Tuesday, December 23, 2003

NY Times: "The federal government said this evening that the first suspected case of so-called mad cow disease had been discovered in the United States." 

A new Manila macro, available only on Harvard's server (for now) is a clone of the Radio macro that displays recent blog posts.  

Amazingly, my test site has become an authority on Gretchen Pirillo. 

Still have the number one slot for John Doerr. 

And the number one Dave.  

Lessig: "Enough already!" 

Highly recommend Mort Sahl on NPR's Fresh Air today. 

Scott Rosenberg: "Today's open-minded kids are tomorrow's democratic majority." 

Bryan Bell's viral marketing scheme for the Central California Falcon Club. 

Update at 6:30PM. It's over. Whew. All the services are turned back on.  

Update at 4:30PM. First the good news. Shanti Braford responded to my emails. It's not a denial-of-service attack, it's just a buggy bot. The bad news -- the flood continues unabated. About five requests per second. A huge waste of bandwidth and money. 

I was about to begin a day away from the computer, and decided to check my server log, and saw tens of thousands of accesses by a bot at 69.10.144.111 of a single file. It's reading a fairly large file about 100K times per hour. I entered the IP address in my browser. This usually doesn't get you anything but this time it got me an empty Movable Type weblog for "Shanti Braford." I looked up this person on Google, and found that he is the author of Popdex. So this probably isn't a denial of service attack, rather a script with a bug -- a bug that's costing me a boatload of money. If you're friends with Mr Braford please call him up and ask him to kill the script. In the meantime I've temporarily removed the file (sorry) to help minimize the damage.