matter to me much. I appreciate good design, and the iPhone definitely has better hardware design, but at that point the phone is running iOS 7. And that, i can live without.

About a couple weeks after that, i thought, why not. After some research, i found that there’s a serious hype surrounding Xiaomi. If you live in the US or where Xiaomi is not yet a household brand, and curious to know what kind of hype is surrounding Xiaomi in Southeast Asia, i will explain it to you this way. People have to signed up for a waiting list to purchase the phone. Or, wait for a flash sale, where you can buy the phone if you’re fast enough. One of the biggest e-commerce website in the country, Lazada, put up a page where you will know when another flash sale is coming, and the phone usually sold out in hours, even minutes.

Why, did people seem so excited about a phone from a brand they didn’t really know about? Even i’m not so sure. But reviews speaks for itself. The company’s hardware & software approach that seem to come straight from Cupertino in a black bag, carried by someone wearing Mcdonald’s Hamburglar costume is working, and it’s working really well. When i finally pulled the plug on my iPhone, put it in the box and sell it to an unofficial importer (so i can avoid the wait list), i got handed the surplus money and a singapore version of the phone that they only have a couple left on stock.

I open the phone, set it up, and it’s just works. I am now holding a phone that when i go somewhere, people ask is that the Redmi 1S? Mind, of course, that people who knows about the existence of the brand are usually people in my age group or younger, so there’s definitely truth to Thompson’s assertion that people who trust the Xiaomi brand are people who in their lifetime associates China to a big powerful country, and not the 3rd world communist state who makes cheap products that most older folks seem to associate it with.

So to conclude. What’s the reason for me purchasing the phone and selling the iPhone? One, it’s cheap. Very low barrier to entry. Two, the brand got a lot of hype so early adopters and young people like me are naturally curious. Three, it’s not running iOS 7. I know it’s not exactly a powerful or maybe interesting enough reason, but i digress. Most teenagers and early adopters are naturally curious and doesn’t have so much brand-paganism in their mind, so if they just bought the phone for whatever reason and find the phone is working well, AND, it’s cheap, they will probably just stick with it.

You claim you’re an Apple Fanboy but you clearly decides willy-nilly to dump the iPhone for cheap junk

This section is aimed at people who’ll probably be confused and mad that i claim to be apple fanboy but clearly doesn’t love it enough to consider the iPhone a hugely better product compared to the Redmi 1S. “I mean the Redmi 1S! Not even the Mi3, or the Mi4!”, they’ll probably said.

Yes, it’s true. I’m stupid. But i have used the iPhone 5 for a couple of years, and while the 5S and the 6 & 6S is clearly a really, really, really great product, one fact that you can’t deny is they are expensive. Remember that there’s no subsidy towards the purchase of a smartphone in my place of living, and so the iPhones are as expensive as a brand new motorcycle people usually use to avoid traffic jam and commute to their workplace. It’s expensive enough to make you say, why, and usually when you start to ask why, that’s when your claim to fanboyship are revoked. Unfortunately, i am one of those people. I still love Apple, still use my iPad mini & Macbook Pro daily, and i love them to death. Love them enough that i decided to start another apple blog (imagine that) late last year. But when i ask why, here’s what i found.

  1. MIUI and Vanilla android is equal enough and in some areas even better than current iteration of iOS
  2. Hardware-wise, the Redmi 1S and my iPhone 5 is equal. I’m not saying the design, i’m saying spec-wise and how it runs apps
  3. I’m not going to be branded as a cheapskate when i run around holding the Redmi. Again, the curious thing about the brand is it’s not associated with cheap quality hardware
  4. It’s more reasonable in price.

To be honest, the seconds after i sold my iPhone 5, i started feeling sad, and thinking i might regret the decision. But a couple of days later, i found i didn’t miss anything much after losing the iPhone 5.

So with all that being said, i wanted to re-iterate the fact that if you think Xiaomi’s brand proposition is in the fact that they’re cheap, you’re probably wrong, or at least not entirely correct. Yes, that’s one of the reason why i stick with my Xiaomi and starting to love the brand, but that’s the last point in my reasoning. Fact is, they build well-made products, and while the early hype surrounding the brand might be more related to early adopters curiosity & their price proposition, the fact that their products are affordable AND good quality, is what makes them trully interesting. If, they are successful at maintaining this two quality of their brand, i can truly see the reality of Xiaomi’s ambition mentioned in Thompson’s article. That’s a reality where there there is a full line up of Xiaomi’s electronic products, and people are buying it because it looks and handles like an Apple product while being cheaper. I mean, if Toyota can start making their car by reverse engineering GM & Ford cars, and became where they are today, i don’t see why Xiaomi can pull it off, probably even in a shorter period of time than what it took Toyota to pull it off.

“I thought making a high-quality app was the hard part that was keeping iPad magazines from being more successful”

English / Uncategorized / Writing

That’s Marco Arment, the creator of The Magazine, an iOS only magazine that he launched in 2012. He’s commenting on the fact that now, less than two years and a new owner later, it will be shut down.

Many non-ideal factors and decisions I made up front probably contributed to The Magazine not being sustainable forever. But the biggest challenge was simply that running a magazine today is a really tough business. I thought making a high-quality app was the hard part that was keeping iPad magazines from being more successful, but the app turned out to be the easiest and least important part of the business.

To me this is a powerful paragraph of the attitude of us nerds when it comes to running a business. The attitude that “Build it And They Will Come” is very pronounced among us that we forgot that making something great that we think have values doesn’t necessarily mean the average people will see the same values. Sometimes, building something great just means we’re the first to get into the market and lack of competition makes us the only viable choice.

Thus, this paragraph can also explain the app store kerfuffle that happens 2 months ago, when developers are complaining about lack of income from it. Making something great is simply not enough. You really have to get things truly right from the very beginning to get considerable success now.

A Quick Rundown What Happen Yesterday At The Parliament

English / Uncategorized / Writing

So Twitter rightly exploded yesterday after our Parliament voted yes on passing the new Regional Election Law. The law basically return the regional, and local election system to be represented by their domestic parliament instead of a direct election system voted by the people. I have written my quick, feelings and thoughts piece (in Indonesian) at Kompasiana, but in here i just want to make a quick rundown on the political drama and strange things that happen following yesterday’s drama.

  • Hours after the vote got official, the Indonesian twitter sphere got together and commented on the shameful display of the parliament by putting #ShameonyouSBY hashtag on their tweets. Seeing as how we have a large population of twitter user here in Nusantara, the hashtag trends worldwide for half a day yesterday. Pretty amazing display of solidarity and a measurable proof of how the people’s feeling of harsh disagreement and betrayal not just with the Parliament but also the President. SBY, of course, is short for Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, our first directly elected, first post-reform era President who serves for two full term.
  • Why people are mad with the President is also pretty clear. The President’s own party in recent week seem to completely reverse its course of supporting the parliament’s motion and joining the good side in rejecting this law from being passed. Yet, at the very last second they decided to walk out from the building for some vague disagreement with the law’s finer points and pretty much makes the good side lost a guarantee.
  • After the twitter display of anger, the President, who is in New York for the UN General Assembly put a press conference saying he is surprised at his own party decision to walk out, instructing a thorough investigation on who told them to walk out and generally saying he will fight this law to the constitutional court because he disagree with the law due to some part of it overlapping with a higher law.
  • Problem is, one of the President’s son, Ibas is definitely in the building last night and he joined the whole gang of Democrat Party Senator who decided to walk out, plus the vice president of his party Max Sopacua is said to have got a permission from SBY for the decision to walk out. Source of this is Ruhut Sitompul, Demokrat’s high lieutenant.
  • The President also have the power to not sign the law passed by the parliament in order to hold it from being a full-blown, official law. Why the President puts himself in a position of a civilian just observing and can only go to the constitutional court to stop this, is a question mark for his sincerity.
  • Some people have said that the whole course reversal and then another by the Democrat Party is a ruse, wholly orchestrated by SBY to have a revenge on the next ruling party PDIP. This can be true but it is so shameful and childish i can only think that there must be some common sense left in the mind of our current President. He leaves office in less than a month and for this to be his final legacy, is it really that wise of a decision?

That’s it for now, i think. There are finer points to think about but the whole thing really is a shambolic display of democracy and a definite sign of how democracy in this country still has a very long way to go. I can only imagine what the next 5 year will look like, and it ain’t gone be good.