Swag.  Hey, I might go to jail here.  :)

Now Buy This Shirt.  Just in case your intrepid host ends up in court, you can help pay the lawyers.  :)

Slowdowns and errors

Well, the new server isn’t *quite* the miracle worker I expected.  If the site, or any other site I run that is MySQL powered, seems slow to you...it is.  If all these sites were static HTML they’d be blazing.

Anyway, I’m working on it.  Please excuse us while we remodel for your convenience!

Clarification of the rules

I have never given much thought to the default agreement one must click in order to sign up here.  It simply hadn’t occurred to me.  Until one of our resident critics decided to make a big stink about the use of profanity and insults.

Now I’m paying attention.

Non Moore-related…MOOREWATCH related

Two things:

One, the DNS seems to have propagated for the big move...I set all the internal linking back to use the domain name.  If you have problems navigating, just replace the domain name with the IP number 67.19.19.67.

Everyone should be cleared up by now, but if you still have problems, shoot me an e-mail. Not that I can do anything, but it would be nice to know where in the world you are that hasn’t propagated yet.

Two: I am thinking about starting a page where people can promote their own websites.  Blogs, debunking sites, whatever.  We’ll have three categories: Left Right and Middle.  I can probably set something up so that people can submit their own links...and I can manage it so that only logged-in members will be able to access it, hopefully that will reduce spamming.

What do y’all think?  We may be an arguing bunch of freaks around here, but I’m guessing there are a lot of good web projects going unnoticed in all the furor.

DOS attack part 2, or “You won’t speak ill of *my* hero, fuckers”

Ahh, the wonderfulness of the Michael Moore fan.

This entry was originally written at about noon EST:

You may have noticed the server was not responding.  We were under a DoS attack, again.  Gotta love those Moore fans, real proponents of free speech.  Don’t like the site?  Let’s take it offline so NO ONE can dissent from our glorious Christ figure Moore’s holy message!

Real pieces of work, some of you folks are.  The word is it almost has to be DDoS, whch means organization, because they were saturating a 100mbit/s connecton.  You can’t do that with a couple of cable modems.

The beauty is, the new server providers are that damned good.  The fact that you can see this message is proof that they are worth every penny this server costs.

Then the server went back down while I was writing.  The techs came back and said DEFINITELY a DoS attack, this machine has a 100mbit/s connection and it was being completely flooded by incoming traffic.

That isn’t possible with just one computer, unless it was a damn powerful computer and the machine was upstream of the connection our server location has to the Internet.  It *had* to be a DDos, a Distributed Denial of Service attack.  Meaning a team, multiple fucktards attacking the server all at once.

Here’s an image showing what I mean.  You can see the low green parts...those are the every-day traffic.  Notice it never even begins to approach a worry point.  Not even remotely.  Now, that spike at the end, in blue?  That’s the incoming traffic right before the machine stopped responding altogether.

They should be so proud...they took out the site of a New York City poet, a charity drive for the troops in Iraq, my personal site, Lee’s personal site, everything.  All because they don’t like the fact that we don’t buy what Moore is selling.

Nice.  Let’s see the Moore-ons defend *this*.

Oh wait, they already are.

Official notice

As of 12 Noon EST on 6/26/2004, neither Lee nor Jim has viewed F911.  Do not come and demand our take on the film, or chastise us for not debunking it point by point.  WE HAVEN’T SEEN IT YET.

Lee plans to see it tonight.  I do not, I have to take care of my wife who is very ill.  Also, I would not pay a single penny to see Moore’s movie, I plan to steal it from the Internet.

Come sue me, Mike.

But I digress.

I’m also seeing people with the same IP using multiple accounts.  Know this: If I catch you, you will be banned.  Period.  No discussion.  Pretending to be multiple people to make your points hardly seems necessary, this movie is proving, as I predicted, to be quite popular.

TECHNICAL ISSUE:

Old comments have been restored.  I may have missed literally a handful here and there, but the bulk of all comments to the site since the beginning have been restored.

CATASTROPHIC FAILURE

Do NOT ask.  Suffice it to say I blew out the entire database with one errant click.

This is now the new server...DNS has not been changed yet, so bear with me.

OK, that was a bad, bad experience.  NEVER CODE WHEN EXHAUSTED.

A warning to all

The next person that pasts URLs into comments will be banned.  And the one after that, and the one after that.  The directions could not be more clear, and they appear at the top of the text box EVERY TIME YOU POST.

When leaving a comment, please use the formatting buttons. Do not past URLs into your comments or your comment is subject to editing and/or deletion regardless of content. If you want your comments to stay archived, make sure you follow these simple instructions.

If the link button doesn’t work for you, turn on Javascript.  It works in every browser I’ve tested so far, Mac, Linux and Windows.  It even works on my Pocket PC.  If you still can’t get it to work, learn how to create proper links by hand.

This is the last time I’m going to say it.

Attention iirightii

iirightii , your email is coming back undeliverable.  I put your account on “Pending “ status...I can’t reset it or email you about it.  :) Contact me with a new email address if you want it fixed.

PAY ATTENTION

I’m not going to say this again.  The following text appears above the comment form EVERY TIME YOU POST ONE.  If you don’t pay attention to it, you will find yourself banned.  I hope that is clear enough.

When leaving a comment, please use the formatting buttons. Do not past URLs into your comments or your comment is subject to editing and/or deletion regardless of content. If you want your comments to stay archived, make sure you follow these simple instructions.

If the button doesn’t work for you, turn Javascript on in your browser.  And speaking of browsers, this site was built using a text editor and Mozilla Firefox. Therefore, I would feel comfortable saying it is Firefox optimized.  If you’re a Windows user and you’re not using Firefox as your main browser, you’re a fool.  A FOOL I say!  I recommend looking through the Third-Party Builds forum and choosing one that has a lot of good feedback.  It’s free, it’s extensible, you can block popups and ads or any images or elements using the right extensions...and it’s FAST.

A glitch in the Matrix

As some people may have noticed, the notification when someone has replied to your post can get annoying when there are 80-100 comments on a thread.  And to top it off, the link to de-notify yourself wasn’t doing jack.

It looks like there was a bug in the code, and the developer released a new version of the file that handles that function.  I just uploaded it, so if you continue to get notifications that you do not want, try again to click on the link in the email.  If it still doesn’t work, let me know and I’ll submit a bug report.

New policy

Due to the inordinate number of people trolling the comments, and the whirlwind that we know will be coming as F911 gets closer to release, we’re now going with a membership requirement to post comments.

You will have to provide a valid email address and confirm it in order to post.  That should weed out the trolls and drive-by commenters.

The Trailer

I’d love to comment on the new F911 trailer, but I still can’t get the fucking thing to stream properly.  It doesn’t matter what format or data rate I choose, it craps out after about two seconds.  Piece of shit.  I don’t know why Mikey wants to stream this one, when all his other trailers were posts normally, as standalone QT files.

A change

You may have noticed a bit of a change on the site.  I’ve upgraded from pMachine to ExpressionEngine, a more modular and powerful blogging package. If you find something that is broken or just looks plain awful, please let me know in the comments of this post.  I’m about punch-drunk and blind from the last three straight hours of staring at PHP.  :)

*Addendum: One thing that would be useful is to tell me if font sizes are too big or too small on your system. With so many different browsers and rendering methods, not to mention screen resolutions, it;s hard to make a good guess as to text size.

**Addendum 2 - If you are posting a comment and you do NOT want the “Notify me of follow-up comments?” checked by default, you should go to the Your Account link in the upper right-hand corner.  Choose “Email Settings” and look at the third checkbox.  Set it accordingly.

Server Fund Drive: an update

Man, do I have some great news.

I’m logged in to the new server right now, setting things up.  It will be a few more days configuring various things, then a couple more to get all the blogs and websites installed properly, databases moved over, etc.

But that’s not the coolest thing.

This machine is a Dual Xeon...which means hyperthreading, which means the power of 4 processors if the application can handle it.  Linux does, natively, so that’s a bonus.  But so do game servers.

And that’s where the fun begins.

We’re going to have three game servers installed right away: Enemy Territory, Unreal Tournament 2004 (full version) and Battlefield Vietnam (full).

If you’ve ever wanted to shoot Lee or Jim, now’s your chance.  :) The game servers won’t be up all the time, and they’ll be by invitation only.  To get on the list for invitation, you muct have donated, or donate in the future, to MOOREWATCH.  ANything.  A buck.  5 bucks.  Whatever.

We’ll have some frag fun.

The current tally is 6 months of the contract have been paid, and we have another $700 to put toward the next 6 months.  We need a total of $1580 to finish the year.

Server Fund Drive: Almost halfway home

Thanks to the awesomeness of the blogosphere, we’re almost halfway to our goal of being able to pay off a year’s contract for a new server.

To date, we have collected....drumroll please…

You people are amazing.  But we’re only halfway there.  I worked out a contract with someone who hosts commercial stuf for some pretty heavy traffic sites.  We’re looking at a dual Xeon box, twin 7200RPM 80GB drives, RedHat Enterprise 3.0, Plesk, a bank of IP numbers, 1.2 terabytes of data transfer per month, 100 mbit connection and 24/7 personalized support.  All hosted off a company that rarely uses even 30% of it’s direct-to-backbone 10.5gigabits per second uplink.

In short, one hell of a box.  :)

So spread the word!  We’re doing this, remember, because some little pissant DoS (Denial of Service) attacked us last week and took not just this site, but Lee and Jim’s blogs down as well. 

Link us from your blog.  Email your friends!

Give ‘till it hurts!

Fund Drive part 2

Just a reminder...give ‘til it hurts!  We need a pretty large sum of cash to get this bigger better server for a year at a discounted rate, so if you want to help us stay online...donate today!

While I’m here, one of our resident dissidents, microphonehead, made some pretty stupid and unfounded accusations about this, and other anti-Moore websites.  His comments intimated that we all ask for money, bt we never tel you what we spend it on.

That’s NOT TRUE here.  I have always been completely up front about where the money goes: every penny we have ever collected here has gone to the server bill...and then some, since we do not ever make enough to meet the monthly charge.  I pay the difference, sometimes up to $199 a month, out of *my* pocket.

If you have donated to this site, I am personally guaranteeing you that your money was used strictly to maintain the server.  We dont buy hookers, we’re not cocaine addicts.  If we were going to steal people’s money, the worst we’d spend it on is pizza and beer.

I have always struggled to stay as open and honest as possible in *all* my dealings online.  I am easy to track on the Internet, I use the same names and aliases everywhere since 1994.  Everyone knows my real name or can find it in a heartbeat.  I strive to stay clean and honest *because * of assholes like microphonehead.  It gives me great pleasure to invite a jerk like him to investigate me as much as he wants: I do what I say, and I’m saying every penny goes to the server fund.  If we end up with more than we need, I have a plan to turn that right back around into the site.

In closing, microphonehead, you can kiss my ass.

The First Annual Server Fund Drive

If you’re reading this, then you know this website, as well as a few others hosted on teh same server, have been down for a few days due to a Denial of Service attack.  What this means is that someone, usually using an “off-the-shelf” script, decided to flood this site with as many connections as possible in order to prevent any real people from being able to connect to the server.  It’s the most common attack against a server, and hard to defeat without direct access to the router that serves this machine, which I do not have.

However, one way to stay up during a D0S is to have a monster box that you can get to via SSH during an attack.  The server we’re on now was just upgraded as a stop-gap measure, but it’s not good enough.

And that’s where you come in.

Lee and I cannot afford the server we truly need.  What we need to handle the spikes in traffic (which are increasing every day with all the F-9/11 activity) will cost us about $350

What we need to do is raise some cash to pay for a yearly contract up front and we get a discount.  We’re askig *you*...yes, you.  Right there, I’m pointing at you.  The one with the keyboard.

We need you.

Make a small donation today.  If we reach our goal, we will migrate to the new server and be able to weather traffic spikes AND DoS attacks, and we’ll have a much higher standard of customer service (24/7 365 tech support for one thing).

If you find yourself using our site often, even if you don’t agree with our point of view, please consider a small donation.  If you find yourself loving what we do, consider a large donation.  :)

We appreciate the support…

We’re ba-ack…

You may have noticed the site went down.  We were the victim of a DoS attack targeting Moorewatch.com.  Typical infantile response from script kiddies who don’t like what we have to say.

You want to know what censorship is?  It’s when you completely silence someone’s means of communication.  Funny how that didn’t come from the “right wing,” but rather from fans of Michael Moore.

Dude, Where’s My Server?

You may have noticed the site went bye-bye.  Our whole SERVER went bye-bye!  We got a link on the main page of Fark, which happened to coincide with the big brouhaha over Moore’s Disney fraud.

All hell broke loose FIVE (that’s 5) minutes after the link hit the main Fark page!  All day and night the server was hammered.  I rebooted remotely 4 times during the last 18 hours to try to break the connections and give it a chance to breathe, but each time it came up, the traffic just slammed in before I could log in to the machine itself to turn off services or try to mitigate it in any way.  Total lockout/meltdown.

I finaly begged the Fark Gods to yank the link...and tried one more reboot.  Finally, we’re back.

Man that Fark sure can crush a bitch.  :)

I am going to look into upgrading...I suspect it was a processor/RAM thing, as the data connection is about 5,000 times larger than we need.  The poor little server just couldn’t keep up with all the requests.  So...soon we’ll be looking for some handouts in the form of private citizenry-subsidies.  Keep an eye out for that, and in the meantime, visit a sponsor’s blogad.  All good people, and they think *you* were worth paying to meet!

You know, even though Lee and I despise corporate welfare, believe me, if I thought there was a government welfare program that would give us the money for a load-balanced set of servers with big processors...I’d be filling out forms in triplicate right now.  :)