Being Hacked is a Badge of Honor
We OEN Members Must Defend Our Site
A Message from Rob...
We have been dealing with a denial of service ATTACK on OEN. It shut us down for hours on Monday, slowed us down on Tuesday and is still ongoing. We've taken steps to deal with it, but these attacks are insidious, using virus infected computers from all over the world. We're being assaulted by computers in China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Sweden, Israel, Bulgaria, Brazil--all over the world. It's taken up way too much of my time and wasted a lot of users' time, causing lost submissions.
Best thing to do is do all your writing in a text editor, not on OEN. We seem to have it somewhat under control, using a beefed-up firewall. But it's still not over. It's amazing it took this many years--we're going to celebrate our 6th birthday next month--to be hit with one of these.
We're fighting on, keeping at all the issues we care about.
thanks for all you do,
rob kall
If you have been hacked, you may skip my scribble below. The hackers use ever more powerful viruses. They have gone from simple ad tracing market research programs to bugs that reduced my computer to scrap metal.
This was an affront to my personal liberty.
In one day several years ago I earned my place on the enemies list. In the morning I studied the FBI's Ten Most Wanted List. Immediately, they countered by converting my wallpaper to 24 images of the self-styled terrorist Al Ameriki. He uttered his propaganda in English with a Brooklyn accent.
In the afternoon I reviewed Israel's wall to keep the Arab infiltrators out. Suddenly, my Service Provider began to dun me for late payment. Considering I had arranged the fees to be taken automatically from my bank account, I thought my ISP was over-zealous.
My confusion lasted for months until The Angry Arab from Germany refused my contact because within my computer a deep bug was monitoring my every communication. Even after I located and destroyed it the curse returned every time I opened my computer.
As a prelude to the 2006 mid-term elections, the right wing agitators invaded my blogging site in great numbers. Aside from one fellow who made noises like Bill Buckley, they indulged in personal attacks and calls for racism.
They had nothing positive to offer the site except the money they used to buy out the owner. The threats increased against the leftist bloggers. If we fought back, many of us received warnings that we would be dumped from the site. Several of us lost the Internet connection for weeks at a time. One of our technically proficient colleagues traced our woes to a source located in Langley, Virginia. Already a certified CIA enemy, he re-located to Southeast Asia. Those of us less wealthy migrated to a new blogging site operated by the owner who had sold his original site to our tormentors.
With most of the lefties congregated on one site, we became bored. There was too much agreement and too little controversy. In a funk, I joined Blogspot, as an insignificant drop in the ocean. My 400 articles there did not draw a single comment.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
