Monday, August 08, 2005
The Hunt for 928
Something that occurred to me goes back to one of the original stupid reasons for chasing after this. There are any number of stories out there of crashed UFOs. If you buy all of them, then the damn things must be falling out of the sky everywhere. Something that's always been in the back of my mind (and probably many others) is “Wouldn't it be fun to try and track down one of these things?” Well, after investing all this effort into searching for a terrestrial (although very spacey looking) craft, I'm pretty skeptical that any remnants of an actual saucer crash (assuming one really occurred) could be found. I was dealing here with an event I knew had occurred, which had a reasonable amount of documentation, was in favorable, open terrain, and proved nearly impossible to find. If a saucer ever did plop down somewhere, I suspect not a trace would remain. Still, it would be more fun than hunting snipe …
Quite a long article about trying to find a crashed A-12, the precursor to the SR-71 (it's a bit shorter, only room for a single pilot and a smaller flight range, but faster and can fly higher than the SR-71).
Briefly, Tom Mahood heard about the A-12 crash, and decided to test Merlin's Laws:
- There is always something left (Applies to UFO crashes only if there's a real crash!)
- There is almost always a road to the crash site.
- Newspaper information is not to be trusted.
If he could find evidence of a top-secret CIA spy plane (even if it did crash some 35 years previously to his searching for it) then it might be possible to find an actual UFO crash site. But given that he spent not only two years but:
- Personal trips out there: About 20
- Money spent on aerial photos: $500
- Additional money to replace sunk truck: $6,000
- Cumulative searchers involved over entire hunt: 9
- Other wrecks found during the search: 3
The chances of finding a possible UFO crash are very slim indeed.
And the article is well worth reading (even if it is a bit on the long side).
It's about time!
Amazing!
Smirk came in, saying that once again, a website on a shared IP address needed its own separate
address. And since the website in question is under the
Insipid control panel, that means moving the site to a new server under a different
plan because Insipid is too stupid to readdress a
site.
That is, it was too stupid.
Seems that since the last time, Insipid was hit with a big ol' clue-by-four and now you can easily change the IP address of a site.
Simply amazing.
Nice try, but that's an abandoned site
One reason for my journal is to document some pretty arcane technical information, like … oh … surviving a DDoS attack. Good thing too, because one of the servers I manage—the ones that typically get hacked and attacked, was under attack today.
Annoying, but nothing that I couldn't handle.
After blocking some 3,100 IP addresses, I was of the opinion that the source addresses were forged. While it's possible that some hacker or hackers had control of thousands of zombie boxes, it was curious as to why they were attacking the particular sites—just small marketing sites that, as it turned out, were no longer used.
Once I found out the sites under attack (all under the same IP address) were no longer needed, it was a simple matter to take down the IP address under attack.
