Hello fellow bricksters,

The brickboard website has been increasingly and variably unresponsive over the past 6 months. Nobody seems to know what's going on. There's clearly a bandwidth and/or server response issue resulting in frequent and extended periods of extremely slow responses and timeouts. Periodically, like only every few weeks lately, there seem to be a few days like now where it runs almost normally. I really wish Jarrod would post an update. He's not responding to our emails, yet clearly there have been recent changes with logins often not working properly and Google ads turned off then back on. Lately I've been seeing URL's suggesting it's sometimes running on an Amazon Web services cloud server rather than an external server connected to the internet through Amazon Cloudfront. After almost 3 weeks straight of it not working, I'd pretty much given up and only been trying to check in every few days. It was only by chance I found it up and running again two days ago. I fear this isn't go to last long.

Some tips I have for people having logon problems. Go to the home page and login there. It seems to work when you can't login from the forum pages or when trying to post. Also, if you set your browser to clear cookies then you will lose your login between sessions. You can clear temporary cookies and browsing history without losing your logon.

I'll take this opportunity to send my best wishes to all our brickboard members, especially our longtime members who have come to know each other through this social media experiment that Jarrod Stenberg started over 25 years ago now. I've learned so much here from all of you, especially through trying to help others and needing to find information for you as well as share both my own experience as well as the experiences of others I've seen posted here. My longtime hobby keeping our old Volvos on the road wouldn't have happened without out. I'd almost certainly be driving something else by now.

-Dave (userid #20 out of over 60,000 userids now)
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Dave -still with 940's, prev 740/240/140/120 You'd think I'd have learned by now

Just finished re-reading Cliff Stoll's The Cuckoo's Egg last night after 35 years. Back then I missed all the social subtext of this book having been involved in very similar investigation current then. I always think of Cliff Stoll when I imagine Jarrod -- make sense to me politically as well as from the programmer slash sysadmin viewpoint. Makes me wonder if this on-again off-again attention is part of a grad school experiment to learn how much it takes to get users to give up on it; what hold it has over us. Of course Jarrod has to be well beyond grad school, but as Stoll writes "research!" We're the guinea pigs.

Machine man let me know it was working today, so I tried it. Now what's here to read??
--
Art Benstein near Baltimore

"Our A students become professors. Our B students go to law school. Our C students rule the world." - Henry Rosovsky

Well then, Art, seems like Jarrod is now going to get a failing grade when it comes time to present his thesis. When the guinea pigs start having the self-awareness that they're experimental guinea pigs then their behaviour changes and the experiment is no longer blind, let alone double blind, throwing any conclusions he might postulate into doubt.

I just read a summary of Clifford Stoll's book The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage. Quite an interesting story. He first detected the foreign spy hacker by monitoring a 1200 baud dial-up connection. No wonder the brickboard keeps timing out if Jarrod's trying to slow it down to 1200 baud so he can monitor our access. I very much remember my early consulting career packing around an acoustic coupler that could do an impressive 1200 baud with a customer's CRT terminal after having used 300 baud acoustic couplers with hard copy terminals and even 110 baud teletype terminals. For others reading here, a data transmission rate of 1200 baud is 120 characters per second and could take close to 20 seconds to refresh an entire screen of characters and as much as two to tens times that to do a screen of graphics.

You of course know Jarrod's profession is as a cyber security systems developer and consultant. Some of his early experience dealing with hackers he'd exposed involved revenge cyber attacks against his brickboard. Do you recall the Denial of Service attack back around 2015 as I recall that shut the brickboard down for over a month and crippled it for over 3 months as he slowly tried to bring it back online?

Did you also know that one of the main symptoms of a DoS attack is users getting 504 Gateway Timeout errors during the attacks? What are known as DDoS attacks (Distributed Denial-of-Service) are even more difficult for sysadmins to deal with. They can be almost impossible to stop if the hacker is determined and follows the DNS registration entry changes as the sysadmin tries to escape the attacks by changing the server internet addresses, even changing the website domain and URLs.

Moving the website into the cloud is one way to help stop a DDoS attack, basically letting the website move about on mirrored servers in the cloud and allowing the powerful cloud servers to absorb the attack, hoping the attackers will now move on to more fertile ground. I've noted a couple of times during the past few months when the brickboard system is working with normal immediate responses that the brickboard.com URL in my browser address bar comes back as having been re-directed to an Amazon Web cloud server (US-East-1 and today I momentarily saw it come up as US-East-2). This can sometimes happen when the DNS registration is being updated while you attempt to access the site, suggesting the site may be running mirrored in the cloud.

I've long been suspicious that this is the kind of thing that has been happening with the brickboard in the past year or so. I'm sure Jarrod and the security companies he works with have PO'd a number of hackers in their day. Some of these are going to be big time criminals and/or foreign entities. I recall either an old post or a personal email reply to me where Jarrod alluded exactly to that. This might also help explain why Jarrod doesn't post to let us know what's going on lest he tip his hand and give the hackers a clue he's onto them and having to admit defeat that he can't stop their attack. Entire websites have been fatally crippled by DDoS attacks and their company can quickly go broke if the attacks cripple their web presence and web sales.
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Dave -still with 940's, prev 740/240/140/120 You'd think I'd have learned by now

Hi Dave!

You are Art Benstein and I favorite poster.
Catching the BRICKBOARD up is a treat this morning.

It’s amazing how much you know specially what you say about Jarrod and his background.
I never knew about the BB being down for a month back in 2015. I missed that or was not involved in using the BB back then.

Time and incidents fly faster than a hummingbird can.
But it is the same as we never know what direction and when. The real Cuckoo’s Nest consistently being rewritten.
America really has went and let the cheese slip off the cracker now.


I only contact Art through his website cleanflametrap but he might have my email as well have exchanged physical addresses when he sent me some manuals that he had given to him. I have one of those illustrious 1993 240s that keeps surprising me with subtle changes.

Hope all stays well with you!

Phil

Hi Dave!

You are Art Benstein and I favorite poster.
Catching the BRICKBOARD up is a treat this morning.

It’s amazing how much you know specially what you say about Jarrod and his background.
I never knew about the BB being down for a month back in 2015. I missed that or was not involved in using the BB back then.

Time and incidents fly faster than a hummingbird can.
But it is the same as we never know what direction and when. The real Cuckoo’s Nest consistently being rewritten.
America really has went and let the cheese slip off the cracker now.


I only contact Art through his website cleanflametrap but he might have my email as well have exchanged physical addresses when he sent me some manuals that he had given to him. I have one of those illustrious 1993 240s that keeps surprising me with subtle changes.

Hope all stays well with you!

Phil