I run an ecommerce site and lately they’ve latched onto one very specific product with attempts to hammer its page and any of those branching from it for no readily identifiable reason, at the rate of several hundred times every second. I found out pretty quickly, because suddenly our view stats for that page in particular rocketed into the millions.

I had to insert a little script to IP ban these fuckers, which kicks in if I see a malformed user agent string or if you try to hit this page specifically more than 100 times. Through this I discovered that the requests are coming from hundreds of thousands of individual random IP addresses, many of which are located in Singapore, Brazil, and India, and mostly resolve down into those owned by local ISPs and cell phone carriers.

Of course they ignore your robots.txt as well. This smells like some kind of botnet thing to me.

At least you didn’t try to open the bleed valve via the righty-loosey technique my neighbor tried on his near-new N series Elantra the other week. Snapped that sumbitch clean off. Bailing him out of that one was fun.

Bikes are dead easy to bleed; you don’t need any kit. You should be able to reach the bleeder nipple and the lever yourself without outside assistance which is all I’ve ever needed. Unless this is on the rear brake of a 'Busa with a 27 foot long swingarm installed on it or something. Pro tip: Loosely put the cap on the reservoir when you pump it, otherwise the master cylinder (especially for the front) tends to act like one of them ornamental fountains.

Hose that brake fluid off of everything right away because it’ll eat the finish off of just about anything that’s not bare metal. You probably also want to make sure both the piston and its bore are real clean before you put them back together.

Yes, I am aware of where this is posted and am prepared for my inevitable crucifixion as a result of this observation. But, like… is this really a problem that requires a self hosting solution? That seems like quite the overcomplication to me unless you absolutely require access to your entire selection on multiple devices that will have 24/7 network connections for some reason. I imagine most people actually don’t. And if you do, a simple file share is probably a less convoluted solution, and surely already exists on the server you already have.

MP3’s take up negligible amounts of storage space on modern devices and can be played on anything, and can be easily taken with you anywhere including out of network range.

I guess teaching people how to drag-and-drop audio files onto their phone and open them with VLC would be a much shorter article.

(Ed: Punctuation.)

Do you take your hands off before you go to bed? Do you fight for good or for awesome?

If approved, the state would prohibit possession at public buildings, parks, fairgrounds and playgrounds where “children are likely to be present.”

State law already prohibits possession in restricted access areas of airports, jails, law enforcement and public health facilities, courtrooms and other related areas, bars and places off-limits to minors.

Something’s not adding up, here.

The company pays for it. Not my dime. The expense doesn’t seem onerous and is just to name one example probably a small fraction of what we spend on pens in a year.

And we get everything of that ilk from one vendor with one bill. It’s all managed in one place. The renewals all happen at the same time. They like that.

Yes.

I just had to log in and check. We pay $49.99 per year for our SSL cert. Do they do surge pricing or something…?

They’re trying hard to couch this as a security thing but I remain unconvinced that the “threats” they’re positing actually exist. Do you even leave your printer connected to the outside internet anyway? I sure as shit don’t.

The only person they’re locking out of your printer with this is you. This is to keep you walled within their own bullshit software ecosystem as much as possible, and the only possible benefit of that is so they can inflict further restrictions later, probably in the hopes of making the software side of their crap a subscription model so they can extort you for that sweet recurring revenue.

I feel like I must be the only person on Earth who has successfully used Godaddy for anything and not had a problem…

This twerp must have some absolutely devastating dirt on Trumpy boy. I’m coming to the conclusion that there’s no other explanation. It can’t possibly just be money; Trump has tons of other rich donors. What I’m struggling to predict, though, is just what he could possibly have to hold over Trump’s head that’s worse than selling classified documents, misusing campaign funds, trying to incite an insurrection, or failing to pay his hookers.

Notice how we’re already asking past the sale with the tacit labeling of “sexual material harmful to minors,” with the presupposed declaration that sexual material is automatically harmful to minors.

The all-consuming mission to look at boobies is essentially universal for all pubescent boys from about 12 all the way to the age of majority. This is well known, and none of us came off any the worse despite widespread availability of older brothers’ back issues of Hustler, Usenet, dial-up BBS systems, and ultimately the world wide web.

If teens weren’t naturally interested in sex where wouldn’t been all them teenage pregnancies. Q.E.D.

Yeah, that’s ridiculous.

Just slapping a “homeopathy” label on something with no oversight can’t be an automatic dodge-all to regulation. If Hershey needs to prove what they put in a candy bar, anyone hawking homeopathic products should need to prove what they put in there as well.

At least homeopathic anything is not directly harmful in the context of ingesting it, because it contains no active ingredient.

It’s only harmful in that people don’t understand that it’s bullshit and therefore believe that it works, and might skip actual effective treatment for whatever their ailment is in favor of cheaper (and totally ineffective) homeopathic whatever-the-hell. For that reason it should at least be regulated to the extent of having a big neon warning sticker on it that says, “This product is completely ineffective and accomplishes nothing other than setting your money on fire.”

I’m all for outlawing it from a consumer advocacy standpoint because it’s a scam, but otherwise it’s just expensive water.

Pfft. Everyone knows nobody really lives in Montana. They just pretend they do on paper so they can incorporate LLC’s there and put license plates on their dirt bikes and quads. Montana’s entire population is actually in Kentucky and Florida.

Just think of all the moose you could farm in that space, or whatever it is the Canadians want to do with it.

Boy howdy, I sure can’t wait for 99.9% of all manufacturers on Earth to completely ignore this as well, and keep selling devices and cables that are completely unlabeled.

So is lobsters and crabs.

Eating them anyway, though.

Well, I can at least claim that I can legitimately claim an oft-unused spot on this diagram through being one of the probably select few who has ever put an edge on a spoon.

Look, some of us have a brand to maintain, you know?

Also, perhaps now is a good time to dredge up this.

The Turing Test as it is popularly conceptualized is really more of a test of human intelligence (or stupidity, more likely) rather than that of the machine.

If you put a big enough idiot in front of the screen, Dr. Sbaitso could conceivably “pass.” Well, maybe if you muted it, anyway.