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2011: A Year In Review

As I sit back and write this retrospective on 2011, I realize just how much I stopped blogging when we got really busy. That’s our resolution: blog more. Easy resolution to keep, I suppose. Onto our stories of 2011!

2011 was a year full of surprises, failures, catastrophes, losses and laughter. We first covered 2011 with Alabama Moon, a movie based on a book by Watt Key about Moon Blake. Supposedly this film took place in Alabama, but it was filmed in Canada and Louisiana. Fail. Read More about Alabama Moon.

In March an Earthquake and Tsunami struck Japan causing manufacturing and supply outages from mega-corporations like Sony and Canon. It took almost the rest of the year just to get some of the companies back on their feet again while others just shifted jobs to other parts of the world. Read More about the Earthquake and Tsunami.

Later in March, the White House called for a “New” copyright crackdown law citing that they wanted the US Congress to fix “deficiencies that could hinder enforcement” of intellectual property laws. Netflix and Hulu later gained an unprecedented momentum (thus filtering out pirate traffic vs. legitimate traffic) and later in the year SOPA took center stage where the Internet went into a rage. Read More about the Call for Copyright Crackdown.

In Late April, the Sony PlayStation Network outage occurred near simultaneously to the Amazon EC2 outage. Foursquare, Quora, Amazon, Sony, Apple, Reddit, Hootsuite, Wattpad – all went down. The only group to naturally take credit was “Anonymous” for the lawsuit Sony rightfully brought against George Hotz aka GeoHot for purportedly jailbreaking the PS3. Read More about the Sony PSN Outage Timeline.

In mid-May, the US State Department drew attention to the effect Social Media was having on the Internet landscape stating that it had become a “must-have communication tool. The Wall Street Journal put out a graph that indicated that while only a fraction of millions of people had visited websites like Coca-cola and Starbucks, almost 10 to 15 times that had visited their Facebook pages. We outline the Social Media aspect and as the question “Is It Time to Shut Down Your Website” in this retrospective.

Steve jobs 2011

On October 5th, 2011, Apple co-founder, CEO and American icon Steve Jobs passed away. Noted with the creation of innovations such as the iPod and iPhone, millions remembered Steve Jobs by e-mailing Apple how he changed their lives. To this day, that memorial can be seen here: http://www.apple.com/stevejobs/. We reposted his Stanford Commencement Address that still inspires many in our blog “Remembering Steve Jobs“.

In mid-October, we announced the upcoming 3rd Annual South Alabama Film Festival which took place in Downtown Mobile November 4th through the 6th bringing commerce and Independent entertainment to the area. Movies such as Wrestling For Jesus, Missing Pieces, Prairie Love, Man of Deeds and The Reconstruction of Asa Carter were featured. Read More about the South Alabama Film Festival.

Later in October, we reposted an article by Tomer Tagrin citing Steve Jobs at the Apple World Wide Developers Conference in 1997 in which he stated “Focusing is about saying ‘No'”. The video of the original conference as well as the article by Tomer can be read here.

The iPhone 4s and iOS 5 launched in late October. As subscribers of Google Voice, we posted some handy instructions for those who wanted to manually swap over their line to a new device. Read More about Activating Google Voicemail on the AT&T iPhone 4s.

On Halloween, we got word that Google had chosen Mobile, Alabama to launch their Mobilize Mobile campaign. At first, we didn’t believe it because of the source announcing it. But it did later happen. Read More about the Rumor of Google Coming to Mobile Alabama.

Also on Halloween, we resounded our own feelings about the banking industry, specifically Regions Bank, charging from $3.00 to $7.50 for debit card usage. We also got pretty ticked off when a “friend” didn’t repay a loan and illustrate just how much Regions can doublespeak when they want to. Read More about Banking: The Importance of Not Bearing False Expectations.

November 1st, 2011 brought some joy to PS3 MMO players around the world when Sony Online Entertainment made DC Universe Online Free-To-Play. Read More about DC Universe going FTP here.

Exciting for us, and maybe not for you, but we had Hibachi On The Go open up in Daphne, Alabama opened in November. Pretty good Japanese food and at a more affordable price than a sit-down sushi restaurant. Read More about Hibachi on the Go. Love the seaweed salad.

Also in the beginning of November, after leaving the area Checkers, also known as Rally’s in other parts of the country, reopened at it’s founding location in Downtown Mobile. The first 100 people got free Checkers fries for a year. Read More about the free fry giveaway.

Amidst the earlier speculation, Google actually DID come to Mobile, Alabama. We got a chance to meet Jason Spero, @speroman on Twitter, Director of Google’s Mobile Division in the Americas, see a few of our competitors, and learn more about the Mobilize initiative. We posted an online schedule of events and a link to the Mobilize website here.

Late November, we posted an important blog about the lessons we’ve learned on Twitter. Namely we wanted to emphasize to engage your followers and those you find interesting. It’s a good read and we hope you find it helpful. Read more about Twitter Best Practices Learned With Hard Knocks.

Client Brad Sundberg, who’s list of achievements are longer than this post, of BSUN Media Systems posted a very helpful guide to the Do’s and Don’ts of Black Friday Shopping. It’s still good for next year so take a look.

Final fantasy vi

At the beginning of December, the long awaited Final Fantasy VI, also known as the SNES version of Final Fantasy III, launched on the PlayStation Network. Listed on multiple blogs, websites and magazines, this game has won top 10 and above in accolades for Must-Have RPGs. Read More about Final Fantasy VI.

The Thomas Hospital Foundation on December 9th announced that artwork by Elizabeth Goree was available to support the foundation during the holiday season. They also shared information on a Family Fun Project that anyone can do. Read more about the Thomas Hospital Foundation Christmas Greeting Program.

GoDaddy Sucks. And this is just Part 1. We illustrate what SOPA is, why GoDaddy was supporting it (we still think they are), and how it’s a major crux to the Internet. PR stunt by GoDaddy? Totally. Read More about GoDaddy Sucks and Here is Why – Part 1 – The SOPA Truth.

Just before Christmas, we shared a rather interesting and concerning video about how Siri, the newest feature of the iPhone 4s, could kill people. It wasn’t true, of course, but technology may concern people like this in the future. Consider yourself warned and Read More about When Apple’s Siri Kills People.

And in the continued SOPA controversy, Anonymous decides to declare war on the Sony PlayStation Network – again. Yawn. These kids are annoying, but if you want to Read More about Anonymous Declaring War on Sony for SOPA Support, be our guest.

Ending the news in December, barring nothing important happens between now and midnight, The day after Anonymous declares war on Sony more companies including Sony Electronics, Nintendo and Electronics Arts drop their support for SOPA. We also outline our stance on SOPA. Read More about Who Dropped SOPA.

From everyone at TurkReno Incorporated, Have a Happy New Year and a Prosperous 2012!

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Anonymous Declares War on the Sony PlayStation Network for SOPA Support

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This was just released from a Sony Fan-site. Hopefully this is an idle threat because we’re tired of the PSN going down…

Anonymous To “Destroy” Sony’s Online Network for SOPA Support

With Sony’s online service hacked and brought down earlier in the year by internet activists Anonymous, gamers everywhere suffered from the downtime of the PlayStation Network and its subsequent hack. Unfortunately, if you thought that it was all over, then you’d sadly be wrong – Anonymous seems to have declared war on Sony, again.

Hello, SONY.
We are Anonymous.

It has come to the attention of the Anonymous activist community that you have chosen to stand by the Stop Online Piracy Act. This act will halt online businesses and restrict access to many sites for many users. Supporting SOPA is like trying to throw an entire company from off a bridge. Your support to the act is a signed death warrant to SONY Company and Associates. Therefore, yet again, we have decided to destroy your network. We will dismantle your phantom from the internet. Prepare to be extinguished. Justice will be swift, and it will be for the people, whether some like it or not. Sony, you have been warned.

To those doubting our powers. We’ve infiltrated the servers of Bank of America, The United States Department of Defense, The United Nations, and Lockheed Martin. In one day.

For their approval to SOPA, we have also declared that our fury be brought upon the following persons. Justin Bieber. Lady Gaga. Kim Kardashian. and Taylor Swift.

Operation Blackout, engaged.
Operation Mayhem, engaged.
Operation LulzXmas, engaged.

We are Anonymous.
We are Legion.
We do not forgive.
We do not forget.

Supporters of SOPA, you should’ve expected us.

The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is the highly controversial bill that, if passed, would give the US government and copyright holders powers to block access to “rogue websites dedicated to infringing or counterfeit goods”. But SOPA has received growing criticism by free speech activists and tech companies like Google and Facebook due to the vague terminology of the bill, which could mean sites like YouTube (or even PSLS) could be blocked for having copyrighted material submitted by users rather than the actual site owners.

With Sony being one of the largest publishers and producers of films, music and games, piracy has severely impacted their profits, and have a vested interest in SOPA being passed. While it’s fair to protest SOPA and any company that supports it, Anonymous’ actions earlier this year showed that the group is willing to let normal consumers suffer from their attacks.

It’s important to note that Anonymous have no central leadership, and this video seems to be the only declaration of war against Sony so far, so it’s hard to tell just how many Anonymous ‘members’ are actually behind the new attack.

Via: http://playstationlifestyle.net/2011/12/29/anonymous-to-destroy-sonys-online-network-for-sopa-support/

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While we don’t support SOPA ourselves, we do understand the importance of anti-piracy measures. As stated above, no one knows just how many people are behind this, but it screams “look at me, we need attention” on behalf of Anonymous. This ridiculousness needs to be stopped, and by stopped I mean Anonymous stopped.

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PlayStation Network Down

Sony PlayStation Network Outage; Amazon Brings Countless Millions Offline

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Sony has released a Questions list that can be found here: http://us.playstation.com/support/answer/index.htm?a_id=2356

  • April 19th – Amazon:

Dear Amazon Web Services Customer,

We’re excited to announce the launch of live HTTP streaming for Amazon CloudFront, AWS’s easy-to-use content delivery network.

Using Amazon CloudFront with Amazon EC2 running Adobe’s Flash Media Server and Amazon Route 53 (AWS’s DNS service), you can now easily and cost-effectively deliver your live video via AWS. And, we’ve made it simple to get started by creating an AWS CloudFormation template that handles all of the provisioning and sequencing for all the AWS resources you need for this live streaming stack.

Portal 2 on Steam, XB360 and PS3, SOCOM 4 Launches.

  • April 20th – GigaOm:

The first graph gives an idea of normal Amazon EC2 response times over the last 30 days, but notice the US-EAST region start to spike at April 20.

The outage that affected a hundreds of applications running in the provider’s US-EAST region is almost resolved, more than 24 hours after a “networking event” took down a number of popular services, including EC2, Elastic Block Storage and Relational Database Service.

We continue to see progress in recovering volumes, and have heard many additional customers confirm that they’re recovering. Our current estimate is that the majority of volumes will be recovered over the next 5 to 6 hours.

First 24 hours of outage (worldwide)

EC2 Outage

Foursquare, Quora, Amazon, Sony, Apple, Reddit, Hootsuite, Wattpad – All went down.

  • April 21st – Sony:

While we are investigating the cause of the Network outage, we wanted to alert you that it may be a full day or two before we’re able to get the service completely back up and running.

  • April 22nd – Sony:

An external intrusion on our system has affected our PlayStation Network and Qriocity services.

  • April 22nd – ZDNet:

Amazon’s Web Services outage: End of cloud innocence?

  • April 24th – 1:42 AM Amazon:

Service disruption: Database instance connectivity and latency issues

In line with the most recent Amazon EC2 update, we wanted to let you know that the team continues to be all-hands on deck working on the remaining database instances in the single affected Availability Zone. It’s taking us longer than we anticipated. When we have an updated ETA or meaningful new update, we will make sure to post it here. But, we can assure you that the team is working this hard and will do so as long as it takes to get this resolved.

At the time, Amazon’s AWS Service Health Dashboard was at red.

  • April 24 – 2:08 PM Amazon:

The number of Database Instances without access continues to reduce steadily. As the access to these remaining database instances is restored, they will become usable without additional action on your end. If your Database Instance is not yet available, you also have the option to initiate a Point-in-time-Restore operation using the steps outlined in our previous post at 10:08 AM PDT. We are in the process of contacting this small set of customers who still do not have access to their Database Instances.

  • April 25 – 8:20AM Sony:

I know you are waiting for additional information on when PlayStation Network and Qriocity services will be online. Unfortunately, I don’t have an update or timeframe to share at this point in time.

As we previously noted, this is a time intensive process and we’re working to get them back online quickly. We’ll keep you updated with information as it becomes available. We once again thank you for your patience.

  • April 25 – 7:39PM Amazon:

We are digging deeply into the root causes of this event and will post a detailed post-mortem.

Amazon and Sony appear to be taking a very similar approach. So was the attack on the PlayStation Network, on Amazon Web Services, or are they one in the same? The answer is: No, they are not.

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Others blame Anonymous who had taken credit for a separate hacking attempt earlier in the month towards SCEA. Some believe that this is also partially motivated by Geohot’s impending court rulings. First IANAL, but it would seem there’s a certain level of legality that has been crossed. Clearly he’s not getting hired right now by Sony at the moment because he’s probably being prosecuted by the US DOJ because he’s IN FEDERAL COURT. When a Corporation files a complaint of that caliber, especially one with a DMCA, Copyright Infringement and allegations of Computer Fraud and other crimes, that could be the act of a number of different things including faking the identify of Sony, misuse of the Sony logo or other things that we’ll never hear about. “Geohot” may deserve what’s coming to him just like any one who has walked across a line that fine. He alone will decide what he does with his life at that point.

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