Jun 29 2020

Dirty Rotten Scoundrels

image_pdfimage_print

Christopher Spivey

Now, as most of you know I have an agreement with my web-hosts Orange that they will not take me offline due to pressure from any government.

And indeed, to be fair Orange have been true to their word, giving invaluable tech support to Wolfie (my tech guy for those that don’t know) when the site was receiving millions of DDOS attacks per day:

A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack is a malicious attempt to disrupt normal traffic of a targeted server, service or network by overwhelming the target or its surrounding infrastructure with a flood of Internet traffic. Source

Now it soon became clear to Orange & Wolfie that these sustained attacks were originating from places such as Cyprus where the British Military Intelligence has huge “listening stations”.

Course, it stands to reason that it was the British Government behind these attacks because no one else would have the resources, know-how or inclination to launch such an offensive.

Moreover, when these attacks on my website were thwarted, the focus was then turned onto Orange themselves… With little affect I am pleased to say and Orange were very good about it.

However, as most of you will also already know, Orange charge me nearly £300 per month to keep me online, which is paid for by you via your Paypal donations.

Which brings me to the old saying: “One way or another, they’re gonna getcha“.

You see, on the 22nd of June, Paypal – without any prior warning whatsoever – terminated my account because they “do not want to be associated with the content put out on this website” – apparently it goes against their terms & conditions… The dirty rotten scoundrels.

And of course, without Paypal I cannot collect the crippling £300 monthly site fees needed to keep the site online.

So where does that leave us?

Well, to be frank, I have to say that my initial reaction was one of relief in so much that; I was kind of glad that it’s all over. In fact I felt like a huge weight had been lifted off my shoulders. I mean, the stress of never knowing if I could meet the monthly site fees for the last 4 or 5 years has undoubtedly taken it’s toll on me and my enthusiasm to write.

However, having mulled it over for the past week, it dawned on me that I have put my heart & soul into my writing and all of my valiant efforts over the last 8 years would now be lost, although all of the information is backed up – but no one will be able to read it.

So, I looked at alternatives to Paypal and it would seem that a viable option would be Skrill.

Course, I have to say that it is hard enough getting people to donate to Paypal, so fuck knows how you will react to Skrill, so before I open an account there, perhaps you could let me know via the comments if you would be willing to donate through this lesser known UK company… Although I must say that they offer much better terms than Paypal.

Unfortunately, the problems don’t end there. You see, Wolfie is now too ill to continue running this site, which means that if I open a Skrill account, I would need someone with the know-how to install the donate button and indeed, oversee the smooth running of the site in general.

And of course, finding such a person is no easy task because there is no money in it for them and knowing if I can trust a volunteer not to sabotage the site is a lottery.

The only other alternative is that I abandon this site altogether and start afresh with a new – scaled down – website which wouldn’t require anything other that a nominal yearly fee to run… Thus, no donations needed for the site to survive.

Nevertheless, I would of course also need someone to set that up for me and how long I could keep the new site online would be anyone’s guess.

Now obviously, there is little point in me writing anything new until this crisis is resolved one way or the other, but the site will remain online until sometime after the 9th of July.

In the meantime, as a precaution you may want to take that window as an opportunity to download your favorite articles as PDF files in case the worst happens. You can find the option to do so using the PDF icon located under the title of your chosen articles.

Sucks don’t it?

Just sayin’.

By • Written by me •