Audioguy was one of the original team who created the existing SoylentNews site. He has stayed with us since that time and has served the community as a sys-admin for over 10 years. It is no exaggeration to say that over the last year or two he has played an almost single-handed role in keeping this site working.
Audioguy has suffered a series of significant personal and medical events over the last 6 months or so. He is now about to commence ophthalmic surgery tomorrow (Wednesday) and is facing other potentially life changing medical issues in the near future. He has, quite understandably and reluctantly, been forced to stand down from his role which was effective from late last week. Unfortunately that has meant that we have lost the ability to correct the current certificates problem. Access to the Linode servers is still controlled by the existing Board and we have experienced additional problems accessing one of our servers by the usual methods. This appears to be common to many staff and has further exacerbated the current problem.
I have written an email to NCommander requesting his assistance in updating the certificates so that the site becomes fully operational again. Your patience is appreciated. What might appear to many in the community to be a relatively minor issue is, behind the scenes, a major blow to the existing team. We have other sys-admins who are ready to pick up the challenge but they do not yet have the necessary access, nor are they yet experienced in managing the beast that that is Slashd.
Returning to audioguy, I am sure that the entire community would wish to join me in thanking him for a decade of support to the site, and to wish him well for the upcoming surgery. He remains one of this community and evidence of his past contributions can be found in numerous bits of code and associated documentation. He has also, for example, been the manager of the technical wiki which has been vital to the support team for all of that period. We are indebted to him.
Good luck for the future, audioguy. Take it easy. Best wishes to you and your family.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by melati on Tuesday May 07 2024, @08:20AM
thanks, audioguy.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by pTamok on Tuesday May 07 2024, @09:31AM
I hope audioguy has the best possible outcome from his treatment.
I am very grateful for all his work.
I also hope SN transitons to an at least equally functional but more supportable set-up soon.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by quietus on Tuesday May 07 2024, @11:43AM
Thanks for all your efforts to both audioguy and janrinok. Take it easy.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by VLM on Tuesday May 07 2024, @11:50AM
best of luck audioguy
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Gaaark on Tuesday May 07 2024, @01:02PM
If i was religious, i'd be praying.
Instead, i'll just wish you the best and hope for a good outcome. Thank you for what you do, did, and hopefully will be able to continue doing again.
Obligatory: "Spank you. Spank you very much. Spank you over and over.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. I have always been here. ---Gaaark 2.0 --
(Score: 2, Redundant) by pkrasimirov on Tuesday May 07 2024, @01:04PM (2 children)
Get well soon, Audioguy, and thanks for all the fish. Thank you to all other people who put effort and make the magic happen. Stay healthy all.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 07 2024, @11:57PM (1 child)
The moderation here seems rather lame. Title of the post says "Mark me redundant." Can't we game the system to get him a +5 redundant? Here, I'll do my part!
(Score: 0, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 07 2024, @11:58PM
Well, that didn't work as I expected . . .
(Score: 5, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday May 07 2024, @01:28PM
You remain one of this community. Thank you for your "time served," looking forward to your best possible future.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Kell on Tuesday May 07 2024, @01:40PM
These sites aren't free and they don't maintain themselves. The blood, sweat and tears you've put in are appreciated by bums like me who enjoy the fruits of your labour! Thank you!
Scientists ask questions. Engineers solve problems.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by liar on Tuesday May 07 2024, @02:39PM
Thank you for your commitment and hard work, audioguy ! I hope all the medical stuff gets favorably resolved and that you are back on your feet soon!
Noli nothis permittere te terere.
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by Frosty Piss on Tuesday May 07 2024, @03:11PM (4 children)
The entire control structure of Soylent News is functionally disfunctional, there seem to be way Way WAY too much politics and dick measuring going on. Get it together.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by janrinok on Tuesday May 07 2024, @04:48PM (3 children)
I am unclear which 'control structure' you are criticising. Do you mean the existing Board which comprises of NCommander, Matt Angel and kolie, or are you referring to myself and a few others who are trying to get this resolved?
We have a new Board for the new Company which is made up of community volunteers. There are also Community Representatives who are from the community. One of their initial tasks will be to organise elections to confirm their positions or to be replaced by others selected by the community. The Bylaws - which you have had numerous chances to study - give control back to the community. All the site assets will belong to the community. That is what we have been working towards this last year or so. I would much prefer to be carrying on with my Editor role.
None of the names that you see trying to resolve this situation will be on the Board.
We had just reached the point of requesting that the transfer of the site from the current Board to the new Board to begin when we had the bombshell from audioguy. He was the only sys-admin on the team who has experience of the existing codebase and knows how the build of a complete system should be carried out. Furthermore, we could no longer fix the SSL certificate ourselves because of lack of access permissions to the Linode management page. Furthermore, for unknown reasons, none of the existing staff could access the relevant servers to commence the work either.
I asked NCommander for help, he gave it willingly, and the SSL certificate problem was resolved.
But how will we build the new site if we haven't got an experienced sys-admin? So I am feverishly looking at alternative solutions to our problem. Your criticism has been invaluable in resolving this issue.
Now, what are you volunteering to do to help?
[nostyle RIP 06 May 2025]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 07 2024, @11:21PM
Parent is already at +5, otherwise I would have added a Touche' for this zinger:
> Now, what are you volunteering to do to help?
Sorry, this AC has zero programming and sysadmin experience, so I'm no help for that kind of role.
(Score: 2) by Rich on Wednesday May 08 2024, @10:42AM (1 child)
audioguy deserves not just thanks for doing the sysadmin job, but also for doing it with all the organizational issues that have been going on in the background.
(Score: 3, Informative) by janrinok on Wednesday May 08 2024, @11:18AM
audioguy also played a major role in writing the first 5 versions of the bylaws which took a significant amount of time, and he attended many of the weekly Governance meetings.
[nostyle RIP 06 May 2025]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Whoever on Tuesday May 07 2024, @03:39PM (10 children)
Many thanks to Audioguy for his work.
First task for the replacement: fix the infrastructure issues preventing automatic renewal of certificates using Let's Encrypt. The site has been down far too often due to expired certificates. It's time to automate the process.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 07 2024, @06:02PM (9 children)
It wasn't really "down". It's just that some browsers make circumvention very difficult. The site works very well. Thanks all! The technical issues are trivial compared to the politics of censorship and downmodding that it suffers. Deleting comments is just plain evil. Hiding comments should be a user preference, not an admin's dictate
However, while I'm here, what happened to the comments preferences config page? It comes up blank
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 07 2024, @06:10PM
That is a good question and should be raised as an issue as soon as they have someone who can look into it. I haven't changed those settings in quite awhile so I have no idea how long that page has been failing.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by janrinok on Tuesday May 07 2024, @06:28PM (7 children)
No-one is being censored. Deleting comments (which often contain marginally disguised doxxing material) only applies to a single individual. The fact that the information as been compromised by the same person each time does not mean that it is no longer treated as doxxing.
Moderation is an individual thing. If several people decide that your comments are worth up-modding they can do so, likewise if they think that your comments are worthless then they can moderate them appropriately too. Mod bombing is detected by software. There is nobody who appears to be abusing the moderation rules on AC comments.
Anonymous Cowards don't have a preferences page so if you want to be coy and hide your ID then so be it. My comments preference page is working fine.
[nostyle RIP 06 May 2025]
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 07 2024, @07:12PM (6 children)
HA! Look who's being coy.Your charade fails to impress. I'm logged in and you know it (because this thread is for "logged in users only"), but apparently pretend not to. This page [soylentnews.org] comes up without any options at all, can't set karma bias, thresholds, nothing. All other tabs on the prefs page work fine. It's okay, no pressure, it's just an observation
"Often"?, but clearly not always. Regardless, I already proved to you that is a lie, with a link to my deleted comment and everything. I don't care that you do it, only that you lie about it.
And your partisan "mod squads" are abusing the system
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by janrinok on Tuesday May 07 2024, @07:43PM (2 children)
You are falling for ari's propaganda. If you are posting as AC, even if you are logged in, we do not know who you are unless you compromise yourself. If you have changed your IP address then we do NOT know who you are. We have actually described this procedure in the Wiki and it has been there since 2014. I can make a guess, but it is no more than that. If however, you keep using the same set of IPs then it does give an administrator a good steer.
However, this is off-topic by miles. We have a way of reporting defects, feel free to use it please.
[nostyle RIP 06 May 2025]
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 07 2024, @10:05PM (1 child)
That's odd. How can I? You delete all comments you believe are from him, whether they are or not
(Score: 2, Funny) by khallow on Wednesday May 08 2024, @01:06AM
I find it interesting how few people are allegedly affected by this mean policy. I suggest going elsewhere, if you have problems with your stuff being identified with Aristarchus and deleted.
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by janrinok on Tuesday May 07 2024, @07:59PM (2 children)
Not a very useful link - it does not tell me who you are. I get a blank comment preferences page (which confirms you have a problem) but no clue as to who it belongs to. In fact it says "This page was generated by a Group of Psycho Geeks for janrinok (52)" but it isn't my page.
I can reproduce the fault on other pages, but my page is displaying correctly. There is a fault - that is now confirmed.
What 'Mod Squad' ? Perhaps people don't like your posts? You seem to think I have far more power and control than is actually the case.
[nostyle RIP 06 May 2025]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 07 2024, @09:32PM (1 child)
That's all I needed to hear, considering the staffing issues, I'm not really anxious to have it fixed right away.. Who I am is is irrelevant, I'm just assuming everybody sees the same thing I do on their own comments prefs page. If you get the correct page, then something weird is happening.
(Score: 3, Informative) by janrinok on Tuesday May 07 2024, @09:35PM
Agreed - but if you don't raise it as a bug it will never get looked at.
[nostyle RIP 06 May 2025]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Deep Blue on Tuesday May 07 2024, @04:31PM
Take care of yourself.
(Score: 3, Informative) by mtm_king on Tuesday May 07 2024, @05:49PM
Hey
(Score: 4, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday May 07 2024, @07:04PM (14 children)
Once again, like Cinderella's carriage turning into a pumpkin at the stroke of midnight, in an instant certs have taken a website from perfect functionality to none at all, just because. What was the fairy godmother thinking or, if it wasn't her, why should such a limitation on her magic exist? But that's fairy tales for you. In the real world, it's not because the certs were known to be compromised, or even that there was a minuscule chance they might have been compromised, no, it's only because of reaching a wholly artificial deadline. And because browsers take such events way too seriously. There really should be fallback, graceful degradation of some sort. The website owners couldn't get out even one UTF-8 character, let alone 140, enough to convey a very brief explanation.
I have long wondered why the whole world shifted away from http to https. Sure, good reasons to have more security, but there are still use cases for plain old http. It seems the answer is pretty simple: Google. Google's search. That is, if your website doesn't use https, Google will bury your site. Won't put search results from http at the bottom even, won't list them at all.
Was there nothing to warn the folks maintaining the website that this deadline was approaching? The only way to know is by being proactive? I've an idea. How about a browser add-on to warn the user that a site's cert is near expiration? There are a few. The one I checked, Certificate Expiration by Johan, can be pinned on the toolbar where the user can see at a glance how many days until the cert expires.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Whoever on Tuesday May 07 2024, @07:09PM
You are ignoring the fact that the soylentnews website is sending the HSTS header, which tells the browsers not to connect without full TLS security.
This may be a choice by the developers, or it may be simply an oversight.
However, consider that most people will be sending login information and I would bet that some users use the same login/password pairs on other websites, so no, HTTP access to soylentnews isn't a good idea.
(Score: 5, Informative) by vux984 on Tuesday May 07 2024, @07:45PM
"I have long wondered why the whole world shifted away from http to https."
One of the big ones was ISPs and other middlemen started injecting their own ads into the content, modifying content, and so forth which is trivial to do with unencrypted data.
(Score: 5, Informative) by janrinok on Tuesday May 07 2024, @07:45PM (11 children)
That is an interesting question. In fact, I personally gave audioguy a 1 month warning, a 14 day warning and at least 2 warnings in the last week of the certificate's validity. But nobody knew how dire audioguy's personal situation was. He has explained in his email to me all that he was having to contend with but only after the event. Now that we know what he was facing I am not surprised in the slightest that the site took a back seat to his health and his family. I would hope that you would do the same in a similar situation. A lack of awareness was not a contributory factor in the site's downtime.
In the meantime, despite all of his personal and medical problems he was still fighting with the system to get access to the servers that he needed to update the certificates. Unfortunately time ran out - but we did not discover the full situation that until late Sunday my time, when the site had already been partially offline for 24 hours. We had other staff who tried to assist but they each encountered problems. We had a very quick discussion On Monday (my time) and we decided to request help from NCommander.
Both NCommander and kolie were helpful in turn but there is a time difference between our respective locations. As soon as NCommander woke up he appears to have got straight on with the update and the site was recovered.
[nostyle RIP 06 May 2025]
(Score: 2) by Whoever on Tuesday May 07 2024, @08:36PM (9 children)
It looks like the job isn't fully done.
I don't know what the purpose of the server at sylnt.us is, but it still has the old certificate.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Tuesday May 07 2024, @08:53PM (7 children)
I don't know either. How did you find out?
[nostyle RIP 06 May 2025]
(Score: 2) by Whoever on Tuesday May 07 2024, @09:01PM (6 children)
I looked at the certificate for soylentnews.org, and saw the other domain name in there, then I went to the website for that other domain name.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Tuesday May 07 2024, @09:05PM (5 children)
If I click on sylnt.us it takes me to an IRC related page.
[nostyle RIP 06 May 2025]
(Score: 2) by Whoever on Tuesday May 07 2024, @09:21PM (4 children)
Try:
https://sylnt.us/ [sylnt.us]
(Score: 3, Informative) by janrinok on Tuesday May 07 2024, @09:34PM (3 children)
[nostyle RIP 06 May 2025]
(Score: 2) by Whoever on Tuesday May 07 2024, @09:55PM (2 children)
That's true. In fact, if you click on the link for IRC, it goes back to soylentnews.org.
Services on sylnt.us -- note that it is the mail server for soylentnews.org:
Starting Nmap 6.40 ( http://nmap.org [nmap.org] ) at 2024-05-07 21:49 UTC
Nmap scan report for mail.soylentnews.org (72.14.184.41)
Host is up (0.11s latency).
Not shown: 927 closed ports, 61 filtered ports
PORT STATE SERVICE
22/tcp open ssh
25/tcp open smtp
80/tcp open http
143/tcp open imap
443/tcp open https
587/tcp open submission
993/tcp open imaps
6666/tcp open irc
6667/tcp open irc
6668/tcp open irc
6669/tcp open irc
7000/tcp open afs3-fileserver
Nmap done: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 2.82 seconds
It does appear to be running some kind of irc.
But I'll come back to my original point: first order of business is to automate the certificate updates. I think some complexity in the current setup comes from using wildcard certificates, instead of individual host certificates and perhaps some judicious use of self-signed certificates might simplify things.
Note that the DNS is also a mess: there are tow MX records, but, when resolved, they both point to the same IP address.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Tuesday May 07 2024, @10:44PM
IIRC someone (NCommander?) said they condensed some of the (too) many servers, so some of the DNS / IP stuff might not have been updated (yet).
Also IIRC there is / was a web interface for IRC. Used to be, but I'm not really an IRC person; I can't remember the last time I was on it, likely more than a year ago.
(Score: 3, Informative) by RS3 on Tuesday May 07 2024, @10:47PM
Seems to be still there: https://irc.staging.soylentnews.org [soylentnews.org]
I don't have time to try it more.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Tuesday May 07 2024, @08:55PM
It seems to be IRC related.
[nostyle RIP 06 May 2025]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Thursday May 09 2024, @03:35AM
> I personally gave audioguy a 1 month warning, a 14 day warning and at least 2 warnings in the last week
This is one of the more exasperating things about computer technology. Why is cert renewal dependent upon not just one, but a chain of human actions? This is surely something that can be more automated, ideally completely automated. Automation of informational work is the computer's greatest strength. It often feels like the way we use computers is still pretty primitive. Just not seeing all sorts of uses, as if we're old fogeys who hitch horses to cars. We treat computers like they are cars without a reverse gear, in which the users are expected to get out and push the car whenever there is a need to back up. Also, no starter motor, have to hand crank it to start the engine. At one job I had, the boss had college students preparing images by loading them into Photoshop to do a few simple enhancements. Was taking them a week to do a hundred images. I showed them the netpbm suite of image manipulation utilities, and wrote a script to grind through a subdirectory of images. That way, could do in under an hour all the work they were tediously taking a week to do by working the human user interface of Photoshop.
> I would hope that you would do the same in a similar situation.
Quite. I am not so fanatically devoted to any cause that I would sacrifice my and my families' lives for it. I hope audioguy is doing better.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by SomeRandomGeek on Tuesday May 07 2024, @09:26PM
Thanks, audioguy! Take care of yourself.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Hartree on Tuesday May 07 2024, @09:26PM
Best wishes for a successful treatment with no complications, Audioguy!
(Score: 4, Insightful) by corey on Tuesday May 07 2024, @10:43PM
Appreciate all your effort audioguy, this is one of my 2-3 main websites I read daily, so thanks!
Wishing you all the best for your medical journey moving forward, and hope to see you back soon (maybe as a back-seat commenter like myself).
(Score: 4, Insightful) by mrpg on Tuesday May 07 2024, @11:10PM
Remember to update us on your situation, thanks for everything.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by srobert on Tuesday May 07 2024, @11:39PM
Thanks Audioguy, Best of Luck to You.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by hubie on Wednesday May 08 2024, @04:32AM
I wish you all the best in your procedures and hope for a speedy recovery. I appreciate greatly all you have done for this site.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by The Vocal Minority on Wednesday May 08 2024, @08:52AM
I don't think I have ever exchanged words with you, but I do sincerely appreciate the work you have put in to keep the site running.