Those of you who also frequent torontomike.com know there have been technical issues over there since Thursday. I knew there would be a natural curiosity as to what the heck was going on, so I tried to keep everyone up to date with this posting. Now it's time to tell the rest of the story.
The first sign of trouble was November 29 when CGI scripts at torontomike.com wouldn't execute. To a visitor that just means you can't leave comments. For Fred, that meant he couldn't publish new entries or edit existing ones. I wrote the hosting company to complain about the issue, assuming it was a permissions thing that the hosting company could remedy in seconds, but I was told it was far more serious.
torontomike.com was under attack! The hosting company shut down the CGI scripts and eventually the entire site until we could determine what the cause was or what was being exploited. This is standard practise and I don't judge them for it. I started investigating and wondering who would have motive to instigate a Denial of Service attack and then it occurred to me that Fred writes very opinionated entries daily. He takes a public stand on just about everything, and it's often controversial. It's very likely a number of factions would want torontomike.com offline. Fred's even been threatened for what he's written. An easier question might be "who doesn't want torontomike.com offline?"
When life gives you lemons, it's best to make lemonade, so we took this opportunity to give torontomike.com a new home and update his version of Movable Type to 4. Propagation started yesterday afternoon and by now most of you should be seeing the new site when you hit up torontomike.com.
They say there's freedom of speech on the world wide web, where you can speak your mind, but I'm not sure it's as free as it should be. I suppose we'll soon find out. Fred's back blogging.
