skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Judging by the fact that it uses BLINK tags and all the tags are in CAPS, this will be pretty old.
I think they mean that because this casual phrase came after the deactivation of the ACARS system, it implies the guy who said "good night" knew it was disabled and likely had done it himself and concealed the fact.
Thanks. We spent half the day with them and are awaiting a confirmation from their network guys that this is, indeed, a botnet attack. Unfortunately, the network guys aren't in until the morning -- only the general support people are -- prompting the post on HN. So much for the 24/7 support they claim ...

We also suspect it might be an aggressive search engine. Our next step is to pull some IP data. If it turns out to be a search engine, what can we do beyond editing robots.txt?

If it's not a search engine, how can we confirm a botnet attack ourselves. We don't want to wait for these network guys to wake up and drink their morning coffee.

Thanks again!
Don't believe that for a moment. Yes, not every aspect is under control (obviously). And yes, various factions vying for various aspects of control trip each other up (thank goodness). But these powerful factions do exist and amongst themselves are "conspiring" to make a great many decisions that effect a hell of a lot of people.

And no it is not "grey aliens" or "reptiloids". It is simply the very rich and well organized.
Google Checkout had subscriptions.

Google Wallet does not have subscriptions.
Generalization that Windows has better "power management, suspend/resume and hibernate and driver support" is grossly wrong. Noob friendly Linux distributions like Ubuntu provide excellent support of all the points you mention.
More likely to land somewhere small and tumultuous, a decommissioned airbase in Bangladesh or Sri Lanka. NK is too closely monitored.
50-100 requests per second doesn't sound like an attack (or at least not a very scary one, depending on request size...), more like a crawler or prefetcher gone haywire.

Anyway, best way to figure out what's going on, is to generate a distinct list of IPs originating the bad traffic from your logs, and block those addresses at your firewall. If this doesn't stop the strange requests in 15 minutes or so, you may want to get some expert help.

Your hosting provider may be able to be of some assistance here, but that greatly depends on their level of clue: many budget providers will just drop you at the first sign of denial-of-service related trouble, so do keep that in mind.

Signing up for a specialized service like Cloudflare is probably your best bet, and should be pretty affordable as well (their web site lists their business plan with "advanced denial of service attack mitigation" as $200/month, and they suggest that if you call them they can have you protected pretty much immediately).
I was under the impression that this was supposed to imply that, because the transponders were off, the pilot would likely be aware of _something_ being awry (if even just that the transponders were acting up). Thus, an informal, nonchalant response might suggest that the transponders were intentionally disabled, and that would feed a suspicion of foul-play.
cloudflare.com? - I believe you could get everything swapped over to their DNS and start benefiting from their ability to ward off attackers within a couple of hours.
> Show me a case where an IN-FLIGHT transponder shutdown is a needed issue, or where this does not need a better engineered solution.

Certainly. There's always more than one transponder on board a big jet, for safety and redundancy reasons. If a transponder begins to misbehave, it might position the aircraft incorrectly on the ATC screen, very dangerous, or the transponder could be getting bad information from the altimeter (class C transponder), which would cause ATC to paint the aircraft at the wrong altitude -- also very dangerous.

These are just two reasons among many, for flight deck officers to require an immediate way to disable a transponder.

> Give me any reasonable response to why this is not something that should be fixed.

There's something you need to understand about the relationship between an aircraft and its pilot. The aircraft is designed to protect the pilot and the passengers, not the other way around. All this talk about protecting the aircraft from the pilot and passengers has it backwards. Obviously this means if a pilot goes crazy or someone unauthorized gets into the cockpit, the results can be catastrophic.
At the same time: http://zachholman.com/posts/github-communication/

> We still use (and love) Campfire.
It would make for a great HBO boxset though :)

As for the fantastical, mysterious theories, there are plenty of real conspiracies hanging around with verifiable support, that we don't need to make up bullshit ones.

As for whether or not this one is a conspiracy, we must refrain from pontificating until we get more evidence. The default belief must be disbelief.
I like how they use antivirus/antimalware software as an example, because it's what is almost universally considered "a good thing".

The flip side of it is that this security software can also be used as a tool for mass censorship, and I certainly don't want something like that being impossible to remove and running in "ring -1".
Interesting. I suppose an automated DDoS of everything on the hackernews front page isn't impossible.

Are there other explanations? Scribd definitely got it automatically at least once, maybe they do it too many times? How many HN users use EC2-based proxies?
I welcome the down votes.

My point - I read the article and agree as described are typical ways of dealing with memory in C (and in particular within Nethack). At the end of the day, dynamic memory allocation comes down to tracking mallocs and frees and whatever extra book keeping you put on top of them.

Reference counting came up. There are libraries that help with such, but you better understand what that actually means.

Wrapping primitives in higher level abstractions can lead many developers to wondering why there is a memory leak. Before you embrace the abstractions, you better darn well understand what is going on under the hood.

I've seen many inexperienced devs get lost in simple valgrind dumps.
That's probably a custom client for Campfire (right underneath the screenshot[1] they say it's Campfire).

[1]: http://zachholman.com/posts/github-communication/ (first screenshot)
Share buy backs are equivalent to dividends, modulo taxes and accounting.
If the majority of the requests are coming from a certain set of IPs, configure your server to immediately drop those requests to reduce the load on your app.
British 18-19th C domain versus everyone else. Only Central America and Thailand buck the trend, the former most likely because of the enormous economy to their north.
Fashion is so 2001.
MALAYSIAN AIRLINE: THE REAL CULPRIT
"People: when did our brains melt and spill out of our ears?"

When the topic is as controversial as sexism in tech and the workplace. Or whatever the flashpoint happens to be at the moment. Like sequoia, I've noticed that controversial topics brings out the most incredible responses from both sides, and often with very little definitive evidence. To me, this is a sign of how deeply felt this topic is, and how much it is just under the surface of our thoughts, ready to explode when an appropriate trigger occurs.

I laughed when I read the quote above and thought it was a good comment.
[Video lectures] Game Theory for Business Strategy (Yale University)
Can you tell us the site URL so we can take a look ?
Jesus Christ. Let the reader beware indeed. There are horrible suggestions here that will result in bad code if you think "Hey, that's a cool suggestion, I'll try that!". Or "Hey, I read in that blogpost this is OK in C, I'll do this".

For instance:
Stack allocation. It's seldom OK to use static variables even with accessor functions. Wrap the state that the functions operate in structs that you pass to functions. There are a few places where you cannot avoid effectively global variables (usually external resources like sockets, window handles etc) but those should be wrapped in their own subsystems and not leaked all around the place in global variables. "Still, this is one of the better reasons to use a global variable." - congratulations, you are on your way to Spaghetti Code land. Would you like some black pepper with your Complexity Bolognese? Protip: Wrap it in a struct and pass it as a variable. Or redesign your module dependencies.

Too much state in your God-Object. Getting confused? Need better design. C is not an excuse not to write modular, understandable code where the program flow is obvious.

Yes, it can get really verbose. If verbosity is an objection, then do not write in C.

Or, if you dislike verbosity, do what so many others have done. Write your core routines in C and then write the high level logic in Lua.

Please excuse me my theatricality. I'm not assaulting the author. I'm rather agravated that this post has this level of visibility and the potential damage it can do.
we looked at them earlier today. do you have experience with them?
Wow. The section "Political Impotence" describes the experience of working in a well-functioning "structureless organization", and it sounds a lot like the descriptions of early-stage startups. (Chunks omitted with ellipses for brevity; go check out the whole thing!)

"While working in this kind of group is a very heady experience, it is also rare and very hard to replicate. There are almost inevitably four conditions found in such a group:

1. It is task oriented. Its function is very narrow and very specific, like putting on a conference or putting out a newspaper. It is the task that basically structures the group...

2. It is relatively small and homogeneous. Homogeneity is necessary to ensure that participants have a “common language” or interaction. ...too great a diversity among members of a task-oriented group means only that they continually misunderstand each other... If everyone knows everyone else well enough to understand the nuances, these can be accommodated. Usually, they only lead to confusion and endless hours spent straightening out conflicts no one ever thought would arise.

3. There is a high degree of communication... This is only possible if the group is small and people practically live together for the most crucial phases of the task....Successful groups can be as large as 10 or 15, but only when they are in fact composed of several smaller subgroups which perform specific parts of the task, and whose members overlap with each other so that knowledge of what the different subgroups are doing can be passed around easily.

4. There is a low degree of skill specialization. Not everyone has to be able to do everything, but everything must be able to be done by more than one person..."
sure, but the site is down. :) do you have an email? don't want people to think we're doing this for free publicity...
Yes, she could exert influence. Just like every other SO of every other hiring manager in the world. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that.

I hire people, and I talk to my wife all the time about work matters. And if, knowing everything she knows about my team, she told me that I should be looking at cutting someone loose, I would take that advice very seriously. Every good executive has trusted advisors, and for people in serious relationships the partner is very commonly one of those advisors.

The only problem here is the wife's alleged direct meddling with work matters, not that she had a strong influence on her husband's work decisions. For founders, life is totally enmeshed with work and it would actually be weird if his wife DIDN'T have strong opinions on the company he built while she supported him at home.
thanks for the suggestion! we're using singlehop ... definitely not a budget hosting provider. these requests have been ongoing since yesterday morning (~36 hours). we looked at cloudflare earlier today. do you have experience with them? does the solution really work?
> GitHub's response neither confirms nor denies any part of the story.

Well, they do say:

We know we have to take action and have begun a full
investigation. While that’s ongoing, and effective
immediately, the relevant founder has been put on leave,
as has the referenced GitHub engineer. The founder’s wife
discussed in the media reports has never had hiring or
firing power at GitHub and will no longer be permitted in
the office.

So it's not like they're completely silent. They said both the referenced founder and employee have been put on leave and the wife, who apparently was allowed in the office before this, is no longer. They didn't flat-out admit to anything, but it's not like they're totally silent.
They're reputable. HN itself uses Cloudflare.
> In my layman understanding current prevailing theory is that acceleration of expansion will reduce observable universe, and as consequence there is basically no question of "size beyond observable universe" ...

Yes, but that was true before the Dark Energy discovery. It's predicted to become much worse in the far distant future because of the acceleration caused by Dark Energy, and eventually there will be comparatively small island universes -- galactic clusters -- that will remain gravitationally bound far into the future, after the remainder of the universe has receded from view. This is because galactic clusters are below the threshold for being affected (i.e. torn apart) by Dark Energy.

> there is no possible interaction with it and as such it doesn't exist.

Yes to the first, no to the second. At present, we cannot see beyond a certain time horizon, but cosmological curvature measurements take this invisible mass-energy into account even though it's not directly observable. Our present conjecture that the universe is infinite in size (based on curvature measurements) obviously implies a universe most of which isn't visible, but all of which affects the measurements.
What about all the problems that are inherent to hosting anything ? It's not hard to set up a server that will respond to a request and deliver data.

It's hard to make it do that when the power goes out, when you anger somebody and they decide to ddos you, or when your code/service/whatever becomes insanely popular and whatever mac mini you run it on is overheating. It's hard to keep up with all the security patches required to keep your box from getting pwned. It's hard to negotiate the fine print with all the TOS's you've signed with your internet provider.
You're being downvoted because these comments have little to do with the content of the article, which is about "dirty" low-level memory management techniques designed to avoid naive heap allocation, not trying to abstract the problem away.
Oh.Yeh, you really shouldn't post it in here becasue it might cause it to get DDOSed by HN traffic.
This statement has more meaning that you are willing to concede.

If they are starting now to investigate, it means that when troubles were occuring, or even when Julia H. gave her demission, they didn't care enough to investigate thoroughly (perhaps they have other priorities, that's just a fact).

This in itself is not good looking, and I feel that from there whatever really happened, they won't have the full version anymore (one of the party is already out) and they will have a huge incentive to go into damage control mode instead of genuinely trying to make the situation better for both parties. Especially, the more they do, the worse their image would be on the PR front ( I hope they do whatever is fair anyway, but the balance is tipped).
Tell HN: Crypto coin exchange Coinex.pw most likely hacked, check your coins
Well, it's looking like another crypto coin exchange has been hacked again. Coinex.pw might not be anywhere near the scale of Mt Gox, but they had some serious volume for Bitcoin and other crypto currencies like Litecoin, Dogecoin, Infinitecoin, etc.

There is no official word yet other than their Twitter stating security issues. I can confirm via at least 4 separate people that their BTC have been split and sent to different wallets tracking it through the blockchain. This is their vague Tweet: https://twitter.com/CoinexPW/status/445302786927104000

Whether or not the supposed attack is limited to just Bitcoin remains to be seen. I am trying to get more information.

Erundook has deleted his Github account: https://github.com/erundook and also deleted his Twitter account: https://twitter.com/erundook

His NPM profile is still up however with his full name, email address, etc: https://www.npmjs.org/~erundook

I am no private investigator or law enforcement officer, but it is looking like Erundook or should I say Vitaly A. Sorokin is trying to erase himself from the Internet here...
No personal experience with deploying Cloudflare, but they're pretty widely used (including by the very site you're on right now), so if you're really having urgent issues, I'd definitely give them a call.
>P.S. Why don't we track buses? Why don't we track cars? Why don't we track everybody?

Buses are at alt==0 and never over an ocean - you're an idiot for comparing the two.

Why don't we track everybody? Do you understand what the NSA has been doing?
military pilots sometime become civilian pilots when they get out of the service. i have no idea the background of the pilots in question, but that isn't an abnormal thing.
Honestly If all of this is true, then obviously what happened is wrong, but I don't really see the sexism in this whole thing. Is it the houla-hoops thingy ? Because I gotta tell you if 2 dudes start doing houla-hoops where I work everybody will stop and watch ... Just because it's ... I dunno weird ? funny ? unusual ? Am I missing something ?
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Ministers criticised for sale of postcode database
> [...] a transition from "shareholder capitalism" to "manager capitalism".

Essentially, owner operated companies work better than manager operated companies. On average. Look up `principal agent problem' for more literature.
True, but the only theories under which this would be a logical course of action are fucking stupid. Someone did this to steal a 777 to use in a 9/11-style attack? There are lots of ways to get a 777 that would be WAY easier, such as: leasing one.
robots.txt is purely advisory and many of the people who code a crawler which could get in a state where it hits you hundreds of times a minute might not be great about actually respecting it. If it is a crawler, though, it is probably operating from a single C block, likely on AWS or what have you. You'd probably just drop them at the firewall. Simple, no fuss.

I'm not a sysadmin, and I have nothing but respect for you and your team with the following recommendation: if it isn't obviously how to implement "drop that C block at the firewall" then find yourself a competent contract sysadmin, pay him for one hour of work today, then pay him for 10 hours of work over the next few weeks beefing up your infrastructure. It will be cheap at the price.

If you're absolutely determined to do it yourself the magic word is "iptables" and may God have mercy on your soul, because iptables is the most obtuse piece of software I've ever had the misfortune of trying to configure.

In the alternative, if you're actually facing a botnet, the expected behavior is lots of requests from widely distributed IPs. You'd be able to verify this with your access logs (which record IPs and timestamps) and a 10 or 20 line shell script to put a histogram of unique requests per IP. If it's a few requests from thousands of IPs per hour, then you have a bit of a challenge to address it on your end of things. My first totally-not-a-sysadmin advice would be to dial down dynamic content within the app for non-logged-in users and start aggressively caching pages, which might or might not be enough for you to weather the storm.

Best of luck and skill.
Maybe he shouldn't have repeatedly broken the law if he didn't want to deal with the consequences?
Predicciones para hacer apuestas de futbol – Line Reversal
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Hopefully, they're toxic environments that showcase the worst aspects of the industrial revolution.
How to track an updates to a 3party libraries?
As any software developer, I use many 3-party libraries in my daily job. Mostly, they are python libraries, but I think this theme should be language agnostic.

In python, we could store project's dependencies in different ways. They could be stated in the setup.py file or in pip's requirements.txt file. Some programmers prefer to pin exact version numbers some are not. I'm belonging to the first group.

Although pinning exact version numbers keeps me from accidental update to a backward incompatible versions, it also keeps me from updating (and more importantly from discovering) to a bug/security fixes, introduced in these new versions.

What do you use to follow 3-party libraries updates? How to solve this problem and keep on a bleeding edge?
>who would be better off encoding things in SD with the low bitrates they use

DCT quantization always beats down-scaling at the same bit rate.
Maybe it's a stupid remard, but - isn't Windows XP vulnerable as it is right now anyway?

Also, if someone is still running Windows XP in 2014, he probably doesn't use the newest updates and antivirus anyway, so his security is weak in other respects too.
Jonathan Ive: 'We're surrounded by anonymous, poorly made objects'
That's absolutely valid, CR exists because customers don't know what to do next. That said, there's a lot that could be done to mitigate that.

- High phone support visibility on how-to pages: Don't link to chat if it's not going to an ideal experience
- Focus on customer facing how-to resources: I'm confident every minute spent making the thorny aspects of phones (e.g. moving photos from internal storage) rock-solid is worth no less than an hour of CSR time.
- Proactively making recommendations on more ideal support scenarios if applicable: "Hey, before we get started, this part can be tricky and I'd love to walk you through it, it'll only take a few minutes and I can schedule a time to call you if you're busy right now. <details of next steps>."
- Perhaps most importantly (I just noticed from your interaction) CSR A should handle (and be given the freedom to handle) the problem from start to finish OR it should be made -very- easy for CSR B to pick up where it was left off (either a great CRM or an honest "I've got a family to go home to, I'm going to hand you off to So-and-So or I'll be back and available at"). That said, Simple lacks consistent CSR interaction but I haven't encountered a problem with the hand-off, most of the time I never notice.

When I was a CSR 99% of the time the customer wasn't my enemy, it was my coworkers (or my CRM).

That said, I don't believe SMS literally is a reasonable form of support and should never be marketed that way, but chat, even in-app chat could substitute. Additionally, providing these methods gives people a chance to ask questions and get resolutions that may be nagging them but not enough to call someone, it also opens up lines of communication to people like myself who get anxious thinking about calling people.
The other posts by <patio11> and <lutsup> have the right of it. ToSes are written by lawyers to be read by judges who are lawyers in response to often spurious class action lawsuits filed by plaintiffs' lawyers.

You don't like ToSes? Demand some serious tort reform. If that happens, they'll get shorter. But they won't go away.