AR15.com down?

[mallic]

I work in IT for my day job, so I am very familiar with what happened with AR15.com and what they did to address it short-term.

Can it happen here? Short answer: Yep. While I can institute a static IP with my hosting provider (which is not a big cloud provider; ie - not AWS, Azure, Google, etc - and no, not GoDaddy either), there is a cost to it. And doing that would simply allow you to go to an IP address in lieu of the domain name. DNS is essentially just a service on the internet that translates the web sites we visit from IP addresses that look like 68.105.28.11 into something we can easily remember for convenience. GoDaddy essentially deliberately prevented AR15.com's DNS from working during the outage. If you knew AR15.com's IP address (actually, they have 3 front ends that are load-balanced due to the traffic the site gets), you could still get to it.

ar15.com. 5 IN A 3.20.37.167
ar15.com. 5 IN A 3.139.193.203
ar15.com. 5 IN A 3.138.255.236

While I'd love to be able to build AZS in a resilient and redundant fashion with full DR (Disaster Recovery) and a quick RTO, this site is run entirely at my own expense with the help of a few generous patrons who throw a few dollars to help each month. This site generates no profit, so anything I do is at my own expense. To that end, I do take twice-daily backups which are stored at the hosting provider (for quick restores) and off-site for security. However, the site doesn't have a DR environment or a cold/off-site copy ready to spin up - to have that would more than double operational costs and complexity.

When I first built AZS (the old one, a LONG time ago), I actually built it on my own system at home and hosted it through my home router. That was when most ISP's didn't restrict or prevent their customers from running a web site from home and DSL was synchronous, meaning that I had just as much upload as I did download. Today, most ISP's heavily restrict upload bandwidth to prevent hosting web sites.

The internet today is heavily distributed and it would be very difficult for Big Tech to bring down access to all sites like AR15.com, AZS, etc. Could it be done; yes - but it would either need to be vastly coordinated at a level like nothing before we've ever seen, or it would be done in waves with the big stuff first, and then gradually move on to the rest.

Given the influence that the players have (Google, Twiter, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, politicians in power), it would not be too much of a stretch to have them exert influence to hardware vendors (Cisco, HP, Dell, etc) and major internet backbones/routes (Verizon, TimeWarner, etc) to not sell or support environments that host undesirable content, or to de-prioritize, blacklist or block entirely, certain web sites or worse, entire ISP's who allow routing or traffic to those undesirable web sites.

It's scary to think about and it is certainly not something that could be done in a day or a week, but it's certainly more plausible than I would have ever thought if you'd asked me 3 months ago. I know that doesn't quell any fears, but I also know that if all that were to happen, you'd have a lot of rogue sites that would pop-up and it'd be like playing whack-a-mole for them to try to stop it all.

Be prudent. Unfortunately, in the world of today, it's pretty much impossible to be involved economically or have a job and not use some aspect of the Big Tech companies I mentioned earlier, but it's also worth having a backup plan, just in case.

Make sure you have a free Protonmail account.

Consider downloading Tor while you still can (https://www.torproject.org/).

Consider changing from Google to DuckDuckGo for web searches...

We're in a whole new world and the next couple years are going to be very interesting to say the least.

I know I have made this offer before, but if you ever need a backup host, I have a dedicated server hosted at PhoenixNAP and would be more than happy to host a mirror for you. Can't to squat about DNS though. Although it might be worth looking at getting a domain name provider from one of the shady countries that doesn't give a sh*t about what they host.

[Cubiclerevolt]

I read that protonmail isn't secure.

Here's an article.

https://www.securityweek.com/protonmail ... -spy-users

[Ben7]

Hey admin. Thanks for doing what you do to make this place run. PM me if there is a Venmo where I can send you a couple bucks for your trouble. I don’t say much, but I’m a daily visitor and I can afford to kick in a couple duckets for my enjoyment.

[deadshot556]

Well for me on here today every time I change windows or try to post I get logged out and have to log back in...
Rather annoying...

[AZHTfreak]

And then there's m4carbine.net using GD also...
https://www.whois.com/whois/m4carbine.net

[admin]

I read that protonmail isn't secure.

Here's an article.

https://www.securityweek.com/protonmail ... -spy-users

Possibly, but if you're using gmail, hotmail or yahoo (etc) as your primary means of email, it's a significantly better bet. There is a reason Protonmail is used by Snowden, politicians and others. The bottom line is that unless you run the mail server yourself, using software that you built, on hardware you run with encryption protocols that you built and endpoints that you control and the means to connect those two endpoints - you have to rely upon some other entity in some fashion and decide if they are trustworthy. The vast majority of people cannot build all that themselves - and if they can, they want to make money off it (because it would be very expensive and very time-consuming), so you end up with things like Protonmail. Just sayin'.

For the others who asked, yes, I have thought about setting up an alternate domain name and 3rd party DNS - but again, that's just an added expense that I don't want to bear at this moment. I do feel that this site would likely fly under the radar initially should Big Tech try to purge all firearm forums because we don't have a lot of traffic comparatively speaking and we don't run any of our infrastructure on any of the cloud providers or big names. We're a small fish.

While I choose not to participate in the traditional social media at any level (FB, Twitter, etc) I do have a Flote page, which is social media based in blockchain:

https://flote.app/ArizonaShooting

The intent of that was similar to having an alternative/backup DNS name in that I can provide updates there independent of Big Tech actions; for example a new IP address of the site, etc. I hadn't ever mentioned it or published it before because I thought it was a 'silly idea' when I created it. However, I just made an initial post so that it's apparent that it's linked to this site. If I ever need to move the site and ICANN prevents the ArizonaShooting.ORG domain name from transferring/moving/routing, etc, then I can use that site for updates.

I also have an email discussion list set up (think, late 90's!) that can be used to communicate to those who subscribe. That's available here: http://lists.arizonashooting.org/listin ... ooting.org

[admin]

Well for me on here today every time I change windows or try to post I get logged out and have to log back in...
Rather annoying...

That's on you - not the site. For one reason or another, your IP rotates so the site doesn't associate your cookie with the new session (or you just have a corrupted cookie that just needs to be deleted from your browser). Otherwise, I'm guessing you're using some sort of VPN or unusual security configuration.

This uses session IP validation for the first 3 octets of an IP: "A.B.C.D". If the "D" portion of your IP changes, that's fine, but if any of the previous octets change, it will assume it to be a different session, which is probably what's happening with you.

If you're not using a VPN, anonymizer or some other security thing or Anti-Virus weird config like that (and you'd know if you were), then delete your cookie and try again. You can test the cookie theory by browsing the site in "incognito" mode in your browser to see if that works.

[admin]

Worth reading to understand what we're potentially up against: https://www.eff.org/free-speech-weak-link#dns

[Harrier]

I went out to arf.com and there was the notice directing everyone to their backup site - smart planning on their part...
So out of curiosity I went thru my entire folder of saved gun site links in firefox... I admit many were years old and had probably been inert for some time.
After saving the link to a folder, I deleted all the ones that wouldn't open for some reason (domain not found, domain available, etc). Some actually had a banned due to undesirable content notice. Many showed the same 3 or 4 redirected pages, usually a search page and a few opened chines sites. Another 3 or 4 tried to download some "covidtracker" script app that my java blocker caught...

all in all I had 216 that failed to connect... most probably no longer around due to ongoing costs BUT many of them were well known sites that probably had lots of traffic OR were large enough orgs that they con afford the cost due to business, so it raised an eyebrow (sites like Midwest Industries, 1911 history, Winchester serial numbers, The federalist/Anti-Federalist Papers, etc)
I also noticed a larger percentage of them seemed to deal with reloading, components, parts, DIY gunsmithing and AK's...

WE need to stop feeding the beast. Need to get familiar with TOR and Signal, Veracrypt and others...
It will take a while but I'm gonna try to dump gmail, yahoo and msn.

[HPMike800]

This kind of honest dialog about very important topics is the biggest reason I log onto this site. I don't spend much time on the computer anymore and so am not very active.

I thank all of you, especially the admins who devote so much to benefit the free community. I know the devotion it takes. I've run a rifle division at Rio Salado for 14 years.

[smithers599]

Just a hint of things to come. AZS will be shut down eventually, as will all other gun forums.

[dsotm]

All conservative voices must be silenced, we are domestic terrorists after all