To commemorate the spirit of Halloween as well as Project Afterlight’s updated PageRank, we have a new look! Hallow House is the latest theme of Project Afterlight. Inspired by the use of contrast in Timo Virtanen’s Icicle Outback, Hallow House seeks to achieve the same effect with the help of some tricks shown in Photoshop Top Secret.

Underneath the design is XHTML and CSS well taken cared of. The default XHTML code was adequately modified to comply to Web standards and Web accessibility. In addition, the CSS code was implemented well which resulted to similar displays across several platforms and Web browsers including Firefox 2, Opera 9.2, Safari 3 Beta for Windows, Netscape 9, Konqueror, Internet Explorer 6, and Internet Explorer 7.

Read more…

The pretty URL’s of this blog will be removed in the next few days due to changes in the Web host’s policies. As a result, visitors will get to see a 404 error pages on this blog, especially when they come from pages aside from the main page.

I’ve been preoccupied with World in Conflict and a lot of video tutorials on Linux and networking lately. I’d love to post new articles now but the .htaccess problem has been a hindrance in publishing my new articles. I know that my previously published articles won’t be accessible to many anymore by the time the new policies will be enforced. But until then, I will have to rebuild my links, promote a new set or articles, and continue watching video tutorials.

Hoping for your consideration,

Gabriel

Links aren’t working at the moment because of a sudden change in the .htaccess usage policy of our Web host. Sorting this out may take a while. Please bear with us.

In the meantime, permalinks have been disabled.

We apologize for the inconvenience.

For whatever reason, my Web host has been experiencing Distributed Denial of Service (DDos) attacks. What’s DDoS, you might ask. First, let me explain to you in layman’s term what denial-of-service means. The Internet offers several services- WWW, email, ftp, newsgroup, telnet, p2p among others. These services have corresponding numbers or ports assigned to them. For example, WWW uses port 80, e-mail- port 110 and port 25, ftp- port 21, telnet- port 23, and so on. There are over 65,000 possible ports. The most used service could probably be the World Wide Web. The Web uses HTTP (protocol) and assigned to port 80. A denial-of-service occurs when access to a certain service, such as the WWW is (well, what do you know?) denied. In other words, when we get The connection has timed out messages in our Web browsers while visiting our favorite Web sites, a denial-of-service might have taken place. Of course there are other possibilities, but DoS is certainly one of them.

This is what I’ve experienced yesterday. For more than 4 hours, my blog was inaccessible. It didn’t take long before I found out that all of the other blogs and Web sites in the domain were also down.

My Web host isn’t just experiencing an ongoing DoS attack. Unfortunately, it’s on a larger scale- a DDoS attack. DDoS is different from DoS in that the former makes use of multiple compromised (or infected) computers that are collectively termed as a botnet. Moreover, my Web host may be a victim of a special type of DoS attack termed as pulsing zombie. Wikipedia describes this scenario:

A network is subjected to hostile pinging by different attacker computers over an extended amount of time. This results in a degraded quality of service and increased workload for the network’s resources. This type of attack is more difficult to detect than traditional denial-of-service attacks due to their surreptitious nature.

Denial-of-service attacks are difficult to detect because some occurences may be unintentional, such as the Slashdot or Digg effects. A Web site may also be mentioned in television that’s why there’s a sudden increase in traffic and thus, a heavy load on the Web server is experienced.

Below is a video that demonstrates how a DDoS attack is done. In the video, the attacker used some kind of master program that controls where the zombie or compromised computers should attack. Notice how the target domain became slow and/or inaccessible.

Thousands of sites have been affected yesterday. The issue here isn’t really the service that the Web host is providing, but rather the motive behind these attacks. I believe most of us have been contented with the level of service that this Web host has provided for FREE. What could’ve enraged the attackers? When motives aren’t clear, then I guess conscience should take over.

A few hours ago, Project Afterlight was inaccessible in some parts of the world. This was due to a hardware problem on the Web host’s data centers. Another minor error recently appeared as well. If you’re seeing a cryptic code on the sidebar of this Web site, please ignore it. Rest assured that all of these problems are being sorted out by our ever supportive Web host.

Our server is having technical difficulties at the moment. If you’re still seeing an error that pertains to an error 28 from storage engine, please ignore it. Our technicians are painstakingly working on the problem so it could be resolved at the soonest possible time. Please bear with us.

Thank you.