DOS ain't dead

Hi all!

As some of you may already have noticed, since yesterday in the evening when visiting this website one will see a dark screen reading 'Sicherheitsprüfung' ('Security check') for about 1-3 seconds.

This is the expected behavior now, because this sites' hoster introduced a new feature to improve security by blocking (bad) bots.

If you experience any problems, please report here.

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Forum admin

> If you experience any problems, please report here.

As of this change, i can no longer read the forum using dillo.

> > If you experience any problems, please report here.
>
> As of this change, i can no longer read the forum using dillo.

I see. This feature requires JavaScript enabled in the browser.

Dillo supports a subset of HTML 4.01 and CSS 2.1 but it doesn't support JavaScript and only implements some elements of HTML 5 and CSS 3.

Source: https://dillo-browser.github.io/user_help.html

I love 'progress'.

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Forum admin

On android phone (firefox) it took 10-20s. And I think that web about DOS should be readable under DOS (Links, Dillo, Arachne...).

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DOS gives me freedom to unlimited HW access.

I understand the need.

I wonder how hard it would be to sync the forum and a SSH/Telnet BBS? More to tend to, though.

> I understand the need.
>
> I wonder how hard it would be to sync the forum and a SSH/Telnet BBS? More
> to tend to, though.

My workaround to read the forum without Javascript is to subscribe to the RSS feed linked at the bottom of the forum index.

I verified that it works using sfeed, which fetches the feed using curl.

As of this change, i can no longer read the forum using Links 2.30 in pure MS-DOS

> My workaround to read the forum without Javascript is to subscribe to the
> RSS feed linked at the bottom of the forum index.
>
> I verified that it works using sfeed, which fetches the feed using curl.

That's interesting, because wget for downloading files from the rest of this website didn't work.

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Forum admin

Yesterday, I filed a ticket with my hoster's support team and they told me this and that about the reasons. They also proposed a non-JS solution for the future. Until now, I didn't answer, but since today 10:30 a.m. CET, the 'Security check' is no longer active for this site. But I dunno for how long.

Will keep you posted.

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Forum admin

The mode has been switched back from displaying the challenge for each visitor to the heuristic variant. Depending on the risk of the actor or the target, a challenge is then displayed for different visitors or websites.

So, case closed for now.

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Forum admin

These things have nothing to do with security. They are badly implemented denial-of-service preventions that also block most actual users that happen to use some other browser than Chrome or Firefox.