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The owner of the website where I used to host my journals has decided to publicly accuse me of trying to kill him. I'm also totally related to some kind of denial of service attack because a botnet has a non static IP address that's the same as the non static IP address used by a person I seem to have once communicated with via his site who also lives in Asia and is also a translator. 

It's some truly amazing level of paranoid ramblings but I suspect that I'm too much in his bad graces for him to ever accept the advice that he really needs to see a psychiatrist.

Presented in all of it's "too long shouldn't read" glory:

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Last night my wife and I were re-watching "The Game", that classic Michael Douglas paranoia movie from the 90's. As we were taking a break to do something in the kitchen, we were joking about what kind of stuff someone would do to me if I was the target of a similar scheme. Then while Chiho was doing her thing, I went to check email, and discovered a slew of emails from the server indicating heavy load. 

Upon investigation, it turned out it was all being caused by a particular ip address in Taiwan. It had apparently been ripping through the website like a mad demon ever since the early morning, but I just hadn't noticed until now. The behavior was odd, though. It was obviously some sort of automated script, based on the fact that it was doing many requests per second at times, but in other ways, not like a regular bot. It was mostly just crawling the text pages, but not downloading images - though sometimes, it did. Over the day it managed to download over 130,000 page requests, which is more than the whole site usually gets on a day. 

Then I did some more digging, and discovered that this ip address was associated with a user on this site. I looked at this user, and it was someone, I'll not reveal the name for now but let's just say he is supposedly from Belgium and has had a couple of featured journals in the past. I also noticed that he lives in China (or Taiwan, somewhere around there), worked as a translator and seemed to have traded messages with Marian Rosenberg, the person who tried to call SWAT down on my head a few months ago after I kicked her off this site (I don't think I talked about that here, but basically I banned her from crazyguyonabike after she went on reddit trash talking me in relation to the Chris Pountney review thread. Then, after I banned her, she attempted to call my local police department telling them I was an mentally unstable person with guns, which was extremely dangerous because it could have precipitated a visit from SWAT which could have gotten me killed. No, I'm not joking, she really did this).

 Also yesterday, I was notified by the system early on of a user who had exceeded the email sending limits. This generally happens when someone is clicking too fast on email addresses (the ones that say "click here to see email address", as a protection against spammers). I noticed then that this other user was coming from exactly the same ip address as the Belgian guy. Interestingly, the account doing the email shenanigans wasn't new - it was registered about a year ago, but has had zero activity since then - no journals, no posts, no nothing. Also, I looked up when it was registered, and sure enough the ip address was Taiwan even though in the "reason for joining" they talked about blogging a ride across France (which never happened). 

Now, I'm not saying that this guy who was doing all the website crawling yesterday is associated with Marian. 

I'm not implying anything. Just observing: 

1. A user who according to his profile is in IT crawls the site aggressively. 
2. He has in the past traded posts with Marian Rosenberg, with whom he shares a profession and locale (translator in Asia). Marian and I had a fairly serious falling out. 
3. He apparently also registered a fake account a year ago, which he was using yesterday in tandem with his "real" account to try to harvest email addresses from the site. 

This attempt at subterfuge tends to suggest that the activity was neither innocent or friendly. What to make of all this? It seemed a little surreal at the time, because I was just walking out of watching a movie like "The Game", where people are screwing with the hero. What's the point of all this? If he was trying to scrape the entire website, then to what end? Why was he trying to get email addresses? Why did he register that fake account over a year ago? Why is it that he seems to have this connection (through location, profession and past communication) with Marian Rosenberg, who recently basically tried to get me killed in real life? 

I emailed the Belgian guy asking him what he was doing, but I've had no reply yet. In the meantime his account has been suspended, his journals unpublished and I have taken further steps to block his activity, though I'm sure if he is determined then he'll figure out some other avenue. 

Very strange stuff indeed.

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In case it needs saying, I don't know who the Belgian is or if he's Belgian or even a translator or someone who lives in Asia. I'm also not trying to kill Neil or anyone else for that matter. I have better things to do with my life.