“Let the universe go on in exactly the same way it would have if that one critical moment had never occurred. Twenty years later, that was what he would desperately wish had happened twenty years ago, and twenty years before twenty years later happened to be right now. Altering the distant past was easy, you just had to think of it at the right time.”
— Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres, on time-travelSomebody Else's DDoS
After weeks of occasional mystery outages on our office network, lasting minutes to hours, always ending as mysteriously as they started, this morning I was able to get into the router and get something that looks an awful lot like a smoking gun: connection attempts to port 80 on a single IP address from 725,000+ machines around the world.
The catch? The destination address wasn’t on our network. It belongs to an ISP in Spain.
So, somehow, our ISP’s global routing table decided to forward this attack to us. Given that their response to the previous outages was “gee, looks fine to us”, I’m looking forward to eavesdropping on our network manager’s conversation with them.
I've got a Good Robot...
…and I’m not afraid to use it. Shamus Young’s Good Robot is now available on Steam.
[Update: buy the version that comes with the soundtrack; it makes great background noise at work, and reminds you to get home as soon as possible so you can kill robots.]
Fark Curry Database
fark.com had an amusing April Fool’s day page. Only one I’ve seen worth noting so far.
Fuck you, Rachael Ray
The award for Most Annoying Verbal Tic On A TV Food Show has to go to Rachael Ray for constantly spelling out “EVOO” and immediately following it with the complete phrase “extra-virgin olive oil”. Made me want to drive a steak through her heart any time I accidentally flipped past one of her shows.
She didn’t invent the acronym, which predates her first cooking show by at least ten years, but she certainly made it trendy, to the point that things like this exist:
Note that my local Safeway didn’t put this stuff with the salad dressings or the olive oils, instead squeezing it in between the cooking sherry and the balsamic vinegar. Probably not a top seller.
Disarming cosplay
When she gets out of the hospital, her new nickname will be “Lefty”.
Finding Nemo
I’m not particularly interested in the music of the new idol group Niji No Conquistador, but I’ll include a representative sample that features some hilariously bad weapons play:
The only reason I know about them at all is because I recently felt the need to track down the source of Yet Another cute Japanese girl wearing an American flag bikini:
Doin’ the Obama Tango
Apparently he just couldn’t say no to a quick tango during his failed-state tourist cruise, but the moment I heard about it, all I could think of was the end credits from Amazon Women On The Moon:
DOTT Returns...
Day of the Tentacle Remastered is out now on GoG, Steam, etc.
Coming in 2017: Full Throttle Remastered.
