Build Date: Fri Jun 13 10:30:21 2025 UTC
Oh good; more stupid. We were running low.
-- S. Dallas, Esq.
All Quiet on the Eastern Font
2022-03-14 01:48:32
In the days leading up to the Russian invasion of Ukraine there was a lot of speculation in the media that Russia would launch cyberattacks against Ukraine and any other countries that were helping Ukraine. Although some researchers dismissed such speculation as a lot of hype, one thing is becoming pretty obvious: There are a lot of web sites down right now -- Russian and Belarus web sites.
Over at Grant Birkinbine's site Borscht, the Russian Site Monitor, uptime for several hundred Russian and Belarus sites is checked every few minutes. If a site is up, the site displays a green pill, if it's down it shows a red pill. According to the data, there are an awful lot of Russian and Belarus sites that are down right now.
That may be due, in part, to projects such as StopPropaganda and NoRussian, two open-source distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) tools that allow anyone to educate themselves about how DDoS attacks work, or to launch their own DDoS attacks against Russian sites.
StopPropaganda comes in a number of different package formats but it's heart is a Golang program that floods a list of Russian websites with traffic, attempting to overload them and take them offline.
NoRussian consists of a single web page that repeatedly attempts to load data from the main pages of Russian and Belarus Official State News sites using a short Node script. One person running such a script wouldn't cause much of a blip, but several thousand volunteers running it very well might.
It's hard to say just who or what is causing these outages, but one thing is certain: there are an awful lot of Russian and Belarus sites that are down right now.
T O P S T O R I E S
California Glory Hole attracts huge crowds
A glory hole at Napa's Lake Berryessa is drawing huge crowds. According to Chris Lee, the general manager for the Solano County Water Agency, the glory hole hasn't been active since 2019, and only restarted operations on Feb 4. (More...)
Republican State Senator busted after soliciting a teenage girl
Republican State Senator Justin Eichorn of Minnesota was arrested for soliciting a teen girl on Monday just hours after he introduced a bill proposing "Trump derangement syndrome" (TDS) as a form of mental illness. (More...)
Parents claim measles is not that bad after having only one child die
The parents of a Texas girl who died from the measles are defending their decision not to vaccinate their daughter. "She says they would still say 'Don't do the shots,'" an unidentified translator for the parents said. "They think it’s not as bad as the media is making it out to be." (More...)
Delusional rich man tries to fire town staff
"I'm mayor now" said write-in mayoral candidate and founder of Pirate’s Booty Snacks Robert Ehrlich after losing the election for Mayor of Sea Cliff, NY. Then he tried to take over the Village Hall and fire everyone. (More...)
Musk claims Xitter security is staffed by idiots
Earlier this month Xitter experienced a massive outage. In an interview, Musk told Fox Business that he believes the attack came from "IP addresses originating in the Ukraine area." (More...)
The Future Ain't What It Used To Be
Ideas have taken horrifying shape and rooted into our modern reality. (More...)
C L A S S I C P I G D O G
High Availability Guinness Stress Test
All too often we forget the incredible depth of technology behind the weekly ritual of TNiPN@*. We tend to only become aware of the strategy of High Available Guinness (HAG) when it rises to the forefront during a complete and utter venue failure. Yet we should all be super grateful that this system exists. (More...)
Report from Spiritual Machines
Arkuat gives you the inside scoop on the "Spiritual Machines" panel and conclave. Wacky excitement ensues! (More...)
An innocent trip to the Central Market resulted in a severe attack of arachnophobia (and a meal) when a depraved street kid set her vicious pet spider on an unsuspecting shopper. (More...)
The end of summer is near and sirens call of Black Rock City are beginning to summons Pigdoggers from all of the world to Burning Man. Spock Mountain Research Labs (SMRL), the world leader in beverage science and leisure technology will be at our second home for a week at 5:00 and Infant (how fitting) as we enjoy the liberated lifestyle of a temporary community 200 miles from nowhere... (More...)
Experimenter is a film released in 2015 starring Peter Sarsgaard. It tells the story of Dr. Stanley Milgram's life, including the infamous Milgram electric shock experiment, tests on crowds, and his work developing a theory on the mechanics of social networks. It currently streams on Netflix. (More...)
Patient Joab's scientifick editorial discusses aspect of the space-time-beer continuum never before processed by sub-bush-robot minds!!! Too fabulantastic to contempulate! (More...)
