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Google now has free 411 service to find telephone numbers and addresses and other information for free.

Just call 1-800-GOOG-411 or 1-800-466-4411. It also works as a text messaging service. The text number to send your messages to is 466-453. When searching by text send business name and then city and then two letter state abbreviation.

For example let’s say you want to find Harrahs Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada. You would send a text to 466-453 that would look as follows:

Harrahs Casino Las Vegas NV

Then Google would come back with a reply that would give you the name, address and phone number.

How cool is that? You no longer need to spend your hard earned dollars on 411 information calls.

Yippee!!!

I was thinking bandwidth (at first) when they suspended my website. But then I realized, I have unlimited bandwidth, so that wouldn’t be a reason to suspend me. So I call them on the phone to: first to get the account restored and gain access, and second to figure out why it went down like it did, so I could stop the problem from happening again. Why was the performance on my site so degraded and using so much resources it caused a large company with lots of servers to slow to a crawl, and almost crashed the company’s servers? :hmm: Good question!

:nerd: So I get into nosing through server logs, boring stuff mostly. :yawn: Then I find something very interesting. Several IP numbers (IP – Internet Protocol – numbers used to assign addresses to individual computers and websites) are calling for the same files (huge movie files) over and over and over. And as I read the logs it becomes perfectly clear what is going on here. Someone is trying to crash my website. :shock: Why else would someone repeatedly load movies 30, 40, 50, 60, 1000 (etc…) times a minute? And they weren’t just loading them from one computer in the address block. Heck no!. Try 20 or more computers per block, and doing this from several address blocks all at the same time. Who would be so evil?

:nerd: I then decide to run a search for the perpetrators of this grave injustice, this crime against my site. And what do I find? Lo and behold, it turns out that a big chunk of the address blocks in question belong to the CIA or Central Intelligence Agency. Wow :shock:

To make a long story short, their (CIA) attack with computer bots was an attempt to take my website down. It (the CIA bot network script) was aimed at some old movies I had, with an inefficient plugin running the scripts that calls for the movies to play. This inefficiency in the plugin, combined with the CIA bot network calling for it over and over, was in turn causing server performance degradation that almost shut down a company which houses more than 186,000 websites. :shock:

:aww: Now I had to fix the problem. What to do, what to do?

The fix, it turns out, was actually pretty easy. :bigrin: Deactivate the plugin, and then block the offending evil CIA bots from ever visiting again. It’s a done deal. Ha Ha.