Archive for February 2nd, 2012

Bulgaria silently signs for ACTA / Why ACTA, SOPA and PIPA are bad for our freedom

Thursday, February 2nd, 2012

r freedomYesterday silently with zero publicity, Bulgarian representatives ratified the ACTA (Trade agreement for fighting counterfeit.)
The name sounds really good, but it has not much to do with what ACTA is about, when applied to digital medias and data sharing.
The ACTA legislation has been ratified in Tokyo last week, where 22 of the European Union membership countries signed in favour of these "malicious" treaty.

The basic idea of ACTA looks tempting as it gives more freedoms to copyright holders, however if you look closely you will understand actually this copyright infringement clauses are not so in favour of us the users but mostly in favour of multinational corporations.
For all those who have not heard about ACTA and SOPA in short this is anti freedom of speech treaty, which if put in action could lead to serious filtering of the internet.
The ACTA 's controversial treaty has already raised an outcry from dozens of computer literated individuals who daily use the internet. Unfortunately, ACTA is less known among non-tech guys … and hence most people on the internet have no about its existence.

If ACTA is ratified and set to be valid as a legislation to Bulgaria, this could lead to total Internet censorship in BG (more or less like it is in china now).
ACTA legislation will make sharing files via torrents and other P2P community file sharing networks a criminal activity.
Another effect of ACTA is that practically free software which reads a proprietary formats like DVD becomes illegal in Europe (like it is currently in America) and I will become guilty for just reading the non-free format..
As a result of ACTA our ISP (Internet Service Providers) will be forced to log and keep all traffic flowing through their (Routering servers). Filters on a local ISP level that will be censoring free speech could also become totally lawful…
Already there are plenty of ANTI-ACTA and ANTI-SOPA propaganda website which are trying to bring some more awareness to the public for the issue… Once an individual is suspected, to fraudulent activity or anything that breaks what is in ACTA is he is presumed to be guilty of crome …
Just watch the two videos below and you will see how terrible the consequence could be if this legislation is integrated with todays Bulgarian government laws. If you're hearing for ACTA for a first time and you live in a country which has still not rafitied ACTA as a local country legislation, make sure you spread the word and let all your friends about the bad impact of this anti-human legislation. We have to really stand up and protest to retain our digital freedom !

The Internet can be censored if Protect IP ACT (PIPA) and Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) are put in action !

ANTI-ACTA – Hmmm But What can you do??
 

How to make wordpress Update Plugins prompt to permanently store password / Get rid of annoying updates wordpress prompt

Thursday, February 2nd, 2012

I'm managing few wordpress installations which requires me to type in:
Hostname , FTP Username and FTP Password , every single time a plugin update is issued and I want to upgrade to the new version.
Below is a screenshot of this annoying behaviour:

How to get rid of update plugins wordpress username password prompt

As you can see in the above screenshot, there is no way through Update Plugins web interface to store the password permanently. Hence the only option to store it permanently is to manually edit wp-config.php (file located in wordpress docroot, e.g. /path/to/wordpress/wp-config.php , inside the file find the line:

define ('WPLANG', '');

Right after it put a code similar to:

define('FS_METHOD', 'ftpsockets');
define('FTP_BASE', '/path/to/wordpress/');
define('FTP_CONTENT_DIR', '/path/to/wordpress/wp-content/');
define('FTP_PLUGIN_DIR ', '/path/to/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/');
define('FTP_USER', 'Username');
define('FTP_PASS', 'Password');
define('FTP_HOST', 'localhost');

Change the above defines:
path/to/wordpress/ – with your wordpress location directory.
Username and Password – with your respective FTP username and password. The localhost

That's all, from now onwards the User/Password prompt will not appear anymore. Consider there is a security downside of storing the FTP User/Pass in wp-config.php , if someone is able to intrude the wordpress install and access the documentroot of the wordpress install he we'll be able to obtain the ftp user/pass and log in the server directly via FTP protocol.