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
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