One In A Million!

Everybody knows that just because you’re paranoid and fear that someone is out to get you, it doesn’t necessarily mean your wrong. In reality, I’m more sensitive to changes in machine operations and data than I am to a woman’s moods. So when I sense a change in data, I analyze it. It wouldn’t take a genius to figure out that a 92% drop in traffic overnight simply wasn’t a naturally occurring event.

I mean every writer would like to believe they have false stats, that far more people visit them and their growth should be better. In reality, we learn to live with our readership and trust the stats. But what the heck, I thought I would go a little further and check on my service from WordPress to see if it was slow or off line. The tool of choice is my new best friend for tracking kiddie porn web sites called Visual Route from Visualware. You can track the path to porn along the backbone carriers to their big business hosting companies, and find them snugly nestled in the rolling hills of Northern Virginia next to Washington DC.

Now traceroutes to wordpress.com are strange at best. When you track them from Australia, the effort is partially blocked by a firewall. near Dallas-Fort worth at layeredtech.com. When you track them from Austria, you get a complete search which also ends at layeredtech.com in Dallas Fort Worth while heavily relying on the Savvis backbone network which is big in kiddie porn. Coincidentally, the path from Austria which is not blocked passes through a group of IP’s which have been identified as Cable and Wireless Honeypots and which are now owned by Savvis. A whois check of WordPress places their IP in a block owned by Layered Technologies, Inc.

Now the personal traceroute for fatsavage.wordpress.com is the typically weird stuff you get used to seeing from kiddie porn sites. From the Visualware server in Ashburn, Virginia it goes to Washington, DC and returns to Dulles, Virginia before being routed to Broomfield CO on the PSI network where it entered the Level 3 system returning to Washington, DC where it was routed to Newark, New Jersey before being returned to a Level 3 hosting service in Broomfield CO. Huh?

Clearly the last statement was bullshit except to point out I am under the control of Level 3 hosting and not anyone affiliated with WordPress.

Now being a normally inquisitive guy, I figured I’d check on how the rest of the world is treated and I went to a random list of most recent posts desplayed on my admin page.

I went to the the following list of sites and found that they all had very weird paths but very much different than mine. They went through 15 hops starting at Ashburn before going to DC than back to Dulles and back to DC where they entered the MCI system which doesn’t deal in kiddie porn. The route stays with MCI and passes back to Dulles, and Ashburn before ending up with Netli Inc in Palo Alto California.

All of the following sites took exactly the same path before ending at Netli.

divino551.wordpress.com
isaiahlim.wordpress.com
flippingskirt.wordpress.com
unambiguously.wordpress.com
rugge.wordpress.com
sugarsweets.wordpress.com
archiesarchive.wordpress.com
mysteriousm.wordpress.com

Now I was really feeling alone in the dark but my ego kicked in to give me comfort. I figured it must be because I’m so popular that I need my own server. So I checked the WordPress list of “Fastest Growing Sites” for the day and guess what?

The following sites:

offthebroiler.wordpress.com
strangemaps.wordpress.com
2aday.wordpress.com
ladiesdotdotdot.wordpress.com

All follow the same pat to Netli as normal WordPress blogs………………..

Well, since there are now one million wordpress blogs and I’m the only one that ends up on Level 3 Hosting in the center of New Jersey’s kiddie porn Honeypots, I have to feel special.