Everything's bigger in Texas

I was spending an evening window shopping for a future BSD hosting provider when I came across ARP Networks and its list of VPS plans. What caught my attention was not the technical specifications, but rather the naming scheme that I found to be simply astounding.

A digital ocean of bots

Last week I noticed yet another ongoing brute-force attack against our managed WordPress hosting. The botnet is very low key and each bot connects on average only once per day. Up until now, I’ve collected in the ballpark of 3100 unique bots.

How to enable TLS 1.3 on Gentoo Linux

I figured it was about time for this Gentoo powered blog to enjoy the security and performance enhancements provided by TLSv1.3. However, that meant leaving “Gentoo stable” behind and travel on a journey of discovery into the land of the unmasked and dangerous.

Email service providers should kill off the bitcoin extortion scam

Like everyone else with an email address, I’ve been receiving these bitcoin extortion messages for months. I’ve also observed with ever greater dissatisfaction as scammers raked in tens of bitcoins within a week. What especially annoys me is not so much that people are falling for this scam, but that email service providers are simply looking the other way.

An insignificant WordPress brute-force attack

Earlier this week I noticed a minor brute-force attack against our managed WordPress hosting. The attack lasted for 72 hours and deployed around 2000 unique bots. The botnet attempted on average 100 logins per hour while rotating bots to avoid triggering our automatic defense systems.

Abandoning the Gutenberg ship

Even though I really enjoy the new Gutenberg experience from a content creator’s point of view, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s not the right editor for me. My dear Gutenberg, it’s not you, it’s me.