Category Archives: Discourse.net

The host for this blog, Dreamhost, has just sent out an email reporting that it has been under attack but is coping better than last time,

Starting at around 2:45 PDT this afternoon, we experienced yet another Denial of Service attack launched at a completely different target from the previous attacks. Within 15 minutes, we had established the destination of the attacks and had them blocked at our network's edge. We're currently waiting for our upstream providers to provide us with more global protection from the attacks, but for now network performance is running at only a slightly degraded state. We hope to have full service restored within the hour.

I've made some stylesheet and template changes in order to make user-inputted type bigger. In addition I added some links to recent related stories to fill up what seemed like a large empty spaces in the comment pages.

If you encounter any ugliness or surprises due to either change (or anything else), please let me know via a comment here.

I've also thrown in an experimental style-switcher. Of the styles I've swiped from the public domain, so far the only alternative style I've been able to make work (in the sense of 3 columns looking ok) is quite lurid, and extends just a bit too wide for reasons that escape me. If you want to try it, you can find the switcher part way down the right hand column. Be prepared to reload the page if it all goes wrong…

Dreamhost now says its router went down because it was attacked:

At this time, all network services have been fully restored to our data center. The cause of the outage was a major distributed denial of service attack (DDOS) aimed at one of our main routers. Once we isolated the problem, we quickly worked with our upstream provider to resolve it. A full report detailing the problem and the steps we will be taking to prevent it from happening again will go out tomorrow. All services are now up, but you may experience email delays as remote networks re-establish connections with our servers. No emails were lost. If you are still experiencing problems of any kind, please contact our support team.

Whatever happened, it seems to have taken a number of the blogs I read with it, notably Whiskey Bar.

So the blog went away again, and now it's back. If you care, I've attached dreamhost account of what went wrong.

Meanwhile, the law school's email went down today for a while, and the internal network remains nearly useless as it moves data at a crawl. The law school borrowed a $100,000 sniffing tool from the university, but rumor has it (all we get is rumor…) that this didn't solve, or even identify, the problem. Oh joy!

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The blog was down for many hours today, as was the support line at dreamhost. They're usually pretty reliable, and very helpful, but when things fail, they fail hard.

A Technorati link tickle to my culinary commentary via the new discourse.net links feed clues me into a new blog entitled Laplace's Demon.

Here's some of what the proprietor has to say about him/herself:

Well, here it is. I've been following weblogs of various kinds for years because of my work. In fact, I would venture to guess that I have one of the longer reading-to-writing ratios among bloggers. The reasons for not keeping a blog have been easy.

I am a freelance purveyor of difficult to locate and valuable information. I know that is not exactly precise. One of the things I will need to do is work out how vague I must remain in terms of the kind of work I do. I don't break laws unless I really have to, and I try to remain ethical in the jobs I take, though once I agree to a job, I feel obligated to do almost whatever it takes to maintain my obligation to my client. I would say that I am a “troubleshooter” or maybe simply a “process consultant” (I've used both of these titles in the past.) But basically my job is to provide a client with the means to make a decision, and sometimes to help coordinate the solution.

Anyway, since my work involves providing an informational advantage to clients, a public blog doesn't mesh well with that. I don't advertise: my clients come to me because of a very strong reputation within various circles. I do have business cards, but that's about it.

And the person has a sport, probably a martial art. And s/he's seriously into crypotgraphy (“I've always liked to think about information through the lense of crypto.”)

Add to this s/he reads my blog, and I figure it's someone I know, at least vaguely, back from the cypherpunks list or CFP days.

I'm guessing male, maybe a little younger than me, just going on the braggadicio. And has lived somewhere where croc was on the menu…

Give me time, I could walk this cat. But that wouldn't be nice, would it?