vaguely heretical musings on travel and technology
In January 2026, archive.today targeted this blog with a distributed denial of service (DDoS) in an attempt to take offline a blog post I had written about them back in 2024. In February, I published a blog post about this attack. Here s what happened next. First-order effects The traffic chart below pretty much tells the [ ]
Around January 11, 2026, archive.today (aka archive.is, archive.md, etc) started using its users as proxies to conduct a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack against Gyrovague, my personal blog. All users encountering archive.today s CAPTCHA page currently load and execute the following Javascript: Every 300 milliseconds, as long as the CAPTCHA page is open, this makes [ ]
Questions about scams are common on Travel Stack Exchange, particularly those where inventive scammers come up with sob stories about how they ve been detained at the airport or can t get a visa unless their victim sends them thousands of dollars. Often the scammers attach evidence of their travel plans, including fake tickets and boarding passes. [ ]
Do you like reading articles in publications like Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal or the Economist, but can t afford to pay what can be hundreds of dollars a year in subscriptions? If so, odds are you ve already stumbled on archive.today, which provides easy access to these and much more: just paste in the article link, [ ]
In a world embracing instant digital gratification, I d like to compose an ode to a quirky game where the average length of a move is measured in days and even paying money can t speed things up. This game is Mars: The Arrival (MTA), a Mars colony builder app by Heiwa Games, for Apple and Android. [ ]
In February 2021, Singapore launched Connect@Changi (C@C), offering business visitors the tantalizing chance to brave pre-vaccine travel during the global COVID-19 pandemic, navigate a 12-step process more likely to cause than cure alcoholism, stay in a cubicle in a hastily converted windowless exhibition hall, meet visitors only through a wall of plexiglass, and get their [ ]
For the past year and half, many Singaporeans have come to expect the government s daily COVID-19 case update at around 4 PM. Delays tend to mean bad news, as most recently shown yesterday, when the update was delayed by around two hours and revealed Singapore s worst community transmission numbers ever (88 cases). So I couldn t [ ]
Singapore and Hong Kong recently announced what's claimed to be the world's first air travel bubble, meaning a controlled two-way corridor between largely coronavirus-free territories, with travel allowed for any reason and no quarantine required on either side. Here's some speculation about what other countries could follow.
Security guru Bruce Schneier invented the term security theater to describe the showy but time-consuming and largely ineffective security measures adopted by airports in the wake of 9/11. As passenger flights fitfully restart in the wave of COVID-19, we are starting to see the first acts of its successor, COVID theater. Here s a breakdown of [ ]
TL;DR: The world is likely to soon be an archipelago of coronavirus-free islands in a sea of infection, and will remain so until an effective vaccine or treatment is globally available. First up, a disclaimer: I m not recommending any particular course of action, since I don t claim to have the expertise to do so. This [ ]