Just look here (nice megalomaniac style threats) and here (how mature, with the writing style of a 14 years old script kiddie). Do you trust these people to deal with spam in a professional manner? I know I don't, because I've had to deal with the results of their "work" before. They simply don't care if they cause damage, they probably even enjoy it, otherwise they would try to screw up less often.

Neither is distinguishing between "having open relays", "sending perfectly legitimte e-mail to addresses that have a new (domain) owner" and "sending spam", but they don't do it - you will always be slandered (called "spammer") and your business will be disrupted by their blacklisting, even if no spam e-mail was ever sent by your hosts. Last time I checked, they will even blacklist you for having a vacation responder at the address they send their probes to and on one occurrence they kept blacklisting us with the following reason (i.e. their probes that prolonged the blacklisting were these lines):

postfix/smtp[....]: XXXX: to=, relay=XXXX:25, delay=[...] status=bounced (host XXX said: 571 Your IP is BLACKLISTED at UCEPROTECT-LEVEL 1 - See: http://www.uceprotect.net/rblcheck.php?ipr=XXX (in reply to RCPT TO command))

So basically they extended the blacklisting because we were blacklisted, at least that was the reason in the logs (which we were supposed to use to find a problem on our side).

In fact the problem was that we had a registered user many years ago with a domain that had changed owner in the mean time and was used as a spam honeypot now - how do we "debug" that, let alone prevent it? And why do we need to "punished" with a blacklisting when we obviously did nothing wrong (or should we demand of our users to tell us when their e-mail provider sells a domain or goes belly-up?).

What is usually ignored by people in this thread is the simple fact that no spam e-mail is required to get you blacklisted, they don't seem to classify e-mail at all, that needs to be understood.

* you do not get any notifications if you are blacklisted, except whatever obscure message is in your logs
* you do not have to have spam originating from your system, it can be perfectly normal e-mail to an address used by someone you knew in the past, that is now used by someone else as a spam honeypot.
UCEprotect sucks. It's no wonder the people behind it are hiding their identities.

You're an ignorant fool. Unfortunately, too many sysadmins are just as ignorant, so they trust these badly-run, possibly with malicious intent, services. We've never sent 1 spam e-mail in 12 years doing business online and have been blacklisted several times by UCEprotect due to them recycling old domains (which were used by users to register on our site) for use as spam honeypots. They wasted countless hours of our time for nothing.

We've had several such extortion attempts and on the last occasion, we found that they are using domains that were previously held by e-mail providers as "spam honeypots". We've had such e-mail addresses in our forum users database since 2003 and now every time we sent them a forum notification, we got blacklisted by the extortionists (who by the way refuse to tell you which e-mail address caused the blacklisting). So in my opinion, they are trying very hard to get people blacklisted for legitimate uses of e-mail addresses in order to blackmail then.

That's both good (theoretically better code) and bad (large-scale attacks when some exploit is out in the wild). In practice, a decent programmer can write a safe, simple forum for themselves easily, while they will get hit regularly by exploits in phpBB etc. if they just trust such solutions instead.

They could, but why should they put themselves at a disadvantage over Google, every other corporation that buys such data and the NSA, who all most certainly do not delete stuff in the way you'd like them to?

... because the data is "only" their users' private information, communication and other such things. So convenience / scalability (something that "the cloud" is actually good at) wins.

But maintenance isn't, esp. not people with 24/7 availability to fix problems with your hardware. And don't underestimate the huge task of making something fault-tolerant / highly available.

I hope the aspiring journalist will sue them all and that some of those thugs lose their jobs and get their own share of authoritarian treatment (i.e. jail time). Needless to say, noone who is right in their mind should shop in a mall run by such a jerk.

There are more than 1 alternatives. How about advertising, but not tracking and not serving targeted ads? What's wrong with it, except that it might earn websites less money?

From my 12 years of experience running an online business, I'd still urge everyone to stop dealing with (the mostly) shady online advertising agencies. They're mostly corrupt (expecting and accepting kickback payments from websites so they do not put ads where their customers benefit most, but where they can line their own pockets best), incompetent (still using document.write in 2012 and still trying to push the most annoying ad formats down both publishers' and advertisers' throats when everyone knows that AdSense was hugely successful doing the opposite) and greedy like any other purely parasitic business that adds no value (and usually removes value).

That's not the case if the images came with an "Expires" header or similar, browsers will just reuse them without any network operation. You can verify this with all the built-in header/network debugging facilities in major browsers.

OTOH if those small images can be cached, the advantage of using data-URIs disappears (is negated) on the 2nd time someone visits the page. So I don't think it's a very good idea to do it in this case.

(comparison shopping engines) I've looked at a few products now and they seem generally much cheaper in Australia than in the EU, so the article is probably just based on sloppy research.

.. you will run into problems with customs because they consider original equipment e.g. from Nikon Japan a "grey import" and trademark violation and confiscate it and fine you. Trademarks for Asia/Japan are often held by a different company than the same trademark for Europe. This may not necessarily hold up in court (esp. ECJ), but that doesn't stop customs from fucking people over and fining them.