A lot of people seem to be concerned about the implications of ISPs being asked to block access to certain websites by private companies.

With that in mind several Irish internet users have launched an online campaign to raise awareness - Blackout Ireland.

You can read more about the campaign on their site.

Posted by Michele Neylon at 12:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Posted by Michele Neylon at 11:18 PM | Permalink

I don't want to get into the entire IRMA vs Eircom and IRMA vs ISPs debacle.

The only reason I'm even writing this is because I'm getting a bit tired of all the "quotes" of "quotes" and other unclear and misleading things that people have been saying about ISPs over the last few weeks.

To start with, we at Blacknight are not an access provider.

Basically that means that we do not provide broadband services (internet access)  to anyone. We provide hosting, domain registration and a lot of other services.

We are, however, members of both RIPE and ISPAI

So I was more than a bit taken aback when we got a letter from solicitors representing IRMA (EMI, Sony, Universal Music and Warner).

Since so many people have heard about these letters but so very few people have actually seen one I've taken the liberty of publishing the one we received below (I'm not sure if our legal counsel will approve, but I'm more than a little tired of all the "cloak and dagger"). Sorry it's a PDF, but I wasn't going to type it out again!
irmaletter.pdf

Since we don't provide access, as I've already said, I don't see how this can affect us, so I instructed our legal counsel to tell them as much:

Dear Sirs,

We act as solicitors for Blacknight Internet Solutions Limited who have handed us a copy of yours of the 13th inst.  We have explained the contents in detail to our clients who acknowledges your clients situation. 

It is most important to note however that our clients are a hosting provider.  This is distinct to an access provider and our client therefore does not offer DSL or other internet access services. 

We understand that the agreement with Eircom relates to DSL services, which make illegal filesharing possible.  Again we reiterate that our clients do not offer this service.  Nor does our client have any subscribers as outlined in your letter.

We sympathise with your clients, we hope you will see that our clients are not involved in such activities and therefore we would be grateful if you would kindly revert and confirm our clients cooperation and also a release from any legal action as mentioned in your aforesaid letter.

Obviously we cannot and will not condone any illegal activity on our network and will quite happily enforce our terms of service should we find them breached.

However the reality is that most of the "illegal content" that we do find on our network ends up there due to servers being hacked or people using weak passwords, though there have been exceptions!


Ultimately as a service provider we have to be answerable to our clients as well as the law. So if someone gets a court order we will act on it, however we will not share client data with $random 3rd parties.

If you have an issue with one of our clients for whatever reason then get a court order - sending us silly threats isn't going to work. Seriously.

Demanding that ISPs act as a replacement for the judicial system, due process and all those lovely things that we expect in a democracy, is unreasonable. Apart from anything else the privacy issues cannot be ignored.

From a purely business perspective.. it's a bit like David taking on Goliath in some respects.. While there are several large ISPs being targetted, others wouldn't be much bigger than ourselves in terms of staff numbers etc., It's highly doubtful that any of the smaller providers could really afford to engage in a lengthy and costly legal battle.

I guess we'll see how things progress in the coming days and weeks ....

Posted by Michele Neylon at 2:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (32)

One of our clients was asking me yesterday if we had any "hosted by" or "hosting powered by" type images that they could use on their site.

We do, but for some stupid reason they aren't on our website at the moment..

I'll see if I can rectify that, but in the meantime here are a selection of images that people can use to show us some "link love":










If you want us to link back to you on this page just let us know

If you use any of the images when linking back to us please please please link to www.blacknight.com (and not our .ie or .eu)


NB: Please download a copy of the image and upload to your own site.
Please do not "hotlink" to the images here, as we may block hotlinking entirely due to some "charmers" who keep using the stock images on their own sites (without paying for them!)

Minor update: Before anyone asks... All images were done by SpoiltChild Design

Posted by Michele Neylon at 11:13 AM | Permalink

I'm not sure who is responsible for this, but it does amuse me.

The cut-out is courtesy of MadeinHollywood.ie

So who has been abusing our lovely horse?

UPDATE: Sorry about the multiple posts. Flickr was throwing an error when I tried to use the "blog this" link, so three posts got sent instead of one

Posted by Michele Neylon at 1:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Posted by Michele Neylon at 11:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (16)

Tonight a bunch of Irish bloggers and their friends will be living it up down in Cork at the Irish Blog Awards.
I won't be there, though I will probably follow the event from a distance via Twitter..

Both the company blog (here) and my personal one have been shortlisted, which is nice.

Whether we win anything or not is irrelevant. Getting nominated for an award is always nice and getting as far as the shortlist is fantastic.

To anyone who is shortlisted - well done and best of luck tonight.

And for anyone going - don't forget to thank Damien for all his hard work organising the event.

Posted by Michele Neylon at 3:41 PM | Permalink

While I missed the first half of Dragon's Den (Irish edition) this evening, I was following the chatter on twitter

It's 2009, so most of the entrants have a web presence of some kind.

Unfortunately, from what I was able to see, a lot of them experienced issues with their websites both during and shortly after the programme aired.

I've no idea how many people watch TV with a laptop close by, but judging by the level of activity on twiiter (the #ddire tag becoming one of the most popular this evening) there was a lot of interest.

It doesn't matter who you host your website with, but if you don't do some advance preparation a sudden spike in traffic can take you offline.

So here's a small bit of free advice for anyone going on Dragon's Den.

Talk to your web developers.

Talk to your hosting provider.

Maybe you need to move your website to a beefier machine.

Maybe you need to tweak your website's code to improve responsiveness.

Maybe you need to invest a little bit more in hosting.

Even if the Dragons don't decide to invest in your business idea those few minutes on primetime national TV are worth their weight in gold. If your website is slow or "dead" then you're losing possibly your best chance at "getting your name out there".

Posted by Michele Neylon at 11:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

Posted by Michele Neylon at 9:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

People are strange.

It's always amazes me how they react to things.

A carefully thought out article / post will result in at best a half dozen comments, whereas a random musing that gets thrown up on whim manages to attract ten times that number.

In any case we have gone over all 60+ comments and suggestions about the horse heads

Some of the ideas were funny, some very clever and some simply bizarre.

After a long and totally unscientific process we reached a verdict that no single comment could possibly win, as there had been so many good ones.

In the end we opted to choose four commenters contributions:

Le Craic
Ruairi
McAWilliams
David Behan

We've been in contact with all of them already and will be organising delivery of their prizes in the coming days

Thanks to everyone who took part - you never know .. we may still end up adopting some of your crazy ideas.

Posted by Michele Neylon at 11:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (7)

We really like shiny objects chez Blacknight.

Some "shiny objects" are useful, whereas others just look nice.

Well the latest one we got was from Microsoft, as we are now a certified partner:


We're hoping to upgrade our certification level with Microsoft in the coming months when a couple of more technical staff complete a few more exams.

Pity the signatures on the plaque aren't genuine :(

Update: We also get to use this little logo as well:

Posted by Michele Neylon at 9:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Our logo is a horse's head. You'll see it in various formats on all our websites, business cards, headed paper, adverts and everthing else..

Now we've been sent not one, not two but four horse's heads in our logo's style, but made of polystyrene foam (big thanks to MadeInHollywood)

Now let's be honest, they are cool. You can say what you like, but they are fun objects.

The problem is now that I've got four horse's heads sitting in my office I honestly don't know what to do with them:


So here's what we'll do....

We're inviting you to make suggestions on what we can do with them via the comments here and we'll give something "nice and shiny" to the winner.

Posted by Michele Neylon at 3:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (65)