Over the past day or so, you may have noticed that Daily Nous was down quite a bit, and sluggish when you could access it.
It turn out there were over 127 million requests (web communications) initiated with Daily Nous over the past 24 hours or so. That is 135 times the normal amount.
According to my IT guy, the best explanation for this is that there was a DDOS attack on Daily Nous.
Why? Why now? I have no idea.
It took a little while to diagnose and address the issue. In the course of doing so, the site had to be restored to an earlier version: one saved this past Friday night. Unfortunately, this means that any comment made between then and now is gone. Roughly 100 comments across several posts have disappeared, and we are unlikely to recover them.
I’m terribly sorry about that.
You are welcome to resubmit your comments, if you’d like.
We’ve installed some security measures that should help prevent this from happening again. Thanks for bearing with us.
(If you notice any weirdness in how the site is currently operating, please let me know.)
At least we don’t need to worry about whether this will have a chilling effect on future philosophical discussions here that touch upon piña coladas.
It’s like losing ancient scrolls to a fire.
Sic transit gloria mundi.
It’s the AI getting revenge for all the anti-AI comments people are posting.
Cyber security professional here. While I cannot say anything terribly useful without examination (and I’m not in the subprofession in question either, I do know that there is also a rise in the number of autodownloaders as everyone and their dog is trying to train systems using currently hyped AI approaches. In some contexts this may be indistinguishable from DDoS.
Serious hypothesis: this may be because of the posts about Stephen Kershnar, orchestrated by anti-pedophilia hacktivists. Why now? In the past they might have attacked his university, but now that he’s fired they have moved to different targets.
ROKO’S BASILISK JUST TOOK NOTES
I was just closely following updates to the Heap of Links.
For what it’s worth, I haven’t been able to access Daily Nous through Chrome since this post went up. I was thinking at first that it might be because I was in Europe, but I got home yesterday and still had the issue. My RSS reader was continuing to notify me there were new posts, but I got a “Sorry, you have been blocked” any time I tried opening in Chrome. Today I thought to try Safari, and it’s working. I don’t know how many other people are still having some version of this issue – they wouldn’t be able to load the page and leave a comment until they figure out a way around it, but it’s possible you could see some site statistics that would make it clear.
Thanks, Kenny. Some people have reached out by email to let me know they have been blocked since the security incident. I will put a message on social media about this but the first set of things to try is: close out of any DN tabs, clear cache and cookies, then hard refresh the page. If that doesn’t work, email me with your ip address(es) and I will fix the problem manually.
That worked! (And I didn’t have to delete all my cookies – when DailyNous.com was open, with the “you are blocked” screen, I clicked on the little bars in the address field, just to the left of “dailynous.com”, and clicked “cookies and site data” and was able to delete the cookies just for this page, without having to reset cookies for other sites.)