For a variety of reasons, I prefer to run my websites, and those of a few friends, email and various other services on my own server. it is sitting here beside me, occasionally winking its disk access light at me.

Doing this is apparently an open invitation to half of the population of China, 30% of Russia and practically the entire populations of Poland, Vietnam and a host of other countries to attempt to break into the machine, either for purely vandalistic reasons, or to try to use the system to launch further attacks or to deliver SPAM.

Last Christmas I treated myself to the bits to build a more compact, but much faster and more capable server. I, of course, loaded the latest and greatest versions of all the software and frequently load all the latest patches. So far, there have been no direct successful break-ins.

However, there are a continuous stream of people “rattling the doorknob”.
I noticed that some of the log files were getting big. Fast. It was hundreds of attempts per minute to remotely log into the system, trying random user names, and long lists of passwords.
One or two of these, I would just ignore, because they are not going to get in with just a username and password anyway. But the huge volume was just annoying.

I have a firewall between the Internet and my internal network, so I set up a set of rules to allow people three attempts to successfully login (after all, I want to be able to do it myself), and on the third failure, block that IP for 24 hours.

After 24 hours, the list was hundreds of entries long. But there were now many fewer people rattling the doorknob.

Next, I woke up one morning to email on my cell phone with several hundred bounced email messages.
I don’t allow people to route email via my system unless they can authenticate, but someone by continuous trial and error had somehow guessed my wife’s password and was using that to send SPAM – by the thousand. A quick change of password fixed that, but I wasn’t happy looking at the continuous stream of attempts to guess passwords on the email server.

Back to the firewall, and a new set of rules to do basically the same thing that I did for remote login. As soon as it had blocked a few hundred IP addresses, things quietened down.

Looking at the IP addresses in the block lists, most are from China, followed by Russia, Poland and a variety of smaller countries.

A while later, there was another deluge of bounced email messages. A bit of digging around revealed that these were coming via the web server.

I run a few websites. For simplicity, I have tended to set up WordPress for most of these. Its relatively easy for people to use (I don’t have to get too involved) and can be made to look not too bad relatively easily. The problem with WordPress is that it is a pile of s**t. Full of holes for hackers to exploit. I had already somewhat locked down user registration, requiring anyone wanting to register on one of these sites to respond to an email to activate the account. Since 99.99% of the “new users” come from bots, they tend not to reply to email. But that doesn’t stop them trying dictionary attacks, guessing usernames and passwords.

So, you say, what is the worst they can do? Post a few spammy messages?, Well, no. There is a utility in WordPress intended for things like “trackbacks” (which I consider useless anyway), but which also allows basically execution of arbitrary commands — once you have authenticated. That had been used to add extra code to the website to go fetch SPAM and a list of addresses, and to blast it out to those addresses.

A quick delete of the entire website, and a restore from a backup removed the problem. But I had to stop it happening again. First thing I did was to change the permissions on that evil little tool (xmlrpc) to completely disallow access.

My logs now began to fill with error messages caused by attempts to access this file. There were also various other things they were trying to access, including the login process.

Unfortunately, since this was a website, there was no easy way to detect/block these at the external firewall. There is a tool (fail2ban) that can be used to scan log files for certain patterns, and block IPs locally on the machine when it finds those patterns. I took a look, and decided that it was overly complex, so let it drop, and decided to just ignore the garbage in the logs.

Then, someone found a new bug in WordPress, and within a day hacked every WordPress site I had to convert them into sites via which to download all sorts of undesirable content (mostly stolen/hacked software, documentation etc). A new WordPress release was rushed out to fix this hole, but everything was already hacked. So, one by one, delete the website, restore from backup, upgrade WordPress. Of course, there were still thousands of hits on the old download URLs (which no longer worked), as well as attempts to restore the hack.

I gave in. I installed fail2ban.
I set it up such that anyone just touching the xmlrpc file was immediately blocked.
Anyone attempting to access the old hacked URL was immediately blocked.
Anyone trying to authenticate more than N times within M seconds was blocked.

There was still a lot of traffic trying to authenticate. It was coming from random IPs. These people have vast numbers of hacked machines that they use, so you tend not to see the same IP too regularly.

But, this website is a little different. Its mine. Only I log on to it. So I set this one up so that any authentication attempt not coming from my computer gets blocked immediately. That locks out that IP from all the other websites too.

The lockout is about two weeks.

looking at the list of IPs blocked just by fail2ban, there are currently 1,936 of them, and growing steadily.

I do wish these people would go find another job. I find doing this stuff annoying.

Those encountering the story about the infamous BBC “policy seminar” in 2006 and its subsequent revelations  for the first time (which you will not have seen on the BBC or almost any other mainstream media at this point) might not appreciate all its implications.

The story is not simple, and drags out over many years. This is an attempt to give a brief history of the issue and explain why it is important.

The BBC Charter

The BBC is a somewhat peculiar institution in that it is funded by what is essentially a tax, but not controlled by the government. It operates under a charter which makes it independent of the government, and free to operate in whatever way it sees fit, subject to some fundamental constraints. One of the most important of these is that of impartiality. The BBC is required to be impartial. This has been one of its greatest strengths  and the reason why it came to be regarded as the benchmark against which all other news organizations were judged. Since it has no shareholders, and gets its money independently of what it reports about the government, it is in a unique position in the entire world.

Adherence to the charter, in spirit as well as its letter is what made the BBC respected/great.

Impartiality is spelled out in the charter. If there are multiple sides to any story, the BBC is required to present all sides of the story.

The Charter Broken

It became apparent some years ago that the BBC was being less than impartial on the subject of Global Warming (I will stick with that name, even though it has gone through several marketing make-overs and name changes). Only one side of the story was appearing in BBC output, that of the impending end of the world if “something” was not done. Now, there are many very respectable scientists that disagree with this, and have very valid questions about the validity of the models and their results upon which these predictions are based.

As time progressed, empirical evidence, actual physical measurements, began to disagree with the model predictions, and research into into the data and methods being used started to show some unsettling discrepancies.

Rather than explore these, the BBC essentially closed ranks, ignored these and doubled down on the side of predictions of doom (if you don’t all pay up one way or another).

Questions were raised about the requirement of the charter to explore all sides of  any story. When it became obvious that these questions would not go away, the BBC Trust (those responsible for ensuring that the charter is observed) produced a report. There is one famous paragraph which is the center of today’s problems for the BBC:

The BBC has held a high-level seminar with some of the best scientific experts, and has come to the view that the weight of evidence no longer justifies equal space being given to the opponents of the consensus. But these dissenters (or even sceptics) will still be heard, as they should, because it is not the BBC’s role to close down this debate. They cannot be simply dismissed as ‘flat-earthers’ or ‘deniers’, who ‘should not be given a platform’ by the BBC. Impartiality always requires a breadth of view: for as long as minority opinions are coherently and honestly expressed, the BBC must give them appropriate space. ‘Bias by elimination’ is even more offensive today than it was in 1926. The BBC has many public purposes of both ambition and merit – but joining campaigns to save the planet is not one of them. The BBC’s best contribution is to increase public awareness of the issues and possible solutions through impartial and accurate programming. Acceptance of a basic scientific consensus only sharpens the need for hawk-eyed scrutiny of the arguments surrounding both causation and solution. It remains important that programme-makers relish the full range of debate that such a central and absorbing subject offers, scientifically, politically and ethically, and avoid being misrepresented as standard-bearers. The wagon wheel remains a model shape. But the trundle of the bandwagon is not a model sound.

On the basis of this, the BBC gave essentially no opportunity for those with a viewpoint contrary to “the consensus” and exposure, and when they did, tended to choose the least articulate and well prepared and contrast them to very articulate and well prepared proponents of the consensus.

Before looking at the central issue here, it is interesting to observe that science does not operate by consensus. Even their own example “flat-earthers” was once the scientific consensus. Consensus has no part in real scientific debate. Science is based upon evidence. The output of models, while useful in formulating a hypothesis, is not in itself evidence.

But back to the core subject. The paragraph begins with this assertion:

“The BBC has held a high-level seminar with some of the best scientific experts, and has come to the view that the weight of evidence no longer justifies equal space being given to the opponents of the consensus.“

There were some that questioned what self-respecting group of scientists would agree with that statement. When pushed to be more specific about this meeting the BBC said that it was a seminar held in 2006.

Being interested in who the scientists were that would formulate such a statement, Tony Newbury asked for more information. In particular who attended this meeting. The BBC refused to divulge that information. Tony then issued a request under the Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) asking for the same information.

After a long series of refusals to deliver the information as the law requires, the case was taken to court. The court case was interesting. On one side, we have Tony, an old age pensioner with very limited means, and on the other, the BBC had retained no less than six barristers to represent them in court. The legal bill for these has been estimated at £40,000 per day.

After some rather strange statements by  the judge, indicating and expressing a distinct bias towards the BBC case, the final verdict was that the information need not be revealed because for these purposes the BBC (totally funded by tax) was a private organization.

The verdict is likely to be appealed simply on the basis that there is not, and should be no possibility that the BBC can be considered a private organization.

But at that point, it appeared that there was little possibility of the names of the attendees at this rather important meeting ever being revealed.

The WayBack Machine

At this point, we will take a small diversion to mention a project that few people are really aware of.  For many years a non-profit organization based in San Francisco, California has been taking snapshots of many servers on the Internet. It is essentially a history project, documenting the evolution of the web. It is possible to go back many years and request a page on a given web server as it appeared at any specific date. Not all pages and not all servers are covered, but enough to make this a very useful research tool.

Enter Maurizio Morabito

Maurizio was looking around to see what he could find on this infamous seminar and found a tantalizing reference to it, which ended up pointing nowhere. He had the idea of using the WayBack Machine to locate the document.

A version of the complete document was found there, containing the names of all the participants. It appears that these had been published on the Internet, then, when questions began to be asked, the document had been heavily edited to remove the participants names in one case, and deleted in others (for example, the broken link that Maurizio found).

The website on which this was located (International Broadcasting Trust) was interesting in itself, as were some associated documents found there.

It appears that the BBC deliberately obstructed, and spent something of the order of £100,000 of taxpayer money to suppress the release of information previously freely available on the Internet.

One has to wonder why.

It is also clear that this meeting was not organized for the purposes stated. It is much more likely that some justification was needed for the failure to observe the charter, and this meeting was selected to be that justification, even if it served some other purpose entirely.

 Why This is Important

A quick look reveals that the attendees at this seminar we not “the best scientific experts” at all, but mostly representatives from groups with a vested interest in perpetuating the global warming story.

In addition, there were high-level representatives from almost every branch of BBC  programming.

Since this was obviously not what the BBC had stated (a meeting with the best climate scientists), what was its purpose? It is also interesting to note that the attendees and purpose of the meeting were misstated, under oath, by several BBC executives. They appear to have committed deliberate  perjury. One can only wonder if there will be any repercussions from this. Ordinarily, it might have been “overlooked”, but with the current focus on the BBC for its dealing with sexual predator issues, there may be a less forgiving attitude.

So what was the meeting about? There was a clue in the climategate emails:

date: Wed Dec  8 08:25:30 2004
from: Phil Jones <p.jones@uea.xx.xx>
subject: RE: something on new online.
to: “Alex Kirby” <alex.kirby@bbc.xxx.xx>

At 17:27 07/12/2004, you wrote:

Yes, glad you stopped this — I was sent it too, and decided to
spike it without more ado as pure stream-of-consciousness rubbish. I can well understand your unhappiness at our running the other piece. But we are constantly being savaged by the loonies for not giving them any coverage at all, especially as you say with the COP in the offing, and being the objective impartial (ho ho) BBC that we are, there is an expectation in some quarters that we will every now and then let them
say something. I hope though that the weight of our coverage makes it clear that we think they are talking through their hats.
—–Original Message—–

Prof. Phil Jones
Climatic Research Unit

The aim is stated fairly clearly in the document that Maurizio unearthed:

The aim
The aim of the seminars is to change minds and hearts. We want to talk about the
developing world in a way that is interesting, engaging and provocative, so that the BBC
participants and independent producers come away convinced that this is an area which
their programmes should no longer ignore. We are not pitching ideas and have no
guarantees that specific programmes will be commissioned on these issues. Our goal,
therefore, is to bring to life stories and issues from the developing world. We shall not be
talking in detail about tv coverage so we do not need participants to have a detailed
knowledge of British television.

It appears the aim, which seems to have been achieved, was to insinuate the global warming meme into every thread of every class of programming produced by the BBC and ensure minimal to no airtime for anyone with a different viewpoint. Anyone listening/watching any amount of BBC programming will appreciate how ingrained references to global warming have become, it is mentioned at every appropriate opportunity (and at some totally inappropriate ones too).

This is propaganda that Goebbels would recognize and appreciate. Force ideas into everyday life, get them unconsciously assimilated. They have become the propaganda wing for (lunatic) Green fringe.

Not only is this a most egregious trashing of the BBC charter, but it has undoubtedly cost the British (and probably other) taxpayers untold millions and diverted government policy into what may well be  the biggest waste of money ever. There are also those that have suffered and died through being unable to afford heating due to the effects of this atrocity.

As an executive responsible for managing a large budget and safeguarding the image of the various brands that you manage, you may be interested in one of the principal reasons why I, and I suspect a lot of other people are not seeing the advertisements that you are paying a lot of money to have shown on prime-time national TV networks. Even more to the point, I (and many others) are actually paying good money to avoid watching the programs that you are betting upon to attract attention to your advertisements.

The problem isn’t, as you may be thinking, that the sheer volume and length of advertising slots during programs is the issue. That is an issue, but its one that we have learned to live with over the years. No the real issue is that the TV networks are making the programs themselves — you know, the filler material between the ads, the stuff that attracts the eyeballs in the first place — completely unwatchable.

They do this with those incredibly annoying and disruptive animated things at the bottom of the screen. They were bad enough when they started as little more than ticker-tape height, but over time have grown to fill the bottom third of the screen, filling it with highly animated and brightly colored distraction. Most often, seemingly timed to completely disrupt the atmosphere that the program producer has spent his talents building.

Apparently, the networks think that this is just a free slot they can use to pimp their future programming, not having to use that valuable time that they can sell to you.

Unfortunately, this makes watching any serious programming impossible. This is why I, and presumably many others, will wait, and actually pay money to watch the exact same program via the Internet.

It’s not only being able to watch on my schedule as opposed to that of the networks.  It’s not to avoid your advertising (although that too has its attractions), but is very definitely to avoid the garbage that the networks insist on slapping on the screen during the program I am trying to watch.

I accidentally tried to watch House on Fox last night. It was impossible to not be continually be distracted and lose track.

It left a very bad taste in my mouth, not only for Fox, but for the morons that spend good money paying for advertising slots that I will ensure I never watch again. Back to Amazon and Netflix for me.

I suggest that you, who really control what goes on here with your advertising budget, apply as much pressure as you can to ensure that programming around your paid for time does not include this garbage. Then, one day, I may actually see some of your advertising material once again.