My friend Louise is like one of those brilliant cold-sell salesmen, only the other way around. If she buys something and it turns out to be a bit rubbish, she harasses the company into doing anything she wants. Here’s how she got a free replacement part for her Dyson vacuum even when it was outside the guarantee.
Coinage I’d not heard before, but will now overuse: ad hominid
Well, apparently somebody requested slashdot’s front page two thousand times – although it’s unclear whether it’s from my IP (in which case, why are none of the other browsers behind my NAT banned) or from my user login (in which case, why would do a DOS with cookies set? Maybe to force a dynamic page?).
They’ve unbanned me, in a minimally helpful way – which I don’t begrudge them much, since they must get this sort of thing thirty or forty times a second in a normal working day. I wish they’d given me more hints as to what happened though – this could be a symptom of something more profoundly messed-up with my security, or it could just be an error on their part. It’s really difficult to tell with no information. And you’d think that we’d both benefit from more of that.
The random UIDs is a bug, apparently. Which doesn’t, I have to say, fill me with hope for their analytic forensics.