March 19, 2012 By 48 Comments

Zombie Robots Are Eating My Site

One of my sites has been under mass attack by bots for a month now, without cease.  It’s cost me (and my developer partner) time, money, and an undue amount of stress.  It’s undermined my analytics and stats.

When Bots Attack

It Just. Keeps. Coming.

And while there are a couple things we’ve been able to do to minimize the damage, essentially there’s no way to stop it. It just. keeps. coming. And frankly, if it continues, and spreads, there could be big repercussions across the web on ad revenue and analytics.

What I Know

The attack started on February 21, 2012, around noon.  I keep an OCD-level eye on my traffic, and I noticed a big jump in direct traffic.  This is unusual, because this particular site is less than a year old, and has not had a chance to develop a lot of branding yet.  It’s pretty well situated in the search engines for its niche, but not that many people know it by name.  Anything more than twenty or thirty percent direct traffic would definitely be odd.  And then I started noticing some other strange behaviors:

  • All the traffic was reported as Internet Explorer (versions 6 through 9)
  • All the traffic was reported as Windows (XP through Win 7)
  • The traffic was coming from all over the world (and the site is focused on ONE state in the US) and from thousands of IP numbers & ISPs.
  • It was all hitting the home page and leaving immediately.  My bounce rate quickly soared to about 99%
  • There was nothing – no one thing – that I could pinpoint to block this traffic from coming in. No commonality.
  • It was executing javascript – because it showed up in Google Analytics, Statcounter & Woopra.

Strangest of all, the traffic was *slow* – drip drip drip.  Never so much to come anywhere near a DDOS, or have an effect on the server, but at any given point, there would be six to ten “visitors” on the site at a time.  While it looked very much like actual human browser traffic, it wasn’t difficult to conclude that this was something automated.

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Filed Under: Blood
March 16, 2012 By 2 Comments

Lenny

As some of you may know, we lost our yellow lab, Lenny, on February 16, 2012.   My mom wanted to write up a tribute to him, and as she doesn’t have a blog or site of her own, I told her I’d post it here.  So I took the picture, she wrote the words.

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In July, 2011, at the Huron Valley Shelter, we were introduced to ”Bobby.”  Our Malamute had died in his sleep at 14 years, and I had had in mind another Alaskan-type dog, perhaps a middle-sized young adult.  So of course I came home with a 100-pound-plus yellow lab, already eight years old, with a noble head, a soft cream-colored coat, and big sad brown eyes.  For the eyes or whatever reason, he reminded my daughter of someone named “Lenny”, and “Lenny” he became.

Lenny

Lenny put that bone there

Wherever Lenny spent his previous years, he had been well fed, well trained, already neutered.  He was very large, and some would say past his prime – not everyone’s candidate for adoption.  But he charmed us with his easy response to basic commands, his mindful, no-nip acceptance of treats, and his amazingly expressive “helicopter” tail.  We’d never before had a shorthaired dog, or one with long soft ears that flopped wildly when he galloped after a ball. But once home, Lenny settled in as if he’d been with us for years and expected to stay forever. The bowls, the toys, the big bed he inherited – all these were immediately his, as we were now his own people. Like our departed Worf, he loved food, treats, walks, other animals, and everyone he ever met.  (Our incumbent – and territorial – cat wasn’t even on his radar.)  He lived for attention and company, and would ask for “cuddles” with a huge but gentle paw to the nearest knee.  His house training was impeccable.  He could bark, but very seldom did, and then only outside the house.  From July through December, we had early walks and long days together, and we expected many more.

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Filed Under: Effluvia
March 12, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Twenty Five Songs About Rain

Sitting here listening to a thunderstorm, and I wondered how many different songs about rain I could collect in five minutes. Here’s the spotify playlist. I haven’t sorted it in the exact mix I want (and I’ll probably add to it eventually) but like I said – I wanted to see what I could come up with in five minutes. Maybe seven. Enjoy. If you think of any I missed, please comment; if I can find them on spotify, I’ll add them.

 

Twenty Five Songs About Rain – a Spotify Playlist.

Or you can just play them here:

Filed Under: Playlists
December 30, 2011 By 30 Comments

Dear GoDaddy – Why I’m Moving Out

Dear GoDaddy -

I don’t know if you noticed, but I’ve started moving my 1400+ domain names (spread across four accounts) to other registrars; mostly Namecheap (not an aff link).

If you have noticed, you’ve probably attributed it to the brouhaha over SOPA, and it’s true, GoDaddy’s situational ethics were the last straw for me.

But I don’t want you thinking this is the only reason I’m leaving.  It’s just the most recent one.  Because once I started adding it up, I should have moved out LONG ago.

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Filed Under: Blood
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