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Last week, a small Greenhost-delegation visited the Internet Freedom Festival in order to meet other people active in the field of Privacy and Internet Freedom, and get new ideas to improve upon our services. Inspired by a great session by Daniel Khan Gillmor we immediately set up a new DNS-over-TLS server, allowing advanced users to use the internet more privately.

The Domain Name System (DNS) underpins most of our use of the Internet, by providing a way to look up IP addresses from domain names. By design, it provides very little privacy. While more and more sites use encryption once the...

Bepakt (Dutch for 'packed') is an informational site about zero-waste shops in Europe. Zero-waste means reducing waste dumping to zero, by designing and managing product chains in smart ways. On bepakt.com you can find hundreds of addresses of shops that sell packaging-free products. In addition, it is a starting point for more information about zero waste, for example on starting a packaging-free shop.

Buying packaging-free stuff is not yet mainstream. Bepakt helps you to see where you can find packaging-free shops. You can reduce your material footprint by buying less packaged products and...

Mainly by using WordPress sites and newsletter sign up forms a huge amount of unwanted email is being sent. In most cases the owners of these sites don't know they are contributing to this problem.

In the rest of this blog post we will look at the reason for this abuse, how you can see if you are contributing to this problem too and how you can prevent it.

Unwanted email sent from hosting packages

Recently we've been getting more complaints (via Feedback loops) about unwanted emails being sent from the web hosting packages of our customers. We always look into these complaints seriously.

Since Greenhost was founded we have made as many "green" choices as possible. We started by working together with EvoSwitch, continued by buying second hand furniture and developed a shared hosting environment that is extra energy efficient. But at Greenhost we do not only want to be greener than the other companies. We want to be as sustainable a company as we can be!

That is why we have created a permanent team of employees that will dedicate themselves to keep the "Green" in "Greenhost. We have identified the following as important next steps:

• Yearly reporting of our energy usage

What follows is a relatively detailed and technical description of the reasons for the outage. Because we understand not everyone wants or understands this much detail we added a simpler and shorter summary of the problem:

There was a problem with the devices (switches) that regulate the (redundant) internet (network) connections to our data centre. In trying to solve this isolated problem unfortunately a feedback loop occurred that clogged the multiple connections.

We have multiple connections going to the data centre to prevent losing access to our machines, however this issue managed to...

Art Up Your Tab is a browser plug-in for Chrome and Firefox. After installing the plug-in you will get to see a new art piece or archive documents from Europeana every time you open a new tab in your browser. With every image there is a possibility to read more information about the piece.

The plug-in is designed to inspire, surprise, inform and get internet users acquainted with European heritage. Digitalised collections are even more visible and it takes only one mouse click to get familiar with cultural heritage. Greenhost is pleased to sponsor innovative ideas to make heritage more visible...

As you may have read or heard, the Register announced several severe security problems with Intel processors, which are affecting nearly all computers with modern Intel processors (link below). This means an emergency maintenance window is scheduled from tomorrow onwards (January 4th), which can lead to downtime for your website or Virtual Private Server(s) outside the normal maintenance window. Please see below for more details.

To meet the standards we did a necessary update on our SMTP mail server on the 21th of December. This means that from now on you can't send any unidentified emails from a non existing email address. The exceptions to this are the following types of addresses: webmaster@…, noreply@…, no-reply@…, wordpress@…, cron@…, and root@….

Do you still want to use a non existing e-mail address you can simply add a wildcard/catch-all email address. When that is set, all the emails to addresses on this specific domain will be accepted and email can be sent from all possible addresses.
You can create a wild...

In this newsletter we will give you a short update of the work we did the last couple of months: we've moved office, we have free https security on our website for all our customers, speed improvement of the databases, six tips about the security on your mobile devices and a request not to cooperate with scamming domain sellers.
And if you're a Dutch citizen please don't forget to sign for the referendum about the Sleepwet (dragnet surveillance law)!

The Greenhost team

Greenhost moved!
A moving company that drives on green energy drove our moving boxes, desks and computers from the centre...

Go to greenhost.nl/blog for more, Dutch, articles.