Friday, March 23, 2012

Temporary unavailability of this blog during parts of the weekend (March 24-25)

As some of you may have noticed, the domain name of this blog has been affected by a design decision on Google's part (Google runs the Blogger, or blogspot.com, service). It is now automatically redirected from fosspatents.blogspot.com (the address under which I registered it, and which still appears in the settings of this blog) to fosspatents.blogspot.de whenever I access it. The same actually occurs to Google's own corporate blog (googleblog.blogspot.com) as well. It may or may not happen to users based outside of Germany.

[Update] I've been pointed to a section of this EFF article. The subhead above that section is "Google Quietly Releases Country-by-Country Take Downs For Blogger". I don't want to take a position on "censorship" here since my blog doesn't have to fear anything like that anywhere. [/Update]

Whatever the rationale for that decision on Google's part may be, I've finally decided to assign the fosspatents.com domain to this blog. I registered that one when I created this blog about two years ago.

DNS (domain name server) updates have delays of up to 24 hours, and the smallest configuration error results in the temporary unavailability of a site. I just wanted to let you know that I will make this configuration change over the coming weekend (March 24-25, 2012), so don't be surprised if you get error messages when trying to access this blog these days.

Thanks for your understanding. I probably should have done this a long time ago since a shorter URL is generally desirable.

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