Build Date: Tue Mar 18 23:10:30 2025 UTC
Isn't it wonderful that, despite our differences, we're united in our mutual love of beer?
-- Mr. Bad
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
The Future Ain't What It Used To Be
Ideas have taken horrifying shape and rooted into our modern reality. (More...)
The Once & Future King of Dust
Only The Onion could have acquired Infowarts. (More...)
Another Nobel Prize-Winning Author Describes Drunkenness
This book won a Pulitzer Prize. Here's its famous paragraph on getting drunk... (More...)
Why I'm pretty sure JD Vance had sex with a couch
True or false? The answers await us in that magical land where all truths are revealed -- the internet. (More...)
In 2010 Dr. Cheng-Huai Ruan discovered a way to cause a patient with an abnormal heartbeat to get back into a normal rhythm by sticking a finger up the patient's ass. (More...)
WKRP in Cincinnati aired from 1978 through 1982. Howard Hesseman played Dr. Johnny Fever, a DJ from Los Angeles who was fired from his previous job for saying the word "booger" on the air. In the show Hesseman would do some dialogue, introduce a song, and start the song. You'd hear a few notes, but never the whole song. (More...)
C L A S S I C P I G D O G
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...)
Pigdog brings you SETI astronomer Seth Shostak to bring you the truth about Ay-leens (More...)
Owner of 6 Medical Marijuana Dispensaries Arrested
Reefer madness or a government fabrication? (More...)
Brother Wayne Lays Down the Truth
Flesh interviews Wayne Kramer of MC5. (More...)
Ratsnatcher gets HOT HOT HOT in this classic road tale that looks at the steamy underworld of Bay Area Linux advocacy. Loosen your collar for this one! (More...)
During a magnificent sunny day in a fast receding autumn, the Spock Science Monitor reporters once again blew the playa dust off of their computers and covered the 2002 Burning Man Decompression – held every year just east of Portola Hill in beautiful San Francisco. Both an afternoon and evening issues were released to the unsuspecting crowd of freaks attempting to in some small way experience the euphoria of the playa – if but for a brief afternoon far from the desolation of Northern Nevada. (More...)