Build Date: Sat Feb 22 12:20:41 2025 UTC
When I read about the evils of drinking, I gave up reading.
-- Henny Youngman
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
Absinthia: The Pigdog Interview
Absinthe is making a come back for the Millennium. Even English people are slurping it down in pubs, eschewing their normal, healthy stouts and ales. And why not? Hell, if the planet is going to explode anyway, why not ride the DEATH WAVE in, and celebrate Y2K with the most entertaining and vicious elixir you can find? Come! Explore the "Absinthe Underground" with El Snatcher, Mr. Bad, and Splicer, as they interview the notorious absinthe bootlegger, Absinthia. (More...)
The Innocent San Francisco Mule
Flesh and Abby have moved to an isolated rural location in the United States - equipped only with their sense of adventure. Recently they came down off the mountain briefly to file this report? (More...)
Report from Spiritual Machines
Arkuat gives you the inside scoop on the "Spiritual Machines" panel and conclave. Wacky excitement ensues! (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...)
40 Acres, a Mule, and a Crummy 90-Second Spot on Weekend Update
Consider the plight of the Black Man. The Black Man on "Saturday Night Live," I mean. Has there ever been a more pathetic thing than a token unredeemed for 28 years? Where is the NAACP when you really need them? (More...)
It was the night of the Leonid meteor showers -- the perfect opportunity to break out the evil opaline liquor, get madder than hatters, and test wireless ethernet hardware... Would the plunging meteorites interfere with the 2.4GHz band? What about our delicate brain waves? (More...)
