Netcetera the ‘webhosts’ for the excellent Quackometer have bowed under the pressure of the Joseph Chikelue Obi and taken down the Quackometer site with immediate effect. Here we have the worst form of censorship. The Quackometer was one of the best resources around for the debunking of pseudoscience and because of a couple of quacks and charlatans complaining it has been removed. In both cases the complaints of defamation had no grounds, otherwise fellow bloggers, like myself, who mirrored the offending articles would probably be on the receiving end of legal letter by now. If Netcetera actually cared about their customers, or even had a backbone they would have read the offending pages, and those that followed, and realised that both the SoH and Obi were taking a speculative swipe at those who have criticised them.
Thankfully there are some webhosts who understand the idea of customer service. Positive Internet, saviours of badscience.net, are currently working with Le Canard Noir to transfer the Quackometer to there servers. This is how, in my ideal little world, all companies would be run - make you money from big customers and help out the underdog who is being treated unfairly. Long live Positive Internet, long live the Quackometer (once it returns) and all hail those who are willing to fight against the endarkenment and those profiteering of its back.
*Edit*
For those who are looking for shared hosting I though I’d give you a few more reasons to use Positive Internet over Netcetera if the above is not enough (this may display a slight bias).
1. Netcetera is cheaper per month compared to Positive but charge for MySQL storage.
2. Positive Internet host FOSS legend Richard Stallman as well as the mirroring Debian Linux
3. You get full shell access even on shared hosting
4. Netcetera use Windows servers, ’nuff said
Currently I’m using Lunarpages for my hosting who have thus far been excellent. I am tempted by a change to Positive though, full shell access is almost too tempting to resist.
Update: the netcetera quackometer fiasco has now been picked up by ZDNet.
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