It was mentioned earlier in the thread. From what I remember, he had to downsize a lot, sold a lot of Bitcoins to recoup losses and moved his business away to try pick up the pieces and try start again. He had a huge stage of Bitcoins; The operative word is had I'd imagine.

I can not imagine having to start again after losing that much, sad thing is for most small/medium business' that would of been the end of them. Having access to cash out his Bitcoins was all that could save the business.

Hopefully this helps Theymos, thank you.
Is there a system in place to keep track if they regularly try to exceed the cap for their "activity"?

Thanks Badbear, I understand you have limits to what you can do, as long as you know about it and do what you can that is all I was after.

Just got my 2nd message, identical, just from someone else.
Can the Mods chime in if they are taking action to curb this behaviour?

I had a very similar thing appear in my PM just recently (already reported to mods). No way I'd click on that link after reading this thread.

*Modified link to prevent anyone think it's a good idea to click it.

These message appears to be coming from multiple accounts.
Bought accounts, compromised or just created exactly for this purpose?

Dangerous path they going down, cutting off their toes to save their face won't work for long, if they can't stand any more when they run out of toes.

As already pointed out VPN services are a legit business, are they going to suspend all computer hardware sellers next because hackers use computers? Sounds stupid, but it's the same logic they seem to have used with VPN it seems.

So you just need to insert some php into wordpress?

I use this plugin for that:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/shortcode-exec-php/

It has a very useful backend where you type out your php code, then you just insert the wordpress shortcodes where ever you want.
As many as you need, just add another.

Open up a business account, rather than using your personal account.
It be best if you are honest with the bank on what this going to be used for, the details matter and listen to their advice.

That way that sort of volume, can be considered normal by the bank and also you can keep it separate for your needs of self employment taxes (assumed)

It all depends on what your budget affords you.
Shared hosting is fine if your biggest complaint is sometimes it's slow. If it's crashing then yeah that is a problem.

But why is it slow?

Is it the server fault?
or
Have you asked it to load too many things and the requests pile up.

In this case, most of the reason why the site is slow, is because the site is being asked to load a lot of large graphics, custom fonts and multiple separate CSS files. Tracking the slow ones is easy with browser plugins, so you can see which ones are slowing done your load times.

A VPS or dedicated server certainly improve response and request times to 100's of ms, rather than measured in seconds, but it won't help that much if it's still requesting more information per page load than it really needs to, especially if it's slow because of being reliant on a 3rd party server or is client dependant (Flash/JS).

So first I'd recommend making some changes to speed it up without changing the server:

Question if you really need that custom font (ie. remove it)
Use a WP based CSS min tool to combine the multiple CSS files on the blog as one CSS file.

Try to Replace those like/share plugins with static versions, rather than dynamic ones.
Try reduce the number of plugins used in general, that grab content from their own site to work.

I'll try keep it short.

It's been done. When the first website or two did this, it got a bit of attention.
Now a days, anyone who tries to do it again, just kind gets ignored.
If you got no content or reason for people to visit it (that doesn't directly related back to advertising).
Why would people want to advertise on this website? There is not value to it, other than to the owner who hopes it does.

I like the idea of a 8 port USB hub, via molex, save on the plugs when you need a lot of them.

I swear that wasn't there when I posted. It's clearly not a good idea to post anything before I've had my first cup of tea.

Lost? my condolences to the team and his/her family.

Definitely good to see you Yohan come forward with this.

I'll look forward to see all your variants you end up doing (smaller ones?).
Then I'll probably become a repeat customer (still use 2 CM1's).

That is pretty good feedback thanks.
Once I've got a better grips of making the lists, in it's more raw format, I'll work on implementations and how people can make use of it, which should include things you suggest.

There API (blocklist.de) is a little too simple in the information it provides. It's a good project being a part of fail2ban, I can't fault it. But I do have a tough criteria which it doesn't really fully meet as I do need to know more information. Also since people can easily utilise this service themselves, I'm not aiding them that much. My sources so far have mostly been ones not easy to utilise in a firewall solution (proprietary/paid/complicated) and I make it easier and free, but happen to provide lots of information about the IP address' so I can judge if they should be blocked. It's a small window, but It's been effective so far.

Concerning their API.
Because unless I've misunderstood (which is easy with it be primarily in German), is that while it's possible to look up recent IP address' that have attacked or been reported, I don't know how bad (frequency) or for what - Method or reason.
I can look up an individual IP address and find out how many attacks and reports it's had, which does help a little, but I still don't know what for reason or what they did, just the tally.

So unless I can get more information, I won't use this as a source for my list I give out to others, as the only way to insure I'm not putting false positives in my list and only the worst offenders, which require using the API once to grab recent attacks/reports, then using the API again on every single IP address to check what it was for and how many attacks and reports it had, to judge if it's bad enough to be included.
Obviously that is a lot of unnecessary strain on both my server and theirs, for a service easy to implement already.

It's was a good suggestion to try as I had not considered it.

In the firewalls I'm used to, they are used to handling 100k to millions of IP address and/or rules to filter (pfsense - pfctl).
However, I'm talking anything from dedicated firewall machines to firewalls on a dedicated server, that is already multi-purpose web-server, so any load issues is insignificant in comparison to what else it's doing, by using CSF and/or fail2ban to build some pretty large block lists.
So iptables is also used there, while it does have smaller limits, 5000 ip address' is still not that big of a deal any more as long as it's not some tiny vps using half a proccessor core and 256mb of ram.

5k is relatively small scale still in my opinion and since the lists are growing so quickly, it will be good for me to break them apart for those who want smaller ones, so don't feel like I'm ignoring this issue. I can still make this useful for the small user who is concerned by large lists impacting their servers performance.

The aim with my project, is to blocking just the worst offenders who are attacking a lot of others but maybe just haven't targeted your server yet. So blocking them advance is all I hoping to do so it's helpful in preventing problems that comes with them.

There are already those services out there, that allow for you to query individual address' from a list(s), usually done via a dns service.
I'd prefer to do this for free, so it gets adopted and by just downloading out list and importing it automatically once a day (or a frequency of your choosing), it just provides a level of protection that is good. This puts minimal load on both my servers and theirs once it's done.
There are better suited services out there, for those who want to know at the time of an attack if an IP address should be blocked.


I already use fail2ban (it's great tool along with CSF). Thanks to pointing out blocklist.de I can check it out to see if it definitely fills all the criteria I hope for in finding a good source of data and IP address to validate how bad they are and if they deserver to be on the block list I'm creating. It should, but I have to be sure, so I take false positives very seriously and if I don't have enough data to judge that, I don't use it.

---

I'm under no illusions, this list my be of no use to some, as your service provider (web host) might already be blocking most of these. However for those with minimalistic hosting or those fully in charge of the routing and hosting aspects of your servers, you won't have that sort of protection, unless they put it in themselves. So a free option might benefit them, just like it does me.

Nearer to 5000 now.

Not bad for a few weeks building the list up.

Thank you for your quick answer.

Has any of your research (or potential future ones) in the field neurological disorders, cover epilepsy in anyway? (personal interest)
I couldn't find any, but I do admit to just being amateur in my studies of epilepsy.

I really like the areas of research you cover, it sounds like some good studies being done.
I have a family member who suffers from bad memory loss due to brain injury, so any research in this area helps (unrelated to first query).

So it sounds like a interesting cause to support.