computers – dangermouse.net

Website crashing because of bots

This morning when I woke up I was greeted by several messages from readers of Irregular Webcomic! that my entire domain irregularwebcomic.net appeared to have been removed and replaced with a domain parking page. I also had an email from my webhost, explaining what had happened. They’d detected an unacceptably high server load from my site and acted by disabling it.

I’ve been having problems with the site for months now. The phpBB forums have a setting to disable the boards if the server load gets above a certain amount, which I’ve been tweaking to try to get them to be stable. But there’s enough stuff hitting my site that the forums have been offline more than online for some time now. Well, apparently overnight the webhost got sick of the server load and pulled the plug.

I checked the access logs and noticed that a handful of IP subnets were responsible for thousands of hits a day, whereas most IPs were only logging a few hits. So I banned the offending subnets in the site’s .htaccess file. I looked at the live server log updates to check the effectiveness and confirmed they were now being served HTTP 403 Forbidden responses. But I noticed that these subnets were hammering the server, with sudden spurts of 30 or 40 HTTP requests within a second, then stopping for a few seconds, then doing it again. And again, and again. It’s no wonder the server load was unusually high.

It seems these may be relatively new webcrawler bots that are trawling sites looking for text to use to train Large Language Model “AI”s. Lots of sites have been complaining about these recently, and they seem to be causing major headaches for many site owners.

Anyway, my IP blocks seem to be working, and the forums have been stable and online since I made the changes this morning. I may look at a more drastic solution as well, and investigate getting a free Cloudflare account and changing my DNS to route requests via Cloudflare, which can detect and block bot-like behaviour. I didn’t have time to do that today, but might check it out when I do have some time.

Because today I had to finish repping my science class lesson, which I managed just before the class at midday (after spending an hour or so in the morning with the web server issue). Then I took Scully out for a walk after lunch, and then had another class in the afternoon, and three more this evening. So it’s been a very full day.

In critical thinking we started a topic on bikeshedding, or thinking about the wrong thing. I think this is a good one for teaching the kids specific critical thinking tips. It seems to be going well so far.

In one class we had a sad moment as one of the students said goodbye to the classmates. She’d been participating for several weeks from the UK while on a trip there, but is now moving back home to Bermuda, and unfortunately the time zone there is really bad for the class – she would have to get up at 5am to continue. So she said goodbye, and hoped to be back in the UK and rejoin around Christmas time. I hope so!

A lesson on post-scarcity economies

Because I was busy with other things yesterday, I put off preparing my new critical thinking topic for the week to today. I had to do it in time for classes this evening, so I worked up a lesson plan on the topic of post-scarcity economy. I set it up by talking about how the prices of technology like TVs and computers has fallen enormously since their introduction. Televisions in particular I was a bit surprised to discover have fallen to about just 1% of their value when they were first invented in the 1930s, taking into account inflation. I ask the kids what if this trend continues and in the future TVs and computers become so cheap you could buy them for less than a dollar? Or even that they might be given away for free.

Then I follow up with getting them to imagine this applies to all products. Anything a person might need or conceivably want is super cheap, either free or effectively free. We discuss what a world like this would be like to live in. What people would do, if they didn’t need jobs to make money? Would there be more or less arts and science? Would it be a better or worse world than we have now?

I ran the first three classes tonight and it was really fascinating. Opinions of the kids ranged from “this will never be possible” to “this could happen within 30 years”. And from “it would be a utopia, everyone happy, doing the things they enjoy” to “it would be a nightmare, everyone lazy and nobody doing anything intellectual”. It’s hard to recall a more polarising topic that I’ve done. So it’s a good one!

It was warmish again today, but we had a heavy black sky roll in over lunch time, and I got caught in some light rain with Scully while out for a walk. It didn’t rain much though, and the sun came out again later in the afternoon.

On the problems I mentioned yesterday: I tried PayPal again today and this time I tried transferring an amount below what I discovered to be a single-transaction limit, and it worked. I only found this limit with a Google search – I couldn’t find any mention of it on PayPal’s user help pages. It’s definitely lower than amounts I’ve transferred successfully in the past, so it seems PayPal has introduced this limit without telling anyone (or me at least). Anyway, one problem solved.

The other one, backing up my wife’s new MacBook, I haven’t solved yet, but I did find this StackExchange post about what sounds like the same problem, with two different possible solutions. I’ll try them later when I have some time.

For relaxation I’ve started watching Project UFO on Netflix. It’s a four-part series which is sort of a Polish X-Files/Chernobyl mash-up set in the 1980s. Very Cold War Soviet-style vibe, with dry humour and UFO hunting. I’m very interested to see where it’s going and how it ends.

A touch of spring?

After last week’s cold and relentless rain, this week is turning out beautifully. It’s sunny and even a little warm. It feels like spring is arriving. Many flowers have been appearing already. Magnolias are in full bloom in many places, and some of the trees are even losing their flowers and showing new green foliage already. Cherry blossoms are out, and azaleas are appearing too.

However the Bureau of Meteorology tells us it’s all an illusion. They say next week will see four cold fronts in rapid succession, bringing possibly the coldest weather of the entire year and more rain. They’re even saying it might snow in places like Canberra, where it rarely happens. Also there will be gale force winds with possible destructive effects. But I’m enjoying this week’s warmth while it lasts.

I spent today working on a science lesson for an online class tomorrow. We’re going to do states of matter and a precipitation reaction, with epsom salts and washing soda.

I’m also struggling with two technical issues. For the past two days I’ve been trying to withdraw funds from PayPal into my bank account. I’ve done this many times in the past and never had any issues. But every time I try to do it since yesterday, PayPal has displayed an error message telling me I’m over my daily withdrawal limit. I didn’t even know they had a daily withdrawal limit. But no matter how low I make the amount, it still says I’m over the limit. So I can’t get any money out of PayPal at all.

Secondly, my wife recently got a new laptop, a MacBook Air. I’m trying to set it up to use my network backup drive as the Time Machine backup drive. I’ve followed all the instructions on apple.com to set up the drive as a shared network drive, with a user with read/write access, and I can connect to the drive from the new MacBook. But when I try to configure it as the Time Machine backup drive, it says it doesn’t have read/write permission to the drive, despite me connecting with my username and password (my username that does have read/write permission to that drive). I can’t figure out what’s wrong.

More pleasantly, here’s a photo of that waffle I had for lunch the other day:

Nice looking, isn’t it?

And here’s a photo I took today which I’ve annotated with all the new high-rise apartment construction going on in the neighbourhood.

This doesn’t show all the construction either. There’s more hidden behind the palm tree on the left. I’ll try to take another photo from a different location and show some of that too.

Gaming night and SEO “DMCA” link trolling

Friday was games night with my friends. We’d planned to swap online games for real life gathering this week, due to next week co-opting the regular real life event for our online Pathfinder game. But one guy had a cold so couldn’t come, and the rest of us were a bit lukewarm, so we converted it back to online.

We played Space Base, Just One, and Harmonies. I was happy to get a second game of the last one, since I enjoyed my first game of it. And this time I managed to win with three players, so that was good!

Today we drove up to Gosford for a pre-Mother’s Day lunch with my mother and brother. The traffic was truly awful. It normally takes an hour door to door. We left 15 minutes early, thinking we’d be nice and early…. but we ended up 45 minutes late! The trip took a full two hours. The traffic in Sydney getting up to the freeway was atrocious; in the first twenty minutes we barely got walking distance from home. The freeway was fine, moving nicely. But when we got off at the other end the traffic was just as bad as in Sydney.

Anyway, we had a nice pizza lunch and caught up with various things. We gave my mother the gifts we’d got in Japan and New Zealand. We headed home after wards and the drive back was much easier, taking basically an hour.

When I checked my email at home, I found an ominous looking message, which I reproduce here in full, with one redaction:

Dear owner of https://www.dangermouse.net/travel/tanzania2018/day07.html,

I represent the Intellectual Property division for Big Cat Cheetah. We have identified an image belonging to our client on your website.

Image Details: https://i.imgur.com/KDsoHSP.jpeg
Location of Usage: https://www.dangermouse.net/travel/tanzania2018/day07.html

We require that you credit Big Cat Cheetah for this image. Please add a direct and clickable hyperlink to
[link to website removed]
either beneath the image or in the footer of the page. The anchor text should be “Big Cat Cheetah”. This must be completed within the next five business days.

Please understand the seriousness of this request. Simply removing the image will not suffice. If you do not comply within the given timeframe, we will have to start legal proceedings under case No. 72134, following the DMCA Section 512(c) guidelines.

For historical image usage, you can check the Wayback Machine at https://web.archive.org.

This is an official notice. We value your prompt response and cooperation. Please correspond in English.

Regards
James Harris
Trademark Attorney

Citi Legal Services
1 Beacon St 12th floor
Boston, MA 02108

james@clexperts.org
www.clexperts.org

I immediately recognised this as ludicrous because—although, yes—there are photos of cheetahs on that web page of mine, they are photos that I took.

I own these photos. I am the copyright holder. If someone is really trying to get me to remove them from my website or demand credit for them, then screw them. I did a quick web search and found that Citi Legal Services does (at first glance) appear to be a real law firm at that address in Boston, as stated on (what appears to be) their web site. But all is not as it seems.

Firstly, if you click the imgur link (it’s safe), you’ll notice that the image they’re claiming I “stole” isn’t even the same as either of my cheetah images.

I dug further and searched for whether this is a legitimate law firm, and found this blog post by someone else who had received an almost identical email, with the details appropriate to their website swapped in. I also found a thread on reddit with the identical template, and advice from several people that this is a search engine optimisation (SEO) scam.

In short, no, Citi Legal Services is not a real law firm. Their website is utterly fake, and as pointed out by the above-linked blog, mostly AI-generated. The address they claim to have is an abandoned building. The “lawyers” don’t actually exist.

This email is a scam intended to scare people into linking to the target website in order to drive up their search engine ranking. Hopefully by reproducing it here I’ll also help any future people who get a similar email and go searching online for advice.

With that done, I’m marking it as junk email and happily ignoring it.

A domain registration mystery

This morning I received a strange email message, from someone in Belgium named Piet, saying they were an artist, that they’d noticed I own the domain piet.be, and they wanted to buy it off me to use for their own professional web site. I had never registered such a domain and had no idea why this person thought it might belong to me.

I checked, and sure enough piet.be is currently set up as a redirect to my Piet esoteric programming language page. So that explained one mystery: Why this person thought the domain belonged to me. But raised two other mysteries: Who did own the domain, and why had they set it up to redirect to one of my web pages?

I did some online sleuthing and found that DNS Belgium had a record showing that the domain was registered way back in 2002, and belonged to a company named D Haeze Trading nv, with an address listed in Gavere in Belgium. I looked up D Haeze Trading and discovered that their primary business is listed as “Wholesale of dairy products and eggs”. Curiouser and curiouser.

Now I knew who had registered the domain, but why had a dairy and egg producer registered piet.be and why had they set it up to redirect to my esoteric programming page?

Digging further, I found this company record, which lists the company managers as Piet and Jan D’Haeze. Aha! So possibly the manager of the company decided it would be cool to have the Belgian domain corresponding to his personal name.

But that leaves the main question unanswered: why had he set the domain up to redirect to my website? I mean, obviously my site is relevant to the Piet name, but why would someone named Piet go to the bother of buying the domain name only to redirect it to someone else’s website, owned by a person they don’t know and have never contacted?

Anyway, I replied to the person who wanted to buy the domain off me, and told them this information and that they need to contact D Haeze Trading nv if they want to buy the domain. Later (this evening) they got back to me and thanked me for the information. So, good deed done for the day.

I had 6 ethics classes today, mostly during the day, and two late in the evening. That didn’t give me a lot of time to do much else, besides taking Scully on a couple of walks. I made mushroom pizza for dinner. It’s kind of become our Monday habit to have a home made pizza, now that I’ve discovered how easy it is to make the dough.

New content today:

The New Year’s Eve post

It’s the last day of 2024. I just took Scully for a walk around Greenwich (about 7:30 pm) and saw lots of people walking down towards the Harbour for the fireworks. Also lots of traffic going down Greenwich Road, reaching the closed streets at the end, realising there’s no parking anywhere within 2 kilometres, and turning around and coming back out. Even my street is parked out, and it never is. And I’m a good 2.5 km from the nearest good fireworks viewing spot.

We had a low-key day. I got up and went for a 5k run, my last for the year, taking my total distance for 2024 to 505 km. It was also the warmest weather for a run since March, at 25.2°C (and 70% humidity) when I left at 9:30 am. Despite this, I did a reasonable time, under 27:30.

After I had a shower, I set about working on finishing off the Darths & Droids comics for Episode VIII. I managed to make all of the three intermission strips, which leaves the next strip to be made the opening strip of Episode IX. I created an “EpisodeIX” folder on my computer, and was disappointed to find that the operating system sorts it between “EpisodeIV” and “EpisodeV”. All the episodes so far have sorted nicely since the Roman numerals up to VIII increase alphabetically, but now it’s messed up! I did search briefly for if there was any way to make MacOS sort folders by Roman numerals. People have asked this question, but there are no positive answers, alas.

But anyway, it feels good to have completed another movie! Only one more to go. I was keen to try and get it done by the end of the year, although the strips will run into January.

I upgraded my machine to MacOS Sequoia. I didn’t realise there was an upgrade from Sonoma until I went looking for information about an issue with Photoshop being laggy, and discovered that this was actually a general issue with lagginess known to exist in Sonoma. But that Sequoia came out a few months ago, and for some reason my machine didn’t prompt me to install it. So I did the upgrade and… wow… yeah. Everything on my machine is noticeably zippier and less laggy. So that’s good!

We had our usual New Year’s Eve snack of wine and cheese, a coupe of hours before a light dinner of lettuce, cucumber, and tomato salad with falafels, fried haloumi, and pomegranate, with a tahini dressing. The wine tonight is a 2010 Riesling that we bought in 2015 in Clare Valley, South Australia—one of Australia’s prime Riesling growing regions—and have been keeping ever since. I was a bit concerned it might have turned since we just kept it in the garage, not a proper cellar, but it’s really good. Classic fruity Riesling notes, with a long toasty finish. It’s matured very nicely.

We’re staying in for the night. Sydney’s fireworks are great, but it’s a real chore to see them in person, even living this close. We’ve done it a few times when younger, but the crowds and the hassles claiming a spot and getting home afterwards are just too much now. People claim spots first thing in the morning, and then have to sit out in the blazing sun all day, which is the absolute last thing I want to be doing.

Anyway, here’s to hoping 2025 is a good year for all!

New content today:

Photoshop version upgrade wrangling

The other day I upgraded my Photoshop installation from version 24 to 25. For some reason, my Creative Cloud subscription didn’t offer me an automatic upgrade, which it usually does. It did list the new version as one that I could install, but there was no option to “update” the version over the top of my existing installation like it usually does. So I tried hitting the “install” button and let it install the new version in parallel.

Normally when updating, the new version imports all of my settings and customisations – and for Photoshop there are a lot of these, including things like graphic styles, palette colours, macro actions, keyboard shortcut assignments, new document defaults, tool defaults and styles, and so on. But the new version didn’t have any of these, and I had to spend some time copying them all across from the older version.

When I was finally happy, I tried making a new Darths & Droids comic using the new version. It mostly worked okay, until I got to adding a drop shadow to some of the comic panels. The way I do this is: (a) select the panel layer, (b) hit the custom drop shadow style that I have defined on the styles palette. Done. But even though I’d imported my custom style palette into the new version, the drop shadow style was defined differently! The shading angle and sizes were different! It took me some time to actually notice this – the difference was fairly subtle, but I definitely noticed something was wrong. It took some time to figure out exactly what was wrong, as I had to open comics in the old Photoshop version and examine the style details and compare the numbers, to find they didn’t match.

So even though I imported the styles across version, the details of the styles were different! This was a pain. I had to redefine the drop shadow style from scratch in the new version. And then… well, there must be some larger bug with the styles, because it worked for the document I had open, but when I started a new document and applied the same style that I’d just defined, it produced the wrong result! I don’t see how this could happen, unless the styles are actually buggy. I’m now hoping they’ll fix them in the next point release, because until they do I’m going to basically have to define all the drop shadow panels manually, rather than use a one-click style.

Phew.

In other events today… well, I didn’t do all that much else. Drove my wife and Scully to a lunch that she’d organised with some of her friends. I had some lunch nearby by myself and drove back home, while my wife walked Scully home from there. We played a couple of games of Kingdomino this afternoon, winning one game each. I suggested best of three, but she had other things to do by that time. And this evening three more ethics classes.

Last night I watched Renfield on Netflix. I saw this movie advertised when it was released a few weeks ago, but avoided it because it looked a bit cheesy. But last night I felt like something lighter and watched it, and I’m glad I did. It’s a sort of genre-defying Dracula/gangster/rom-com. Nicolas Cage was excellent as Dracula – a real scenery chewing performance that was hilarious and fun. Honestly, the only thing I can think that would improve this movie is if the young-Hugh-Grant-wannabe lead was actually somehow played by a young Hugh Grant.

New content today:

Swapping my mother’s email

This morning I was home alone with Scully because my wife went to the community garden again. She brought home more green leafy vegetables, and celery and coriander.

After a quick lunch we headed out for the drive to my mother’s place, a bit over an hour away up the coast. I’d set up a new Gmail account for her and now I had to go up there to set up a mail client on their machine and port across all their email. This turned out to be a lot easier than I expected for two reasons: (1) they were using a webmail client, so I just showed them how to use Gmail from the browser. And (2) they didn’t have the expected hundreds of emails saved that required porting across. It seems they have an old-fashioned approach of deleting everything once it’s read, so I only had to transfer less than 10 messages. The simplest thing was simply to forward them to the new address. Then I set up a bookmark for Gmail, and gave them the password on a piece of paper, and we were done.

We had an afternoon tea with some pastries that my mother had bought from a shop nearby. We didn’t stay long though, and headed back home so we could catch the final Matildas game in the FIFA Women’s World Cup, the 3rd place playoff match.

In between all this I typed up the adventure log notes from last week’s Dungeons & Dragons session. I forgot the sequence of events in a couple of places, but was saved by the detailed notes that one of my players took, which he photographed and sent to me.

For dinner tonight we made pizza. With community garden leafy greens. And pumpkin and walnuts.

New content today:

Another big software upgrade

Today I tackled another big task on my to-do list: Upgrading phpBB for my Irregular Webcomic! (and other comic) forums. The forums have been acting up in minor ways lately, and I think it’s more symptoms of the server upgrade from PHP version 7 to 8. So I thought it was time to upgrade phpBB again to make sure it was up to date and fully compatible with PHP 8.

I downloaded the file package, unzipped it, backed up my database and previous installation files, and then copied the new files into the installation directory. Or at least that’s what I thought I was doing. When it came time to run the database upgrade script, it failed spectacularly, both from the PHP web page, and from the command line, with ridiculously arcane error messages that I had no hope of deciphering.

After despairing for a few minutes that I might have utterly broken the forums with no hope of recovery, I realised that I’d installed the new files into a temporary directory where I’d placed files the last time I upgraded phpBB, and not into the actual installation directory. Redoing all of the file copying steps into the actual directory, I held my breath as I attempted to run the database update…. and it worked! Phew.

As a friend of mine put it when I mentioned what I’d done:

That feeling where you realise “oh I did something stupid” is a massive relief because the alternative is that you did everything right but it doesn’t work… Is that unique to working with technology? I can’t see why it should be but it feels much more common than anywhere else.

Another friend thought of something:

I think there’s a similar thing where you get a medical test and you’re relieved that it’s positive because the alternative is that you don’t know what the hell is wrong with you.

Anyway, the job is done. I’m not sure if it’s fixed those intermittent bugs with the forum or not, but hopefully we’ll find that they no longer occur.

In other tasks done, I finally transferred all the photos that I took in Japan on my phone onto my computer, so I can go through them. And I burnt a big audiobook onto CDs for my mother.

I took Scully for a long walk at lunchtime, to one of the bakeries. I felt like the richest chocolatiest treat they had, so got a slab of chocolate brownie to eat after my lunch. It was good, but I felt a bit off for an hour or two afterwards – probably because it was full of coconut oil or something, as it was a gluten-free version, and they tend to have a lot more oil in them. Honestly I vastly prefer my sweet treats to have regular gluten-rich flour in them, because, if I’m being brutally honest, they taste much better and are less queasiness inducing. But it’s so hard to actually find a regular gluten-containing brownie around here these days.

New content today:

Dealing with ISP issues

Not my own, fortunately, but my mother’s which is essentially almost as bad, because I’m the one who has to fix it.

My mother called me this morning to say she’d received an email from her ISP (which is different to mine), saying that she had to do something with her email or it would stop working. I did some investigating and discovered that her ISP is indeed ending all support for email services, as of next month. When I set her up with an ISP some years ago, I chose the simplest option to have her email address @[ISPname]. Now they’re discontinuing it, and I’m going to have to help her migrate her email to somewhere else.

The ISP has “kindly” provided an option with a third party hosting company to continue hosting her email at the same address. They say this continued hosting by the third party company will be free until at least September 2024. Which of course means that beginning September 2024 they’re going to start charging for it.

So the next option would be to move my mother to a Gmail account, which will involve telling all her contacts that she’s changing email address. And I’ll have to do all the migration work, since my mother has no comprehension of the technical details of how email works. So, great. Another task on my list.

New content today: