Title : Why would Russia screw with THIS blog?
link : Why would Russia screw with THIS blog?
Why would Russia screw with THIS blog?
Before we go further, let's get one thing straight: I have no illusions about this humble blog.
At one time, the readership was pretty sizable, but the days when Cannonfire could attract 70 thousand (sometimes a hundred thousand) pageviews are long past. About ten years ago, I privately determined a number below which this blog would shut down. We're way, way, way below that now -- in part because I refuse to touch social media, in larger part because I'm an ornery, unlovable recluse who disdains all groups and movements. Hell, all people.
So why go on? For a number of reasons. In part because a core readership remains. In part because of blind habit. In part because of what we might call "the Feynman principle."
Physicist Richard Feynman used to say that the best way to learn something -- to remember something -- is to teach it, even if your "student" is a figment of your imagination. You gain much when you try to explain a complex idea to someone who is not a specialist in your field.
In Big Bang Theory terms, picture Sheldon teaching string theory to Penny and making a conceptual breakthrough in the process. Right now, I'm Sheldon and you're Penny. In the comments, I'm Penny and you're Sheldon. If Cannonfire ended, both Penny and Sheldon would leave the stage and I'd be Stuart. A terrifying prospect. Thus, the-blog-that-should-die shambles on.
That's a humbling but necessary preamble to the problem I'd like to present here.
For a period of about a week, this blog became very difficult to access. One had to hit "Refresh" about four or five times to see the front page. This problem -- which didn't bother me overmuch -- ended a few days ago.
Mysteriously, Blogger's internal stats insisted that the readership had dramatically shot up. Even when I took a vacay from writing (around the time the Nunes memo came out), the numbers rocketed. Yet those pageview numbers had to be deceptive, since the number of comments had not increased in a commensurate fashion (as had been the case previously).
Moreover, traffic was coming from bizarre websites, such as a site for real estate in Montana. These sites did not link to any Cannonfire stories.
Blogger has a graph which reveals where the readers are located. In the past, the vast majority of hits came from the US (naturally), plus a smattering of views from other English-speaking nations, primarily the UK. Of late, I've been receiving thousands of views each day from Russia. Although I won't reveal exact numbers, the traffic from Russia has been positively freakish.
Cannonfire has also received a freakishly-large amount of traffic from such non-English-speaking countries as France, Poland and South Korea. Nothing of that sort has ever happened before.
I brought this matter to the attention of someone more technically savvy than I, who said that this issue sounds like "a standard DDOS attack...you can order them from Black Hat web sites or the Dark Web for not very much money nowadays."
"But why ME?" I asked, admitting that traffic for this site is far lower than was once the case.
The response: "All it takes is one guy willing to pay about $50/day to over-saturate your allocated bandwidth. It's that easy nowadays."
Me: "Jeez, why don't they just pay me 40 bucks a day NOT to write? I'll take it!"
Now, I don't think that it is quite so easy to pull off a DDOS attack on a Blogspot site, since the whole thing is owned by Google and Google is no pushover. My first suspicion was that someone from Russia had engineered this outbreak of oddness, since so many of the Mystery Pageviews come from that country. However, it is true that -- technically speaking -- a DDOS attack could come from anywhere.
Seriously, though: Why this site? Again, I have illusions about the importance of anything going on here. Throughout most of the past year, I've mostly offered my two cents (or one Penny?) on the same news stories that everyone else has yammered about. I've not broken any new ground. Behind the scenes, I've been "kinda, sorta" working on a story that may break new ground, but I honestly don't know if that line of research will prove worthwhile.
So...what the hell is going on?
Fair offer: If anyone out there wants Cannonfire not to publish a story on any given day, just hit the the PayPal button. For the low, low price of forty bucks, you will buy complete silence from Joseph Cannon for a full 24 hour period. Open to negotiation. For the price of one of those Chinese knockoffs of the Cintiq graphic monitor, I'll stop writing for three weeks. (Not one of those really small monitors, mind you: even I have certain standards.)
It's legal and it's cheaper than hiring a DDOS guy.
Thus Article Why would Russia screw with THIS blog?
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