Simpy Chichimichi

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Once the attachers were discovered, the "attackers" had no effect on Simpy. Got to love that secret defense sauce. All in all, at the last count earlier this month, there were several hundred distinct hosts involved. Some of the computers were clearly computers on residential networks, while others were infected business/hosted servers. Based on a few things I found about the attack, my guess is that a number of these hosts were infected without their owners even being aware of what their computers were doing while their owners were writing emails and surfing the web. In addition, based on the attack-related code I found, I am also pretty confident that these infected computers didn't target only Simpy, but also a number of other sites.

For the geeks among you, this DDoSs involved chunks of PHP, chunks of Perl, tcpflood, udpfood, httpflood, Google and AltaVista SERP parsing, an IRC bot, some HTTP GETs with a fake Firefox user-agent, some JavaScript and HTML forms, curl, wget, forking.... a whole soup of crackery.

Spam and DoS (or D-DoS) ( Distributed Denial of Service) attacks are probably things I "love" the most, at least when it comes to things involved in running Simpy. Spam attempts are ongoing, and spammers get zapped regularly. Sometimes in real-time, sometimes in batches at different times of the day. Some make it through. Some spam is reported by helpful users (thank you and please keep reporting spam when you see it!). It's an ongoing battle.

Denial of service attacks on Simpy are a lot more rare. Distributed flavours of DoS are even less common, but they do happen occasionally. A heavily distributed DDoS happened this morning. I have not analyzed the logs yet, but it looks like it might involve a few hundred bots spread around the planet. It started around 06:00 EDT, and is still going (well, trying to) now at 10:45 AM EDT. This caused some "503 Service Unavailable" errors earlier this morning. Sorry about that!

I'll try doing something to reduce the effect of these attacks in the future, but any piece of advice about how to deal with this would be welcome.

Update: You can now digg this story.

Perhaps this post should really be titled "Alexa vs. Sitemeter", and TechCrunch + Lifehacker are just examples of the mismatch of Sitemeter and Alexa metrics, but...

When you think TechCrunch vs. Lifehacker, which site do you think has higher web traffic? I would guess TechCrunch, you?

To check my guess, I would go to Alexa or Alexaholic and I'd see a graph like the one below.

alexa website statistics by alexaholic

Excellent - I was right! But am I really right? Can we double-check Alexa?

Luckily, both TechCrunch and Lifehacker track their traffic with Sitemeter (look at the right column on TechCrunch and at the very bottom of Lifehacker for links or just use these: Lifehacker , TechCrunch ). See anything funny?

Sitemeter numbers for these two sites do not match Alexa at all! According to Alexa, TechCrunch is clearly ahead of Lifehacker. On the other hand, Sitemeter tells us that Lifehacker is about 4 times more visited than TechCrunch. Lifehacker gets about 218,000 page views per day, while TechCrunch has about 57,000. Lifehacker gets 165,000 visitors per day on average, and TechCrunch gets about 41,000 visits. Note that the numbers here don't include feed readership and feed accesses.

Who can one trust here? Alexa? Sitemeter? Somebody else? Who do you trust?

Just a day after the French version of Simpy was announced, two Italians contributed their Italian translation!

The credit goes to Alex Mufatti and Stefano Nurchi. Thank you, Stefan and Alex!

If you have Italian friends who'd find Simpy useful, please tell them about Simpy, or just invite them. I hope the localized user interface makes it even easier for Italians to use Simpy.

I am very happy with the response of the community and the desire to help. My thanks to everyone who offered their help!

Here is what happened so far:

• Jérôme, Sven, and Manu split the work on French translation and turned it around within days! As the result, the French version has been running for several days already. My big thanks to the three musketeers!
• Two other people are working on the Italian translation. Half of the translation is already done. I will make a separate announcement once this translation becomes available.
• Another two people offered to translate Simpy to Portuguese.
• A long-time Simpy fan from Romania will be doing a Romanian translation.
• An old college friend of mine is working on making Simpy easier to use for Russians.
• I am slowly working on the Croatian translation.

I am still hoping to find volunteers to help with German, Spanish, and Chinese. I really want to make Simpy available in as many languages as possible, so if you speak any other language, including Esperanto, please let me know if you can help with a translation.