Enough people associate dental work with pain already… no need to remind them of it!
(The sign normally says “Bright Now!”)
Blue vs. 6A
Remember how LiveJournal, TypePad, and related sites were down the other day? The official line was that “Six Apart has been the victim of a sophisticated distributed denial of service attack.”
It turns out that the DDOS wasn’t aimed at 6A, LJ, or any other part of their network. It was aimed at Blue Security, an anti-spam company, who decided to re-route their web traffic to their blog—a blog hosted on TypePad. So instead of their own site going down, it took out Six Apart’s entire network of millions of bloggers.
Classy move, guys.
I do admire Six Apart’s restraint in not pointing fingers themselves. If it had been my site (though in a way, I suppose it was, since I’ve got an LJ blog, even if I don’t update it very often), I would have been royally pissed off.
Sure, Blue Security didn’t launch the attack—but they did choose where to redirect it. Maybe they thought Six Apart would be able to handle it. Maybe they thought the attackers were targeting them by IP and not domain name. Maybe they were panicked and didn’t think. Maybe they thought things through, but 6A got bitten by the now-all-too-familiar law of unintended consequences. They could easily have pointed their domain name at empty IP space, or to localhost. Redirecting it to a third party was less like deflecting a punch and more like the “Do it to Julia!” moment in 1984, or the classic joke, “I don’t have to outrun the bear, I only have to outrun you.”
(via Spamroll)
Update: Additional articles at Computer Business Review and at Netcraft, and a Slashdot story.
Update 2: According to Blue Security, the DDoS was not targeting their website by name, and the DDoS didn’t attack their blog until after they had already redirected the website. So it looks like it was less a case of them redirecting the attack and more a case of the attackers chasing them.
*Sigh* Must remember to collect all facts before engaging in righteous anger.
Update 3 (May 9): Apparently “all the facts” as reported by Blue Security don’t add up… (via JMason)
Scott Pilgrim Progresses
After seeing it recommended on several blogs (sorry, I can’t remember which ones), I eventually tracked down the first book of Scott Pilgrim. It was great fun—a wonderful balance of comedy, drama, and sheer post-video-game absurdity—and I immediately went out and got volume 2. Then I started watching for volume 3, which was supposed to come out early this year.
The scheduled date came and went. For about a month, I would walk into the comic store each week and ask whether Scott Pilgrim volume 3 was out. After a while I didn’t even have to ask. All that anyone knew was that it was behind schedule. Way behind.
So I started checking the website from time to time. Nothing, then nothing, then more nothing… so I checked less and less often… until tonight, I found a note that not only is volume three done, it’s at the printers, tentatively scheduled for May 24!
Plus, there’s a book scheduled for Free Comic Book Day, which is coming up on Saturday. (Yes, you can walk into a participating comic store this weekend and get a free comic book.)
I’m sure this is just like the Animaniacs DVDs that everyone seemed to know about before I did, but just in case anyone missed the announcement…
Only in Vegas
You know the routine. We can’t pass up a bizarre image without taking a photo and posting some sort of comment. Not even on vacations.
The drive to Las Vegas from southern California is simple: make your way to the 15, head north, and keep going until you get blinded by the neon. The ⅔ mark is Baker, CA, a small strip of restaurants, stores and gas stations in the middle of the desert, famous for the Bun Boy and the world’s tallest thermometer. Baker has something new: Alien Fresh Jerky.
We were staying at the South Coast Hotel and Casino, the latest megasino to open, which is a bit off the strip. At first I was a bit worried about finding the right exit. As it turns out, it’s the first giant hotel you’ll see as you approach Las Vegas from the south…about two miles before you actually have a chance to get off the freeway! (They have a free shuttle to the strip, though that had its own share of problems.) They put us in a room on the 24th floor, which had a great view of suburban South Las Vegas. Continue reading
Haunted Vegas… In Your Room!
We picked up a few flyers on our way to Las Vegas, including one for the Haunted Vegas tour and show. We didn’t get around to looking it up, but we didn’t quite need to.
The South Coast Hotel* is so new that they’re still building things like the swimming pool. Being new, lots of things didn’t quite work right. The 42″ wide-screen TV was stuck on with no picture, so it glowed faintly in the dark until I unplugged it and plugged it back in. The water was so soft that you couldn’t rinse off in the shower. One drawer in the dresser just wouldn’t open.
The most bizarre was the whistling. Our first night in town, we noticed a whistling sound like water rushing through pipes, or like someone trying to blow across the top of a bottle. We figured someone in the next room over was taking a shower, but it kept going. The noise stopped when we opened the door, then started again when we closed it. Standing barefoot near the door, I could feel the air rushing in underneath it. It turned out the air pressure in the hallway was high enough that the air rushed in through the door jamb, creating a constant whistling sound.
So we blocked the jamb with a towel every night and slept soundly. But it wasn’t just our room. Every time we walked down the hallway, we could hear the sound coming from other doors as we passed them.
*We finally found out why it’s called South Coast when it’s hundreds of miles from anything resembling an ocean. (The Salton Sea doesn’t count.) The company also operates the Barbary Coast, Gold Coast, Sun Coast, and several other casinos in the city. The new one is farther south than… well, anything else in town, so: South Coast.
Back from Vegas
Whew! We took a few days off for our second anniversary and drove out to Las Vegas last weekend. Neither of us gamble, so it might seem kind of an odd choice, but there’s something else Vegas has a lot of: shows.
In four days we managed to see Avenue Q, “Pirates 4-D” (a cheesy 3-D pirate movie with Leslie Nielsen that even Eric Idle couldn’t save), a museum replica of Tut’s tomb at the Luxor, Cirque du Soleil’s Zumanity, Star Trek: Borg Invasion 4-D, an impressionist exhibit at the Bellagio, Excalibur’s “Tournament of Kings” (a Medieval Times–like dinner show), Rita Rudner, Treasure Island’s pirate show, and the Shark Reef aquarium at Mandalay Bay.
We also got to see how much Las Vegas had changed since the last time we were there, back in 1998. The hotel we stayed at last time (the Holiday Inn—we were college students on a budget) has been bulldozed. Several gigantic hotel/casinos have opened on the strip, and more off.
And for some reason, I don’t remember noticing all the mountains in the distance last time. Maybe it was too cloudy or hazy, or maybe it was just that we stayed off the strip this time and weren’t surrounded by buildings.
Such a Dreary Place
A mortgage spam started with this line:
D r ear Home O u wne u r ,
OK, so they’re inserting random space-letter-space sets into the text. But let’s ignore what they’re trying to say, and look at how it actually came out.
“Drear” home owner? (Or rather, “ouwneur?” Are they French?) Apparently I picked up the deed to the House of Usher or some such miserable domicile. I can’t say I’ve noticed any ravens around (not counting my comic collection, anyway), though I’ve certainly been awake many a weary midnight.