Ok, this is just speculation, but going back to this post, perhaps all these ghost accounts are vectors in to the DDOS or a way to test the effectiveness of the DDOS?
GitHub ‘Ghost Accounts’
I’m sure you’ve looked at your News Feed on your GitHub account and have seen the occasional Forking or Staring of something of yours or someone following you:
Yet, I have noticed most of this activity to be suspicious to say the least.
The common things I see are:
- Only forking of others’ projects that for the most part are random, no common languages, utility, etc.
- No public projects of their own.
- No contributions to anything they have forked.
- Activity in spurts; within the same day.
- They follow and are followed by like accounts with the same traits.
- Those accounts seem to have creation dates that are similar
I’v reported these accounts as suspicious but they can’t do anything about — or won’t. As they haven’t done anything. But, this has to take up disk space. I think this may be a slow build up of accounts to blend in for eventual network of malware spreading. I hope GitHub wises up to this soon and makes sign ups a bit less trusting. Email verification? Something.
iCloud, the little sync service that can’t
So last night I started to notice that Pages, Numbers, Keynote iCloud documents and Day One entries were not able to sync.
I tried the standard rigamarole: turning off Document syncing, restarting computers and iOS devices to no success. Right now, my Day One entries are in a zip file on my Desktop.
Then I found a log file called ubiquity-digest.log in Console.app. Here’s what I found:
there was a http error 503 while talking to iCloud reason: ubiquity account locked
I work with web servers and mail servers, so here’s my thought on what is happening: deep in Apple’s server farms, they found or a major error occurred and they have turned off the server process by disabling the user account it runs under (ubiquity) that the Macs, iOS devices talk to, to prevent damage to existing data. Granted this is just a wild-ass guess.
This could be only related to a particular server or so, otherwise I am sure it would be in the media.
I would hope they are fixing it, but Apple’s Server Status pages are, as of this post, silent.
So, Apple, I have a question: What kind of cock-up does it take to communicate with customers via your server status pages?
Setting up my Raspberry Pi
Actually, this is my second Pi. Here’s some basics when setting up Wheezy Raspbian.
Once done running
sudo raspi-config
and enlarging the fs to the max, setting up ssh and the other little things, I also install PyGlow for the PyGlow.
It is not a necessary thing, but it is handy to see the load of the Pi at times and sets up some GPIO utilities with python.
A solution for backing up your GitLab install
Here’s some shameless self-promotion, I made a script that automates backing up the database and the repos in your GitLab install.
If you find this post, feel free to use and contribute to it.