Cave News

We don’t use news aggregators, feed readers or web scrapers

We get our content the old fashioned way - we search for it manually.

Takes longer but is more satisfying as well as more accurate in some cases.

This website is now back to normal - the long loading delay has been fixed

Thanks for your patience.

The slow loading problem was with Technorati. We put a link to Technorati on our left sidebar several years ago but thought it had been removed.

This afternoon we discovered the link had only been partially removed and late today we finally killed off any connection to Technorati.

Blogging was so simple and easy when this website began nearly eleven years ago. It is not as much fun now but we still enjoy blogging so we are here to stay.

Thanks for visiting this blog.

Perry

Our blog outage should never have lasted this long! Are you listening Typepad?

Many bloggers who have suffered though several days of blog outage are not happy. Many of these bloggers have lost nearly all of their readers and some, who sell on their blogs, lost their only source of income.

If we sound cynical it’s because we are.

Our blog host went on year after year (our blog began in October 2013) seemingly oblivious to the hazard of not recognizing and repairing the flaws in older Internet protocols that were not originally secured very well.

Denial of service attacks have been around for several years but this one should never have been allowed to take down many thousands of blogs for such a long period of time!

More on the DDoS (distributive denial of service) attacks on our blog host

Our blog host was hit with a DDoS (distributive denial of service) outage that has kept our blog unavailable off and on (mostly off) for the last six days.

Many of the blogs are up and running. Our address ends with “blogs.com” and we were still waiting while the blogs ending with “typepad” have been up and running for a few days.

___________________________________

What is a denial of service attack?

Perhaps the most common method of attack involves saturating the target website with external communications requests, so much so that it cannot respond to legitimate traffic making the website unavailable.

Most of these attackers attempt to extort money from tech companies. In most case, as in the case of our blog host, the company has chosen not to give in and are fighting the attacks rather than paying the ‘ransom’ demanded.

The group responsible for this has been stopping and starting their attacks on our blog host at random intervals for the past week crippling their ability to function.

____________________________________________

Our blog host has assured us that none of our data has been compromised and all of our photo albums remain intact and will be available for viewing, as well as all previous postings, once this attack is over.

____________________________________________

Basecamp, Fotolia.com, GitHub and Meetup.com have joined Typepad, Livejournal and Moveable Type as victims of this latest round of malicious denial of service attacks.

These attacks are more powerful than precious attacks as the criminals are now taking advantage of flaws in older Internet protocols that were not originally secured very well.

We have been using Typepad to host our blog for ten years and five months. During that time one would think they would have anticipated a problem such as this and would have upgraded their security to prepare for an attack like this. Obviously they did not.

Typepad keeps thanking us for being patient. Most of us are not patient. We wonder how many bloggers will switch to another platform.

This blog is free of the encryption flaw called the Heartbleed bug

An encryption flaw called the Heartbleed bug has exposed a collection of popular websites, posing a potential security threat to passwords as well as credit card information. We want to assure you that this website, powered by TypePad, is not one of the websites affected.

A word from Six Apart Ltd. (6A), a software company that created TypePad blog hosting service.

The security of our bloggers is a top priority. We were able to confirm that TypePad was not vulnerable to the Heartbleed bug as soon as the bug itself was discovered, and we worked diligently to ensure that no personal information was compromised. As always, we will continue to work to protect the security of TypePad users and their data.

This Blog is ten years old

...license plate art by Caveman

Today we received the one Millionth visit to this blog

This blog now has been visited more than 1,000,000 times with 1,500,000 page views.

The visitor count detail can be viewed by clicking on the sitemeter bar in the Visitor Count section of the righthand sidebar.

Changes to comment requirements for this website

Sign-in requirements for posting comments on this blog have been relaxed although a “captcha” requirement has been added as shown below.

___________________________________

___________________________________

Captcha is used to prevent automated comment spam. It takes a human to respond to captcha - bots can’t do it.

In the past most of the comment spam directed at this blog was automated commercial promotions usually beginning with words such as “ we have been reading along...” or “good posting" followed by a URL hot link to a commercial web site.

Most often the links would bring up an online store selling products ranging from designer shoes to sporting equipment. Some were online sellers of products to enhance female and/or male body parts.

Any attempt to get free advertising via comment spam is prevented with the captcha requirement.

___________________________________

Your comments are welcome and can be posted up to two weeks after a posting first appears.

For a time our right sidebar disappeared for viewers using Firefox

For the last 24 hours the right sidebar on this website was invisible (as shown above) for viewers using Firefox. This glitch did not affect anyone using Internet Explorer.

There was an HTML error in the posting here about the smallest production car in the world.

It has been corrected now. Sorry for any inconvenience to anyone using Firefox (my favorite browser).

A short pause…

Posting to this website will resume in a couple of days or so.

I hope the surgeon's hands are steadier than mine.