Can’t Stop the Signal

Ever since moving to my own server, this blog’s visibility has skyrocketed. I am getting 4500 unique visitors a day- over 1.4 million hits in the last year. Big Country is even busier than I am, if my resource counters are any guide. I can’t see how many hits he gets, but his disk access and I/O usage is awesome.

The blogs that I am hosting are actually touching on 100% of available I/O and memory resources. We aren’t running short on disk space, it’s processing that is getting close to max. I may have to add some processing power. The seven blogs that are hosted here are surprisingly popular.

That’s the goal- free speech.

A Request

For the first time ever in my blogging career, I am thinking about having a guest post or a collaborative post from another blogger. It came about from a question posed by commenter Joe Blow at this link.

I used to wonder, like what would be the sign, how would you know the communists really have taken over, bolshevism is coming, etc , etc… like, how would you know that balloon has gone up?

My answer was:

I posted on that just after the 2020 election. You can read it here.
https://areaocho.com/vzyali/

The trials have begun.
https://areaocho.com/cia-insurgency-manual/

The show trials MUST happen. I outline why here:
https://areaocho.com/show-trials-4/

You bet your ass that I am closely watching the lists of Republican donors and prominent political figures. If the disappearances begin, you will know that its time to disappear before you hear the knock at your own door.

My experience is all on research and guesses on my part. I would be interested in hearing from anyone who isn’t from the US, and experienced it firsthand.

So here is my request to all of my readers:

If you have any first hand experience or memories of what this would look like from your own past, it would be an honor if you could share some firsthand experience with all of us. You can either share them with me so that I can do a post, or post it on your own blog. If you are interested, please email me at the link in the sidebar. Divemedic at areaocho.com. I have also reached out to another blogger to see if he would be interested in this project.

Problem Found

So when it upgraded to Windows 11, my computer decided that it belonged to the college where I went to nursing school and locked everything down by making the school the administrator in charge of this computer. I guess that’s because I have a Microsoft account through the school. That shut down my VPN, changed my bookmarks, took over my email accounts, and more. It really screwed up my computer. I really hate it when computers and other devices try to be smarter than I am and do things because they think I should.

I think I have fixed it by removing this computer from the college Microsoft account. I will see.

Computer Issue

There hasn’t been a post today because my computer decided (without my permission and over my objections) to upgrade itself to Windows 11. It’s been a bitch. The “upgrade” changed all sorts of stuff. My browser now says it’s being managed by my organization and I need to contact an administrator to change anything. My search engine is now Yahoo as a default, and many things have changed, right down to my bookmarks being reset to a version from 6 months ago.

It’s going to take a bit to fix all of this.

Spam

I just banned an entire IP address: 104.165.169.245

A fake user registered from that IP and spammed this site with over 200 comments last night. They were deleted in moderation before they were published, but that is annoying. If you are using that IP, you won’t be able to comment on this blog.

Security Upgrades

Now that we have registration, there has been a large number of users attempting to register from fake email domains, and there are even a few that have registered from government accounts in the Ukraine. I went through and deleted a large number of fake registrations. If I deleted you by mistake, please let me know by email. I got an alert from my server that someone attempted to install malware on the site, so I am going to tighten security a bit.

I have installed a number of security plugins that should be invisible to readers, but will greatly enhance the blog’s resistance to spam and to malware. Email me with any concerns or problems.

SPAM

Recently, I activated a means for registering for this site as a means for combatting spam. The spam to this site has become ridiculous, with almost 100 spam comments a day- everything from pharmaceuticals, to porn, to comments in Chinese and Russian. So I thought maybe having people register in order to make comments was considered.

The problem now is that I was getting about 20 spam accounts trying to register everyday. It was bad enough at that level, but today I had over 100 fake accounts register. They all come from the same email domain: imailfree.cc.

There are numerous solutions to this, and I am not sure where I am going to go with this, but SPAM has become a major problem that I will need to find a solution for.

Registration

For those that have had problems registering on this site: It was my error in the way that I set up the SMTP server. I sent emails to everyone that has tried to register so far. If you didn’t get one, please comment here and let me know.

That should fix the registration issue, but I am continuing to work on it. Sorry if there are still speedbumps. When I had to fire my old IT guy, I have had to learn all of this on my own. Everything from running the blog to the email system and the server is new to me.

On top of that, I started my new job and have been spending my days in training to learn everything from new medical charting software to new equipment and all of the typical HR stuff. So, I’m busy.

The email will come from wordpress (at) sectorocho.com. That is an automated and unmonitored email account, so don’t try replying to it.

New Features

This one is just for EN2 SS. He requested that he be able to save his credentials on the site, so I am enabling registration here. You can save your name and email address if you want. This is completely voluntary. You may continue to post comments as an unregistered user, and I am OK with that.

If you want, simply click here to to access the login page, and click the link for “Register”:

I am also trying out a sidebar to see if that makes the site more navigable. Let me know how you feel about both in comments.

Out of Pocket

The blog has largely been on autopilot for the past three weeks. I have been out and about, doing stuff. In the last three weeks, I was in the Dominican Republic, Bermuda, and New York. We walked in the door less than an hour ago. Now that I am back home, I can spend time on getting stuff done around here. It’s tough running this site on a cell phone.

I would have mentioned it sooner, but we all know that there are some loons out there that will take advantage of us when we aren’t home.

I got selected for “random” extra screening on both of the US legs of my flight. The second time, they swabbed me for explosives and spread my luggage all over the place. It seems that my checked bag was also randomly tossed and inspected by TSA. Random, my ass.