Build Date: Fri Apr 4 02:30:39 2025 UTC
[It] was quite a trip, I went to the fractals at the end of time - and back.
-- ICBINJ
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
The Deep Dark Underbelly of the Star Wars Myth, or Ramayana Remembered
It's a fact: Star Wars is a blatant plagiarism of an ancient Asian legend, and the long lines of devout Star Wars freaks are really unscrupulous Asian copyright busters. From Indonesia to Thailand to Nepal, videos are available for sale or rent before they're even released in the US and UK due to this nerdy camcorder-clutching bunch. (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...)
Clowns Take on God in Mysterious Annual Ceremony
Last Sunday's (the 6th) Grimaldi Service at a small church in East London was a red-letter day for clowns worldwide. About a hundred old-school red-nosed clowns made the sombre trip to darkest Dalston to pay their respects to clowns who died in the last year and to thank God for the gift of laughter in a bizarre ceremony presided over by the eccentric Reverend Clown Roly, resplendent in a garish red lumberjack shirt with oversized gold lapels. (More...)
It's that time of year again -- Burning Man Season -- and that means fresh SCIENCE! Here is a new lab experiment for the fruity hillbilly in all of us. (More...)
One of our star reporters was sent to Comdex by his employer. El Destino reports live from the biggest, geekiest trade show in the world. (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...)
