Free Radical is now on Mastodon v2.4.4.

I previously said that the Russians are coming. Yes, I meant it. In the last two weeks, I’ve had registrations from 25 accounts that flagged themselves as bots. Of those, about half went on to post exactly one spammy toot. Of these, 24 of them had email addresses that were hosted by mxsrv.mailasrvs.pw. That one server itself is hosted by DigitalOcean, an American hosting company. The other email address is from a domain without a designated mailserver (that is, it lacks an MX record).

This updates my last blog post where I said that we’re getting a flood of spambots. Summary: if you’re an admin affected by this, you must act now. I’ll cut to the chase. It seems that this week’s collection of spammer registrations come from Russia. I think that the spam they’re sending today is a probe to see who will respond to it. My prediction is that instances who don’t act quickly will see those accounts stop posting and drawing attention to themselves.

Admins of Mastodon: I’ve deleted four bot accounts that were spamming movie streaming links, with captions like: Tickling Giants Film Gomovies Super Streaming keine Anmeldung putlockers Kostenloser Stream Attack on Titan Season 3 tamilisch Ganzer Film Youtube Ohne Anmeldung Sonnenfilme Movie The Insanity of God Film complet 720px pas de login Youtube putlockers Movie Stream Little Shop of Horrors: The Director’s Cut 123movies Without Signing Up Watch Here putlockers in Hindi En el Septimo Dia (On the Seventh Day) Regarder gratuitement double audio en hindi gostream gomovies pas d’inscription Not on my instance.

Free Radical is now on Mastodon v2.4.3.

Free Radical is now on Mastodon v2.4.2.

Free Radical is now on Mastodon v2.4.0. Please let me know if you see any wonky behavior (particularly images not loading, or not being able to upload new images). Thanks!

An critical security vulnerability has been found on the unreleased master version of Mastodon. If your instance is running code from the tag v2.3.3 or older, it is not affected. If you are running a newer version that includes commit ca42f9b, it’s urgent that you upgrade and change your passwords stored in .env.production immediately! See https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/releases/tag/v2.4.0rc3 for more details.

Who accidentally ran sudo reboot because it was in their shell history? I would never do a thing like that. ahem Pesky gremlins.

Free Radical turns one year old today! The fediverse has grown from 250 instances to 2,300. The network went from 100,000 users to nearly 1.2 million. Free Radical has grown from 1 user (me) to 366, with 44,000 toots. Thanks for being a part of our journey. I’ve made some great friends here and it’s been a grand adventure. See you online!