spam and grieg
For almost two months, this website was down, and I was unable to use my main email address, because of something called a denial-of-service attack.
Suppose you live at 123 Anywhere Lane. Suppose I want to cover the city with advertising for my new widget. I send out postcards to every address on every street in town — 111 Main Street, 112 Main Street, 113 Main Street... — even if those addresses don't really exist. The ones that do will get the postcard, and YOU will get all the returns, because I'll put 123 Anywhere Lane as the return address. Who can stop me from doing it?
So, one fine day, you begin receiving "No Such Address"s and "Return To Sender"s. It gets to where you're getting hundreds of these every minute. Your mailbox is full, and your house is full, of returned postcards from some anonymous person (me) who put your return address on them. There's nothing anyone can do about it, except simply shut your mailbox down. Which is fine for the moment, because there wasn't any room for your real mail anyway.
Translate that into electronic terms, and you've got a denial-of-service attack. Usually they're malicious, geared toward punishing someone who's done a geek wrong. But sometimes — increasingly — they're just random domain names that some spammer uses.
Fortunately, we're back on, and everything seems normal for the moment. Why not celebrate the re-advent of barryland.com by visiting one of my strange links? Like a complete and rare recording of Edvard Grieg's "Norwegian Peasant Dances?" A Hardanger fiddler first plays the original ditty, then the pianist plays Grieg's transformation. It has delighted me for years. Enjoy.
Suppose you live at 123 Anywhere Lane. Suppose I want to cover the city with advertising for my new widget. I send out postcards to every address on every street in town — 111 Main Street, 112 Main Street, 113 Main Street... — even if those addresses don't really exist. The ones that do will get the postcard, and YOU will get all the returns, because I'll put 123 Anywhere Lane as the return address. Who can stop me from doing it?
So, one fine day, you begin receiving "No Such Address"s and "Return To Sender"s. It gets to where you're getting hundreds of these every minute. Your mailbox is full, and your house is full, of returned postcards from some anonymous person (me) who put your return address on them. There's nothing anyone can do about it, except simply shut your mailbox down. Which is fine for the moment, because there wasn't any room for your real mail anyway.
Translate that into electronic terms, and you've got a denial-of-service attack. Usually they're malicious, geared toward punishing someone who's done a geek wrong. But sometimes — increasingly — they're just random domain names that some spammer uses.
Fortunately, we're back on, and everything seems normal for the moment. Why not celebrate the re-advent of barryland.com by visiting one of my strange links? Like a complete and rare recording of Edvard Grieg's "Norwegian Peasant Dances?" A Hardanger fiddler first plays the original ditty, then the pianist plays Grieg's transformation. It has delighted me for years. Enjoy.
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