Comments on: Hmmm

By: Bryan

Bryan — Sun, 20 Nov 2011 18:12:20 +0000

It certainly had a creepy enough start, based on what is known, as a college coed rating site.

By: hipparchia

hipparchia — Sun, 20 Nov 2011 15:05:36 +0000

facebook is evil. i don’t even like the name.

By: Bryan

Bryan — Sun, 20 Nov 2011 05:45:05 +0000

I don’t think any of us have a Facebook account. We have been around too long and can smell trouble. I still have my e-mail set up for text only, although it is quite capable of displaying html. ESET is very good at tagging things, but why take a chance?

I dump cookies every time I shut down the browser to prevent any long-term tracking.

When you use your computer for work, you can’t afford to screw around with lax security by other people, especially when the business model of those people is based on selling your personal information.

By: Steve Bates

Steve Bates — Sun, 20 Nov 2011 04:56:15 +0000

“Not found” here, too, about 10:45pm Central time. And it’s a domain-not-found error, so yes, it’s some peculiarity on (apparently a bunch of) DNS servers.

I refuse to do Facebook. I refused to do it even when my “concierge medicine” doc set up his practice communication facility on FB. I told the woman in charge of such things at his office that I had no confidence in FB’s commitment to keep private things private; she agreed with me and said (effectively, more politely) that she had refused point-blank to maintain the setup for the doc. I wonder if anybody has sued yet…

By: Badtux

Badtux — Sun, 20 Nov 2011 04:44:39 +0000

Just ask Salman Rushdie about that, Ellroon :). (Google ‘Salman Rushdie Facebook’ if you’re wondering what I’m talking about). To summarize: Facebook is evil.

So has anybody gone to Facebook and found out what’s up with Corrente?

By: ellroon

ellroon — Sat, 19 Nov 2011 18:40:28 +0000

Facebook has a real name policy?… I go on with this old gamer name with no problem. No real reason to start using my real name as all my net interactions have been with this one with its trackable history. Have I signed something somewhere that will get me dragged off to the re-education camps?

By: Bryan

Bryan — Sat, 19 Nov 2011 17:53:48 +0000

Assuming they are on the host contained in the Whois listing, the host is up and operating, so it must be an individual problem of some kind. Yeah, Badtux, the whole DNS thing is not a normal problem, and the solutions take time to propagate around the ‘Net.

I also avoid Facebook as too intrusive into my personal space, even though I have no problem with using my name.

By: Badtux

Badtux — Sat, 19 Nov 2011 16:47:00 +0000

The nature of the downage is… interesting. It appears their DNS is down — can’t resolve an IP address for corrente — I don’t do that facebook thing because of their ‘real names’ policy (I’m not retired and can’t afford to be blackballed), do you have more details Rook?

By: Rook

Rook — Sat, 19 Nov 2011 16:40:32 +0000

Lambert announced on Facebook that corrente was down and would be up eventually.

By: Badtux

Badtux — Sat, 19 Nov 2011 07:04:42 +0000

There is a zero day DNS exploit going around that mostly crashes DNS servers (it’s aimed against specific Linux distributions and BIND releases that most DNS servers aren’t running on) but which has gone viral on enough DNS servers to keep unpatched DNS servers flapping. Since I run Debian for my DNS the new dpkg’s for the exploit came out roughly 30 minutes after the fix was published by the BIND authors (one of whom is a Debian contributor) and I accelerated my usual auto-apt-get to do the upgrade early, but there’s still a lot of DNS servers out there which have not been patched yet and are flapping. My brother notes, for example, that Centos and Fedora 14 (what he’s currently running because he’s skipping 15 in hopes that 16 is less buggy) have not yet released fixes. He just installed a Centos server to replace a Mandriva server that had been up for 7 years straight (yes, SEVEN YEARS STRAIGHT! Even through hurricanes, he has it on a UPS and has a generator!), it annoyed him that it was the latest and greatest but his DNS would crash whereas the antique version of BIND on the Mandriva system merely shrugged off the attack.

So anyhow, if Corrente’s ISP is slow to update their DNS servers, it could very well be that they’re flapping. As much as I like to hate on Blogger, usually Google is pretty good about keeping things like DNS up and going… though I’m not exactly a slouch in that department either :).

– Badtux the Geeky Penguin