Open Letter to Curt #2: He Didn't Get it the First Time

[SkyBoat]

An Open Letter to Curt
Flight Gear Forum Administration

Curt:

Really, a fourth ban on bomber? You have really lost your touch and your grip on reality. You are treating bans as if you were throwing “balls” in baseball. Does this mean bomber gets to go to first base now? No? Banned, huh. And It0uchpods, too. Simply because he likes terraGit. Tsk, tsk.

You see, your silly system of bans is effective only if it has teeth, real teeth. One strike and you are out. But you’ve gone soft, along with the rest the motley crew you call global moderators and Thorsten, whatever the heck he is. The Grand Vizier of your FlightGear group, he who can do no wrong and can speak great wisdom even when it isn’t worth the price of whatever secret non-GPL project he’s working on. So much for Open Source and The Bazaar.

Or hooray, who writes volume of volumes and if anybody can ever decipher what he’s really saying, that guy ought to get a Nobel Prize in Cryptography, even if they have to invent one just for the discovery.

Anyway, before I digress too far, because, I always liked hooray even when I didn’t understand half of what he was saying, you, Curt, or curt, to formally address you, just don’t have it anymore when it comes to dropping the boom on somebody, despite the fact you finally got around to it today.

You’ve got your ostentatious Manifesto, so use it. It’s a great document to help us here at Free Flight, Free Speech increase our membership. So stop lollygagging around and ban these guys that are being a pain in the ass and are baiting you.

Bomber and It0uchpods have been going at it for weeks, and today, bomber by his own admission has been trying to push every button and boundary to see how long it would take before you banned him forever to FGMEMBER Land.

You Are Screwing Up Our Enrollment Quotas

I have to tell you on this side of the great chasm, the entertainment value has been enormous, but the game has become a bit tedious.
You see, curt, not a single thing bomber or it0uchpods have been doing would have elicited a scolding, let alone a banning here. We don’t ban people for expressing their opinions, either obnoxiously, or even if they are pissed at us and taking us to task over something they don’t like.

Now, we reserve the right to disagree in the forum and respond in kind and with equal force, which, depending who is the author has varying degrees of, well, force and stubbornness. Even hyperbole. But that’s the way we do things here.

Now, I realize that none of you are willing to sign up with Free Flight, Free Speech because of our policy of speaking our minds openly, and because in this setting you cannot tightly control your narrative. But at the moment you are doing a really lousy job of controlling your narrative on your own forum with this conditional banning system.

Frankly, curt, we here are all feeling a little embarrassed for you.

The Free Flight Administrative Team

Israel (IAHM-COL, Administrator)

David (SkyBoat) Administrator

Peter (JWocky), Administrator

Vincent (KL-666) Global Moderator

[jwocky]

With reference to not understanding Hooray ... I think, it's so hard because over there, you have always to find out first, which opinions are sanctioned by King Curtis and his Grand Wizard ... so probably, Hooray often doesn't even know at the time of posting what opinion he has to have.

[D-ECHO]

Any chance curt even gets to read this?

[jwocky]

Atthis time, he has probably read it twice in person and got it by email at least four times. Their paranoia forces them to keep a close eye on us here. And of course, I recognize some IP addresses of some visitors...

[SHM]

, I recognize some IP addresses of some visitors...

Haha. Do you get one from Finland?

[D-ECHO]

You monitor IP-adresses of the visitors to this forum? Interesting...

[D-ECHO]

And who's email-spamming him?

[KL-666]

Hi D-ECHO,

I see you are interested in standard internet security.

If you would regularly check who is attacking you inside your network, you'll be shocked to see a constant bombardment of attempts to break in. I'll give you a simple one: trying all sorts of variants of /myphp/admin in the hope that you have one on your production web server, so they can try to brute force themselves in. And there are heavier cases that try to brute force any service you have open to the internet.

A sound administrator should defend his network by keeping out ip's that attack. I let myself be emailed when an attack is going on, others chose to do it manually. By now i have an impressive list of mostly Chinese ip ranges that i keep outside.

Edit:
Coming to think of it, i also had attacks from an ip range where some flightgear server resided too. Not implying it was them. But they really should have chosen a more decent hosting company.

Kind regards, Vincent

[jwocky]

Every website has of course the IP-addresses of all visitors, D-ECHO. It's how you connect to it. And like most websites, I have also a statistics module that shows me for example, how many % of the visitors are from the US, European countries or wherever and how many visitors remained for five minutes, how many for hours. Since TheJabberwocky.Net shares this with my writer's site BrendtAndBrendt.com, it is a bit iffy to say for example how many of the German visitors came for flying and how many for novels, for example, so one has to look closer, at what pages were actually loaded. So aside of a list of IPs, there is also some statistics over the raw data, as on any other website. And yes, we have visitors from Finland, here and there, over the course of a months about hundred, for TheJabberwocky.net and BrendtAndBrendt.com together. As it looks mostly for the writer site, at least one spent hours on the serial killer pages there. Hard to say, whether and if which oen would be Thorsten.
And yes, we have a long list of the usual Chinese and Russian hackers, some from the US (funny thing, also from theFG-IP range) and some IPs that tried to spam us with porn ads on a block-list, and some other IPs from Western Europe and the US who tried strange things (I am not sure was it a clumsy hacker attack that failed or did someone try to "steal" data that is actually free for everyone) on a watch list.
So, D-ECHO, server administration business like usual.

[SkyBoat]

I doubt if curt, Thorsten,or one of the other major players would launch a direct attack on us. It would be too obvious and with the protections JWocky has set up, it would be both an exercise in futility and they would be exposed immediately at the same time, something they would want to avoid at all costs. If one of them is a friend of Putin, however, we might have a problem.

If we were attacked by someone from the other forum, it would more likely be from a sympathizer lurking in the background who has been nursing a smouldering hatred for us and decides to teach us a lesson once and for all.

Depending the on the skill level of that individual, the attack would be at varying levels of sophistication. Even then, the chances of him getting through or doing us any damage are virtually nil due to JWocky's expertise in shielding us from an action like that.

I'm not losing any sleep over it.